Who won the Battle of Racławice?
Tadeusz Kościuszko's Polish insurgents won the Battle of Racławice on 4 April 1794, defeating a Russian corps under Major General Alexander Tormasov in the hills northeast of Kraków. The decisive blow came when 320 peasant scythemen, led by Kościuszko, took the Russian battery. It was the first victory of the Kościuszko Uprising, which was crushed that autumn.1
The smoke hung low over the fields of Racławice on the afternoon of 4 April 1794. On the slope ahead stood a Russian battery that had been tearing holes in the Polish line. Then a column of men in white peasant coats rose out of a ravine, scythes fixed upright on their poles like pikes, and ran straight at the guns. At their head rode the commander of the whole uprising, Tadeusz Kościuszko. Within minutes the guns were Polish, and a legend was born.2
For the wider story, see the military history of Poland. Two years earlier, in the war of 1792, Polish troops had won at Zieleńce; Kościuszko had already fortified the American lines before Saratoga in 1777; and Poles would face Russia in the field again at Olszynka Grochowska in 1831.
A country partitioned
By 1793 the Polish-Lithuanian Commonwealth was a state in name only. Russia and Prussia had carved off huge provinces in the Second Partition, and what remained was in practice governed by the Russian ambassador in Warsaw, Osip Igelström, backed by Russian garrisons.3
Kościuszko was the obvious man to lead a rising. Born in 1746, he had served through most of the American War of Independence, fortifying the Hudson before Saratoga and West Point, and in the Polish-Russian war of 1792 he had made his name at Dubienka. When the king went over to the pro-Russian camp, Kościuszko resigned his commission and went into exile, where he planned a national insurrection.4
The uprising begins
The spark came before Kościuszko was ready. On 12 March 1794 General Antoni Madaliński, ordered to cut his cavalry brigade, refused and marched south from Ostrołęka. The Russian troops in Kraków left the city to chase him, leaving only Polish units behind, and the conspirators had their base.5
On 24 March Kościuszko stood on Kraków's Main Square and swore the oath of the uprising before a huge crowd: he would use the power entrusted to him only to defend the nation's borders, regain its independence and secure universal liberty. He became Naczelnik, commander in chief, with near-dictatorial powers.6
He had too few soldiers and almost no arms industry. His answer was mass recruitment: villages had to send recruits, and since there were not enough muskets, many were armed with farm scythes whose blades had been reforged to stand straight up on the shaft. On 1 April he marched north out of Kraków toward Warsaw, gathering troops as he went, while the Russians moved to stop him before the revolt could spread beyond Lesser Poland.7
Armies and commanders
Kościuszko's force by 4 April counted a little over 4,000 regular soldiers, infantry and cavalry, and about 1,900 to 2,000 peasant recruits with scythes and pikes. According to dzieje.pl he had only 12 guns. Against him stood a Russian group under Major General Fyodor Denisov, about 5,000 to 6,000 strong, but split in two. Only part of it, roughly 3,000 men under Major General Alexander Tormasov, actually barred the road at Racławice, about 40 km from Kraków.8
The Russian plan was to trap the insurgents between the two columns. It went wrong because the commanders did not get on and did not coordinate. Denisov marched toward the village of Koniusza, where he expected to find Kościuszko's camp, realized his mistake only as he approached, and had to turn back over roads soaked by rain. Tormasov, facing the Poles alone, decided to attack anyway and counted on Denisov arriving during the battle.9
The battle: the Russian attack
In the morning Polish patrols caught a few Cossacks, who gave away the Russian line of march, so Kościuszko could pick his ground. The armies faced each other across the valley of the little Racławka stream: the Russians on the hills around Górka Kościejowska, the Poles on the heights by Dziemierzyce. Kościuszko chose to wait and let the Russians come down into the valley and climb toward him.10
At about three in the afternoon Tormasov sent two columns forward against the Polish left and center. A sharp artillery duel opened in the center, where Polish fire held the Russian infantry. On the left it went badly: Russian cavalry under Lieutenant Colonel Pustovalov drove off part of the Polish horse and threw the wing into confusion. Some fugitives ran all the way to Kraków with news of a defeat, and the city briefly panicked. Kościuszko steadied the line and sent Madaliński's cavalry to plug the gap.11
The charge of the scythemen
Then the Russians pushed their guns out in front of their infantry, and Kościuszko saw both the danger and the chance. Tormasov had drawn more and more men toward the Polish left, and Denisov could appear at any moment. The Naczelnik decided to strike the Russian center at once. For the blow he picked 320 scythemen, flanked by companies of regular infantry from the 3rd and 6th Regiments, and put himself at their head.12
The column moved up under cover of a long, narrow ravine and burst out close to the battery. Two blasts of canister did not stop it. In the volley at the guns sixteen peasants fell, and then the scythemen were among the gunners. The report of Jan Feliks Ślaski, who commanded them, says three guns were taken in the first rush and eight more as the peasants and a battalion of infantry drove the Russians back along the edge of a wood. The peasants knew nothing of the customs of war and gave no quarter.13
The battle was still not won. On the Polish left fighting went on, and Kościuszko threw every reserve he had, mostly scythemen and infantry, onto that wing. The Russians there, shaken by the loss of their battery and of officers killed or captured, began to give way and fell back. A Russian officer later recalled that the armed peasants, pushed forward by their infantry, broke the Russian ranks.14
Denisov reached the field only toward evening. Seeing Tormasov beaten, he fired a few volleys and withdrew east. The Russians lost about a thousand men killed and wounded, and 11 or 12 guns depending on the account. Polish losses were about half as heavy.15
How many died at the Battle of Racławice?
