page_title: January Uprising
section_title: Romuald Traugutt
hierarchical_section_title: January Uprising / Evolution of events / Romuald Traugutt
caption_attribution_description: English: Zygmunt Szczęsny Feliński Русский: З. Щ. Фелинский Polski: Zygmunt Szczęsny Feliński
context_page_description: The January Uprising was an insurrection principally in Russia′s Kingdom of Poland aimed at the restoration of the Polish–Lithuanian Commonwealth. It began on 22 January 1863 and continued until the last insurgents were captured by the Russian forces in 1864.
  It was the longest lasting insurgency in post-partition Poland. The conflict engaged all levels of society, and arguably had profound repercussions on contemporary international relations and ultimately provoked a social and ideological paradigm shift in national events that went on to have a decisive influence on the subsequent development of Polish society.
  It was the confluence of a number of factors that rendered the uprising inevitable in early 1863. The Polish nobility and urban bourgeois circles longed for the semi-autonomous status they had enjoyed in Congress Poland before the previous insurgency, a generation earlier in 1830, while youth encouraged by the success of the Italian independence movement urgently desired the same outcome.
context_section_description: It was only after Polish general Romuald Traugutt took matters into his own hands on 17 October 1863 to unite all classes under a single national banner that the struggle could be upheld. His restructuring in preparation for an offensive in spring 1864 was banking on a European wide war. On 27 December 1863 he enacted a decree of the former provisional government by granting peasants the land they worked.  This land was to be provided by compensating the owners through state funds after the successful conclusion of the uprising. Traugutt called upon all Polish classes to rise against Russian oppression for the creation of a new Polish state. The response was moderate since the policy came too late. The Russian government had already begun working among peasants granting them generous parcels of land for the asking. Those peasants who had been bought off did not engage with Polish revolutionaries to any extent nor did they provide them with support.
  Fighting continued intermittently during the winter of 1863–4 on the southern edge of the Kingdom near the Galician border from where assistance was still forthcoming. In late December in the Lublin Voivodeship General Michał Heydenreich's unit was overwhelmed. The most determined resistance continued in the Swietokrzyskie hills where general Józef Hauke-Bosak distinguished himself by taking several cities from the vastly superior Russian forces. Yet he too succumbed to a crushing defeat on 21 February 1864 which presaged the end of the armed struggle. On 29 February Austria imposed martial law and on 2 March the tsarist authorities brought in the abolition of serfdom in the Polish Kingdom. These two events neutralised Traugutt's concept of developing the uprising with a general mobilisation of the population in the Russian partition and reliance on assistance from Galicia. In April 1864 Napoleon III abandoned the Polish cause. Władysław Czartoryski wrote to Traugutt: "We are alone, and alone we shall remain".
  Arrests decimated key positions in the secret Polish state, while those who felt threatened sought refuge abroad. Traugutt was taken on the night of 10 April. After he and the last four members of the National Council, Antoni Jezioranski, Rafał Krajewski, Józef Toczyski and Roman Żuliński had been apprehended by Russian troops, they were imprisoned and executed by hanging on 5 August at the Warsaw Citadel. It marked the symbolic closure of the Uprising. Only Aleksander Waszkowski, head of the Warsaw insurgency eluded the police till December 1864, but then he too joined the list of "the lost" in February 1865. The war consisting of 650 battles and skirmishes with twenty-five thousand Polish and other insurgents killed, had lasted eighteen months. It is worthy of note that the insurgency persisted in Samogitia and Podlasie, where the Greek-Catholic population, outraged and persecuted for their religious observance, "Kryaki", (those baptised into the Greek orthodox church), and others like commander and priest, Fr. Stanisław Brzóska, clung longest to the revolutionary banner until the spring of 1865.
caption: Archbishop of Warsaw Feliński
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