Discover the Short Life and Long Legacy of Casimir Pulaski, a Polish Cavalry Officer Who Became an American Revolutionary Hero

Eli Wizevich

History Correspondent

In the monumental painting Pulaski at Savannah, Casimir Pulaski is caught forever in the moment of his demise. The hero’s black steed rears into the air. His grim face points heavenward. In a haze of kicked-up dust and gunpowder, American and French soldiers follow their Polish brigadier general into storms of British grapeshot and the glory of death on the battlefield.

Pulaski died on October 11, 1779, two days after he was mortally wounded while fighting for the patriots in the American Revolution. In the centuries since, his martyrdom has fueled a narrative of self-sacrifice in service of high idealism. Pulaski charged toward something he believed in, the story goes. His only connection to the rebellious colonies was ideological. But he knew his cause. He knew the risk. “I came to hazard all for the freedom of America,” he wrote in a letter to Congress.

That idealism is why the president of Poland, the senior United States senator from Illinois and much of the local political machine gathered beneath Pulaski at Savannah on the first Monday in March this year to mark Casimir Pulaski Day at Chicago’s Polish Museum of America. Designated as a commemorative day in 1977, the annual event falls around Pulaski’s birthday on March 6 and is only celebrated in Illinois, a state that is home to a sizable Polish American population.

The landscape of Stanisław Kaczor Batowski’s 1931 painting of Pulaski is drab and dusty. “Looks more like the Battle of Tucson, Arizona,” Jan Loryś, the museum’s resident historian and former director, told Smithsonian magazine two weeks before Pulaski Day, as officials from Warsaw and Chicago, sister cities since 1960, prepared for the influx of special guests. Perhaps the Polish-born Batowski envisioned a real savanna instead of lush, coastal Georgia.

Barbara Kozuchowska, a guide at the museum and the curator in charge of fabrics, offered another theory: The desert landscape is symbolic of a world without liberty, a barren plain of tyranny that Pulaski and his ragtag cavalry were fighting valiantly to replenish.

For many in the audience and at the podium during Monday’s festivities, Kozuchowska’s interpretation wouldn’t be too far from a powerful, inherited truth. Pulaski is celebrated as a hero, and for his 280th birthday, it was only fitting to go all out.

Kasia’s Deli flooded buffet tables with caviar-topped deviled eggs, finger sandwiches of Polish ham on dark rye bread and sweet cheese blintzes smothered in a dark berry compote. Catholic priests mingled with Cook County commissioners and two of the last surviving members of the 1944 Warsaw Uprising. Uniformed men with graying mustaches, epaulets and sabers presented the American and Polish flags, and folk dancers twirled and stomped in floral skirts and feathered caps in between speeches.

Parsing myth from truth and legacy from history complicates the old tale of how an exiled Polish nobleman came to be the so-called Father of American Cavalry and only the seventh honorary U.S. citizen. But asking why the Polish general came to fight for America, as well as how his memory has endured 246 years after his death, is worth a charge.

Casimir Pulaski in Poland

Pulaski was born in Warsaw on March 6, 1745, the second son of one of the Polish-Lithuanian Commonwealth’s most prominent szlachta families. For years, these nobles had formed a “warrior caste” so elite that it rivaled the elected monarch in power and influence, wrote historian Adam Zamoyski in The Polish Way: A Thousand-Year History of the Poles and Their Culture. But by the 1760s, the szlachta’s power was ebbing away.

The Russian Empire had coerced the Polish king Stanisław II August (in his youth an intimate companion of Catherine the Great) and the Polish legislature to adopt reforms that would weaken the nobility’s independence, ease restrictions on Protestant and Orthodox Christianity, and make Poland a Russian puppet state.

In 1768, Pulaski’s father was among the reactionary szlachta who formed the Bar Confederation, a pro-Polish, pro-Catholic, pro-noble militia bent on rebelling “against the predatory claws of Moscow,” as Polish President Andrzej Duda put it in his March 3 speech in Chicago.

The young Pulaski was conscripted into the family business along with his brothers. His cavalry’s defense of the Jasna Gora Monastery, home to the venerated Black Madonna icon, boosted his clout as a defender of Polish liberty and the Catholic faith.

On the whole, “the military fortunes of the Bar Confederates were uneven,” wrote historian Angela Pienkos in the journal Polish American Studies. In 1771, a group of desperate Bar Confederates briefly abducted Stanisław, who had ventured outside of Warsaw’s walls to dine with his uncle. They botched the kidnapping, and the king escaped.

Convinced that Pulaski was the ringleader of an attempted regicide, Stanisław denounced him and his associates “far and wide throughout Europe,” wrote historian Clarence Augustus Manning in his 1945 book Soldier of Liberty. The notion that the Bar Confederates were a noble group fighting valiantly for their inherited liberty crumbled. The rebellion faltered. Facing death in his homeland, Pulaski fled into exile. He would never return to Poland again.

