Although statues commemorate Tadeusz Kościuszko’s place in a very specific kind of historical memory, the complexities of his life and legacy are less well-known. Hello, and welcome to Footnoting History. I’m Lucy, and this week, I am back to discuss why Romantic authors loved Tadeusz Kościuszko, why there’s an anti-Nazi movie about him made in 1938, and why I think he should have cooler statues. Tadeusz Kościuszko looms large in certain kinds of historical memory.
You’ll probably know about him if you’re into Revolutionary War history… or if you’re Polish, or Polish-American; or if you’re from Philly or have been to West Point. But there are also ways he could be remembered but isn’t. He could be commemorated, accurately, as an antislavery activist. He could be remembered as a man who fought for the full citizenship and legal equality
a rarity in eighteenth-century Europe. He could be remembered as a war veteran with a permanent disability. As someone who spends a lot of time thinking about how we create historical narratives—in the classrooms, in our public squares, in our collective memory—I am fascinated by this.
So, in talking about Kościuszko, I think it’s also important to talk about how the story of his life has been told and retold from his own lifetime onwards, how he has been surrounded by heroic tropes; how writers and readers have dealt with his disability; and how they have handled the possibility of his queerness. The editor of a collection of Kościuszko’s letters wrote that biographers and others interested in his life “have always found documented facts about him scattered and sparse.”
Speaking as a medievalist, I’d say that “scattered and sparse” are definitely relative terms. She goes on to say that “the lacunae in the evidence have been filled with legend, hearsay, and sometimes just wishful thinking.” And almost 50 years after she published this collection for the bicentennial of the American Revolution… I’d have to agree with her assessment.
Several times while working on this set of episodes, I’ve had to revise my own notes because I’ve found evidence contradicting claims blithely made without footnotes. And sometimes I’ve ended up tracking down obscure 19th-century periodicals, as one does. And in this episode, I want to spend some time looking at the process of filling those lacunae in order to make a legend, and how this took place for evolving sets of reasons over the course of the nineteenth and twentieth centuries.
No new legends have grown up around him in the twenty-first century, to my knowledge, but as I shall argue, it’s not too late for his reputation to become more complex. The first version of the legendary Kościuszko stories I’ll be discussing is what I call the Romantic Kościuszko.
This is Romantic with a capital R, lining up with the ideals of capital-R Romanticism, an international artistic and philosophical movement that was just getting started around the time of the American and Polish Revolutions, gaining steam in Kościuszko’s later years, and at its height in the decades immediately following his death. It was big on natural sentiments, high ideals, sublime nature, and tragic heroes.
(Literature teachers out there: yes, I know I’m simplifying; this is the highlights reel.) So perhaps you can already see where this is going. Collections of anecdotes about Kościuszko circulated praising his heroism, his restraint, and his generosity; portraits were painted of him in the traditional Polish costume he wore, linking him with the noble if tragically interrupted history of his country.
Even though it can be frustrating to have to sift through nineteenth-century narratives to figure out how much might be made up, I can understand why Romantic authors and artists went a little bit starry-eyed over Kościuszko. He’s an almost eerily apt allegorical figure, despite being a real person. And even some of the verifiable stories about him can seem too good to be true: like the one about his snubbing Napoleon at a party because of the latter’s failure to live up to revolutionary ideals.
Just four years after his death in 1817, Kościuszko was already the subject of a patriotic opera—not only that, but the opera libretto was published independently. An 1826 American verse play entitled Kosciuszko, or The Fall of Warsaw was written in a similar romantic vein. In 1835, the pro-democratic German author Heinrich Elsner published a work whose translated
“The Liberation War of the North American States, with Biographical Descriptions of the Four Most Famous Men of the Same.” These four most famous men were, in order, Washington, Franklin, Lafayette, and Kościuszko. This in itself is interesting to me.
But what I think is particularly important about this is that it is a book published by royal permit in a period known as the Vormärz, as a sort of prelude to the 1848 parliament and uprisings which attempted to establish a parliamentary democracy in Germany. Elsner starts his book with a Latin motto meaning “After the clouds—sunshine” and the claim that the American Revolution kickstarted a new era in history.
