Pulaski and Kosciuszko

Casimir Pulaski and Thaddeus Kosciuszko are honored in a unique park next to the Cooper River near Camden, New Jersey in the Polish American Congress Monument.

We see Kosciuszko in the foreground and Pulaski in the background in this view.  I have posted previously about these two; both are memorialized elsewhere in New Jersey and in other states.  The two of them are also part of the 14 statues comprising the American Revolution Statuary in Washington, DC.

The day I was there was somewhat cold and the park sparsely attended.  The two generals faced the road, their backs to the Cooper River.  Pulaski died at Savannah and Kosckiuszko survived the war, although he was wounded at the Siege of Ninety-Six in South Carolina.  I simply found this one of the more interesting sites memorializing Revolutionary War generals, and in particular, uniting the two Polish generals.  Their paths crossed in South Jersey, with Kosciuuszko engineering the Delaware River defenses and Pulaski seeing action with British Major Patrick Ferguson, though I do not believe they ever fought side by side.

More Thoughts on Valley Forge and Today

Here are the huts of Washington's guard, reconstructed at Valley Forge.

According to Thomas Fleming (Washington's Secret War), a "little-discussed aspect of Valley Forge" was the relative comfort of the officers compared to the enlisted soldiers.  He describes the "jollitry" they report on their leaves, while in the meantime, the soldiers--mainly poor and from the bottom of American society--were suffering from starvation, disease and cold.

Today, we are bombarded with rhetoric about the "middle class," the "99%" and so forth.  We have a Congress whose members travel the world on "fact-finding" missions.  When is the last time a Congressional delegation went to Camden, New Jersey--reported in 2012 by the U.S. Census as the poorest city in America?