USPS 250th Anniversary of American Revolution - Tadeusz Kościuszko

USPS on 10 April 2026 issued a commemorative First Day Cover stamp honouring Tadeusz  Kościuszko (1746–1817), a Polish military engineer, statesman, and national hero in Poland, Lithuania, Belarus, and the United States who served as a colonel in the Continental Army during the American Revolutionary War. 

He was included as one of  the important figures in America's Revolution for his role as a Polish military engineer whose fortifications helped win the Battles of Saratoga, alongside America 250 branding. 

At some point in 1777, Kościuszko composed a polonaise and scored it for the harpsichord. Named for him, and with lyrics by Rajnold Suchodolski, it later became popular with Polish patriots during the November 1830 Uprising. Around that time, Kościuszko was assigned an African American orderly, Agrippa Hull, whom he treated as an equal and a friend.

In March 1778, Kościuszko arrived at West Point, New York, and spent more than two years strengthening the fortifications and improving the stronghold's defenses. It was these defenses that the American General Benedict Arnold subsequently attempted to surrender to the British when he defected. Soon after Kościuszko finished fortifying West Point, in August 1780, General George Washington granted Kościuszko's request to transfer to combat duty with the Southern Army. Kościuszko's West Point fortifications were widely praised as innovative for the time. In fact, to this day there a statue of him at the academy. This was highlighted in a US 3-cent postage stamp in October 1933.

Kościuszko was born in February 1746, in a manor house on the Mereczowszczyzna estate in Brest Litovsk Voivodeship, then Grand Duchy of Lithuania, a part of the Polish–Lithuanian Commonwealth, now the Ivatsevichy District of Belarus. 

Upon returning to Poland in 1784, Kościuszko was commissioned as a major general in the Polish–Lithuanian Commonwealth Army in 1789. 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. The defeat of the Kościuszko Uprising that November led to Poland's Third Partition in 1795, which ended the Commonwealth.

 In 1796, following the death of Tsaritsa Catherine II, Kościuszko was pardoned by her successor, Tsar Paul I, and he emigrated to the United States. A close friend of Thomas Jefferson, with whom he shared ideals of human rights, Kościuszko wrote a will in 1798, dedicating his U.S. assets to the education and freedom of the U.S. slaves. Kościuszko eventually returned to Europe and lived in Switzerland until his death in 1817. The execution of his testament later proved difficult, and the funds were never used for the purpose he intended