Andrzej Tadeusz Bonawentura Kościuszko
Naczelnik — Supreme Commander of the Polish Insurrection
"Za naszą i waszą wolność. (For our freedom and yours.)"
Polish fortifications turned two American positions into traps the British could not break.
Kościuszko's siting of the works at Bemis Heights helped force Burgoyne's surrender at Saratoga in 1777; his later design of West Point made the Hudson a strategic asset rather than a vulnerability.
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Born at Mereczowszczyzna
Military engineer, Continental Army colonel, later national leader of the Polish 1794 uprising
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Radical Enlightenment republicanism: national independence, peasant emancipation, abolition of serfdom and slavery, Jewish equality, and a constitutional, citizen-army state.
How one life was remembered on three continents.
An engineer's hero: West Point cadets still salute the granite monument he designed for himself. His emancipation bequest — entrusted to Jefferson — remains one of the Revolution's sharpest moral indictments.
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Naczelnik of the 1794 insurrection, secular saint of partitioned Poland. The Kościuszko Mound in Kraków was raised by hand from soil of the nation's battlefields.
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For the great Polish migrations after 1830, 1863, and 1945, Kościuszko was the founding ancestor twice over — of American independence and of Polish freedom. Polonia in Chicago, Detroit, and Milwaukee built him in bronze.
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Born to the szlachta gentry, trained as an engineer in Warsaw and Paris, Kościuszko absorbed the most advanced fortification science of Vauban's heirs.
[Citation: Storozynski, The Peasant Prince, 2009]
Portraits, monuments, maps, and manuscripts. Captions, dates, and credits below each plate.