Reflections On Polish-American Heritage Month Part II: Kosciuszko - The First Polish American?

HAMTRAMCK, Mich. - Kosciuszko was our representative at the creation of the American Republic before he went back to lead the struggle to try to save Poland from the partitioning powers. In the process he became a great international hero of liberty. He is a good example of the richness and complexity of our Polish American tradition that spans two continents. He left Poland with distaste for the rigid class structure of the old world and an antipathy to serfdom. His hatred for inequality was reinforced by the failure to win the hand of the woman he loved because he was considered too low born by her father. His sojourn in Paris of the Enlightenment confirmed his convictions and gave them an ideological structure. In the writings of the French Philosophes, he found a language to express his instinctive opposition to oppression.

In America the battle for Independence solidified his belief in democracy and the capability of ordinary citizens to fight for their liberty and manage their own affairs.  His experience of the horrors of slavery in America turned him into an even more committed foe of all servitude.  His Polish, French and American experiences led him to make an original and important contribution to the ideological battle against slavery in America. He was later to will all the considerable land and money Congress had voted him to buy and free slaves, educate them and give them land and tools so they could build solid families, become good citizens prepared to defend their own and the nation’s liberty. His will which was contested in the courts kept alive the debate about slavery for almost half a century after his death.

In turn, these same experiences coalesced in the 1790’s into his ideas for a Polish Citizen Army drawing on all classes and groups including serfs, Jews and Tatars.  It also fueled his desire for a democratic state and an end to serfdom. No one gave as much for these ideas nor struggled for them so mightily in both the Old World and the New. He was in this sense the first prominent Polish American, the product of two worlds. He was also the heir of the Jamestown artisans. His life and ideas demonstrated the best that the two traditions and experiences could produce.

At the end of his life he was a great international hero. His example inspired the Decembrists, the first Russian Revolutionaries to try to overthrow the autocracy in 1825. Thomas Campbell, the Scottish Poet wrote in The Pleasures of Hope when Kosciuszko was wounded and captured by the Russians “And Freedom Shrieked as Kosciuszko Fell.” Thomas Jefferson called him “As pure a son of liberty as I have ever known which is to go to all not just the rich and the few.”  The number of towns, townships and places in the U.S. and elsewhere named after Kosciuszko indicates how deep his reputation was in the first century after his death.

Yet nothing speaks to his place in the hearts of the ordinary people than the incident that occurred when he rode out from his Swiss exile over the border to a small south German village at the end of the Napoleonic Wars. He saw a band of Russian soldiers about to loot and burn the place. He heard from their speech that they were Polish conscripts. He demanded they cease their vandalism immediately. The soldiers demanded to know who he was to command them in this way. He replied, “I am Kosciuszko.” The soldiers immediately fell to their knees and begged his forgiveness. They threw sand on their heads as a sign of deep remorse. The village was saved. More than 20 years after he left Poland as a prisoner of Catherine the Great his name still evoked almost mythic reverence.

Kosciuszko is a hero for the ages and he is ours as Poles and Americans. Next week I will discuss the Great Immigration.

For more information,
contact Virginia Skrzyniarz
at 313.733.4535
or by email at skrzyniarz@piastinstitute.org