Adriana · Third and Pine
, evening. The ship Adriana makes fast to the wharf in the port of Philadelphia, where twenty-one years earlier a young captain from Mereczowszczyzna had appeared as an anonymous engineer. This time a crowd receives him: word of the arrival of the Naczelnik — the most celebrated soldier of the Revolution after Washington — had already crossed from England. Kościuszko spends the first days at Mrs. Loveson’s on Second Street; then Niemcewicz chooses lodgings that are small, secluded and cheap — the corner of Third & Pine Streets (today, 301 Pine Street), the boarding house of Mrs. Ann Relf, a three-story brick house with a porch, its windows looking out over Society Hill. Here Kościuszko will spend the next eight and a half months.
Philadelphia · a second encounter
The first weeks bring a steady stream of visitors. Jefferson, regularly in the evenings — conversations in French, long, sometimes political (Jefferson, Vice President under Adams, stands in open opposition to the Federalists; Kościuszko returns to politics from the deepest of falls), sometimes technical (Jefferson enthusiastically asks his opinion on a moldboard plow of his own design). Benjamin Rush, the physician of the Declaration, attends to the wounds in Kościuszko’s head and back — pain that has not subsided in three years. Kościuszko himself paints — among other things, he sketches a portrait of Jefferson. Others call as well: the architect Benjamin Latrobe, Justice Paterson, the chiefs Little Turtle and Joseph Brant. Niemcewicz, his secretary, conducts the correspondence — with England, France, Solothurn, Warsaw.
The second weeks bring practicalities. The Treasury pays Kościuszko his back pay from the war: twelve thousand two hundred eighty dollars of principal on a certificate of October 1783, with six percent interest from 1784 for fourteen years of arrears — some fifteen thousand two hundred dollars. In January 1798 Congress adds a further three thousand six hundred eighty-four dollars — in all, close to nineteen thousand dollars, a colossal sum by the standards of the day (the equivalent of roughly half a million present-day dollars) — together with a warrant for five hundred acres of land on the Scioto River in Ohio, where Columbus stands today. After his death that land would pass into his estate. In sum — a fortune that Kościuszko had never possessed and had never desired. And it is precisely this fortune that he resolves to bequeath to someone he had never known.
Someone he had never known — but not someone he was unable to imagine. From to Kościuszko’s orderly was Agrippa Hull (1759–1848), a Black soldier whom he treated “as an equal and a friend.” Those four years of closeness are the biographical root of the act that is about to be drawn up in the room on Third Street.
The Will
Saturday, . Philadelphia, the house on Third Street. Kościuszko, in the presence of Thomas Jefferson (designated executor), sets down in his own hand a single long sentence — revising a version drafted at the end of April. The text is brief — some 150 words in English — but its content is without precedent in the eighteenth-century world:
I, Tadeusz Kościuszko, being just on my departure from America, do hereby authorize my friend Thomas Jefferson to employ the whole of my property here — should I make no other testamentary disposition of my property in the United States — in purchasing Negroes from among his own or any others, and giving them liberty in my name; in giving them an education in trades or otherwise, and in having them instructed for their new condition in the duties of morality, which may make them good neighbors, good fathers and mothers, husbands and wives — and in their duties as citizens, teaching them to be defenders of their Liberty and Country, and of the good order of Society, and in whatsoever may make them happy and useful.
Tadeusz Kościuszko, Philadelphia Will,
In this act Jefferson is named as executor; on Kościuszko had also signed a power of attorney in his favor (witnessed by Dawson and Barnes). Under it Jefferson places the money in shares of the Bank of Pennsylvania and sends the dividends through Barnes to Amsterdam — which is why the estate will keep growing long after the testator’s departure: from about twenty thousand nine hundred dollars in to forty-three thousand five hundred and four in . The document is consigned to Jefferson’s personal papers — and there it will remain for the next two decades. Kościuszko, having signed, rises from the table and extends his hand to Jefferson.
The most recognizable portrait of Jefferson in his mature years, painted by the younger son of Charles Willson Peale — in the year Jefferson stands for (and is subsequently elected to) the office of third President of the United States. Two years after Kościuszko entrusted him with the execution of the Philadelphia will, seventeen years before the testator’s death.
Jefferson would become executor of the will in 1817, but never put its provisions into effect — in 1819, then seventy-six years old, in debt, himself a slaveholder, he ceded the obligation to the courts; the matter dragged through American courts until .
White House Collection (gift of Paul and Bunny Mellon). Reproduction: Wikimedia Commons, public domain.
Return to France
That same night — , at four in the morning — Kościuszko slips out of Philadelphia in secret: Jefferson drives him in a closed carriage to New Castle, with a passport in the name of Thomas Kanberg. The reasons are news of the Polish Legions, which General Jan Henryk Dąbrowski is organizing in Italy alongside the French army, and Jefferson’s request that Kościuszko act as an unofficial intermediary in easing the quarrel with France after the XYZ Affair. The departure is thus in essence a diplomatic mission: the United States and France are sliding into an undeclared naval war (the Quasi-War), and Congress is preparing the Alien and Sedition Acts, passed later that summer. On , with Kościuszko already gone, Jefferson writes him a letter — partly in cipher.
From New Castle he sails directly for France; on he lands at Bayonne and sets out for Paris. This time he is no longer returning to Poland — for Poland is no longer on the map. He returns to the margins of Poland, where the last act of his life is yet to be played out: outside Paris, in Solothurn.
Here ends the testament. There begins the long European old age.