Return from America
August 1784. A brigadier general of the Continental Army, freshly admitted to the Society of the Cincinnati, returns to a Poland he has not seen for ten years. From his baggage he unpacks Washington’s pistols, his officer’s commission, a letter of recommendation to King Stanisław August. The Commonwealth to which he returns lives under unrelenting pressure: the partition treaty of 1773 remains in force, Russia retains its grip on Vilnius and Warsaw, the elective crown stands under the personal veto of Catherine II. For the American hero there is no salary, no rank, no appointment. There is only Siechnowicze — a family seat of a handful of villages, a half-overgrown pond, and a few dozen serfs.
Siechnowicze · emancipation
Kościuszko’s first economic decision on the recovered estate is a political act, without precedent among the Polish nobility: soon after his return in 1784, on his own authority, he reduces the corvée of the Siechnowicze peasants from four days a week to two and abolishes it altogether for the women. That leaves the women free to work their own plots and build up their own households. His noble neighbors call him a “philosopher”; the peasants — “our Lord Tadeusz.” To his brother he writes that no man, not even on the smallest holding, may be ground down — for liberty unrespected in another is liberty lost in oneself.
In parallel runs the Four-Year Sejm (1788–1792) — one of the most remarkable reformist projects of eighteenth-century Europe. Kościuszko, appointed in October 1789 a major general of the Crown Army with a stipend of twelve thousand złoty a year, serves in Volhynia as deputy to Prince Józef Poniatowski; in May 1792 he will take over one of the three divisions of the Crown Army. In the corridors of the Sejm he becomes an important consultant to the military commission — he proposes a system of citizen militia modeled on the Continental Army, universal conscription, a corps of engineers. In one of its first resolutions, as early as October 1788, the Sejm raises the strength of the army to one hundred thousand; on May 3, 1791 it enacts the Constitution. Under it, the Commonwealth is to be a hereditary monarchy, with the political equality of townspeople and legal protection for the peasantry. Catherine II responds at once: in May 1792 a Russian army of one hundred thousand crosses the border.
Dubienka · July 18, 1792
The Polish-Russian War of 1792 lasts eleven weeks and ends with Stanisław August’s accession to the Targowica Confederation — which in practice nullifies the Constitution. But before that happens, Kościuszko fights on July 18, 1792 his most famous battle of that war — after Zieleńce (June 18) and Włodzimierz (July 7): Dubienka on the Bug. With five thousand soldiers he holds off for an entire day the offensive of a twenty-five-thousand-strong Russian army under General Mikhail Kakhovsky. Around nine in the evening he withdraws in good order, having lost some nine hundred men and six of his twenty-four guns; the Russians lose about four thousand. For Zieleńce he had already been placed on the first roll of knights of the Order of Virtuti Militari, established on June 22; after Dubienka the king signs, on August 1, his promotion to lieutenant general. But Stanisław August has already ordered capitulation. Kościuszko, for whom capitulation is immoral, submits his resignation and goes into exile in Leipzig. He is forty-six years old.
While it is still August — on — the Legislative Assembly of revolutionary France confers on him the honorary title of Citizen of France — in one company with Washington, Paine and Schiller. He is the only Pole among the honorary citizens of France. It is this credential that will open doors for him in Paris .
Leipzig, Paris, Dresden, Italy — autumn 1792 to March 1794. A year and a half of planned, patient conspiracy. In Leipzig, where he stays barely two weeks, Kościuszko establishes contact with Hugo Kołłątaj, Ignacy Potocki, Józef Wybicki. He drafts the first sketch of a manifesto to the nation. In January 1793 Prussia and Russia sign the Second Partition: Poland loses nearly sixty percent of its territory. Kościuszko himself travels to Paris — on a mission to the Jacobins, to win the support of revolutionary France for an uprising; he returns to Dresden without any firm commitments. He draws up an instruction for the conspiracy at home. , at Podgórze, he postpones the outbreak of the uprising. On March 12, 1794 Brigadier Antoni Madaliński, against Russian orders, refuses to disband his cavalry brigade at Ostrołęka and marches on Cracow. That is the signal. On Kościuszko sets out from Dresden for Cracow.
Cracow · the oath on the Main Square
Monday, around ten o’clock in the morning. On the Rynek Główny in Cracow — the largest medieval market square in Europe, two hundred meters by two hundred meters — a crowd of Cracovians has gathered. From the Capuchin church, where the sabers have been blessed, Tadeusz Kościuszko enters the square through the Shoemakers' Gate, in the general’s uniform of the Crown Army, with a saber at his side; at the head of the procession walks Lichocki, the mayor of the city. The secretary of the uprising, Aleksander Linowski, reads the Act of Insurrection of the Citizens and Inhabitants of the Cracow Voivodeship (Hugo Kołłątaj himself is not in Cracow that day — still en route from Leipzig). Kościuszko raises his right hand and speaks the words that will be engraved in the memory of the nation:
I, Tadeusz Kościuszko, swear in the sight of God to the whole Polish Nation that I will not use the power entrusted to me for the private oppression of any man, but solely for the defense of the integrity of the borders, the recovery of the Nation’s sovereignty, and the establishment of universal liberty. So help me God and the innocent Passion of His Son. Tadeusz Kościuszko, Oath on the Rynek Główny in Cracow
, March 24, 1794
Racławice
Eleven days later, on April 4, 1794, in the fields of the village of Racławice in the Cracow region, the first battle of the Uprising is fought. Kościuszko commands some two and a half thousand regular infantry and cavalry, twelve guns — and, quite exceptional for the age, nearly two thousand peasant scythemen and pikemen from the surrounding Cracow villages, armed with pikes and war scythes mounted upright on their shafts. The opponent — General Alexander Tormasov with about three thousand troops of the regular Russian army and twelve guns. After three hours of fighting, at the moment when Russian artillery begins to decimate the Polish center, Kościuszko personally leads the scythemen’s charge against the guns. The decisive moment is seized by Wojciech Bartos, a peasant from Rzędowice, who reaches a gun barrel and stops it with his Cracow cap. The guns fall silent — all twelve are captured. The battle ends in victory. Bartos is made an ensign and receives the name Głowacki; the promotions are proclaimed on April 8 at Wawel. The Naczelnik himself, for a time during the uprising, goes about dressed in a peasant’s homespun sukmana — and in that garb his image will pass into history.
