Kościuszko—difficult to say, impossible to forget

Happy Sunday!
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A couple of years ago I chatted with Rebecca Bratspies for the podcast. Rebecca is a New York environmental and human rights lawyer who’d just written a wonderful book, ‘Naming Gotham—The Villains, Rogues and Heroes Behind New York’s Place Names’.*

Rebecca shared stories of well-known characters who have been commemorated through the bridges, tunnels, parkways, boulevards and parks of New York.

Our conversation centred on Jackie Robinson, who became the first Black Major League Baseball player in modern US history when he joined the Brooklyn Dodgers in 1947. The Kosciuszko Bridge was mentioned briefly, but we moved on.

Not long after, I was talking to my Australian cousin in Melbourne. He went to great lengths to convince me that there is fantastic skiing in the Kościuszko National Park, situated in the Snowy Mountains in the southeast corner of New South Wales.

I think a hardened skier more familiar with the steeps of Jackson Hole, the bowls of Whistler or the black runs at Val d’Isère, Zermatt or Alpe d’Huez might baulk at the word ‘fantastic’, but the point was made.

Inevitably, instead of the widely accepted 'kosh-TCHYUUSH-koh' pronunciation, cousin Bren settled on 'kozzy-osco'—more reminiscent of a discount supermarket than a Polish national hero.

And then recently, a Polish friend mentioned the Kościuszko Mound in Kraków, Poland, a memorial to a Polish-Lithuanian military leader built between 1820 and 1823.

Three mentions turns out to be the magic number where my indifference transforms into investigative compulsion, a sort of historical tipping point where I stop grazing and start digging.

I had to find out who this chap was that people loved and remembered from the East Coast of the United States, across Europe and down to the southeast corner of Australia.

(*See Rebecca’s episode Beyond the Baseball Color Line.)

Andrzej Tadeusz Bonawentura Kościuszko was born 280 years ago this Wednesday, 4 February 1746, in what was then the Polish-Lithuanian Commonwealth, now modern-day Belarus. He was born out of minor nobility, comfortable enough to open the doors to education, but not wealthy enough to count as true aristocracy.

And, naturally, when you hear about someone like that, the first question isn’t so much what they did, but why? What lit the fuse? What turned a minor nobleman from a Polish-Lithuanian backwater into someone worth remembering on at least three continents?

Stage 1—belief

It turns out that Tadeusz’s eureka moment struck when he was packed off to the Catholic Piarist college in Lubieszów, where he became fascinated by the ancient Greeks and Romans.

In particular, he was obsessed by the story of Timoleon, a Greek statesman who freed the Corinthians and Sicilians from Carthaginian tyranny.

Tadeusz was nine years old.

In later years, when he was asked why Timoleon held such a strong hold on him, he said because... ‘he overthrew tyrants, set up republics and never demanded any power for himself' .

That, at least, was the trigger. At the age of nineteen, just after Warsaw’s Corps of Cadets opened its doors, Kościuszko enrolled at the king’s military academy.

He impressed his teachers so much that, with backing from powerful royal patrons—the Czartoryski family—and a royal scholarship, he was packed off to Paris to continue his studies.

This was the European Age of Enlightenment with Paris at its pulsating centre. Here, Tadeusz immersed himself in the language of natural rights and popular sovereignty—the intoxicating world of Rousseau, Voltaire and John Locke, where freedom and dignity were universal birthrights, not aristocratic favours.

These ideas shaped everything that followed—they became the blueprint for his entire life.

While Tadeusz dutifully attended his art classes, he was also hiring private tutors and studying military engineering—specifically fortifications and military architecture, subjects not generally known for their sparkling dinner party potential.

Stage 2—circumstances

Back in Poland in 1774, Kościuszko made the mistake of falling for the wrong woman—Ludwika Sosnowska. Her father, the formidable General Joseph Sosnowski, took one look at the penniless military engineer and was spectacularly unimpressed.

