The news from Poland was not good. The libertine writer Tomasz Kajetan Wegierski arrived in the United States with stories of Russia’s increasingly belligerent treatment of Poland. Wegierski had been banished from Warsaw because of his burlesque satires of Czarina Catherine and King Stanislaw. Like Kosciuszko, Wegierski had been educated by Jesuits, but he could no longer tolerate the political situation in Poland and spoke his mind.24 Wegierski’s plight made it clear to the engineer that after helping America to win its liberty, it would take some time to readjust to living in a country with
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