The bend in the river · a first look
Late March 1778. Tadeusz Kościuszko, colonel of engineers with the laurels of Saratoga upon him, crosses the Hudson by ferry from the eastern shore to the western, halts his horse on the crest of a ridge, and for the first time looks upon West Point. Below him opens a valley through which the river traces an S-shaped bend, narrowing to roughly five hundred yards. On both sides the Hudson Highlands rise — hills of granite and sandstone, some over a thousand feet in elevation, cloaked in maple and oak forest, with cliffs that plunge straight to the water. This is the place where the French colonel Louis de La Radière, his predecessor as chief engineer of the Northern Department, has been attempting for several months to build a classical bastioned fortress on the low promontory beside the river.
Kościuszko looks and knows that La Radière’s plan is wrong. The Hudson Highlands are not a plain — they are a system of mountain summits. The works of Vauban, which La Radière had studied as a cadet of the academy at Mézières, were designed for the flatlands of Flanders. What is needed here is something else: mutually supporting redoubts upon the summits, where each shields the others, where no point can fall without the seizure of three more, where the river itself — closed by a counter-fortification chain — becomes a fourth defensive weapon. Vauban’s geometric logic, the mountain logic of the terrain. After several weeks of dispute, mediated by General Alexander McDougall, commander of the Hudson Highlands since March 1778, George Washington — writing from his headquarters at Valley Forge — asks Kościuszko to prepare a report of his own. The report, with plans drafted in Kościuszko’s own hand, reaches headquarters by mid-April 1778. Washington decides swiftly: on he orders La Radière recalled, and Kościuszko becomes chief engineer of West Point.
Hudson Highlands · March 1778
The first plan of defense — ready by the end of April 1778 — rests upon four key redoubts on the western bank of the Hudson. Fort Putnam on the summit of a hill (some five hundred feet above sea level), built by Colonel Rufus Putnam to Kościuszko’s plans. Fort Arnold — renamed Fort Clinton after Arnold’s treason — on the promontory one hundred and forty-five feet above the river itself, completed in July 1778. Fort Webb and Fort Wyllys as covering redoubts at intermediate elevation. These are completed by a chain of seven numbered redoubts: Redoubts 1–3 extending the defenses to the southwest, Redoubt No. 4 covering Fort Putnam, and Redoubts 5–7 on Constitution Island across the river. The linchpin of the whole system is precisely Redoubt No. 4 — designed by Kościuszko, raised a further three hundred and twenty-one feet above Fort Putnam, which it guards; without it, the construction of mutual support loses its footing. The whole construction rests upon the principle of mutual support by fire: every fort can defend its neighbors, and an attacker cannot bypass one without exposing himself to the guns of another. Vauban would have approved.
Great Chain · the chain across the Hudson
But the most ingenious element of the system is none of the redoubts — it is the chain. The idea predates him: the first chain is drawn across the river below Fort Montgomery in November 1776 under the supervision of Captain Thomas Machin; the British destroy it on . The new chain — its forging and installation likewise overseen by Machin, a captain of artillery — is stretched across the river on : some five hundred yards of iron forged at the Sterling Iron Works (Noble, Townsend & Co.), more than seven hundred and fifty links, each two feet long and weighing one hundred to one hundred and seventy pounds, several dozen tons in all, secured to a system of wooden floats. Kościuszko’s part is the batteries that keep the barrier under fire. Stretched from early spring through late autumn across the surface of the water between West Point and Constitution Island, it is a gate that no British vessel can force without anchoring within the field of fire of Kościuszko’s redoubts. In winter, when the Hudson freezes and ships no longer sail, the chain is dismantled and serviced. In spring — back in place. Through all five years of the war, not a single British ship will cross this line.
The engineer’s immediate company changes as well. In Agrippa Hull becomes his orderly — a free Black man from Stockbridge, Massachusetts, who had enlisted in the Continental Army at the age of eighteen and had until then served General John Paterson. “Grippy” will remain with Kościuszko to the end of the war; those years of closeness with a free Black soldier belong among the experiences to which the Jeffersonian sentence about a liberty “which is to go to all” will later return. Already in , in a rocky little valley above the river, with more stone in it than soil, Kościuszko lays out a garden — with a fountain throwing up jets of water and cascades — for his own delight and that of his visitors. Kościuszko’s Garden is the only physical trace of his time at West Point that survives to this day.
West Point is the most important post in America.