He also explicitly expresses the hope that revolutionary ideas will continue their journey around the earth, armed with swords. He then goes on to directly address the reader and call out despotic regimes. Yeah, it’s a lot. Notably, this is just when nationalism is becoming a thing (official historian term.) And this would continue to play a role in how Kościuszko was portrayed and remembered. Elsner described him as “the greatest and also the unhappiest of Poles.”
The nineteenth century loves its hyperbole, but I find it more than usually easy to understand the reasons for Elsner’s superlatives. Around the same time, Kościuszko’s friend and sometime traveling companion, Julius Ursyn Niemcewicz, published his memoirs. Niemcewicz himself was a key figure in Poland’s nineteenth-century politics—participated in the Congress of Vienna, all that sort of thing.
And while Kościuszko’s role in his memoirs is clearly important, and Niemcewicz clearly anticipates readers’ interest in him, Kościuszko also appears here as a more melancholy and complex figure than in some other accounts. In Niemcewicz’ discussion of their Russian captivity, for instance, Kościuszko is allowed to be ill and depressed. His wounds aren’t healing properly; he’s weak. He doesn’t explicitly say he thinks he might die, but the implication is there.
Niemcewicz, Kościuszko, and other Polish prisoners were eventually released when Catherine the Great died, leaving her son Paul on the throne. Paul fancied himself as an enlightened despot, and so he wanted to do enlightened despot things like freeing the political prisoners his mother had been allowing to languish in captivity.
Now, I say “languish in captivity,” but this isn’t a Hollywood-style dripping dungeon, though I have seen those in illustrations of Kościuszko’s pre-release meeting with Czar Paul. In fact, according to Niemciewicz’ other memoirs, written in French specifically about his time of Russian captivity, he asserts that Kościuszko was the only one of the Polish prisoners to receive special treatment, first staying in the home of the prison’s commander, and later in a palace.
The reason Niemciewicz gives for this is that the Russians liked to think of Kościuszko as a fool, being manipulated by his scheming betters. And such attitudes may have played a role. But I think another clue lies in a detail Niemciewicz relates: Kościuszko was given a wheelchair so that he could be taken out into the gardens. And this suggests to me that what imperial Russia really, really did not want was Tadeusz Kościuszko dying in captivity and becoming a political martyr.
If you’re saying to yourself “wait, go back to the part where Kościuszko was using a wheelchair…” you’re having the same experience that I did at multiple points while doing research. The amount of discussion I have found about Kościuszko as a figure in disability history is exactly zero. And this is despite the fact that nineteenth-century portraits of him often include signifiers of his disability.
In the picture of his conversation with Czar Paul, for instance, he’s still wearing the black scarf which he seems to have worn in part for hygienic and in part for cosmetic reasons, having suffered a serious head wound in the battle during which he was taken prisoner. A portrait of him by Benjamin West, painted from memory from Kościuszko’s post-captivity visit to London, also shows the black headscarf, along with the crutch Kościuszko was by then using as a mobility aid.
Here’s the quickest possible version of how disability worked as a cultural and social category in the 18th century. How it was understood had a lot to do with both class and gender. In other words, who you were defined how, when, and to what extent your physical impairment was understood as a disability. I wanted to look into how Kościuszko’s disabilities were understood and found myself surprised by the extent to which I found myself having to cobble together scholarship.
There’s been great work done on how disability acquired in war was understood in later periods, and a lot of interesting work on masculinity, disability, and health in earlier periods, but I found myself drawing a blank when trying to find information on the construction of a category of heroic disability, so to speak. So, possibility 1: there wasn’t, in the late eighteenth century, a cultural category for men disabled in war.
But Kościuszko’s injuries are framed by his international friends as being reminders of his heroic conduct… so there’s at least something there!
there is a discourse about melancholy reminders of heroic conduct and self-sacrifice, but I haven’t read enough 18th-century literature to be able to recognize that discourse when I see it. I found evidence for how the category of disabled veterans was articulated legally in the U.S. after the American Revolution… but again, this doesn’t really get to my problem. This is a long complaint! But I keep finding that Kościuszko’s fairly serious impairments aren’t mentioned at all until they are!
