What did Kosciuszko do in the American Revolution?

He laid out the defenses on Bemis Heights that helped force the British surrender at Saratoga in 1777, fortified West Point, and from 1780 was chief engineer in the South under Nathanael Greene, building boats and scouting river crossings. Congress made him a brevet brigadier general.

What was the Kosciuszko Uprising?

A national uprising in 1794 against Russia and Prussia. Kosciuszko swore his oath in Kraków on 24 March, won at Racławice on 4 April and held Warsaw for about two months, but was defeated and captured at Maciejowice on 10 October, and the uprising collapsed.

Who were the scythemen?

Peasant volunteers armed with war scythes, the kosynierzy. At Racławice on 4 April 1794 Kosciuszko led them in the charge that captured the Russian guns.

What did Kosciuszko's will say?

His American will of 5 May 1798 authorized Thomas Jefferson to use his property in the United States to free and educate enslaved people. It was never carried out: Jefferson declined to act as executor, and in 1852 the Supreme Court ruled that a later will had revoked it.

Where is Kosciuszko buried?

He died in Solothurn, Switzerland, on 15 October 1817 and was buried among the Polish kings in Wawel Cathedral in Kraków, in 1818 or 1819 according to different sources. The Kościuszko Mound near Kraków was raised in his memory.

Why is Kosciuszko remembered in the United States?

For his engineering at Saratoga and West Point, his service in the South, and his will in favor of enslaved people; Jefferson called him as pure a son of liberty as he had ever known, and many monuments and towns bear his name.

Tadeusz Kosciuszko: Saratoga, West Point and 1794

Q: Who was Tadeusz Kosciuszko?

He was a Polish military engineer and general (1746 to 1817) who fought for American independence and later led the 1794 uprising for Polish freedom, becoming a hero of both countries.

Quick answer

Who was Tadeusz Kosciuszko?

Tadeusz Kosciuszko (1746 to 1817) was a Polish military engineer and general who fought for freedom on two continents. In the American Revolution he laid out the defenses on Bemis Heights that helped force the British surrender at Saratoga in 1777, fortified West Point and served as Nathanael Greene's chief engineer in the South. In 1794 he led the national uprising against Russia and Prussia that bears his name and won the Battle of Racławice with peasant scythemen.

Tadeusz Kosciuszko was an engineer who could read a landscape the way other men read a page. In America he chose the ground on which a British army was trapped at Saratoga and fortified West Point; in Poland he raised a nation, peasants included, against two empires. He lost the second war, and his country vanished from the map, yet both nations still claim him as a hero.¹

Early life

Andrzej Tadeusz Bonawentura Kosciuszko was born on 4 February 1746 at Mereczowszczyzna in the Polish-Lithuanian Commonwealth, today in Belarus, into a family of lesser nobility. He was schooled by the Piarist fathers at Lubieszów and in 1765 entered the new military academy in Warsaw, the Corps of Cadets, where he later taught.²

King Stanisław August Poniatowski noticed his talent and sent him to Paris. As a foreigner he could not enroll in a French military academy, so he studied at the Royal Academy of Painting and Sculpture, took up architecture and engineering, and read in the military libraries. Back home he tutored the daughters of General Józef Sosnowski, fell in love with one of them, Ludwika, and tried to elope with her. The attempt failed, and he left Poland again; Britannica dates his return home to 1774, the National Park Service to 1775.³

The American Revolution, 1776 to 1783

Hearing of the war in America, he sailed in June 1776 and reached Philadelphia that August. Benjamin Franklin helped introduce him to Congress, and on 18 October 1776 Congress resolved to appoint him an engineer with the rank of colonel.⁴

In 1777 he joined the Northern Department. At Fort Ticonderoga he urged that the hill overlooking the fort, Sugar Loaf, be fortified; a battery there, he wrote, "would completely cover the two forts, the bridge of communications and the adjoining boat harbor." His superiors did not believe guns could be dragged up the slope. In July the British did exactly that, and the Americans had to abandon the fort. That autumn he made up for it. On Bemis Heights, above the Hudson, he laid out the American lines that blocked John Burgoyne's road to Albany, and the British army surrendered at Saratoga on 17 October.⁵ › Battle of Saratoga, 1777

Hand-drawn 18th-century military plan of camps and lines beside the Hudson River — Plan of Burgoyne's fortified camp on the heights near Stillwater, facing the American camp on Bemis Heights across the wooded ground where the battle of 7 October 1777 was fought, drawn by the British engineer William C. Wilkinson. Manuscript, Library of Congress. Public domain

He fortified the heights that helped trap a British army at Saratoga, the turning point of the Revolution.

In March 1778 he arrived at West Point, the post that guarded the Hudson, and spent over two years building its fortifications. The fortress was the prize Benedict Arnold later plotted to hand to the British. In 1780 he went south as chief engineer of the army that Nathanael Greene took over in December. In the Race to the Dan, early in 1781, he scouted river crossings and built flat-bottomed boats that helped Greene's army escape Charles Cornwallis across the Yadkin and the Dan.⁶ › Guilford Courthouse, 1781

In 1781 he directed the siege works against the British Star Fort at Ninety Six in South Carolina, and he ended the war in the operations around Charleston. Congress made him a brevet brigadier general. Thomas Jefferson later called him "as pure a son of liberty, as I have ever known".⁷

Portrait of Tadeusz Kosciuszko by Karl Gottlieb Schweikart — Tadeusz Kosciuszko as a lieutenant general of the Polish army, portrait by Karl Gottlieb Schweikart, after 1802. Public domain

