Tadeusz Kościuszko

military engineer Soldier statesman military leader

February 4, 1746 (age 70)

Mereczowszczyzna, Belarus

On returning to Poland in 1774, Kościuszko, despite great references, had little chance of finding a post in the Polish Army as he could not afford to buy an officer's commission. Instead, he took the position of tutor to the family of the magnate Sosnowski, and fell in love with his daughter, Ludwika Sosnowska. Their elopement was thwarted by the girl's father, who didn't want Kościuszko for his daughter's husband. This event has been linked with Kościuszko's resentment towards all kind of social barriers. In the aftermath of the traumatic event, Kościuszko decided to emigrate. Ludwika remained the love of his life. In June 1776, Kościuszko arrived in America, where he decided to join the American Revolutionary War and offered his services (including his engineering expertise) to the colonial forces fighting for independence from Great Britain. He would spend the next 8 years serving as an officer in the ranks of the American army. In America Kościuszko made his name as a brilliant engineer and builder of fortifications. The Continental Congress appointed him as a colonel of engineers, and he initially worked to build fortifications in order to protect Philadelphia from British attack. Kosciuszko was then sent to New York, where General Horatio Gates put Kosciuszko in charge of planning the defensive strategy for his army at Saratoga, whose defeat of the British forces under General John Burgoyne in October 1777 would prove to be a turning point in the Revolutionary War. In 1778, General George Washington commissioned Kosciuszko to build the military fortifications at West Point, an important defensive position on the Hudson River. Considered impenetrable, the site eventually became the site of the U.S. Military Academy. By war’s end, Kosciuszko was made a brigadier general and received U.S. citizenship, along with a medal for his service to the Continental Army. America became Kościuszko's second homeland. In 1784 Kościuszko returned to Poland, but despite his great experience and his fame as a great general, he once again failed to get a commission in the Commonwealth's Army. Because of his association with the Czartoryski family, then in opposition to the King, he could not secure an appointment in the Polish army. For five years he lived in poverty on a small country estate in Siechnowicze (now, Sehnovichi, Belarus), in debt, moreover, because of his exceptional deed of freeing his serfs from part of their villein service. In 1789 he finally managed to get a royal commission as a major general. In 1792 the Russian army of the empress Catherine II invaded Poland in an attempt to end Polish internal reforms designed to liberate the nation from Russian influence. In the ensuing war Kościuszko rose to fame as a division commander during the bloody Battle of Dubienka on July 18. For this he was raised to the rank of general lieutenant by King Stanisław II Augustus Poniatowski, and the new Revolutionary government in Paris granted him honorary French citizenship. But, when the Polish king, fearing defeat, defected from the liberal cause, Kościuszko prepared to resume fighting. In Russian-occupied Poland, however, the reactionary party assumed power, forcing liberal statesmen into exile in Saxony. Kościuszko, against the king’s wishes, gave up his commission and joined the exiles. From Saxony, in January 1793, Kościuszko was delegated to Paris to seek support for the Polish cause, first from the Girondists and then the Jacobins, pledging in return radical internal reforms in Poland and military diversion against Prussia and Austria, then at war with Revolutionary France. When he returned to Saxony in August, he faced new demands for starting an uprising in Poland in view of favourable indications there. Kościuszko agreed to command the national forces and went secretly to a place near Cracow (Kraków), but, finding preparations inadequate, he delayed the uprising and then went abroad again. His decision proved unwise because time allowed the enemy to undermine the conspiracy through widespread arrests and reduction of the army. Those left in the underground started the uprising on March 12, 1794. On their request Kościuszko arrived in Cracow on March 24 and, amid an enormous assembly of people, solemnly swore an act of national uprising against the occupying powers—chiefly Russia and Prussia. . It would become the first in a long line of Polish national uprisings against the occupying neighbouring powers. Undertaking all political responsibility and military leadership, he set up an insurgent administration and military force. To do so he had to compensate for the quality of the enemy army with the quantity of his own. Therefore, Kościuszko introduced conscription to military service, enlarged existing units by incorporating recruits into them, and developed new formations. Having no