When the young lovers attempted to elope, the enraged general gave chase. Tadeusz barely escaped with his dignity intact, fleeing back to France before the general could express his disapproval in more permanent terms.

As it turned out, By 1776, the French were glued to reports from America’s East Coast, where the colonials were picking a fight with the world’s most powerful empire.

For France’s intellectuals and chattering classes, it was irresistible—a real-life experiment in liberty… and a chance to watch Britain take a beating.

Louis XVI was cautious about backing a rebellion against the British. The optics were tricky—encouraging revolution might set a precedent he might live to regret. (Spoiler alert: it did.)

But Kościuszko wasn’t for waiting. He didn’t need the comfort blanket of official approval. He’d seen people fighting for liberty and concluded, with admirable simplicity, that he should probably help.

By the time Tadeusz had arrived in Philadelphia, the Thirteen American colonies, acting through the Second Continental Congress, had declared independence from Great Britain.

Stage 3—Carpe Diem

When Tadeusz arrived in 1776, he made a beeline for the ‘most famous American in the world’—Benjamin Franklin.

He walked into Franklin’s lodgings unannounced—no letter of introduction, no appointment, barely any English. Through some improvised French, Franklin gathered enough to recognise that this Polish engineer with the unpronounceable name might actually be useful to the revolution.

Armed with a recommendation from Benjamin Franklin, Kościuszko was then welcomed into the Continental Congress as an engineer with the rank of colonel. At that point, the revolutionaries were suffering a chronic shortage of trained engineers. Someone with an education in European military architecture was gold dust.

Stage 4—Execution

Within a year, Kościuszko’s early fortifications had caught the attention of George Washington, who wrote…

Well, Cosieski was close enough I guess.

In March 1778, Washington awarded Kościuszko his most important assignment to date:

Fortify West Point on the Hudson River.

The mighty Hudson River stretches from New York City on the East coast all the way back through New York State to just 80 miles short of the Canadian border at Lake Henderson in the Adirondack Mountains.

With primitive roads, the Hudson was a liquid highway. Control the Hudson and you controlled the movement of troops, artillery and supplies.

From a British perspective, the Hudson River separated New England—the spark of the revolution north of the river—from the middle and southern colonies. The South provided food, raw materials and manpower.

Control the river, split the colonies in half and the rebellion would collapse.

From the American perspective, West Point represented the strategic pinch point of the river, an S-bend with prominent high ground all around—a natural fortress the Americans had so far failed to hold.

If Kościuszko could fortify the site properly, British ships would have to crawl upriver under a hail of cannonfire.

Instead of trying to build one mega-fort to defend the river, Kosciuszko built 30 individual forts and redoubts at different heights, overlapping each other. Any British attack by ship or land would face a gauntlet of cannon fire from multiple angles. It was almost impossible to breach.

Kościuszko’s solution was the first decentralised defensive fortification system in Western military history.

Kościuszko also supervised installation of the Great Chain—65 tons of iron stretched across 600 yards of river from West Point to Constitution Island, a physical barrier to block British ships from sailing further upstream.

In the end, the resourceful Pole’s fortifications worked perfectly—which is to say, West Point never fired a shot. The British took one look and stayed away.

Out of Curiosity

The Revolutionary‑War fortress at West Point became the site of the United States Military Academy in 1802. The US Army has occupied the site ever since.

A monument was completed in 1913 to the honour of the ’patron saint of West Point’.

Stage 5. Rinse & Repeat

Kościuszko returned to Poland in 1784 to find his country being methodically erased. The First Partition of 1772 had allowed Russia, Prussia and Austria to carve off pieces of the Polish-Lithuanian Commonwealth.

A second, more savage partition followed in 1792. Poland was being erased from existence. Kościuszko stepped forward.

On 24 March 1794, he stood in Kraków’s main square before an enormous crowd and took the oath as commander-in-chief of all Polish forces.