General George Washington, ; two years later he would call the fortress “the key of America”
The Plan of the Fortress, 1780
By the summer of , when Kościuszko leaves the Hudson Highlands after not quite two and a half years of work, the fortress already has its shape: Fort Arnold above the river, Fort Putnam on the hill, the redoubts Wyllys, Webb and Meigs, the batteries covering the chain. This state — with fortifications for the most part designed or extended by Kościuszko — was recorded in the French engraving Plan des forts, batteries et poste de West-Point, 1780, a copperplate published by P. Didot in Paris around 1816. It is neither the engineer’s autograph nor a manuscript of the period, but a legible image of the entire defensive system Kościuszko left behind on the Hudson: the forts, the redoubts, the batteries, and the bend of the river that binds them together.
The French engraving shows the fortress as it stood in 1780 — with fortifications for the most part designed or extended by Kościuszko during his time as chief engineer of West Point (March 1778 – August 1780). It is neither the engineer’s autograph nor a manuscript in his hand; it is an image of his work, fixed in print more than thirty years later.
Boston Public Library, Norman B. Leventhal Map & Education Center, call no. G3804.W53S3 1816.P5; scan maps.bpl.org, CC BY 2.0.
Arnold’s Treason
. The fortress that Kościuszko has just left possesses, by this moment, a strategic value reaching far beyond engineering — it is the key to the Revolution’s victory. And it is precisely then that Benedict Arnold, freshly appointed commandant of West Point, the officer-hero of Saratoga (yes, the same man who commanded in the field at Bemis Heights on 7 October 1777, while Kościuszko was raising the fortifications), sells the fortress to the British for twenty thousand pounds and the promise of a British general’s commission. The courier is the young Major John André, aide-de-camp to General Henry Clinton. Arnold’s papers on the state of the garrison and the fortifications — troop returns, orders for the artillery, the engineer’s report — are handed over near Haverstraw on the night of –. Two days later André, returning through American territory in civilian clothes, is detained near Tarrytown by a militia patrol. The papers are found in his boots. The conspiracy is exposed, Arnold flees aboard a British vessel to New York, and André is hanged as a spy on at Tappan.
Kościuszko is not a witness to the treason. From he is riding south, and in September he reaches Richmond, carrying correspondence for the governor of Virginia, Thomas Jefferson; the news of Arnold finds him on the road. The fortress he left behind on the Hudson remains in American hands.
He is as pure a son of liberty as I have ever known, and of that liberty which is to go to all, and not to the few or the rich alone.
Thomas Jefferson, letter to Horatio Gates,
The Southern Campaign · Cincinnati · Farewell, 1783
In Kościuszko leaves West Point and in the autumn joins the Southern Army — from under the command of General Nathanael Greene, who keeps him on as chief engineer — in South Carolina and Georgia — a campaign that would end with the recapture of Charleston from British hands and American victory in the southern theater. Kościuszko constructs fortifications at Cheraw and Camden, designs defensive encampments, and conducts reconnaissance of the terrain. In winter he builds boats — bateaux — for the rivers of the Carolinas, and in and he takes part in the “Race to the Dan”, the Southern Army’s retreat toward the Dan River. On it is he who chooses the field of battle at Guilford Courthouse; on he is at Hobkirk’s Hill near Camden. From to he directs the siege works at Ninety Six — and is wounded there by a bayonet. The skirmish on James Island on is the last the Continental Army fights with Kościuszko taking part; a month later, on , he enters recaptured Charleston with the army.
On , the treaty of peace between Great Britain and the United States is signed in Paris. The war ends de jure. On , Congress promotes Kościuszko to brigadier general (by brevet, in a collective promotion of officers), and the Society of the Cincinnati, founded in May 1783 — the first hereditary officers' organization in the United States — admits him as an original member, one of the few foreigners in that company. He also receives a certificate for 12,280 dollars and the right to five hundred acres of land (later laid out on the Scioto River in Ohio), on condition that he settle in America. The certificate is, in essence, back pay — money the Republic will disburse to him only belatedly; the chapter on the will returns to this sum.
The farewell falls in . Washington presents to Kościuszko a sword and a pair of pistols — a personal gesture, not an official one. Kościuszko is also among the officers who, on , take leave of the commander-in-chief at Fraunces Tavern in New York. A pair of flintlock pistols, by tradition Washington’s gift, survives to this day in the collections of the Princes Czartoryski Museum in Cracow.
On , Kościuszko — with the patent of an American brigadier general in his pocket and Washington’s pistols in his baggage — boards at New York the ship “Courrier de l’Europe”; on he lands at Lorient. The first American period closes — and there opens a decade whose consequences will lead him to the Main Market Square of Cracow.
Here ends West Point — the key of America. There begins the return to the Homeland.