Tadeusz Kościuszko

Tadeusz Kościuszko, the Polish-born engineer who fortified West Point for the Continental Army and later led his own nation's fight for freedom, died in Solothurn, Switzerland, on October 15, 1817. He was seventy-one. He was born in February 1746 on a small family estate in what was then the Grand Duchy of Lithuania, part of the Polish-Lithuanian Commonwealth and now Belarus. He graduated from the Corps of Cadets in Warsaw and studied in France, where he took up military engineering and the ideas of the Enlightenment. In 1776 he sailed to America and offered his skills to the revolution. As a colonel of engineers he laid out defenses that helped the Americans win at Saratoga, and he spent more than two years designing and building the fortifications at West Point, the Hudson River stronghold that the British never took. He later served with Nathanael Greene in the Southern campaign. In 1783 the Continental Congress promoted him to brigadier general in recognition of his service, and he formed a lasting friendship with Thomas Jefferson. Home again, he became a major general in the Commonwealth army. After the Second Partition of Poland he led the 1794 uprising that bears his name, until he was wounded and captured at Maciejowice that October. Released in 1796 after the death of Catherine the Great, he returned to the United States, where he wrote a will in 1798 directing that his American assets be used to free and educate enslaved people. The bequest was never carried out as he intended, but its words remain one of the clearest antislavery statements of the founding era. He spent his last years in France and Switzerland. In April 1817 he freed the peasants on his remaining lands in Poland. That autumn, already in poor health and troubled by old wounds, he fell from a horse, developed a fever, and died some days later. His body was carried to Kraków and placed in Wawel Cathedral among Poland's kings and heroes. In the United States his name marks counties, towns, bridges, parks and a monument at the academy he once helped defend.