The Kościuszko Uprising had begun.

Kościuszko had the rare ability to unite peasants, soldiers and nobility in common cause. At the Battle of Racławice in April 1794, 2,000 scythe-wielding peasants fought alongside 4,000 regular troops and defeated the Russian army.

In their honour, Kościuszko addressed his army wearing a ‘sukmana’—traditional Polish peasant clothing.

That image—a Paris-educated engineer in peasant clothing—became the defining symbol of the uprising. Kościuszko wasn’t just honouring the farm workers; he was demolishing centuries of social hierarchy with a single costume change.

Inevitably, the uprising eventually collapsed. The Poles simply ran out of ammunition. Kościuszko, wounded and captured, was imprisoned in St. Petersburg while Warsaw fell. Russia, Prussia and Austria carved up what remained—Poland vanished from the map for 123 years.

Pardoned by Tsar Paul I, Kościuszko spent time in America before settling in Europe. When Napoleon offered him command of Polish forces in 1799, Tadeusz declined. He was done fighting.

Following complications from a fall from his horse, Tadeusz Kościuszko died in Solothurn, Switzerland, in October 1817. He was 71 years old.

Out of Curiosity

While in America, Tadeusz Kościuszko befriended Thomas Jefferson who said of him that he was ‘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.’

In 1798, while sailing back to America, Kościuszko wrote a will leaving his entire American estate to Thomas Jefferson.

The instructions were explicit: use the money to buy enslaved people their freedom—from Jefferson’s own property or elsewhere—then educate them and prepare them for independent lives as citizens.

This was 65 years before President Lincoln’s Emancipation Proclamation of 1863.

Jefferson agreed to serve as executor, but on Kościuszko’s death in 1817, he declined to carry out his friend’s wishes. Legal complications conveniently arose, other wills surfaced, and in 1852 the Supreme Court declared the American will invalid. By then, lawyers had consumed most of the estate.

Not one enslaved person received a penny.

Three years after Tadeusz's death, volunteers began building the Kościuszko Mound. For three seasons, people of all ages and classes carried earth up the hill—some from his battlefields—creating the monument that crowns Kraków today.

Tadeusz is remembered in the United States with not one but two major bridges: the Thaddeus Kosciusko ‘Twin Bridges’ over the Mohawk River between Albany and Saratoga Counties, and the Kosciuszko Bridge carrying the Brooklyn-Queens Expressway over Newtown Creek in New York City.

As for the Australian connection, in March 1840, the Polish explorer Paweł Edmund Strzelecki climbed Australia’s highest peak and named it 'Mount Kosciuszko' after his hero Tadeusz. The mountain’s shape, he reckoned, reminded him of the Kościuszko Mound back in Kraków.

Ironically, it turned out that Strzelecki had actually climbed Australia’s second-highest peak. So, in classic Australian fashion, the New South Wales authorities just swapped the names of the two mountains.

Andrzej Tadeusz Bonawentura Kościuszko stood for something that was remarkable in his age and would be remarkable today. He simply believed that everyone deserves freedom and dignity.

And he was willing to risk his life to help them achieve it, whoever they may be.

Dates with History

Today...

One hundred and thirty years ago today, 1 February 1896, San Francisco unveiled perhaps its most audacious dining establishment—Cliff House.

The first Cliff House was built on the spot in 1863. The ocean views were spectacular and Seal Rocks hosted a cacophony of sea lions to entertain the restaurant diners.

When it burned down on Christmas night in 1894, the owner, Adolph Sutro, decided to replace the relatively modest structure with a six-story Victorian extravaganza perched precariously on the cliff edge.

What do you think?

Nature would have the last laugh. The magnificent wooden building survived the 1906 earthquake only to burn down in 1907.

Thursday…

Ninety-five years ago this Thursday, 5 February 1931, British speed merchant Malcolm Campbell was thundering down Daytona Beach, Florida, in his Blue Bird—essentially an aircraft engine with wheels bolted on as an afterthought.

