Tadeusz Kościuszko

Born in February 1746 in what is now Belarus, Kościuszko graduated from the Warsaw military academy at twenty and moved to France in 1769 to study after war broke out in the Commonwealth. He sailed to America in 1776 and spent the Revolutionary War as a Continental Army colonel designing fortifications, earning a brigadier general's star in 1783. Back in Poland by 1784, he became a major general in 1789, but the Commonwealth was crumbling: after defeat in the 1792 war with Russia triggered the Second Partition, he commanded the March 1794 uprising as Supreme Commander until his capture at Maciejowice that October. The uprising's collapse brought the Third Partition in 1795 and erased Poland from the map. Pardoned by Tsar Paul I in 1796, he returned to the United States, grew close to Thomas Jefferson, and in 1798 wrote a will leaving his American assets to educate and liberate enslaved people - a directive that was never carried out. He died in Switzerland in October 1817.