Tadeusz Kościuszko

Tadeusz Kościuszko was a soldier of two revolutions: a military engineer for the Americans in their war of independence, and the leader of the 1794 uprising that tried to save the Polish–Lithuanian Commonwealth from partition. A convinced republican who argued for the freedom of serfs and enslaved Africans, he is honoured as a national hero in Poland, Lithuania, Belarus and the United States.

Kościuszko was born in February 1746 (the exact day is unknown) on a small family estate in the Grand Duchy of Lithuania, in what is now Belarus. His family were Polonised gentry of Ruthenian origin with modest lands. In 1765 he entered the new Corps of Cadets in Warsaw. When civil war broke out in 1768, he left for France on a royal scholarship in 1769 and spent five years in Paris, studying art and absorbing military engineering and Enlightenment ideas. He returned in 1774 to a country already cut down by the first partition of 1772 and, unable to afford a commission, worked as a tutor.

In 1776 Kościuszko sailed to America and joined the Continental Army, becoming a colonel of engineers in October that year. He warned that the hill overlooking Fort Ticonderoga needed guarding; the warning was ignored and the British used it to force the fort's abandonment in July 1777. He then chose and fortified the American position at Bemis Heights, which helped bring about the British surrender after the Battles of Saratoga in October 1777. From 1778 he spent two years strengthening the fortress of West Point. Transferring south in 1780, he served as chief engineer to General Nathanael Greene, whose army his river boats and scouting helped save during the retreat across the Carolinas. Congress made him a brigadier general in 1783.

Back in Poland from 1784, Kościuszko finally obtained a commission as major general in 1789. He supported the reformers behind the Constitution of 3 May 1791, though he wanted it to go further for peasants and Jews. When Russia invaded in 1792 he fought a skilful defence, holding off a much larger Russian force at Dubienka in July, but King Stanisław August capitulated and joined the pro-Russian Targowica Confederation. Kościuszko went into exile, and in 1793 Russia and Prussia carried out the second of the Partitions of Poland.

On 24 March 1794, in the main square of Kraków, Kościuszko proclaimed a national uprising against Russian domination and became its commander-in-chief. At Racławice on 4 April he led peasant scythemen in a charge that won the day. His Proclamation of Połaniec granted serfs personal freedom and reduced their labour dues. He defended Warsaw against Russian and Prussian forces through the summer, but on 10 October 1794 he was wounded and captured at Maciejowice. The Russian storming of Warsaw's Praga suburb, in which a contemporary Russian witness put the number of residents killed at 20,000, ended the revolt, and the third partition in 1795 erased the Commonwealth from the map.

Kościuszko was held in St Petersburg until Catherine the Great died in 1796; her son Paul I released him. He went to the United States in 1797 and became a close friend of Thomas Jefferson. Before leaving for Europe in 1798 he made a will asking that his American property be used to free and educate enslaved people, including Jefferson's; it was never carried out. In France he distrusted Napoleon and refused to serve him, and after 1815 he rejected the small Russian-controlled Kingdom of Poland. In 1817 he tried to free the serfs on his remaining Polish lands, but the tsar would not allow it. He died at Solothurn in Switzerland on 15 October 1817 and was buried in Wawel Cathedral in Kraków among Poland's kings.

Our 1783 map shows the shrunken Commonwealth after the first partition, and the 1800 map shows its lands divided between Russia, Prussia and Austria after his uprising failed.