In offhand comments! One fairly sentimental biographer mentions in a section on his old age that “his head wound was troubling him again,” and I may or may not have said out loud to my laptop “wait go back to explaining how this was a problem in the first place.” In multiple journalist-authored biographies, there’s a similar elision of Kościuszko’s potential queerness.
It’s Halina Filipowicz, a professor of literature, who has raised it as a possibility, and it’s one I find intriguing, even compelling. Such a possibility would, of course, diminish the imaginative hold Kościuszko’s early romance with Ludwika Sosnowska has had on many authors.
This romance has been used to explain several things: why Kościuszko’s American friends asked him for romantic advice without considering him as a rival; why Kościuszko declined politely but quite vigorously the equally vigorous attempts of society women to flirt with him, including multiple requests to (ahem) draw them. And if Kościuszko was not straight, this might also explain these things, as well as some elements of his relationship with General John Paterson.
Alex Storozynski has chronicled that Paterson and Kościuszko would often have wrestling and grappling matches which would conclude — when Paterson won — with his holding Kościuszko over his knee, and that they also sometimes slept together under the same blanket. Now, as Storozynski points out, this bed-sharing was common among friends in the late eighteenth-century, and New England winters are cold. Still, it’s not super-typical behavior for high-ranking military officers.
It’s not enough – any of this – for me, any of this, to feel confident about probabilities. But I think that asking what happens when we take away the assumed primacy of a doomed love affair is worthwhile, and that these are possibilities worth exploring. In the late nineteenth and early twentieth centuries, Kościuszko’s most conspicuous image was as an austerely noble freedom fighter.
Władysław Ludwik Anczyc’s 1880 play, “Kościuszko at the Battle of Racławice,” had become the most performed play in Poland by the time of the Second World War. It also got two film adaptations. The first, made in 1913, was an epic production with thousands of extras. It formed a part of the significant market for patriotic Polish films, including adaptations of beloved novels, plays, and even operas, in the early 20th century.
The second big-screen adaptation of Anczyc’s play was made in 1938, and I watched a print made specifically for the Polish-American market. This was also a significant production, with a big-name composer to do the soundtrack, and a historical consultant who ended up becoming the head consultant at the Polish National Archives in Warsaw after the war, which is rather lovely.
This film’s opening text-over asserts that Poland proclaimed its constitution in 1791, but that the three Despotic Powers of Russia, Germany, and Austria were trying to thrash the spirit of liberty. You may note, dear listeners, that this is not only highly colored, but anachronistic, because Germany did not exist in 1791. However! The framing of these powers as despotic and dangerous neighbors was clearly relevant to Poland in 1938!
I still do wonder about the emphasis on Polish soil because the question of which soil, exactly, counted as Polish, was fraught in the twentieth century as in the eighteenth. I started watching this film very seriously to figure out what representations of Kościuszko were like, and by 20 minutes in I was very emotionally invested in the whole thing. It has romantic friendships, malicious compliance, and training montages!
Also, things like carefully egalitarian wine pouring and oaths of lifelong loyalty. And a guy who adopts a war orphan as a single dad! I also appreciated that the film represented Kościuszko’s unusual choices by having him simply dressed. To modern viewers this may not immediately register—a cravat is a cravat to a lot of people in the twenty-first century—but he’s not wearing lace, he’s not wearing rich or embroidered fabrics, and he’s not even wearing a powdered wig!
This self-representation via clothing was a big part of numerous revolutionary movements of the eighteenth century, and indeed of the 19th and 20th. The fact that Kościuszko is a legendary figure to the peasants who sign up to join his army, moreover, is reinforced by the fact that he gets almost no screen time until two-thirds of the way into the film.
