March 31, 1976
Page 8777
KOSCIUSZKO — FRIEND OF THE REVOLUTION
Mr. MUSKIE. Mr. President, Polish-Americans take special pride in this Bicentennial Year in remembering the career of Tadeusz Kosciuszko.
A brilliant engineer, Koscuiszko helped the American armies defend West Point and Charleston. He served in the American forces almost without pay and was known among Revolutionary leaders for his qualities of humanity, gentleness, and patience. His will directed that his estate be used to create a fund to buy freedom and homesteads for Negro slaves.
Americans remember Tadeusz Kosciuszko as a man who practiced the ideals in which he believed. He was a friend of our country and, as Jefferson observed, "a son of liberty."
Mr. President, I ask unanimous consent that a recent article about Tadeusz Kosciuszko, published in the Reader's Digest, be printed in the RECORD.
There being no objection, the article was ordered to be printed in the RECORD, as follows:
KOSCIUSZKO — HERO OF TWO WORLDS
(By Thomas Fleming)
A BICENTENNIAL FEATURE
At 4 a.m. early in May 1798, a covered coach carrying the Vice President of the United States, Thomas Jefferson, pulled up to a stop before a Philadelphia rooming-house. A slight, gaunt man in a military cloak emerged from the darkened doorway, hobbled on crutches to the carriage and climbed into the seat beside Jefferson. The effort brought rasps of pain to the crippled man's lips. The coach rumbled off into the night.
Poland's Tadeusz Kosciuszko was once more in the service of his "second country"— the United States of America. For six years, without a single furlough, he had fought for America's independence. Now, Jefferson was sending him to Paris as an envoy to help the infant United States avoid a ruinous war with revolutionary France. Jefferson was convinced that only an envoy of considerable stature could keep the peace. Kosciuszko was that man.
Most contemporary Americans recognize Kosciuszko's name. But outside the Polish-American community only a handful of scholars know of the remarkable and romantic role Kosciuszko (Kos-choosh'ko) played in the winning of America's independence. For this gallant, tragic figure was passionately devoted to the cause of freedom, both here and in his native Poland. "He is," Jefferson once remarked, "as pure a son of liberty as I have ever known."
Battling Engineer
Kosciuszko was 30 when he came to America in the summer of 1776. His own country had been crushed by Russia and had lost one-third of its territory to Russia, Prussia and Austria.
Kosciuszko had studied military engineering and artillery in France and, since America's revolutionary army badly needed engineers, Congress gave him a colonel's commission and $60 a month. Maj. Gen. Horatio Gates sent him north to strengthen Fort Ticonderoga, guarding the "invasion highway" from Canada. But the over-confident Americans at the fort ignored Kosciuszko's repeated advice to fortify Mount Defiance, which overlooked Ticonderoga.
Kosciuszko's gentle temperament and the fact that he was a foreigner made it difficult for him to deal with the brash Americans. When they scoffed at his recommendation, he dropped it. "I love peace and to be on good terms with all the world if possible," he told Gates. Rather than get his way by quarreling, he would "return home and plant cabbages." Scarcely more than a month later, the British hauled cannon to the top of Mount Defiance, and Ticonderoga's defenders had no alternative but humiliating retreat.
Instead of blaming them, Kosciuszko worked feverishly to keep the British army at bay. He and his men filled creeks with debris to make them unnavigable, broke down bridges, felled hundreds of trees to slow the British advance. When Horatio Gates became supreme commander of the Northern Army, he ordered Kosciuszko to select a position where they could make a stand. The young Pole soon had 1,000 men toiling on fortifications along the Hudson near Saratoga. The British army, commanded bp Gen. John Burgoyne, smashed itself to ruins on Kosciuszko's fortifications and surrendered to Gates on October 17, 1777. It was the turning point of the American Revolution.
Impregnable Point
Kosciuszko's next assignment was West Point, that huge ridge of rock and earth jutting into the Hudson River in the heart of New York's highlands. George Washington called it the most important post in America, and ordered Kosciuszko to make it impregnable. For more than two years, Kosciuszko laid out a series of redoubts and forts — a system depending upon depth, mutual support and use of terrain that was 100 years ahead of its time. The result was "the American Gibraltar," a fortress so strong that the British never even dared to attack it.
Kosciuszko next became chief engineer of the American Army of the South, commanded
by the fighting Quaker, Nathanael Greene. He selected encampments and battlefield sites, and supervised the construction of a fleet of boats which enabled Greene's retreating army to escape the hotly pursuing enemy. When the British finally fell back to Charleston, Kosciuszko turned cavalry commander and fought a number of ferocious battles with British patrols outside the city.
In one of the clashes, Kosciuszko led a head-long charge against some 300 British infantry backed by cannon. When the fight ended, he found four bullet holes in his coat.
In spite of his remarkable record, Kosciuszko did not receive a promotion from the Continental Congress until after the war. The reason was politics. When the French finally decided to aid the Americans, they sent a group of engineers, who arrived in 1777, led by an abrasive character named Louis le Begue de Presle Duportail. He demanded and got from a frightened Congress, over the objection of General Washington, the rank of brigadier general and command of the Continental Army's engineers.