Campbell had to come to Florida for his land speed attempts because English beaches weren’t quite up to the task: too many pebbles at Brighton, too many donkeys at Blackpool and too many deckchairs and retired colonels at Bournemouth.

Guided by the thin markings and timing posts of the measured mile on Daytona’s sand, Campbell hurtled down the beach and reached a world-record top speed of 246.09 mph.

Campbell had smashed the previous record by 15 mph and was knighted by King George V for his efforts.

He would be back in Daytona the following year to break the record again.

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Question of the Week

Robert Hooke was a brilliant English scientist who made groundbreaking discoveries about light in the early 1670s.

Unfortunately for Hooke, he wasn’t the only person working in this field at the time. Which other equally brilliant English scientist became his fiercest rival?

And Finally…

If you watch any documentary about Australia, at some point you'll see the outback; nothing but hundreds of square miles of rust-red sand. And flies. The background music will kick in with a song… Waltzing Matilda.

Andrew Barton 'Banjo' Paterson was born in 1864 in the Australian bush. The nickname ‘Banjo’ came from his favourite racehorse rather than from any musical ability. In fact, there’s no record of him ever playing any instrument. Banjo might have been completely tone-deaf for all we know.

Paterson spent most of his career as a lawyer and journalist, serving as a war correspondent and ambulance driver during World War I. However, he is best remembered as one of Australia’s finest poets.

In 1895, Banjo travelled to Dagworth Station near Winton, Queensland, with his fiancée Sarah Riley. They were visiting Sarah’s best friend from school, Christina Macpherson, whose family owned the property.

One evening, Christina played a tune she’d picked up at the Warrnambool races. Paterson, his head full of local yarns about swagmen and sheep thieves, reached for his pen.

The result was Waltzing Matilda—‘waltzing’ meaning to wander on foot and ‘Matilda’ (or ‘swag’) a modest bundle of possessions every itinerant worker carried on his back.

The song tells the story of one such swagman who steals a sheep and drowns himself in a waterhole (‘billabong’) to escape the police. His ghost haunts the waterhole forevermore. It is distinctly Australian—a defiant underdog, melancholic in tone but laced with a larrikin humour.

The trip to Dagworth also resulted in the abrupt end of Banjo’s eight-year engagement to Sarah. Rumours swirled of an impropriety between Paterson and Christina—perhaps Banjo had been doing more than just waltzing with Matilda.

Nonetheless, what began as entertainment at a bush station became Australia’s unofficial anthem.

Banjo Paterson died eighty-five years ago this Thursday, 5 February 1941, but his swagman lives on.

Thank you for joining me. Have a great week!

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Steve

HOST & CHIEF STORY HUNTER

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P:S: Incidentally, I am always keen to receive your feedback to help me continuously improve this newsletter and the podcast. Just hit reply to this email and...... let it rip! I respond to every email that I receive.

Question of the week… answer

Robert Hooke’s fiercest rival was Sir Isaac Newton, a fellow Fellow of the Royal Society whose genius he both recognised and resented.

Isaac Newton was born on Christmas Day in 1642. By his early 30s, he had already revolutionised mathematics and the study of light. He did, however, have some reticence towards publishing his work. This would prove problematic.

Robert Hooke was a polymath, physicist, architect and one of the most recognised experimental scientists of the time.

In 1675, the two men were locking horns over the nature of light and colour. Hooke accused Newton of borrowing his ideas without acknowledgement.

In response, 350 years ago this Thursday, 5 February 1676*, Newton wrote a note to Hooke. Out of this simple conciliatory note came a line that has reverberated through the centuries:

There has been some debate over whether this was indeed a generous comment or a backhanded insult.

Hooke was rather short and hunchbacked.

*Alternative date sometimes quoted: 15 February 1676