Kosów · Mereczowszczyzna · Siechnowicze
The genealogy of the Kościuszkos reaches back, by the family’s own account, to the Ruthenian boyar Konstanty Fiodorowicz, a grand-ducal scribe, who in 1509 is said to have received a land grant from King Sigismund the Old in the territories around Brest-Litovsk. Whether legend or shard of truth matters little: the surname “Kościuszko” — a diminutive of “Konstanty” — clung to the nest and endured three centuries. When, on 4 (or, by other sources, 12) February 1746, the priest of the Kosów parish enters into the baptismal register the names “Andrzej Tadeusz Bonawentura, son of Ludwik and Tekla née Ratomska,” another representative of the line is born at Mereczowszczyzna — a farmstead on the Mereczanka, in the Słonim district of the Nowogródek Palatinate, a day’s journey from the ancestral Siechnowicze in the Brest Palatinate — a line that for generations has held local offices: sword-bearer, pantler, standard-bearer.
This is not the world of the magnates. The Kościuszkos are middle nobility: they sit on the ancestral Siechnowicze and on Mereczowszczyzna, held in pledge — thirty-one peasant families in all — and live from the labor of corvée peasants. The father, Ludwik Tadeusz Kościuszko, sword-bearer of Brest and colonel of the regiment of the Lithuanian Field Hetman, is an enlightened man to the degree the neighbors' books permit — and a stern one to the degree the estate demands. The mother, Tekla née Ratomska, comes from a family of Samogitian extraction; it is she — as family tradition has it — who instills in her son the habit of morning prayer and evening readings from the lives of the saints. Tadeusz has an older brother, Józef, and two sisters — Anna and Katarzyna. The house is wooden, single-story, eight rooms, shingled. In winter, tile stoves warm it; in summer, vine-tangled porches cool it. This is what middle-szlachta Poland looks like on the eve of the partitions — and this is the cradle of a man who, half a century later, will stand on the Cracow Main Market Square to swear an oath to freedom.
Mereczowszczyzna · The First Homeland
To four-year-old Tadek, the forest beyond the windows is larger than any map. Wolves come out of the woods, water-lilies grow in the pond beside the manor, and on the river — from early spring to late autumn — a mill turns, where the peasants of Mereczowszczyzna and Siechnowicze grind their rye. There are no geography lessons. The father points out the four cardinal directions to his son, tells him where Brest is, where Pińsk, where Vilnius; years later Kościuszko will recall that only in Warsaw did he grasp how far from the rest of Europe his childhood had lain.
The first school is the manor. Reading is taught by the mother, from a primer printed in Vilnius. Arithmetic — by the steward, on fingers and baskets of eggs. Latin — by an itinerant priest, who stops for three days, recites psalms, and rides off, leaving behind a few pages of Cornelius Nepos. This broken rhythm of domestic education will end in 1755, when Ludwik Tadeusz, persuaded by neighbors, decides to send his nine-year-old son to the Piarists at Lubieszów.
Lubieszów — a small town on the Stochód, a little over a hundred kilometers south of Mereczowszczyzna — has for several decades maintained a college of the Scholarum Piarum. The Piarists are a modern order: Stanisław Konarski is at that very moment reforming their studies in Warsaw, introducing into the curriculum logic, natural law, geometry, French. Konarski’s full program has not yet reached Lubieszów — but neither has the dust of scholasticism. Here Kościuszko learns Latin and Polish rhetoric, the foundations of arithmetic, Euclidean geometry, the beginnings of universal history. For the first time he sees a globe. And for the first time he hears of Voltaire — from the lips of a teacher who is unsure whether he is praising or warning.
In 1758 the father dies. Tadeusz is twelve years old. The Lubieszów education ends abruptly: after five years, in 1760, without having completed even the class of poetics, Tadeusz leaves the college for family reasons — the household’s finances cannot bear the cost of schooling, though the Piarists themselves will go on teaching at Lubieszów for three more generations, until the college closes in 1834. The widow of Ludwik Tadeusz — mother of four — must tighten her belt. Tadeusz returns to Mereczowszczyzna — but not for long: the Sapiehas redeem the pledged farmstead and the Kościuszkos move to the ancestral Siechnowicze. For the next five years Tadeusz remains in the home of his mother and his elder sister Anna Estkowa: he reads whatever his older brother Józef, who is beginning a military career, sends him, he draws — and in all likelihood takes lessons from Piotr Estko, a Jesuit and later professor of mathematics at the Mścisław college. Of those five years the sources say no more.
