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The Polish-American Connection

Since General Tadeusz Kosciuszko and General Kazimierz Pulaski arrived to fight alongside George Washington in the American Revolution, the connection between Poland and the Unites States has been a strong one. Pulaski and Kosciusko are names known and respected by generations of Americans.

General Casimir Pulaski

Casimir (Kazimierz) Pulaski was born on March 4, 1745 in Warka Winiary, Poland. Pulaski came from a family of eight, one of three sons and five daughters of his lawyer-father, Count Jozef Pulaski and and Marianna Zielinska. His family belonged to the minor Polish nobility. His father Joseph Pulaski taught his children to be good patriots and to love Poland. When he was eight years old, his father bought him a pony. Casimir loved horses. He practiced riding horseback and shooting guns for many years. When he was fifteen, his father decided to send Casimir for formal training school. He became an officer of the army at the age of fifteen.

Pulaski became a National hero in 1771 when he and his army defeated Russian forces in Poland. Pulaski gained fame as a cavalry commander in the patriotic anti-Russian Confederation of Bar, coming its commander in chief. In October 1771, Pulaski undertook one last major expedition as part of a plot to abduct the King Stanislaus August Poniatowski. The plot misfired, but it led to the young Casimir being unjustly accused of attempted regicide and later, to a death sentence. In the bitter fighting, his father and brothers were killed, Casimir was arrested and condemned to death for his part in the revolt, and escaped.

In 1772, Russia, Prussia, and Austria began negotiations to partition the Commonwealth, he and the other confederates saw the futility of continuing the struggle. In the face of the charges against him, he was forced to flee his homeland, and never to see it again. In 1772 he fled to Turkey, and later to France. Young Pulaski was sorely disappointed in his inability to secure freedom for the Baltic people. In 1776 he appeals to the Sejm (Polish Parliament) in Warsaw to be allowed to return to Poland but there was no reply.

In 1777 Casimir Pulaski arrived in Paris and met Benjamin Franklin, who tried to get military leaders, who could help the Americans in their fight for freedom from England. Benjamin Franklin recommended Pulaski to George Washington and described Casimir Pulaski: "...the young Pole as an officer, renowned throughout Europe for the courage and bravery he displayed in defense of his country's freedom".

Casimir Pulaski understood why people wanted freedom, so he decided to help and on July 23, 1777 he came to America. On September 11, he took part in his first battle on American soil on the Brandywine Creek between Chester and Philadelphia. On Washington's recommendation, the Continental Congress appointed Pulaski general of the cavalry on September 15, 1777. Pulaski received the consent of Congress on March 28, 1778, to form a special infantry an and cavalry unit capable of more independent military action. It took him about five months to form and independent corps of cavalry, later known as Pulaski Legion, at his headquarters in Baltimore.

The new recruit organized a cavalry unit composed of American, Polish, Irish, German, and French troops. In February of 1779, he received orders to proceed to South Carolina to reinforce the southern American forces under British attack. On May 8, the Legion arrived in Charleston where it greatly contributed to the successful defense of the town against a much larger British force.

In October, 1779, the newly formed unit engaged the British in the Siege of Savannah where on October 9, Pulaski was very badly wounded. October 15, 1779, is believed to be the correct date of General Pulaski's death. Historians are unsure how Pulaski died. The popular account holds that Pulaski rallied the troops in a cavalry charge upon hearing that a fellow officer was hit in the leg by a musket ball. During the charge, Pulaski was struck in the thigh by grapeshot and fell from his horse. Within days, gangrene claimed the war hero's life. Historians continue to debate what happened to Pulaski's body after his death. One traditional account is that Pulaski died aboard the American ship Wasp and is buried at sea.

Americans have always recognized Pulaski's heroism and the price he paid for their freedom. Shortly after his death a solemn memorial service was held in Charleston, and, before the end of 1779, the Continental Congress resolved that a monument should be erected in his honor, though a statue was not put into place in Washington, D.C., until 1910.