Return to Poland and the war of 1792

He came home in 1784. For five years he lived modestly on a small estate, where he cut the labor dues his serfs owed him, which left him in debt. In 1789, as Poland began to reform itself, he was made a major general.⁸

When Catherine II's armies invaded in 1792 to undo the reforms of the Constitution of 3 May, Kosciuszko commanded a division. On 18 July 1792 at Dubienka on the Bug, the Muzeum Historii Polski records, his men held field fortifications built to his own plans against repeated Russian assaults before he had to withdraw. The battle made his name. King Stanisław August promoted him to lieutenant general, and revolutionary France made him an honorary citizen. Days later the king gave in to Russia, and Kosciuszko, with many other officers, resigned his commission.⁹ › Battle of Zieleńce 1792

The uprising of 1794

In 1793 he went to Paris to seek help for an uprising. On 24 March 1794, on the Market Square of Kraków, he swore an oath to the whole Polish nation that he would use the power entrusted to him only to defend the country's borders, win back its sovereignty and secure universal freedom. As Naczelnik, or commander-in-chief, he introduced conscription and, lacking firearms, armed peasant recruits with pikes and war scythes.¹⁰

Painting of Kosciuszko swearing an oath before a crowd and soldiers on the Kraków Market Square — Kosciuszko takes his oath on the Market Square in Kraków on 24 March 1794, opening the uprising. Painting by Franciszek Smuglewicz, 1797, National Museum in Poznań. Public domain

On 4 April 1794 at Racławice he met a Russian corps. At the crisis of the battle Kosciuszko led the scythemen, the kosynierzy, in a charge on the Russian guns, and they took them. Britannica calls it a smashing victory won under his personal command. On 7 May, in the camp at Połaniec, he issued a manifesto that suspended the personal serfdom of the peasants and reduced their labor dues.¹¹ › 4 April in military history

Colored bird's eye drawing of battle lines and gun smoke on rolling green hills — Plan of the Battle of Racławice, a drawing by Michał Stachowicz from the Tarnowski archive at Dzików, reproduced in Kazimierz Bartoszewicz's history of the Kościuszko Uprising (1913). Public domain

Defeats followed, and Kosciuszko fell back on Warsaw. Its defense against the Prussian and Russian armies for about two months, with the townspeople digging earthworks beside the soldiers, is in Britannica's view his greatest success as strategist and engineer; the American Battlefield Trust speaks of several weeks. Then Russian reinforcements arrived. On 10 October 1794 at Maciejowice Kosciuszko was defeated, wounded and taken prisoner. Without him the uprising collapsed, and the Third Partition wiped Poland off the map.¹² › Battle of Kobyłka, 1794

Painting of Kosciuszko falling from his horse as Russian horsemen attack him — The wounded Kosciuszko is captured by Russian cavalry at Maciejowice in October 1794. Painting by Jan Bogumił Plersch, Polish Army Museum. Public domain

Command style

Kosciuszko was first an engineer. At Saratoga he used the ground of the Hudson valley to give Horatio Gates a strong position, at Dubienka and Warsaw he fought from earthworks of his own design, and in the South he solved the problems of rivers, boats and camps on which Greene's campaign depended.¹³

As a commander in 1794 he made up in numbers what his army lacked in training and weapons, and he trusted the peasants as soldiers at a time when few nobles did. At Racławice he led the decisive charge himself.¹⁴

Later life and death

He was held in the Peter and Paul Fortress in St. Petersburg until 1796, when the new emperor, Paul I, set him free. In August 1797 he reached Philadelphia, where crowds welcomed him, and became a close friend of Vice President Thomas Jefferson. In May 1798 he left secretly for France.¹⁵

Before going he wrote a will, dated 5 May 1798, that authorized Jefferson to use all his property in America to buy enslaved people, his own or others, give them their liberty and pay for their education. It was never carried out. Jefferson declined to act as executor when the will was proved in 1819, the claims of heirs ended in the U.S. Supreme Court, and in 1852 the court ruled that a will Kosciuszko made in 1816 had revoked it.¹⁶

In France he distrusted Napoleon and refused to lead Polish troops unless Poland's freedom was part of the bargain, and he stayed in exile even when Napoleon created the Duchy of Warsaw in 1807. After 1814 he negotiated with Tsar Alexander I, but the kingdom created at the Congress of Vienna was smaller than he had demanded. He retired to Solothurn in Switzerland, where in 1817 he freed the serfs of his former estate from their labor dues, and died there on 15 October 1817.¹⁷

Legacy and memory

With the permission of Tsar Alexander I, his body was brought to Kraków and laid among the Polish kings in Wawel Cathedral, in 1818 according to the National Park Service and a 2023 PAP report, in 1819 according to Britannica. On a hill outside the city Poles raised a great earth mound to his memory, reviving an ancient custom.¹⁸

A grassy conical mound behind red brick neo-Gothic battlements and towers under a blue sky — The Kościuszko Mound in Kraków, raised in his memory after his death, seen behind the walls of the nineteenth-century fort and chapel at its foot. Photograph by Sebek2d, 2006, via Wikimedia Commons. Public domain

In the United States his memory lives in monuments and place names, from West Point to Philadelphia, where the house in which he stayed in 1797 and 1798 is now the Thaddeus Kosciuszko National Memorial. In Poland the oath, Racławice and the scythemen became a founding legend of the struggle for independence.¹⁹

Meet his peers in the greatest commanders in Polish history, read about the Polish heroes of the American Revolution and his fellow volunteer Casimir Pulaski, or follow his officer Jan Henryk Dąbrowski, who carried the fight on.