war industry, his forces could not be equipped with conventional firearms; hence, he armed his peasant recruits with pikes and traditional war scythes. After a smashing victory at Racławice on April 4, won by the scythe-bearing formations under Kościuszko’s personal command, special new battle tactics were developed based on columns of men attacking on the run and backed by artillery fire. To win more army volunteers from the peasant masses, he issued the Manifesto of Połaniec, on May 7, which attempted to eliminate serfdom, reduced corvee work, and promised that the peasants would own the land they cultivated. The Manifesto is considered the first legal act that would make Polish peasants citizens. This met with some resistance of the nobility. Defeats forced Kościuszko to retreat to his last stronghold, Warsaw. The defense of this city, besieged by Prussian and Russian armies for about two months, remains Kościuszko’s greatest military success, both as strategist and engineer. He managed to use the city population to build earthworks and to defend the city alongside the regular army. In critical moments, he himself led the charge with fixed bayonets. Next, he stirred up an uprising in the occupied province of Wielkopolska, at the rear of the besieging armies, forcing the Prussian king Frederick William II to retreat. But Russian reinforcements retaliated quickly. Kościuszko was unable to concentrate adequate forces in time, and he suffered his greatest defeat at Maciejowice, where he was wounded and taken prisoner. Without its leader, the uprising collapsed, and the Third Partition of Poland ended the existence of the country. Kościuszko, imprisoned in the Peter-Paul Fortress in St. Petersburg, was slowly returning to health when, upon the death of Catherine II, her son, the emperor Paul I, granted him freedom in 1796. Despite a crippling illness, Kościuszko returned to the United States. On August 18, 1797, he arrived in Philadelphia, greeted enthusiastically by the people but held in suspicion by the incumbent Federalists. In the United States he led an active life in social circles and entered into a long-lasting friendship with Thomas Jefferson, who was then vice president. While in America, he authored a document that some historians suggest might have changed the course of American history. The document of his last will stipulated that the proceeds of Kościuszko's American estate (which the American Congress granted the Polish general based on his 8-year engagement in the Revolutionary War) be spent on freeing and educating African-American slaves, including those of his friend Thomas Jefferson, who was also named as the will's executor. After receiving news of fresh possibilities to promote Poland’s cause in France, he secretly left the United States on May 5, 1798. Before that he had appropriated some of his estate for setting free his black slaves and for educating them. Led on by false promises made by the French government, Kościuszko believed Poland had finally found an ally. He met Napoleon twice in 1799 but the two failed to reach an agreement. Kościuszko disliked Napoleon for his dictatorial aspirations and called him the "undertaker of the [French] Republic". Eventually Napoleon’s rise to power dashed his hopes of a unified and free Poland and Kościuszko began to distance himself from politics. Hence, Kościuszko retired from public life and took up residence in Berville, near Fontainebleau. In 1806 Napoleon tried to gain Kościuszko’s aid in the event of war with Russia. But Kościuszko again demanded political commitments, and Napoleon secured other, more agreeable Polish supporters for his plans. Kościuszko remained in exile when his country was rebuilt as the Grand Duchy of Warsaw (1807). Consequently, after Napoleon’s fall in 1814, the Russian emperor Alexander I sought Kościuszko’s help in bargaining for Poland’s territories. After the Congress of Vienna and the formation of a new Polish realm under Russian rule in 1815, Emperor Alexander was anxious to be on good terms with Kościuszko and to have him return home. Kościuszko, however, again proposed unrealistic conditions, demanding social reforms and boundaries of the country reaching the Dvina and Dnieper rivers. When no answer came, he went to Solothurn, Switzerland, and freed all his serfs in Poland from villein service. Kościuszko died in Solothurn, Switzerland, on 15th October, 1817, at the age of 71. His embalmed body was deposited in a crypt of the Solothurn church, only to be transferred to Kraków the following year. Eventually it was placed in a crypt in Wawel Cathedral, a pantheon of Polish kings and national heroes. The people, reviving an ancient custom, raised a huge mound to his memory near the city. Shortly before his death he wrote up his last will in regard to his Polish estate. In it he made sure that the serfs of the village of Siechnowicze were to be freed after his death (a wish Tsar Alexander obviously disallowed).