Over the years Americans have kept alive his memory naming many counties, towns, cities, streets, parks, schools, and squares after him. Among those of Polish descent, his fame rivals that of Kosciuszko, who, after his service in the American Revolutionary War, returned to his homeland, where, in 1794, he led an insurrection against the same Russian domination that Pulaski had fought before coming to America.

General Thaddeus Kosciusko

A large crowd was on the wharf as the Adriana arrived in Philadelphia from England on the evening of August 18, 1797. Aboard was a distinguished passenger whose name few Americans could pronounce but whose noble reputation was well known. He was Thaddeus Kosciusko (pronounced kôsh-choosh’ko), the illustrious veteran of the American and the Polish revolutions. Only recently released from two years in Russian prisons and suffering still from the wounds he had received while leading the ill-fated struggle for Poland’s freedom, Kosciusko was returning to the United States for the first time since the end of the American War of Independence. Word had gone ahead, and now, as the Adriana slipped into the harbor, a welcoming party went aboard to greet the general, who replied in French, saying: “I look upon America as my second country.” As he debarked, the cannon from the nearby fort boomed a salute. There was a great deal of cheering. And then, with cries of “Long live Kosciusko!” the citizens themselves took up the traces of his carriage and drew him in triumph to his lodgings.

To the general the circumstances of his arrival in America that evening in 1797 must have seemed strangely familiar. It was in Philadelphia that he had apparently first set foot on American soil more than twenty years before. Then, as now, he had left behind him an unhappy country, Russia, Austria, and Prussia having robbed Poland of a third of her territory and fully half of her population under the terms of the First Partition of 1772. Then, as now, Kosciusko could see no prospect of serving his country—the goal toward which his training and talents and hopes had always been directed.

Born in 1746, the son of an impoverished small landowner, Kosciusko had grown up among the peasants of the provincial districts of Polish Lithuania. Tutored at home and later at a nearby college of the Piarist fathers, at Lubieszow, near Pinsk, he recalled later that when he was a boy, his favorite hero of antiquity had been the Greek patriot Timoleon, because “he was able to restore his nation’s freedom, taking nothing for himself.” Kosciusko was admitted to the royal military academy in Warsaw and eventually received a royal stipend to continue his studies abroad, leaving Poland for France in 1769 or 1770. Having learned the military arts in the school of engineering and artillery at Mézières and having pursued his interest in the fine arts and architecture at the Académie Royale in Paris, he had returned home in 1774, a well-trained and eager young man of twenty-eight.

Whether America was Kosciusko’s goal from the start is not known. Perhaps he had already heard the news of the battles of Lexington, Concord, and Bunker Hill before leaving Poland. Certainly Paris that autumn was alive with talk about the American rebellion against British authority; and by March, 1776, Lord Stormont, the British ambassador to Versailles, was sending his superiors unsettling news: “I am sorry to say, My Lord, I have good Reason to believe that several foreign officers are gone to join the Rebel army.” Kosciusko was evidently among those officers.

Washington was occupied in New York that summer, trying to hold back the advancing British. Kosciusko was in Philadelphia, where having presented himmself to the Board of War, he was put to work laying out the town’s defenses on the Delaware River. Commissioned by Congress on October 18, 1776, with the rank of colonel of engineers and pay of sixty dollars a month, he spent the fall and winter at work on the river fortifications at Billingsport Island and at Red Bank, on the New Jersey side of the river. He was remembered by one who knew him during the early years of the war as a “rather young man—of unassuming manners—of grave temper.” Small of stature but muscular and agile, he is shown in his portraits to be romantically good-looking, almost Byronic, with dark eyes and a head of wavy brown hair.

For reasons as much of politics as of modesty Kosciusko felt compelled to renounce any claim to promotion. He was too sensitive to his position as a foreigner and too much aware of the resentment that was being caused among American officers by the wholesale promotions of French adventurers for purely political reasons. To a friend in General Horatio Gates’s camp he wrote: “My dear Colonel if you see that my promotion will make a great many Jealous, tell the General that I will not accept of one because I prefer peace more than the greatest Rank in the World.”