The most iconic painterly representation of the battle of April 4, 1794, painted on its ninety-fourth anniversary. Matejko, at the full maturity of his historical painting (after the Battle of Grunwald of 1878 and the Prussian Homage of 1882), deliberately chose Kościuszko not in a classicizing posed portrait but in the act of combat — with the scythemen, with Bartosz beside the captured gun, among the peasantry.
The composition is an interpretive manifesto: Matejko wants us to see the Uprising as a people’s war, not merely a noble one — though he dresses the Naczelnik in a general’s uniform coat, not in the peasant’s sukmana that Kościuszko wore for a time during the uprising and in which his image passed into history. The painting forms the compositional matrix for nearly all subsequent iconography of Racławice, from the Racławice Panorama of Kossak and Styka (1894) to the socialist-realist painting of the Polish People’s Republic.
National Museum in Cracow, inv. no. MNK II-a-151, public domain.
Who is in the painting — twenty-eight details from Matejko’s canvas
Połaniec
Four weeks after Racławice, in the camp at Połaniec on the Vistula, Kościuszko signs the Manifesto Regulating the Land Obligations of the Peasantry and Securing for Them Effective Government Protection. In fourteen points the Manifesto: a) declares all peasants personally free (the abolition of serfdom); b) reduces the corvée by one third to one half, and abolishes it entirely for those serving in the army; c) establishes government overseers to whom a peasant may appeal against his lord. It is the broadest anti-serfdom act of eighteenth-century Europe, greater even than the patents of Joseph II and Leopold II of the 1780s in the Habsburg monarchy. The Polish nobility rebels — some desert the uprising. The peasants enlist in the militia en masse.
That the person of every peasant is free, and that he may move wherever he wishes…
The Połaniec Manifesto, article 1,
Warsaw · the Kiliński Uprising
Meanwhile in Warsaw, on April 17–18, 1794, a popular insurrection breaks out under the command of the cobbler Jan Kiliński. The Russian garrison of General Igelström — some seven to eight thousand men — is broken in two days of street fighting. Warsaw is free. On April 23 Vilnius: the uprising of Jakub Jasiński, victorious. The revolution shows its other face as well: on in Warsaw the Targowica confederates are executed — Ożarowski, Zabiełło, Ankwicz and Kossakowski. The uprising sweeps across Mazovia, the Lublin region, Sandomierz, Ruthenia, Lithuania. By the end of May Kościuszko has seventy thousand men in the field under his command, a third of them peasant militiamen. The opponents: the Russian, Prussian, and partly Austrian armies — together one hundred and sixty thousand. The arithmetic is brutal.
The bill comes due in June. On at Szczekociny Kościuszko is defeated in an engagement with the combined Russian and Prussian forces — the Prussians commanded in person by King Frederick William II. General Wodzicki is killed; Bartosz Głowacki, the ensign of Racławice, is mortally wounded and dies on . On Zajączek is defeated at Chełm; on the Prussians occupy Cracow — the city of the oath. On Warsaw sees a lynching: the crowd metes out justice on its own, without a verdict.
Maciejowice
After more than six months of fighting — the Battle of Szczekociny lost in June, the siege of Warsaw by Russians and Prussians (July 13 – September 6), lifted after the outbreak of the uprising in Greater Poland, the October march of Alexander Suvorov’s Russian corps across Polesia — Kościuszko, trying to prevent the junction of two Russian armies (Fersen from the west and Suvorov from the east), stands at Maciejowice on the Vistula with some six thousand men; Poniński’s division of four thousand will not arrive in time. Fersen and Denisov have twelve to fourteen thousand. On October 10, 1794, around midday, the Russian assault breaks the Polish center. Kościuszko, leading a counterattack on horseback, takes a Cossack saber cut to the head and a pike thrust to the back. He falls from his horse, unconscious. He is taken prisoner.
The war ends in November 1794 — with the massacre of Praga, the right-bank district of Warsaw, in which Suvorov cuts down twenty thousand civilian inhabitants. On October 24, 1795 the three powers sign the Third Partition: the Polish-Lithuanian Commonwealth vanishes from the map of Europe. Stanisław August abdicates. Kościuszko travels under guard to St. Petersburg.
Here ends the return to the Fatherland. Captivity begins.