Tadeusz Kościuszko Edit Profile

also known as Andrzej Tadeusz Bonawentura Kościuszko

military engineer Soldier statesman military leader

Background

Kościuszko was born on February 4, 1746, in a manor house on the estate called "Mereczowszczyzna" near Kosów, (now Kosava, Belarus) in Nowogródek Voivodeship, Grand Duchy of Lithuania, a part of the Polish–Lithuanian Commonwealth to a family of noble origin (szlachta). He was the youngest son Ludwik Tadeusz Kościuszko, an officer in the Polish–Lithuanian Commonwealth Army, and his wife Tekla, née Ratomska. Tadeusz was baptized by the Roman Catholic church and the Orthodox Church, thereby receiving the names Andrzej, Tadeusz, and Bonawentura. Like most Polish–Lithuanian nobility of the time, the Kościuszkos spoke Polish and identified with Polish culture, but his paternal family was ethnically Lithuanian–Ruthenian and traced their ancestry to Konstanty Fiodorowicz Kostiuszko, a courtier of Polish King and Grand Duke of Lithuania Sigismund I the Old. Kościuszko's maternal family, the Ratomskis, were also Ruthenian. Kościuszko once described himself as a Litvin, a term that denoted inhabitants, of whatever ethnicity, of the Grand Duchy of Lithuania, within the Polish–Lithuanian Commonwealth.

A son of a petty nobleman, Tadeusz (unlike his brother) was very fond of playing with the village's peasant children. His respect and empathy for the hard life of peasants very likely originate in this period. While still a boy Kościuszko became an avid reader of Cornelius Nepos' Lives of Illustrious Men, his favourite being that of Timoleon Corinthian. The figure of this Greek politician who had disinterestedly liberated his fatherland from tyrants influenced his character and later activity. For Kościuszko, fatherland became the ultimate good for which he was willing to sacrifice everything.

Education

In 1755, Kościuszko went to Piarist college in Lubieszów, but didn’t finish it due to the family's financial difficulties after his father's death in 1758. The King of Poland Stanisław II August Poniatowski established a Corps of Cadets (Korpus Kadetów) in 1765, at what is now Warsaw University, to educate military officers and government officials. Kościuszko enrolled in the Corps in 1765, likely thanks to the patronage of the Czartoryski family. The school emphasized military subjects and the liberal arts. He graduated in 1766, and was promoted to chorąży (a military rank roughly equivalent to modern lieutenant); he stayed on as a student instructor and by 1768 had attained the rank of captain. Kościuszko’s outstanding abilities soon attracted the attention of King Stanisław II Augustus Poniatowski, who sent him to Paris on a royal scholarship in 1768, where he continued his studies. He audited lectures and frequented the libraries of the Parisian military academies to learn engineering and fortification construction. At the same time he pursued his interest in drawing and painting, and took private lessons in architecture. The French Enlightenment, especially the economic doctrines of physiocracy, turned out to be out a big influence on the intellectual development of Kościuszko during his 5-year stay in pre-revolutionary France.

$Education period of Tadeusz Ko\u015Bciuszko in Corps of Cadets$

Career

On returning to Poland in 1774, Kościuszko, despite great references, had little chance of finding a post in the Polish Army as he could not afford to buy an officer's commission. Instead, he took the position of tutor to the family of the magnate Sosnowski, and fell in love with his daughter, Ludwika Sosnowska. Their elopement was thwarted by the girl's father, who didn't want Kościuszko for his daughter's husband. This event has been linked with Kościuszko's resentment towards all kind of social barriers. In the aftermath of the traumatic event, Kościuszko decided to emigrate. Ludwika remained the love of his life.

In June 1776, Kościuszko arrived in America, where he decided to join the American Revolutionary War and offered his services (including his engineering expertise) to the colonial forces fighting for independence from Great Britain. He would spend the next 8 years serving as an officer in the ranks of the American army. In America Kościuszko made his name as a brilliant engineer and builder of fortifications. The Continental Congress appointed him as a colonel of engineers, and he initially worked to build fortifications in order to protect Philadelphia from British attack.

Kosciuszko was then sent to New York, where General Horatio Gates put Kosciuszko in charge of planning the defensive strategy for his army at Saratoga, whose defeat of the British forces under General John Burgoyne in October 1777 would prove to be a turning point in the Revolutionary War. In 1778, General George Washington commissioned Kosciuszko to build the military fortifications at West Point, an important defensive position on the Hudson River. Considered impenetrable, the site eventually became the site of the U.S. Military Academy. By war’s end, Kosciuszko was made a brigadier general and received U.S. citizenship, along with a medal for his service to the Continental Army. America became Kościuszko's second homeland.

In 1784 Kościuszko returned to Poland, but despite his great experience and his fame as a great general, he once again failed to get a commission in the Commonwealth's Army. Because of his association with the Czartoryski family, then in opposition to the King, he could not secure an appointment in the Polish army. For five years he lived in poverty on a small country estate in Siechnowicze (now, Sehnovichi, Belarus), in debt, moreover, because of his exceptional deed of freeing his serfs from part of their villein service. In 1789 he finally managed to get a royal commission as a major general.