Casimir Pulaski’s second chance

Pulaski arrived in the port of Marblehead, Massachusetts, on July 23, 1777, leaving a continent of troubles behind him. For nearly five years, he had wandered through Europe as Russia, Prussia and Austria divided the Polish-Lithuanian Commonwealth among themselves. He tried to stir the Ottoman Empire back into the fight against Russia. He spent time in a French debtor’s prison, then wound up in Paris, where his reputation as a freedom fighter was restored by other expatriates.

The Pulaski Collection at The Polish Museum of America

Somewhere in that milieu, Pulaski became acquainted with Benjamin Franklin and Silas Deane, patriots who were currying French support for the American Revolution. They promised the Polish exile a new start—and a new fight—in the New World. They packed him off on a 44-day voyage to North America, with a letter of recommendation that he was instructed to deliver to George Washington, head of the Continental Army.

In the letter, Franklin introduced Pulaski as “an officer famous throughout Europe for his bravery and conduct in defense of the liberties of his country.” Franklin added, “He may be highly useful in our service.” In his own letter to Washington, Pulaski spoke in choppy French of his “zeal” to prove himself in combat.

Even with Washington’s written support, Pulaski could not join the rebel army without approval from the Continental Congress. Instead of waiting, he volunteered his services as Washington’s aide in the leadup to the September 1777 Battle of Brandywine Creek, showing no concern for rank or payment.

When the British routed the Continental Army at Brandywine, Pulaski begged Washington for command of an unorganized cavalry detachment. In the fury of the moment, Washington assented, and Pulaski whipped 30-odd men and their horses into a diversion against the British. The Continental Army escaped, and a disappointing day of battle became proof of American resilience—and Pulaski’s potential. Congress approved his appointment to the rank of brigadier general in charge of light cavalry later that month.

Pulaski wanted to reform the ragtag American cavalry into something sleek and efficient—something more European. But Washington preferred his men on horseback to conduct more subtle maneuvers like reconnaissance, and he rebuked Pulaski when his men were too aggressive.

Around this same time, another Polish expat, Tadeusz Kościuszko, was engineering American defenses against the British. His barriers, parapets and trenches along the Hudson River helped the Americans secure a crucial victory at the October 1777 Battle of Saratoga, a turning point in the war that convinced France’s Louis XVI to officially enter the conflict on the American side.

“Kościuszko, by far, was much more important [than Pulaski],” says James S. Pula, an emeritus historian at Purdue University Northwest. “But people don’t value an engineer so much as they value somebody on a horse with a sword leading a charge.”

Becoming the “Father of American Cavalry”

Pulaski’s legacy was built on the powerful symbolism of the cavalry charge, a rebellion against enemies and systems he thought stagnant or backward. “Pulaski was a revolutionary,” says Dominic A. Pacyga, an emeritus historian at Columbia College Chicago. “He revolts.”

The brigadier general revolted once again in early 1778, when he resigned from his post after a brutal winter in Valley Forge. He was, as Washington wrote in a letter, “led by his thirst of glory and zeal for the cause of liberty.” He wanted command, and he wanted free reign. With congressional approval, he fulfilled these ambitions, gaining his own independent cavalry corps—a blank slate for his reforms.

Pulaski’s Legion mustered in Baltimore in March 1778 with a total of 330 men, some infantry and some on horseback. Before riding off to battle, the legion received a blessing and a silk crimson banner from a group of Pennsylvania nuns. Henry Wadsworth Longfellow immortalized the moment in his fictionalized 1839 poem, “Hymn of the Moravian Nuns of Bethlehem,” which reads, “The warrior took that banner proud, / And it was his martial cloak and shroud!”

Blood-red banner in tow, Pulaski’s Legion suffered setbacks in New Jersey and New York before finally finding free rein and glory on the battlefields of the Southern front. Upon arriving in Charleston, South Carolina, in early May 1779, the legion banded with locals to resist a British incursion. Casualties, especially among the legion’s infantry, were devastating. But the prolonged defense of the city prompted American General Benjamin Lincoln to return his army to Charleston, warding off further British attacks.

After Charleston, Pulaski “became the man of the hour,” Pienkos wrote. That summer, his legion and Lincoln’s army unsteadily but successfully beat back the British Army’s territorial gains of the previous year. By the fall, they had met up with French forces under the command of nobleman Charles Hector, Count of Estaing, and made preparations to attack Britain’s regional stronghold, Savannah, Georgia.

