Who were the Polish heroes of the American Revolution?
The two most famous Polish heroes of the American Revolution are Casimir Pulaski and Tadeusz Kościuszko. Pulaski rebuilt the Continental cavalry and was mortally wounded leading a charge at Savannah in 1779. Kościuszko, a military engineer, fortified Bemis Heights to help trap a British army at Saratoga in 1777, then designed the fortress at West Point.
Two Poles crossed the Atlantic to fight for a republic that did not yet exist, and both mattered out of all proportion to their numbers. One remade the army's cavalry and was mortally wounded leading a charge; the other laid out the fortifications at Saratoga and West Point. The engineer then went home to fight for the freedom of Poland itself; the cavalryman, who had fought for it before he came, gave his life for America.
Casimir Pulaski. A cavalry commander from the Bar Confederation, recommended to Washington by Benjamin Franklin. He rebuilt the Continental cavalry from almost nothing, raised his own legion, and was mortally wounded leading a charge at Savannah in 1779. He is known as the father of the American cavalry.1 › Siege of Savannah, 1779
Tadeusz Kościuszko. A military engineer whose field fortifications at Bemis Heights helped trap a British army at Saratoga in 1777, the turning point that brought France into the war. He then designed the great fortress at West Point, and later led the 1794 uprising that bears his name.2
For the war as a whole, see our guide to the American Revolutionary War, 1775 to 1783.
Why they crossed the ocean
Both men came from the Polish-Lithuanian Commonwealth as it was being torn apart by its neighbors, and both saw in the American cause the same fight for liberty they knew at home. Pulaski gave the young republic a cavalry arm it had lacked; Kościuszko gave it the engineering that let smaller American armies stand against professional troops. Their service is one reason the friendship between Poland and the United States runs so deep. They head a long line of Poles who carried the fight abroad, a tradition summed up in the motto For Your Freedom and Ours.
Pulaski's war, from Brandywine to Savannah
Pulaski arrived with a reputation and a past. Born in 1745, he fought the Russians as a cavalry leader of the Bar Confederation from 1768, but a failed plot to kidnap King Stanisław August left him facing charges of attempted regicide, and he fled abroad. In Paris in the spring of 1777 he met Benjamin Franklin, who recommended him to Washington, and he landed in Boston on 23 July 1777.3
His first battle came weeks later. At Brandywine on 11 September 1777, as the British turned the American right and Washington's army fell back, Pulaski asked for a mounted detachment and charged to buy time for the retreat; the American Battlefield Trust puts his party at about thirty men of Washington's own guard. On 15 September Congress made him a brigadier general in command of the cavalry, and in October he fought at Germantown.4
Frustrated by his limited role, Pulaski won permission in the spring of 1778 to raise his own legion of horse and foot, recruited largely around Baltimore from Americans, Germans, Frenchmen, Irishmen and Poles. In 1779 the legion went south. On 11 May it charged a British force outside Charleston and paid dearly for it, and on 9 October, in the failed Franco-American assault on Savannah, Pulaski was struck by grapeshot while trying to rally the attackers. He died two days later aboard the American ship Wasp.5
Why is Pulaski called the father of the American cavalry?
Because he commanded the Continental cavalry as a brigadier general and built its first real mounted legion. When he arrived in 1777, Washington's army had no cavalry arm to speak of; Pulaski trained his legion to European standards, and the National Park Service credits him with giving the colonists “their first true legion on horseback.”6
Contemporaries were less generous. The American Battlefield Trust notes that many American officers disliked working with the proud count, and that Washington lost patience when Pulaski requisitioned horses and supplies from people he suspected of Loyalist sympathies. Yet the fighting quality of his legion was widely praised.7
Kościuszko's war, from Saratoga to the Carolinas
Kościuszko, born in 1746, trained at the military academy in Warsaw and studied in Paris before sailing for America in 1776. He reached Philadelphia that August, and in October Congress appointed him a colonel of engineers. Sent north in 1777, he and others urged the fortification of Mount Defiance above Fort Ticonderoga; the advice was ignored, and British guns on that height forced the Americans out.8
At Saratoga in the autumn of 1777 his defenses at Bemis Heights, laid out to use the hills and the Hudson, gave Horatio Gates the strong position from which he defeated Burgoyne. From 1778 Kościuszko fortified West Point, the fortress that Benedict Arnold later tried to betray to the British. In 1780 he went south as chief engineer of Nathanael Greene's army, building boats, scouting and directing river crossings, and in 1781 oversaw the siege of the British post at Ninety Six. At the end of the war Congress made him a brigadier general.9
What did Kościuszko do after the American Revolution?
He went home to fight for Poland. Back in 1784, he became a major general in the Polish army in 1789, fought the Russians in 1792 and in 1794 led the uprising that bears his name. He won at Racławice on 4 April 1794, but was wounded and captured at Maciejowice on 10 October and held in Russia until 1796.10
Freed by Tsar Paul I, he returned to Philadelphia in 1797, collected the pay Congress owed him and lodged at a boarding house at Third and Pine Streets. Before leaving for France in May 1798 he drew up a will, with Thomas Jefferson as executor, directing that his American money be used to free and educate enslaved people; legal challenges kept it from being carried out. He died at Solothurn in Switzerland on 15 October 1817 and was buried among the Polish kings in Wawel Cathedral in Kraków.11
Where are Pulaski and Kościuszko remembered in the United States?
Across the country. Both have statues in Washington, D.C., dedicated on the same day in 1910. Fort Pulaski and a marble monument in Savannah honor Pulaski; the cadets of West Point raised a monument to Kościuszko in 1828; and the Philadelphia house where he lodged in 1798 is now the Thaddeus Kosciuszko National Memorial.12
Pulaski's equestrian statue stands near Freedom Plaza on Pennsylvania Avenue. Kościuszko's, at the northeast corner of Lafayette Park, shows him holding a map of the Saratoga fortifications; it is one of four statues there honoring foreign officers of the Revolution, with Lafayette, Rochambeau and von Steuben. In Savannah, remains believed to be Pulaski's were reburied in Monterey Square in 1853 under a monument raised the next year, and Smithsonian DNA tests in 2019 found them most likely his. The fort on Cockspur Island below the city was named for him in 1833, and Polish Americans in Chicago and other cities celebrate Pulaski Day on the first Monday in March.13
Is Casimir Pulaski an honorary American citizen?
Yes. A joint resolution of Congress, approved on 6 November 2009 and signed by President Barack Obama, proclaimed Casimir Pulaski an honorary citizen of the United States posthumously. Only a handful of people have ever received the honor; the National Park Service counts him as the seventh, the American Battlefield Trust as one of eight.14
The resolution also recalls older tributes: in 1779 the Continental Congress resolved to raise a monument to him, in 1825 Lafayette laid the cornerstone of the Savannah monument, and in 1929 Congress recognized 11 October, the day of his death, as Pulaski Day.15
Read their full stories, Pulaski and Kościuszko, meet more of the greatest Polish commanders, or see where they fought among the greatest battles in American history.
