The January Uprising (1863 to 1864): Causes, Battles and Outcome

The January Uprising was the longest of the Polish risings of the partition era and the last one fought under the banner of the old Commonwealth of Poland, Lithuania and Ruthenia. It began as a revolt of young conspirators against conscription and became a guerrilla war of small bands in the forests of the Kingdom of Poland, Lithuania and Belarus, run by a secret National Government in Warsaw. Its best known clashes range from Węgrów and Małogoszcz in 1863 to the Battle of Iłża in January 1864. This guide tells the story from the Polish, Lithuanian, Belarusian and Russian sides, and every contested figure is tied to a named source.²

It came a generation after the November Uprising of 1830 to 1831, but it was a different kind of war. In 1863 the insurgents had no army of their own and fought with scythes, pikes and a few guns against a regular army many times their size.³

What caused the January Uprising?

Russia's defeat in the Crimean War and the accession of Alexander II in 1855 raised hopes in the Kingdom of Poland for independence or at least broad autonomy. The new tsar granted an amnesty and allowed a Polish Agricultural Society, but he also warned the Poles against political dreams when he visited Warsaw in 1856.⁴

From June 1860 Warsaw turned funerals and anniversaries into patriotic demonstrations. The first was the funeral of the widow of General Sowiński, the defender of Warsaw in 1831. On 27 February 1861 Russian troops fired on a procession and killed five people, and the burial of the five became a national manifestation in which Catholic, Protestant and Jewish clergy walked together.⁵

The demonstrations spread to provincial towns and to Lithuania, where the Lithuanian encyclopedia counts 227 of them in Lithuania and Belarus in 1861, 116 in Vilnius alone. The government answered with more shooting and, on 14 October 1861, with martial law in the Kingdom. The next day crowds occupied the churches of Warsaw and soldiers burst in to arrest them.⁶

St Petersburg tried concessions at the same time. In March 1861 it promised a Council of State, elected local councils and a commission for education, and it gave the conservative Marquis Aleksander Wielopolski charge of it. From June 1862 Wielopolski headed the civil government under the tsar's brother, Grand Duke Konstantin Nikolayevich, who came to Warsaw as viceroy. He replaced labor dues with rent, gave Jews equal rights, restored Polish in schools and offices and opened a Polish university, the Main School. Polish society, which wanted independence, did not rally to him.⁷

Wielopolski's answer to the conspiracy was the branka, a special conscription. In October 1862 he announced that recruits would be taken by name rather than by lot, which aimed the levy at young townsmen suspected of plotting. The term of service was 10 years according to the Polish History Museum and 15 according to the IPN. The levy was carried out in Warsaw by surprise on the night of 14 to 15 January 1863. The Central National Committee decided it had to rise at once.⁸

Who were the Reds and the Whites?

By the end of 1861 the patriotic camp had split into two parties. The Reds wanted an armed rising, the abolition of serfdom by giving the peasants their land, and cooperation with Russian revolutionaries. Their city committee, founded in Warsaw in October 1861, became the Central National Committee in 1862 and on 1 September 1862 declared itself the de facto government of the nation. Its leaders included Stefan Bobrowski, Jarosław Dąbrowski and Zygmunt Padlewski.⁹

The Whites were landowners, financiers and liberal intellectuals. They wanted the Commonwealth restored in its 1772 borders, but by petitions and pressure, through organic work and the help of the Western powers rather than by a rising. They feared a rising would turn the peasants against the manor. Once the fighting began, many of them joined it to steer it, and by spring 1863 they had a large share in the insurgent government.¹⁰

How did the January Uprising begin?

On 22 January 1863 the Central National Committee proclaimed itself the Provisional National Government and issued its manifesto. It called the nation “of Poland, Lithuania and Ruthenia” to arms under the banner of the Eagle, the Pursuer and the Archangel. It declared “all the sons of Poland, regardless of faith and descent, origin and class, free and equal citizens of the country”. Land that peasants held for rent or labor dues became their property, with the owners to be paid from state funds, and landless men who joined the fight were promised land of their own.¹¹

The manifesto also addressed the Russians, whom it called the “Muscovite nation”. It forgave them “even the murder of our homeland” because they too suffered under the tsar, but it warned that if they backed the tyrant they would be cursed. On the night of 22 to 23 January armed bands attacked Russian garrisons across the Kingdom. The Lithuanian encyclopedia speaks of more than 20 places, the Polish History Museum of 33 places and about 6,000 fighters.¹²

The first blow surprised the Russians, but it failed in its main aims. Dąbrowski, who was to seize the Warsaw Citadel, had been arrested in August 1862, and no larger town was taken where a government could have settled. The Committee had named the émigré general Ludwik Mierosławski dictator. He lost several skirmishes in February and went back to Paris.¹³

Who fought in the January Uprising, and how many?