In 1792 the Russian army of the empress Catherine II invaded Poland in an attempt to end Polish internal reforms designed to liberate the nation from Russian influence. In the ensuing war Kościuszko rose to fame as a division commander during the bloody Battle of Dubienka on July 18. For this he was raised to the rank of general lieutenant by King Stanisław II Augustus Poniatowski, and the new Revolutionary government in Paris granted him honorary French citizenship. But, when the Polish king, fearing defeat, defected from the liberal cause, Kościuszko prepared to resume fighting. In Russian-occupied Poland, however, the reactionary party assumed power, forcing liberal statesmen into exile in Saxony. Kościuszko, against the king’s wishes, gave up his commission and joined the exiles.

From Saxony, in January 1793, Kościuszko was delegated to Paris to seek support for the Polish cause, first from the Girondists and then the Jacobins, pledging in return radical internal reforms in Poland and military diversion against Prussia and Austria, then at war with Revolutionary France. When he returned to Saxony in August, he faced new demands for starting an uprising in Poland in view of favourable indications there. Kościuszko agreed to command the national forces and went secretly to a place near Cracow (Kraków), but, finding preparations inadequate, he delayed the uprising and then went abroad again. His decision proved unwise because time allowed the enemy to undermine the conspiracy through widespread arrests and reduction of the army. Those left in the underground started the uprising on March 12, 1794. On their request Kościuszko arrived in Cracow on March 24 and, amid an enormous assembly of people, solemnly swore an act of national uprising against the occupying powers—chiefly Russia and Prussia. . It would become the first in a long line of Polish national uprisings against the occupying neighbouring powers. Undertaking all political responsibility and military leadership, he set up an insurgent administration and military force. To do so he had to compensate for the quality of the enemy army with the quantity of his own. Therefore, Kościuszko introduced conscription to military service, enlarged existing units by incorporating recruits into them, and developed new formations. Having no war industry, his forces could not be equipped with conventional firearms; hence, he armed his peasant recruits with pikes and traditional war scythes.

After a smashing victory at Racławice on April 4, won by the scythe-bearing formations under Kościuszko’s personal command, special new battle tactics were developed based on columns of men attacking on the run and backed by artillery fire. To win more army volunteers from the peasant masses, he issued the Manifesto of Połaniec, on May 7, which attempted to eliminate serfdom, reduced corvee work, and promised that the peasants would own the land they cultivated. The Manifesto is considered the first legal act that would make Polish peasants citizens. This met with some resistance of the nobility. Defeats forced Kościuszko to retreat to his last stronghold, Warsaw. The defense of this city, besieged by Prussian and Russian armies for about two months, remains Kościuszko’s greatest military success, both as strategist and engineer. He managed to use the city population to build earthworks and to defend the city alongside the regular army. In critical moments, he himself led the charge with fixed bayonets. Next, he stirred up an uprising in the occupied province of Wielkopolska, at the rear of the besieging armies, forcing the Prussian king Frederick William II to retreat. But Russian reinforcements retaliated quickly. Kościuszko was unable to concentrate adequate forces in time, and he suffered his greatest defeat at Maciejowice, where he was wounded and taken prisoner. Without its leader, the uprising collapsed, and the Third Partition of Poland ended the existence of the country.

Kościuszko, imprisoned in the Peter-Paul Fortress in St. Petersburg, was slowly returning to health when, upon the death of Catherine II, her son, the emperor Paul I, granted him freedom in 1796. Despite a crippling illness, Kościuszko returned to the United States. On August 18, 1797, he arrived in Philadelphia, greeted enthusiastically by the people but held in suspicion by the incumbent Federalists. In the United States he led an active life in social circles and entered into a long-lasting friendship with Thomas Jefferson, who was then vice president. While in America, he authored a document that some historians suggest might have changed the course of American history. The document of his last will stipulated that the proceeds of Kościuszko's American estate (which the American Congress granted the Polish general based on his 8-year engagement in the Revolutionary War) be spent on freeing and educating African-American slaves, including those of his friend Thomas Jefferson, who was also named as the will's executor.

