Tadeusz Kościuszko

Tadeusz Kościuszko (born February 4, 1746, Mereczowszczyzna, Poland [now in Belarus]—died October 15, 1817, Solothurn, Switzerland) was a Polish army officer and statesman who gained fame both for his role in the American Revolution and for his leadership of a national insurrection in his homeland.

Early life

Kościuszko was born to a family of noble origin and was educated at the Piarist college in Lubieszów and the military academy in Warsaw, where he later served as an instructor. Kościuszko’s outstanding abilities soon attracted the attention of King Stanisław II Augustus Poniatowski, who sent him to Paris for further study in military and civil architecture and in painting. Returning home in 1774, he taught drawing and mathematics to the daughters of a general, Józef Sosnowski; he fell in love with Ludwika, one of the daughters, and tried unsuccessfully to elope with her.

American Revolution

Facing the wrath of Ludwika’s father, Kościuszko fled to France, and in 1776 he went to America, where he joined the colonial forces fighting for independence from the British. That August he was transferred to the Pennsylvania Committee of Defense in Philadelphia, where he took part in planning fortifications to defend the residence of the Continental Congress against the British. For this work he was given the rank of engineer colonel. In spring 1777, he was assigned to the army of General Horatio Gates at Fort Ticonderoga, in northern New York. Beginning in July Kościuszko became active in Gates’s army, closing by fortifications all roads along the Hudson River and thus contributing to the capitulation of the British army under General John Burgoyne at Saratoga on October 17. He spent the next two years fortifying West Point, New York, where in March 1780 he was appointed chief of the engineering corps. That summer, serving under General Nathanael Greene in North Carolina, he twice rescued the army from enemy advances by directing the crossing of the Yadkin and Dan rivers. In the spring of 1781 in South Carolina, Kościuszko conducted the Battle of Ninety-Six and then a lengthy blockade of Charleston. At the end of the war he was given U.S. citizenship and was made a brigadier general in the U.S. Army.

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Campaigns in Poland

In 1784 Kościuszko returned to Poland. Because of his association with the Czartoryski family, then in opposition to the king, he could not secure an appointment in the Polish army. For five years he lived in poverty on a small country estate, in debt, moreover, because of his exceptional deed of freeing his serfs from part of their villein service. With the advent of liberal reforms in Poland, in 1789 he returned to military service. Under the protection of his former love, Ludwika, now the wife of Prince Lubomirski, and with the support of local nobility, on October 12 he was granted the rank of general major. At that time the 44-year-old general fell in love with an 18-year-old girl of noble birth, but again he was unable to win the father’s permission for marriage.

In 1792 the Russian army of the empress Catherine II invaded Poland in an attempt to end Polish internal reforms designed to liberate the nation from Russian influence. In the ensuing war Kościuszko rose to fame as a division commander during the bloody Battle of Dubienka (July 18). For this he was raised to the rank of general lieutenant by King Stanisław II Augustus Poniatowski, and the new Revolutionary government in Paris granted him honorary French citizenship. But, when the Polish king, fearing defeat, defected from the liberal cause, Kościuszko prepared to resume fighting. In Russian-occupied Poland, however, the reactionary party assumed power, forcing liberal statesmen into exile in Saxony. Kościuszko, against the king’s wishes, gave up his commission and joined the exiles.

From Saxony, in January 1793, Kościuszko was delegated to Paris to seek support for the Polish cause, first from the Girondists and then the Jacobins, pledging in return radical internal reforms in Poland and military diversion against Prussia and Austria, then at war with Revolutionary France. When he returned to Saxony in August, he faced new demands for starting an uprising in Poland in view of favourable indications there. Kościuszko agreed to command the national forces and went secretly to a place near Cracow (Kraków), but, finding preparations inadequate, he delayed the uprising and then went abroad again. His decision proved unwise because time allowed the enemy to undermine the conspiracy through widespread arrests and reduction of the army. Those left in the underground started the uprising on March 12, 1794. On their request Kościuszko arrived in Cracow on March 24 and, amid an enormous assembly of people, solemnly swore an act of national uprising against the occupying powers—chiefly Russia and Prussia. Undertaking all political responsibility and military leadership, he set up an insurgent administration and military force. To do so he had to compensate for the quality of the enemy army with the quantity of his own. Therefore, Kościuszko introduced conscription to military service, enlarged existing units by incorporating recruits into them, and developed new formations. Having no war industry, his forces could not be equipped with conventional firearms; hence, he armed his peasant recruits with pikes and traditional war scythes.

After a smashing victory at Racławice (April 4), won by the scythe-bearing formations under Kościuszko’s personal command, special new battle tactics were developed based on columns of men attacking on the run and backed by artillery fire. To win more army volunteers from the peasant masses, he issued the Manifesto of Połaniec, on May 7, suspending serfdom and reducing in half the existing villein service. This met with some resistance of the nobility. Defeats forced Kościuszko to retreat to his last stronghold, Warsaw. The defense of this city, besieged by Prussian and Russian armies for about two months, remains Kościuszko’s greatest military success, both as strategist and engineer. He managed to use the city population to build earthworks and to defend the city alongside the regular army. In critical moments, he himself led the charge with fixed bayonets. Next, he stirred up an uprising in the occupied province of Wielkopolska, at the rear of the besieging armies, forcing the Prussian king Frederick William II to retreat. But Russian reinforcements retaliated quickly. Kościuszko was unable to concentrate adequate forces in time, and he suffered his greatest defeat at Maciejowice, where he was wounded and taken prisoner. Without its leader, the uprising collapsed, and the Third Partition of Poland ended the existence of the country.

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Last years

Kościuszko, imprisoned in the Peter-Paul Fortress in St. Petersburg, was slowly returning to health when, upon the death of Catherine II, her son, the emperor Paul I, granted him freedom in 1796. Despite a crippling illness, Kościuszko returned to the United States. On August 18, 1797, he arrived in Philadelphia, greeted enthusiastically by the people but held in suspicion by the incumbent Federalists. In the United States he led an active life in social circles and entered into a long-lasting friendship with Thomas Jefferson, who was then vice president; but, after receiving news of fresh possibilities to promote Poland’s cause in France, he secretly left the United States on May 5, 1798. Before that he had appropriated some of his estate for setting free his black slaves and for educating them.

Kościuszko’s return to France was a disappointment. A true republican, he distrusted Napoleon, and he refused to command Polish legions in a fight only for France, promising cooperation only if the liberation of his country would also be involved in the plans.

Hence, Kościuszko retired from public life and took up residence in Berville, near Fontainebleau. In 1806 Napoleon tried to gain Kościuszko’s aid in the event of war with Russia. But Kościuszko again demanded political commitments, and Napoleon secured other, more agreeable Polish supporters for his plans. Kościuszko remained in exile when his country was rebuilt as the Grand Duchy of Warsaw (1807). Consequently, after Napoleon’s fall in 1814, the Russian emperor Alexander I sought Kościuszko’s help in bargaining for Poland’s territories. After the Congress of Vienna and the formation of a new Polish realm under Russian rule in 1815, Emperor Alexander was anxious to be on good terms with Kościuszko and to have him return home. Kościuszko, however, again proposed unrealistic conditions, demanding social reforms and boundaries of the country reaching the Dvina and Dnieper rivers. When no answer came, he went to Solothurn, Switzerland, and freed all his serfs in Poland from villein service.

After Kościuszko died in 1817, his remains were carried to Kraków and were buried in 1819 among the kings’ tombs in the cathedral. The people, reviving an ancient custom, raised a huge mound to his memory near the city.