M. Fajans, Warsaw, ca. 1875–1880. From the series Album widoków gubernij grodzieńskiej, wileńskiej, mińskiej, kowieńskiej, witebskiej i mohylewskiej [Album of Views of the Grodno, Vilnius, Minsk, Kovno, Vitebsk and Mogilev Governorates].
The plate documents the two-layered state of the site in the nineteenth century: on the left, the neo-Gothic palace of Wandalin Pusłowski (built in 1838); on the right, the wooden shingled manor — the original Kościuszko family home, preserved by the Pusłowskis as a national relic (burned in 1942, reconstructed in 2004 as a museum).
Orda’s bilingual Polish/French caption records the date “12 Lutego 1746” — an argumentum ad fontem for the twelfth-of-February variant (complementing the date “4 February” from the baptismal register of the Kosów parish). Master scan: Polona · National Library of Poland, public domain.
Warsaw · The Knights' School
The situation changes thanks to family patronage. Prince Adam Kazimierz Czartoryski — commandant of the recently founded Cadet Corps of the Knights' School in Warsaw — takes under his protection the sons of middle-nobility families. In 1765, at the age of nineteen, Tadeusz Kościuszko receives a scholarship. The way into the corps is opened for him by the protection of the Czartoryskis — and perhaps also of a close neighbor and their partisan, the Field Notary of Lithuania Józef Sosnowski; that name will return in this story when, in , Kościuszko sets out to carry off his daughter Ludwika. From the home of his mother and his elder sister Anna Estkowa he sets out for Warsaw and stands beneath the walls of the new Knights' School in the Kazimierz Palace on Krakowskie Przedmieście.
The school had opened only a few months earlier, in March 1765, on the personal initiative of King Stanisław August Poniatowski and at the monarch’s own expense: about 200,000 Polish zlotys annually from his private purse, to which the Sejm of 1766 added 400,000 from the treasury of the Commonwealth. Its purpose is stated in the statute with brutal candor: “to raise a citizen virtuous, enlightened, and useful to the Commonwealth.” The program joins the exact sciences (applied mathematics, fortification, ballistics, drafting), the humanities (history, law, economics, languages), and — what is revolutionary — moral formation. A few years after Kościuszko’s departure, Czartoryski will set down this ethos in the Moral Catechism for the Cadets of the Cadet Corps (1774), which explains what freedom, justice, family, fatherland, and God are.
He shall love his Fatherland and her good above all things, and shall prepare himself so that he may devote himself to her service. Chivalric Catechism
of the Knights' School, 1774 (edited by Adam Kazimierz Czartoryski)
Kościuszko soon makes his mark in the subjects taught by foreigners: on he distinguishes himself in the weekly geometry examination under Kaufmann. On 20 December 1766, after a one-year course, he receives the rank of ensign and remains at the school as a sub-brigadier and instructor. In the school year 1767/68 he attends, as a non-matriculated auditor, the École de Génie of the Frenchman Bosroger, and follows Oelsnitz’s course in tactics and one in field fortification; by he is already a captain. In that same year, while the son is teaching in Warsaw, the mother — Tekla née Ratomska — dies. But it is not the promotions earned in Warsaw that will carry him to West Point. It is the royal scholarship, confirmed in October 1769, for five years of military-engineering studies abroad.
Toward Paris
The autumn of 1769. Tadeusz Kościuszko, twenty-three-year-old graduate of the Knights' School with the patent of captain, with a letter of recommendation from Czartoryski and a royal patent from Stanisław August, sets out, together with his schoolmate Józef Orłowski, from Warsaw for Paris after 5 October. He leaves in the second year of the Bar Confederation, in which his brother Józef is already fighting; the protégé of the king and the Czartoryskis chooses departure over declaring for either side. The First Commonwealth he leaves behind has twenty-six years of life left to it — but only three years to the First Partition. He will return to it in 1774 — and find it diminished.
Paris will not open its military schools to him: the École de Génie at Mézières is closed to foreigners. Kościuszko and Orłowski therefore enroll in the Royal Academy of Painting and Sculpture, and study engineering privately.
Here ends Polish childhood. Europe begins.