Thaddeus of Warsaw

by Jane Porter

"Enthusiasm attempted to supply the pencil of genius, and though the portraiture be imperfectly sketched, yet its author has been gratified by the sympathy of readers, not only of her own people, but of those of distant nations; and that the principles of heroic virtue which she sought to inculcate in her narrative were pronounced by its great patriot subject, in a letter he addressed to herself, 'as worthy of his approbation and esteem,' seems, now that he is removed from all earthly influence, to sanction her paying that honest homage to his memory which delicacy forbade her doing while he lived.

"The first publication of this work was inscribed to a British hero, 'a land commander and a tar,' whose noble nature well deserved the title bestowed upon it by his venerable sovereign, George III., ('Coeur-de-Lion.') He, a brother in spirit, fully appreciated the character of Thaddeus Kosciusko, and the writer of this devoted tribute feels that she deepens the tints of honor on each name by thus associating them together. But may the tomb of the British hero be long in finding its place! That of the Polish patriot has already received its sacred deposit, and with the sincere oblation of a not quite stranger's heart, this poor offering is laid on the grave of him who fought for 'his country's freedom, laws, and native king;' who, when riches and a crown were proffered to himself by the then dictator of almost all Europe, declined both, because no price could buy the independence of an honest man.

"Such was General Kosciusko; such was the model of disinterestedness, of tempered valor, and of public virtue which his annalist sought to set forth in the foregoing pages; such was the man who honored their narrator with his approval and esteem! and in that last word she feels a privilege, but with due humility, to thus link some little memorial of herself to after times, by so uniting to the name of Thaddeus Kosciusko that of his humble but sincere aspirer to such themes,

"JANE PORTER.

"LONG-DITTON ON-THAMES, September, 1819."

Since the above inscription was first written and inscribed in the former edition, the brave and benign "Christian knight," the Coeur- de-Lion of our own times, has also been gathered to the tears of his country, and his monumental statue, as if standing on the victorious mount of St. Jean d'Acre, is now preparing to be set up, with its appropriate sacred trophies, in the great Naval Hall at Greenwich. It is understood that his mortal remains will be removed from the Pere la Chaise in Paris, where they now lie, to finally rest in St. Paul's Cathedral, where Nelson sleeps. Kosciusko's tomb is at Cracow, the ancient capital of Poland; and in the manner of its most ancient style of sepulchre, it appears an immense earthen tumulus, piled over the simple-mounded grave, which accumulating portions were severally borne to their hallowed place in the arms alone of each silent mourner, in a certain number of successive days, till the whole was raised into a grand pyramidal mass.

In looking back through the avenue of life to those periods the tale tells of, what events have occurred, public and private, to the countries and the individuals referred to in these memoranda! to persons of lofty names and excellence, both in our own and in other lands, mutually affected with admiration and regret for the virtues and the calamities described. It is an awful contemplation, and in sitting down in my now solitary chamber to its retrospection, I find that nearly half a century has passed since its transactions swept over Europe like a desolating blast. Then I wrote my little chronicle when the birthright independence of Poland was no more; when she lay in her ashes, and her mighty men were trodden into the dust; when the pall of death overspread the country, and her widows and her orphans wandered afar into the trackless wilderness of a barren world.

During this wide expatriation, some distinguished captives, who had fallen in the field, and were counted among the slain, having been found by the victors alive in their stiffened blood, were conveyed to various prisons; and along with these was discovered the justly feared, and not less justly deplored, General Kosciusko, who, though long unheard of by the lone wanderers of his scattered host, had been thus preserved by the supreme Lord of all, to behold again a remnant of his own brightened in hope, and comforted by the honoring sympathy of the good and brave in many nations.

Kosciusko was of noble birth, and early distinguished himself by his spirit and talents for the martial field. Indeed, owing to the belligerent position of Poland, situated in the midst of jealous and encroaching nations, arms was the natural profession of every gentleman in the kingdom, commerce and agriculture being the usual pursuits of the middle classes. But it happened, in the early manhood of Thaddeus Kosciusko, that the dangerous political Stromboli which surrounded his country, and often aroused an answering blaze in that since devoted land, slept in their fires; and Poland being at peace, her young military students, becoming desirous of practising their science in some actual campaign, resolved to try their strength across the Atlantic. Hearing of the war then just commenced between the British Colonies in America and the mother country, Kosciusko, as a deciding spirit amongst his ardent associates, brought them to this resolution. Losing no time, they embarked, passed over the wide ocean of the Western world, and landing safe and full of their object, offered their services to the army of independence. Having been readily accepted, and immediately applied to use, the extraordinary warrior talents of Kosciusko soon shone conspicuous, and were speedily honored by his being appointed special aide-de-camp to General Washington. His subsequent conduct in the camp and field was consonant to its beginning, and he became a distinguished general in rank and command long before his volunteered military services had terminated. When the war ended, in the peace of mutual concessions between the national parent and its children on a distant land, (a point that is the duty of all Christian states to consider, and to measure their ultimate conduct by,) the Poles returned to their own country, where they soon met circumstances which caused them to call forth their recently passed experience for her. But they had not departed from the newly-established American State without demonstrations of its warm gratitude; and Koscuisko, in particular, with his not less popular compatriot and friend, Niemcivitz, the soldier and the poet, bore away with them the pure esteem of the brave population, the sighs of private friendship, and the tears of an abiding regret from many fair eyes.

To recapitulate the memorable events of the threatened royal freedom of Poland, by the three formidable foreign powers confederated for its annihilation, and in repelling which General Kosciusko took so gallant a lead, is not here necessary to connect our memoranda concerning his unreceding struggles to maintain her political existence. They have already been sketched in the preceding little record of the actual scenes in which he and his equally devoted compeers held their indomitable resistance till the fatal issue. "Sarmatia lay in blood!" and the portion of that once great bulwark of civilized Europe was adjudged by the paricidal victors to themselves: a sentence like unto that passed on the worst of criminals was thus denounced against Christendom's often best benefactor, while the rest of Europe stood silently by, paralyzed or appalled, during the immediate execution of the noble victim.