KOSCIUSZKO
THE POLISH AND AMERICAN PATRIOT
ONE OF THE RAREST AMERICAN REVOLUTIONARY WAR SIGNATURES TO OBTAIN IN ANY FORM
AN EXCESSIVELY-RARE AUTOGRAPH AUTHORIZATION PENNED DURING THE 1794 POLISH UPRISING
KOSCIUSZKO, ANDREW THADDEUS BONAVENTURE. (1746–1817) [Andrzej Tadeusz Bonawentura Kościuszko] Polish military engineer, statesman, and military leader; acclaimed a national hero in Poland, western Europe, France and the United States; one of the first European volunteers to aid the American revolutionary cause arriving in Philadelphia in August 1776; designed and constructed fortifications to help defeat the British, most notably at Saratoga and West Point; in recognition of his services, the Continental Congress promoted him to Brigadier General in 1783 – and granted him American citizenship; returned to Poland and led his own countrymen in a failed attempt to free them from foreign oppression. Excessively-rare Autograph Document Signed, “T. Kosciusko”, in Polish, penned during the 1794 uprising as Supreme Commander of the National Armed Force. One page, small quarto. September 6, 1794. No place. He writes:
“Being assured from the Provisions Department that the forage and the provisions are going to be provided for the Army as necessary, I am granting the request of the above mentioned Department and am ordering the immediate withdrawl of the command of Lieutenant Kalinsky as well as all others that have been sent foraging. T. Kosciusko”.
Upon his return in 1784, Kosciusko was commissioned as a major general in the Polish–Lithuanian Commonwealth Army. After the Polish–Russian War of 1792 resulted in the Commonwealth’s Second Partition, he commanded an uprising against the Russian Empire in March 1794 until he was captured at the Battle of Maciejowice in October 1794. [Our document is from this period in Kosciusko’s remarkable life story.]
The defeat of the ‘Kosciusko Uprising’ that November, led to Poland’s Third Partition in 1795, which ended the Commonwealth. Seriously wounded in battle and imprisoned in Czarist Russia, upon his release, he returned to the United States. In a small rented room in Philadelphia, Kosciuszko spent the winter of 1797-98 reading, sketching and receiving distinguished visitors like Thomas Jefferson who said of Kosciusko that he was as “pure a son of liberty, as I have ever known.” Kosciusko wrote his will in 1798, dedicating his U.S. assets to the education and freedom of U.S. slaves, including several slaves owned by Jefferson, who was his executor. Kosciusko eventually returned to Europe and lived in Switzerland until his death in 1817. Just an exceptional, honestly exceedingly rare item, worthy of inclusion in the finest of collections.
$16,500.00