Liberty.

The Polish Patriot Who Helped Americans Beat the British ...

Kosciuszko lived in a boarding house in the capital, Philadelphia, collecting back pay for the war from Congress, and seeing old friends. By then, Americans had splintered into their first partisan conflict, between the Federalists, who admired the British system of government and feared the French Revolution, and the Republicans, who initially admired the French Revolution and feared a Federalist-led government would come to resemble the British monarchy. Kosciuszko took the side of the Francophile Republicans, resenting England’s support of Russia and seeing the Federalists as Anglophile elitists. So he avoided President John Adams, but developed a close friendship with Vice-President Thomas Jefferson.

“General Kosciuszko, I see him often,” Jefferson wrote Gates. “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 rich alone.”

Kosciuszko took liberty so seriously that he was disappointed to see friends like Jefferson and Washington own slaves. During the American and Polish revolutions, Kosciuszko had employed black men as his aides-de-camp: Agrippa Hull in America, Jean Lapierre in Poland. When he returned to Europe in May 1798, hoping to organize another war to liberate Poland, Kosciuszko scribbled out a will. It left his American assets – $18,912 in back pay and 500 acres of land in Ohio, his reward for his war service -- for Jefferson to use to purchase the freedom and provide education for enslaved Africans. Jefferson, revising the draft into better legal English, also rewrote the will so that it would allow Jefferson to free some of his slaves with the bequest. The final draft, which Kosciuszko signed, called on “my friend Thomas Jefferson” to use Kosciuszko’s assets “in purchasing negroes from among his own as [well as] any others,” “giving them liberty in my name,” and “giving them an education in trades and otherwise.”

CONNECT