Tadeusz Kosciuszko
Kosciuszko was a Lithuanian – Polish military leader and engineer of such high regard that he is a national hero in Poland and in North America, although his fame in the latter is limited to those who go beyond basic American high school history. As a young man he made a rash attempt to elope with the daughter of his employer, an indiscretion which brought him a severe beating at the hands of the irate father’s servants.
Kosciuszko served in the ongoing wars against the Russian attempts at influencing Polish affairs and partitioning the country, combining his growing military knowledge with his lifelong love of drawing to become a skilled map maker and engineer. Already a revolutionary by nature, as attested to by his fighting against Czarist authority, Kosciuszko was quickly drawn to the American Revolution, and convinced French noblemen Pierre de Beaumarchais to provide him with a letter of introduction to the American Congress, endorsed by Benjamin Franklin.
Congress assigned the young engineer to the Continental Army as a volunteer without portfolio, meaning that he had no recognized rank or pay, which was soon rectified by a commission as a colonel of engineers. Kosciuszko was instrumental in designing and building the fortifications which stopped John Burgoyne’s army at Bemis Heights in New York, leaving them effectively stranded and without supplies at Saratoga. Both the selection of the proper place to fortify and the fortifications themselves were decisions made by the young engineer, and the final nail in Burgoyne’s figurative coffin.
Kosciuszko remained unpaid by the Congress throughout his revolutionary war service, which continued in the southern campaign following the victory at Saratoga throughout the rest of the war. His skills designing entrenchments and fortifications were reflected in the disposition of the American Army before Yorktown in 1781. Following the war Kosciuszko sued the Congress for payment for his services, which was finally awarded via promissory in 1784.
Kosciuszko returned to Poland and to military service there, visiting the United States in the late 1790s. When he died in Switzerland in 1817 he was renowned as a national hero in Poland akin to the status once enjoyed by Washington in the United States. Kosciuszko has been memorialized throughout the United States for his service, and is regarded as one of the fathers of the US Army Corps of Engineers.