Early in August, 1780, Kosciusko was to join General Gates, who had been newly appointed to take command of the Southern Army in the hope that he could turn the tide against the British in the South as he had done in the North, at Saratoga. Washington was reluctant to let Kosciusko go, explaining to Gates that “I have experienced great satisfaction from his general conduct, and particularly from the attention and zeal with which he prosecuted the Works committed to his charge at West Point.” In the end the commander in chief did give his permission, but before Kosciusko had time to reach the Southern Army, Gates was dealt a crushing defeat at Camden, South Carolina, and was relieved of command.

The news must have weighed heavily on Kosciusko’s mind as he travelled south. Certainly the southern campaigns were taking a miserable toll of lives and reputations. Not only were Georgia and South Carolina now in British hands, but the fall of Savannah the year before had claimed the life of Kosciusko’s heroic young compatriot Casimir Pulaski, who had been such a gallant leader in the war of resistance against the First Partition of Poland. Now Kosciusko’s dear friend General Gates had been disgraced as well. Nevertheless he continued on his southward journey and assumed the duties of chief engineer under Gates’s successor, General Nathanael Greene.

Late in the spring of 1781, during the siege of the British outpost known as Ninety-Six (so called because it was thought to be ninety-six miles from the nearest frontier post, Fort Prince George), Kosciusko worked closely with Greene in planning the assault—too closely, according to Greene’s critics. On the basis of his own observations, as well as those of his chief engineer, Greene concentrated his efforts against the strongest point in the British defenses, a star-shaped redoubt which commanded all other fortifications in the area. Kosciusko directed the building of ramparts and the digging of mines and trenches, some of them within seventy yards of the British line. Almost captured during a British sortie against the forward siege works, Kosciusko managed to escape with, according to a British officer, an inglorious wound in the “seat of honor.”

Peace was now in sight, but hostilities dragged on through 1782. Throughout the campaign of 1782 Kosciusko fought more often as a soldier than as an engineer. Commanding an advance guard near Charleston, he seized every opportunity to harass the enemy, ambushing patrols, carrying off horses, and disrupting British supply units. As late as November 14, 1782, he led a party of fifty or sixty men against a troop of British woodcutters on James Island, near Charleston. British infantry appeared, however, and gave the Americans more of a fight than they had bargained for. Five Americans were killed, but although Kosciusko had his coat pierced by four balls, he and most of his men escaped unhurt from what proved to be the last skirmish of the Revolutionary War. A month later the British evacuated Charleston, their last southern outpost, and Kosciusko took part in the Americans’ triumphal entry into the city.

As to his promotion, Kosciusko was brevetted a brigadier general, albeit as part of the general advancement in rank awarded to all officers who had otherwise received no promotion. Thanks to Washington’s intervention, however, Congress did approve a special resolution acknowledging its “high sense of his long, faithful, and meritorious service.” Kosciusko also had the satisfaction of being present in the long room of Fraunces Tavern in New York when, on December 4, 1783, Washington bade farewell to the principal officers of the army.

The great patriot spent his last days in retirement in France and later in Switzerland. At the request of the American envoy to France he also composed a treatise on “Manoeuvres for Horse Artillery,” which was adapted for use by the United States War Department during the War of 1812. Kosciusko died at Soleure on October 15, 1817, at the age of seventy-one. His heart was buried beneath a monument in Soleure and was later transferred to the Polish Museum in Rapperszwil, Switzerland. His body was taken back to Poland and laid to rest in the cathedral at Cracow, where Poland’s kings were buried. Outside the town a great earthen mound was raised in his honor by the men, women, and children of Poland, who brought earth in their barrows and caps and pockets from the Polish battlefields where he had fought. All that was lacking to make his homecoming complete was a shovelful of the earth he had helped to win for America.

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