The assault that followed was, by most accounts, a disaster. Around 1,000 soldiers were wounded, captured or killed. In a letter to Washington, Samuel Huntington, president of the Continental Congress, bluntly called the attack a “failure.” Beyond the lack of strategic gains, the Siege of Savannah was also the source of one of the war’s most tragic, heroic and mystifying moments: Pulaski’s death.

In the painting Pulaski at Savannah, the eponymous soldier leads a charge into the proverbial meat grinder. Historically speaking, however, scholars have little reason to believe such a charge ever happened. As Pula recently wrote in the Polish Review, “A knowledgeable cavalry commander would never willingly order a headlong assault on fixed fortifications manned by artillery with infantry supports.”

In truth, Pulaski’s death was less dramatic than the painting and the myth convey. But it was no less heroic. While surveying the British defenses and looking for cracks to exploit with his cavalry, Pulaski rushed to the aid of the wounded Count of Estaing. On the way, grapeshot from a British cannon hit him below his waist. The wound was mortal. Pulaski died two days later, on October 11, aboard the brig Wasp.

Casimir Pulaski’s legacy

“He was such an angel of a boy,” said tour guide Kozuchowska, perched atop a heater in the Polish Museum of America’s break room, speaking of Pulaski as if he were a nephew. “Such a sweet little boy.” Through the gates of the closed gift shop, she pointed out Kaz: War, Love and Betrayal, a historical fiction novel about Pulaski that she now regrets reading. She said it “throws a grayness” on Pulaski’s legacy.

All heroes receive their fair share of revisions, some more outlandish than others. A 2019 Smithsonian Channel documentary claimed that Pulaski was intersex after his alleged remains in Savannah were shown to bear some female characteristics. But accounts from around the time of Pulaski’s death insist that he was buried at sea. According to Pula, the intersex verdict is “speculative at best.”

For any hero to last as long as Pulaski has, they must be remade, again and again, usually in subtler ways. In the 1830s, Polish revolutionaries fleeing from failed revolutions against Russia saw themselves in Pulaski. By the 1850s, peasants driven to America by “za chlebem”—literally, for bread—“wanted to see themselves as part of American history as well,” Pacyga says.

During World War I, Polish boosters put Pulaski and Kościuszko, the engineer, on propaganda posters next to Washington and Woodrow Wilson to encourage Americans to support Poland. As communism faded in the 1990s, Polish President Lech Wałęsa asked for the support of two generals—General Motors and General Electric—in exchange for the two generals Poland had sent to the fledgling U.S. during the American Revolution. (It was of little concern, apparently, that the Polish state had forced Pulaski into exile, or that Kościuszko left because there were no opportunities in the shrunken Polish army.)

As for why Pulaski eventually outstripped Kościuszko in fame, Pacyga explains, only half-jokingly, that Pulaski’s Slavic last name was “a lot easier to pronounce.”

“A name is a legacy,” said Cook County’s exuberant, spiky-haired treasurer, Maria Pappas. She has attended the event at the Polish Museum of America since 1989, and this year, she decided to use her speech to list the towns, counties, streets and other monuments named after Pulaski. New Jersey has a rickety Pulaski Skyway. Seven states have Pulaski Counties. The brigadier general’s name is emblazoned on a ballistic missile submarine, a fort on the coast of Georgia and an animal hospital in Chicago. “That’s where I take my dog,” Pappas told the smiling crowd.

Then, of course, there’s the holiday—or, rather, holidays. Aside from Illinois, whose political leaders were wary of encroaching on the Italians’ Columbus Day, the rest of the U.S. marks General Pulaski Memorial Day on October 11, the date of Pulaski’s death.

Illinois’ Pulaski Day was first celebrated as a public holiday in 1986—the same year that Martin Luther King Jr. Day was first observed as a federal holiday. The timing is not coincidental. “When Martin Luther King Jr. Day was announced, there was a reaction in the white ethnic community,” Pacyga says. “Pulaski became this obvious symbol around which not only Poles but others could organize.”

Poland’s president visits Chicago to celebrate Pulaski Day

For a while, Pulaski Day represented a triumph of this Polish political clout. Students got the day off school. Some banks and offices closed. That’s not the case anymore. As Poles moved to the suburbs and assimilated, their political power dispersed. Today, Illinois students go to school on Pulaski Day.

Outside of the Polish Museum of America on Chicago’s Milwaukee Avenue, it was an unremarkable March Monday. But Pulaski still meant something. As Duda, the Polish president, told the crowd before he left early for another event, the story of the exiled brigadier general has a “personal dimension” for him, as it did for generations of other Poles facing their country’s “tragic and dramatic history.”

Much like Kościuszko, who survived the American Revolution and went back to Poland to fight against the partition of his homeland, and Pulaski, who gave his life for his ideals an ocean away from home, the legion of community members who put on the Pulaski Day celebration each year continue to fight for their Polish identity, pride and dignity.