Tadeusz Kosciuszko was beaten by a magnate’s guards over a doomed romance, then crossed the Atlantic, passed Benjamin Franklin’s geometry test, and became one of the Continental Army’s most important engineers. This episode follows how his Enlightenment education in Paris, including physiocracy, shaped a lifelong fight against inherited privilege.

We break down his warning about Sugar Loaf at Fort Ticonderoga, the obstacles that slowed the British retreat, the defenses at Bemis Heights that helped win Saratoga, and the West Point fortifications Benedict Arnold tried to betray. We then follow him back to Poland, where he led the 1794 uprising with peasant scythemen, and to the will he left Thomas Jefferson to free enslaved people, which was never carried out.

• How interlocking fields of fire turned the landscape into a trap at Saratoga
• The wagon-mounted flat-bottomed bateaux that kept Nathanael Greene’s army ahead in the Race to the Dan
• His friendship with Agrippa Hull and why he saw slavery as a structural flaw in the new nation
• The Proclamation of Polaniec and the math behind arming peasants with upright scythes
• Why Jefferson never carried out Kosciuszko’s fully funded plan to free enslaved people