After receiving news of fresh possibilities to promote Poland’s cause in France, he secretly left the United States on May 5, 1798. Before that he had appropriated some of his estate for setting free his black slaves and for educating them. Led on by false promises made by the French government, Kościuszko believed Poland had finally found an ally. He met Napoleon twice in 1799 but the two failed to reach an agreement. Kościuszko disliked Napoleon for his dictatorial aspirations and called him the "undertaker of the [French] Republic". Eventually Napoleon’s rise to power dashed his hopes of a unified and free Poland and Kościuszko began to distance himself from politics.

Hence, Kościuszko retired from public life and took up residence in Berville, near Fontainebleau. In 1806 Napoleon tried to gain Kościuszko’s aid in the event of war with Russia. But Kościuszko again demanded political commitments, and Napoleon secured other, more agreeable Polish supporters for his plans. Kościuszko remained in exile when his country was rebuilt as the Grand Duchy of Warsaw (1807). Consequently, after Napoleon’s fall in 1814, the Russian emperor Alexander I sought Kościuszko’s help in bargaining for Poland’s territories. After the Congress of Vienna and the formation of a new Polish realm under Russian rule in 1815, Emperor Alexander was anxious to be on good terms with Kościuszko and to have him return home. Kościuszko, however, again proposed unrealistic conditions, demanding social reforms and boundaries of the country reaching the Dvina and Dnieper rivers. When no answer came, he went to Solothurn, Switzerland, and freed all his serfs in Poland from villein service.

Kościuszko died in Solothurn, Switzerland, on 15th October, 1817, at the age of 71. His embalmed body was deposited in a crypt of the Solothurn church, only to be transferred to Kraków the following year. Eventually it was placed in a crypt in Wawel Cathedral, a pantheon of Polish kings and national heroes. The people, reviving an ancient custom, raised a huge mound to his memory near the city. Shortly before his death he wrote up his last will in regard to his Polish estate. In it he made sure that the serfs of the village of Siechnowicze were to be freed after his death (a wish Tsar Alexander obviously disallowed).

$Career period of Tadeusz Ko\u015Bciuszko in career$ $Career period of Tadeusz Ko\u015Bciuszko in career$ $Career period of Tadeusz Ko\u015Bciuszko in career$ $Career period of Tadeusz Ko\u015Bciuszko in career$ $Career period of Tadeusz Ko\u015Bciuszko in career$ $Career period of Tadeusz Ko\u015Bciuszko in career$ $Career period of Tadeusz Ko\u015Bciuszko in career$ $Career period of Tadeusz Ko\u015Bciuszko in career$ $Career period of Tadeusz Ko\u015Bciuszko in career$ $Career period of Tadeusz Ko\u015Bciuszko in career$ $Career period of Tadeusz Ko\u015Bciuszko in career$

Achievements

Tadeusz Kościuszko fought in the Polish–Lithuanian Commonwealth's struggles against Russia and Prussia, and on the U.S. side in the American Revolutionary War. As Supreme Commander of the Polish National Armed Forces, he led the 1794 Kościuszko Uprising. In America Kościuszko made his name as a brilliant engineer and builder of fortifications. He designed the blueprints for West Point, which was the key American military fortress. The plan for the Battle of Saratoga was his, and it was the turning point of the American Revolution. He became a national hero in Poland, Lithuania, Belarus, and the United States.

Religion

Tadeusz was baptized by the Roman Catholic church and the Orthodox Church.

Politics

Kosciuszko was essentially a democrat, but a democrat of the school of Jefferson and Lafayette. He maintained that the republic could only be regenerated on the basis of absolute liberty and equality before the law; but in this respect he was far in advance of his age, and the aristocratic prejudices of his countrymen compelled him to resort to half measures.

Kościuszko argued that the peasants and Jews should receive full citizenship status, as this would motivate them to help defend Poland in the event of war. The political reformers centered in the Patriotic Party scored a major victory with the adoption of the Constitution of May 3, 1791. Kościuszko saw the Constitution as a step in the right direction, but was disappointed that it retained the monarchy and did little to improve the situation of the most underprivileged, the peasants and the Jews.

Views

Throughout his life Kościuszko stood up for the rights of many social and ethnic groups. He became friends with Agrippa Hull, a black man who was his aide de camp during the Revolutionary War. Kościuszko's liberal behaviour toward Hull was at that time considered unusual. Several years later, during the Insurgence in Poland, Kościuszko was joined by another African-American, Jean Lapierre (see image), who also became his aide de camp.

