Page:Kościuszko A Biography by Monika M Gardner.djvu/185

 Jefferson to Gates, "is the purest son of liberty among you all that I have ever known, the kind of liberty which extends to all, not only to the rich." To Jefferson Kościuszko confided the testament of his American property, which he had been granted from Congress on the close of the War of Independence, and which lay in Ohio on the site of the present city of Columbus; to Jefferson, again, was entrusted the conduct of Kościuszko's secret departure from the States in 1798.

Some time in the March of that year a packet of letters from Europe was handed to Kościuszko. His emotion on reading the contents was so strong that, despite his crippled condition, he sprang from his couch and staggered without a helping hand to the middle of the room. "I must return at once to Europe," he said to General White, with no further explanation. Jefferson procured him a passport to France under a false name, and then with only Jefferson's knowledge, with no word either to Niemcewicz or to his servant, for both of whom he left a roll of money in a drawer in his cupboard, he sailed for France. Before he embarked he wrote out the will that he sent to Jefferson in which, more than half a century before the war of North and South, the Polish patriot pleaded for the emancipation of the negro slaves.

"I, Thaddeus Kościuszko"—the text is the original English—"being just in my departure from America, do hereby declare and direct that should I make no other testamentary disposition of my property in the United States thereby authorize my