Then he gets to make a rousing speech in which he explicitly includes Polish Jews among those for whom the newly free and equal nation is to be crafted—obviously not a given, historically—and I nearly cried, and it was great. It’s hard not to be moved; and this is a moment, in fact, that uses language from one of Kościuszko’s own published speeches.
This brings me to the place where fact and fiction connect and overlap: a place I often found harder to recognize, in doing research for this podcast, than I expected. For all his fame, there’s surprisingly little work focusing on Kościuszko that is written by historians. One such historian is Bartłomiej Szyndler, who wrote biographies of Kościuszko and other Polish luminaries of the 18th and 19th centuries. The biography is an impressive work.
But it also contains, at multiple points, long passages of dialogue which Szyndler describes as “reconstructed” based on the primary sources. And that’s… not typically a thing historians do. Alex Storozynski, Kościuszko’s most recent biographer, is a second-generation Polish-American and prize-winning journalist. He’s a gifted writer: the book is a pleasure to read. But it’s written to be a good story. Also, a Polish-American journalist was Antoni Gronowicz, who wrote the 1940s biography Gallant
Tadeusz Kościuszko (originally in Polish; later translated into English). Gronowicz was an anti-Nazi agitator who delivered a speech titled “Antisemitism is Destroying my Fatherland.” On a lecture tour in the U.S. when Germany invaded Poland, he understandably stayed there. I was of course interested to read this biography, and both surprised and distressed to find that Gronowicz appears to have just… made stuff up, up to and including scenes at Kościuszko’s deathbed.
Now, from a meta perspective, this is fascinating. Gronowicz’ version of Kościuszko, moreover, is sympathetic as a tragic exile. Another version of Kościuszko is found, of course, in heroic statues. One surprising fact I learned while researching this podcast is that there are more statues of Kościuszko in the U.S. than of any other figure except for George Washington, including statues in Philadelphia, DC, and West Point.
Several statues in Poland, including the Kościuszko monument in Warsaw, are modeled after American originals, since they could only be erected when Poland, as an independent nation, could honor this particular historical figure. There’s also the Kościuszko Mound, in Krakow, a literally grass-roots effort to simply make a hill in his honor, which I find tremendously moving. And it has nice panoramic views!
But to come back to the statues: even as recently as 2021, with the unveiling of a new bust in Greenpoint, Brooklyn, they’re often pretty… generic. It’s not quite true that if you’ve seen one 18th-century guy on a monument, you’ve seen them all. But while Kościuszko may have devastating cheekbones, he doesn’t have a statue-specific iconography.
And I really think this is a missed opportunity, when thinking about all the ways that his relationships, permanent injuries, and indeed ideology, set him apart from many of his contemporaries. This is not to say, as one documentary has claimed, that Kościuszko was “a man before his time.”
No one is ever ahead of their time (or backward.) Kościuszko’s commitment to racial and religious equality showcases the fact that his own historical moment was one in which, as today, there was vigorous disagreement about what the ideal society should look like. One of the reasons there are so many statues of him is that Kościuszko is an icon for Polish-Americans.
Thinking about comparable figures for other European immigrant communities, I only came up with Christopher Columbus, who was kind of reinvented to legitimate Italian-American identity for complicated reasons. And Tadeusz Kościuszko, unlike Columbus, actually had robust ties to the United States as such, as well as—obviously—his beloved native Poland. Also, unlike Columbus, he was a decent human being. As 18th- and 19th-century Statue Guys go, he’s one of my favorites.
But I still think that he could and should have cooler statues, that do more to represent both his relationships and his disability. I realize that what I’m saying here is “what if we had Kościuszko statues that totally subverted the tropes of 18th- and 19th-century Statue Guys.” That is, in fact, what I want. So, if anywhere else decides they need a statue — or a miniseries — in Kościuszko’s honor, I want his relationships and experiences more fully represented.
18th-century guys leaning on swords are a dime-a-dozen. And Kościuszko, obviously, is more than a guy with a sword. This and all of our Footnoting History episodes are available captioned on our YouTube channel. Thank you for listening and subscribing, and until next time, remember: the best stories are always in the footnotes.