Alex Storozynski, author of American biography of Kościuszko, Peasant Prince, claims that Kościuszko stood up not only for the rights of peasants, Jews and African-Americans but also Native Americans. He recalls how the chief of the Miami Indian tribe Little Turtle, whom Kościuszko met in Philadelphia, gave him a tomahawk and peace pipe as a sign of appreciation. The Pole gave Little Turtle two pistols and told him to "shoot dead the first man who comes to subjugate you."

Quotations: One of the most famous quotes by Kosciuszko: “There is a time when you have to sacrifice everything to have everything saved.”

Kościuszko's Testament: “I beg Mr Jefferson that in case I should die without will or testament he should bye out of my money so many Negroes and free them, that the restart Sum should be Sufficient to give them education and provide for their maintenance. That is to say each should know before, the duty of a Citizen in the free Government, that he must defend his Country against foreign as well internal Enemies who would wish to change the Constitution for the worst to enslave them by degree afterwards, to have good and human heart sensible for the sufferings of others, each must be married and have 100 acres of land, with instruments, Cattle for tillage and know how to manage and Govern it as well to know how to behave to neighbours, always with kindness and ready to help them-to them selves frugal, to their Children give good education I mean as to the heart and the duty to the Country, in gratitude to me to make themselves happy as possible.”

Version of 5 May 1798: “I Thaddeus Kosciuszko being just in my departure from America do hereby declare and direct that should I make no other testamentary disposition of my property in the United States I hereby authorise my friend Thomas Jefferson to employ the whole thereof in purchasing Negroes from among his own or any others and giving them liberty in my name, in giving them an education in trades or otherwise and in having them instructed for their new condition in the duties of morality which may make them good neighbours, good fathers or mothers, husbands or wives and in their duties as citizens teaching them to be defenders of their liberty and Country and of the good order of society and in whatsoever may make them happy and useful and I make the said Thomas Jefferson my executor of this.”

Letter to Adam Czartoryski (1814): “(...) therefore all sovereign bodies within the nation will act against deeds of the government accompanied by secret revolts and conspiracies which the history is unfortunately full of; one cannot expect that its actions will change on their own because it remains within its vital interest to fascinate people with lies, fear of hell, bizarre dogmas and abstract or incomprehensible theological ideas (...)."

Membership

Society of the Cincinnati , United States

Personality

Kościuszko was a polyglot. He was fluent in English, Belarusian, French, German and Polish. He also knew Latin. He was always busy with something. He did not fancy losing time for sleep. His favourite way to start a day was to have a cup of black coffee. He drank coffee every day, right after getting up which was very early in the morning. This way, in spite of his numerous professional duties, he had plenty of time to compose music, plant herbs, do DIY projects and draw. He was so skilful with his pencil that women in his company would beg him to draw their portraits. He liked to play music. He was an amazing pianist and composer.

For Poles, for whom he was the greatest authority during his lifetime, he became almost a saint after his death, with his portraits adorning drawing-rooms in many Polish houses and a flourishing business selling relics.

Adam Mickiewicz's Romantic epic Pan Tadeusz (1834) was titled in his honour. For several generations in the partitioned Poland children were named Tadeusz after Kościuszko as a manifest sign of their parents' patriotism. The name made it even to America, where Thaddeus Stevens, the most radical American abolitionist politician, was named after Kościuszko, the hero of American Revolutionary War.

Kościuszko appears also in Jules Verne's novel 20,000 Leagues Under the Sea (1869-1870). His portrait hangs in the cabinet of Captain Nemo on-board the Nautilius among other portraits of great men in history who sacrificed their lives to a great humanitarian cause: Greece's Botzaris, Ireland's O'Connell, Italy's Manino, America's George Washington, Lincoln, and John Brown.

In the decades that followed his death also some more physical monuments were erected to honour Kosciuszko in places ranging from America to Australia. One of the more astonishing ones was built in Kraków within a few years of Kościuszko's death. In 1822 a huge, 34-metre-high artificial earth mound was built by a joint effort from all of society, something which was considered a patriotic activity.

In 1840, the Kościuszko Mound inspired Paul Strzelecki, Polish patriot and Australian explorer, to name the highest mountain in Australia Mount Kosciuszko, the reason for that was the mountain's perceived resemblance to the Kościuszko Mound in Kraków.

Interests

drawing, composing

Connections

He never got married. Fate and his enemies would always get in the way of Tadeusz and his loved ones.

Father:: Ludwik Tadeusz Kościuszko
Mother:: Tekla Ratomska
Friend:: Thomas Jefferson

Main Photo