Kosciuszko's friends were outraged and began protesting to Congress. Washington himself wrote a letter in which he called Kosciuszko "deserving of notice too." Kosciuszko put a stop to the quarrel with a single letter to Congress. "If you see that my promotion will make a great many jealous," he wrote in his disarming prose, "tell the General that I will not accept of one because I prefer peace more than the greatest Rank in the World."
The good-natured patience with which Kosciuszko bore such Gallic intrigue and his refusal to seek a promotion made him one of the most popular officers in the American Army. Although he himself was the son of a minor Polish noble, he detested aristocratic pretensions. To him, aristocracy was synonymous with the exploitation and corruption which had destroyed Poland.
Years later, his will would leave all the money he had received as back pay from Congress — he served throughout the entire war without drawing more than a few months' salary — to the creation of a fund to purchase the freedom of Negro slaves, educate them and give them 100 acres of land and equipment to farm it. Unfortunately, the will was broken by avaricious relatives. But it remains a monument to his conviction that all men are born equal.
Act of insurrection
After the American Revolution, Kosciuszko returned to Europe with a fierce desire to restore Poland as an independent nation and to create within it the free society he had experienced in America. "We must all unite for one purpose," he wrote to a friend. "To free our country from the domination of foreigners, from the abasement and destruction of the very name of Pole." The Poles began reforming their nation, and he was appointed to a major general in a revived Polish army. In 1792, the Russians invaded Poland, determined to crush these stirrings of independence.
The division commanded by Kosciuszko distinguished itself repeatedly on the battlefield, but the Poles had no hope of victory over the huge Russian army. When the Polish king surrendered, Kosciuszko fled to Leipzig and organized a resistance movement.
In 1794, Kosciuszko and a small band of followers re-entered Poland and proclaimed his "Act of Insurrection," based in part on the American Declaration of Independence. It denounced the tyranny which made Poland's revolt a necessity and declared as its goals "the re-establishment of national liberties and the independence of the Republic." Finally, it outlined a future government for Poland which strongly resembled that of America. Kosciuszko was named military commander in chief to direct the war against the Russians. For his uniform he chose a Polish peasant's white cloak.
Revolutionary France, the one nation that could have helped Poland, refused to come to Kosciuszko's aid. Both Russia and Prussia sent immense armies into Poland. For a while the Poles held their own, but when Austria joined the war with a third army, Poland's doom was sealed. Kosciuszko's forces were crushed in the savage battle of Maciejowice. As charging Cossacks overwhelmed his lines, Kosciuszko rode to meet them, sword in hand. A cavalry saber slashed open his head. A lance was driven deep into his hip. More dead than alive, he was carried off to a Russian prison, as were 10,000 compatriots.
Despite this defeat, Polish historians agree that Poland as a nation was reborn in Kosciuszko's act of insurrection. "Out of nonentity," one wrote, "he extracted an immense force; he demonstrated what the nation, even without foreign help, can accomplish. From a leader of a lost insurrection, he became forever a symbol of national resurrection."
Living Link
Two years later, a new tsar offered Kosciuszko his freedom if he would swear allegiance. To free his fellow Poles suffering in Siberian prison camps, Kosciuszko agreed. Returning to America, he found dozens of old Army friends begging him to settle in their neighborhoods. The lance thrust in his hip had damaged nerves which forced him to use crutches most of the time. But he responded to Jefferson's plea and returned to Europe in 1798, becoming in the words of one observer,"the first link" in the eventual rapprochement between France and America.
Kosciuszko remained in Europe, hoping that the turmoil created by Napoleon Bonaparte would enable him to strike another blow for Poland. Friends in America, particularly Thomas Jefferson, pleaded with him to return. "My dear friend," Jefferson wrote. "Close a life of liberty in a land of liberty. Come and lay your bones with mine in the cemetery of Monticello." But Kosciuszko refused. Even after Napoleon's defeat, when the great powers brushed aside Kosciuszko's pleas on behalf of Poland, he kept a lonely exile's vigil on behalf of his betrayed country. To the end of his life, he never refused a plea for help from the unfortunate. People said that his horse learned to stop at the sight of a beggar, even before Kosciuszko tugged on the reins.
For two centuries, Kosciuszko's name has remained a living link between the United States and Poland. After World War I, when the Russian communists invaded Poland, a group of American airmen volunteered to help the Poles defend their freedom. They were led by Capt. Merian C. Cooper, a direct descendant of a colonial family at whose house Kosciuszko lived for a time while campaigning in South Carolina. Cooper and his friends called themselves the Kosciuszko Squadron, and they played a dynamic role in the series of little-known but enormously violent battles in which the Poles drove the Russians out of their country, securing for Poland nearly 20 precious years of independence.
"The title of 'an American' will always be sacred to me," Kosciuszko once said. It is abundantly clear that the name Kosciuszko should remain equally sacred to Americans.