No exact count survives. The Museum of Polish History and Polish Radio both put the Russian loss at about 1,000 men killed and wounded, along with the battery of 11 or 12 guns, and both give the Polish loss as about half that. Sixteen scythemen fell to a single volley as they charged the guns.16
Bartosz Głowacki
Among the scythemen was Wojciech Bartosz, a peasant from Rzędowice near Proszowice, recruited only days before. Accounts agree that he was the first to reach a Russian gun and that he smothered its priming with his cap so it could not fire again. In some versions he put out the burning fuse, in others he covered the touch-hole.17
Four days later, on 8 April, in Wawel Cathedral, Kościuszko promoted Bartosz and two other scythemen, Stanisław Świstacki and Jędrzej Łakomski, to ensign in a new unit named the Kraków Grenadiers, built from the peasant militia. Bartosz was given a new surname, Głowacki. He did not live to see the end of the year: he was mortally wounded at Szczekociny in June 1794 and was buried at Kielce.18
Why was the Battle of Racławice important?
Racławice was the first victory of the Kościuszko Uprising. It did not decide the war, but news of it helped spark risings in Warsaw on 17 April and in Vilnius soon after, turning a provincial revolt into a national one. A month later Kościuszko's Manifesto of Połaniec eased serfdom for the peasants who had fought for him.19
Racławice was a tactical victory but not a decisive one. The Polish ranks fell into disorder after the fighting, the scythemen stripped the dead, and there was no pursuit. Around midnight Kościuszko, wary of Denisov, pulled back toward Słomniki, and he did not risk another battle for weeks. Russian columns soon blocked his road to Warsaw.20
Its moral effect was enormous. The captured guns were paraded into Kraków, and Kościuszko's printed report of the victory became the uprising's best propaganda. News of it helped spark risings in Warsaw on 17 April and in Vilnius soon after, turning a provincial revolt into a national one.21
The scythemen also changed politics. On 7 May, in his camp at Połaniec, Kościuszko issued the Manifesto of Połaniec, which ended personal serfdom, protected peasants from eviction and cut their labor dues. Many historians regard it as the uprising's most important achievement.22
Militarily the odds were hopeless. After defeat at Szczekociny in June, Kościuszko held Warsaw through a two-month siege by Prussian and Russian armies, his finest feat as a commander. On 10 October at Maciejowice he was wounded and captured, and the uprising collapsed. In 1795 the Third Partition erased Poland from the map.23
Legend and memory
Racławice gave Poles an image they never let go: the noble general and the peasant fighting side by side for the same country. During the partitions Głowacki became the symbol of the peasant who chose to be a citizen, and the scythe became the weapon of Polish insurgents in later risings. In 1888 Jan Matejko painted Kościuszko at Racławice, now in the Gallery of 19th-Century Polish Art in Kraków's Cloth Hall.24
For the centenary, Jan Styka and Wojciech Kossak painted the Racławice Panorama, a canvas 15 by 114 meters hung in a rotunda so that viewers stand in the middle of the battle. It opened in Lwów on 5 June 1894. Damaged by bombing in 1944, it was moved to Wrocław after the war but kept out of sight for decades, because the communist authorities did not want a Polish victory over Russia on show. Only after August 1980 did a public committee win the fight to display it, and it reopened in a new rotunda on 14 June 1985.25
The battlefield today
The fields where the battle was fought, around Racławice, Dziemierzyce and Janowiczki, were declared a Monument of History by the President of Poland in 2004. The protected area of about 520 hectares includes the Kościuszko Mound, the manor at Janowiczki, the villa of Walery Sławek, the war cemetery known as Bratnie Mogiły and the monument to Bartosz Głowacki, raised for the bicentenary in 1994. Every year the anniversary brings visitors and reenactors back to the hills.26
For the wider story, see the greatest battles in Polish history, or go back two years to the victory of the 1792 war that founded the Virtuti Militari.27› Battle of Zieleńce, 1792
