Kosciuszko

Tomorrow I go on my first work trip. I'm driving to Philadelphia in a GOV* with a project manager and a designer. We're going to visit the Poe house, which I've mentioned before, and the Thaddeus Kosciuszko National Memorial.

Kosciuszko was an aristocratic, Paris-trained military engineer from a two-state commonwealth** covering parts of what are now Poland, Lithuania, Ukraine and Belarus. He gets claimed by Poles and Lithuanians, both, and the Polish-American community, in particular, makes a big fuss over him.

A liberal and romantic young man, Kosciuszko came to America in 1776 to help the colonies throw off English rule. He engineered fortifications along the Delaware River, around Saratoga, and at West Point. After returning to his own country, he joined in a final and futile attempt to free it from Russia, leading scythe-bearing soldiers into battle. Injured and captured, he spent two years in a Russian prison before his release. He returned to the U.S. in 1797 to collect money owed him by the army, staying in a Philadelphia boarding house (now part of the NPS site) for five months. He was buddies with Thomas Jefferson, who visited him there. Apparantly, lots of young ladies visited him, too. He sketched their portraits. (Bit of a baby, wasn't he?)

The site staff want to frame Kosciuszko as a defender of human rights. Along with his freedom fighting, he made life better for - and eventually freed - his own serfs. And here's one of the best parts of his story: before he left the U.S. for the last time in 1798, he wrote a will to

authorize my friend Thomas Jefferson to employ the whole [of my property in the United States] in purchasing negroes from among his own or any others and giving them liberty in my name; [and] in giving them an education in trades and otherwise...

Is that ballsy, or what?! Jefferson was VP of the US, and here's his friend, a foreigner, putting him under obligation to free some slaves, which Jefferson couldn't or wouldn't do himself, in spite of his own objection to slavery. In the end, this will was contested by Kosciuszko's descendents in Europe and wasn't settled until Jefferson and his slaves were long gone.

The NPS site has a period-furnished room, some exhibits and a video. I don't think we're being asked to change these functions, just make 'em better. More later.
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* government-owned vehicle
** The Polish-Lithuanian Commonwealth had an extraordinary golden age of semi-democracy and religious tolerance a century before the Enlightenment.