On one side stood the insurgent National Government and its partisan bands, called parties. On the other stood the Russian Empire. The figures differ widely from source to source. Historians agree that about 200,000 people took part on the insurgent side over the whole war, but far fewer were under arms at any one time: 20,000 to 30,000 at most according to the Polish education ministry and the Polish History Museum, up to 25,000 according to the Lithuanian encyclopedia. W. A. Day, writing from the Russian government's side in 1867, put the insurgents at never more than 20,000 at once.¹⁴

The Russian army grew as the rising spread. Coleman and Day give about 80,000 to 100,000 troops in the Kingdom at the outbreak. The education ministry gives about 112,000 in January 1863, nearly 126,000 by June and some 190,000 counting Lithuania. The Polish History Museum puts the Russian army in the Kingdom at 340,000 by the end of July 1863, and dzieje.pl gives more than 400,000 in the empire's western lands by the end of the year: 170,000 in the Kingdom, 145,000 in Lithuania and 90,000 in Ukraine.¹⁵

Most insurgents were young townsmen, craftsmen, petty gentry and, in many districts, peasants. The Lithuanian encyclopedia says peasants and townspeople made up about 75 percent of the insurgents in the Kingdom. Volunteers came from France, Italy, Hungary and other countries, among them François Rochebrune with his Zouaves of Death, and several hundred Russian and Ukrainian officers and soldiers deserted to the Polish side. Women fought too, in men's clothes, against the government's ban.¹⁶

How did the January Uprising unfold?

The uprising never had a front. It was a guerrilla war of parties that rose in one district, fought, scattered in the forests and gathered again. Their only fortifications were forests and marshes, and their weapons were whatever they could find. The early strongholds were Podlasie and the Sandomierz and Kraków provinces in the south, close to the Austrian border, across which men and arms came in.¹⁷

In the south General Marian Langiewicz, a veteran of Garibaldi's campaign, gathered a corps of about 3,000 men around Wąchock and the Świętokrzyskie Mountains. The Whites saw a chance to take over the rising and had him proclaimed dictator on 10 or 11 March 1863. The dictatorship lasted little more than a week. After costly fighting at Chrobrz and Grochowiska Langiewicz split his force, crossed into Austrian Galicia and was interned.¹⁸

From then on the war was waged by smaller mobile parties, while the conspiracy built a whole hidden state behind them. The insurgents had almost no artillery and too few rifles, and Prussian and Austrian officials seized many of the arms shipments sent to them.¹⁹

Major battles of the January Uprising

Most of the roughly 1,200 battles and skirmishes counted by the Polish education ministry, the IPN and the Lithuanian encyclopedia were small. Zieliński's map of 1913, above, marks hundreds of them in the Kingdom alone, thickest in the Świętokrzyskie region, around Lublin and in Podlasie. A few clashes became famous.²⁰

Węgrów, 3 February 1863. The party of Władysław Jabłonowski, some 3,000 men by Day's estimate, held the town when Russian troops with artillery attacked. A charge of scythemen on the guns made the battle famous as the “Polish Thermopylae”. Polish accounts call it a victory: the charge threw back the Russian attack and covered the withdrawal of the rest of the party. Day's account, written from the Russian side, says the Smolensk regiment took the town and calls the charge on the guns gallant but unsuccessful.²¹

Siemiatycze, 6 and 7 February 1863. In Podlasie, according to the education ministry, about 4,000 insurgents under Walenty Lewandowski faced about 2,500 better armed Russians with cavalry and a battery under General Zakhar Maniukin, and the ministry calls it the largest battle of the rising by the number of men engaged. Poorly coordinated, and despite the courage of their scythemen, the insurgents were driven out with heavy losses.²²

Małogoszcz, 24 February 1863. Russian columns caught Langiewicz's corps of about 2,500 men. Langiewicz reported to the National Government that 3,000 Russians with six guns attacked from three sides, that his men killed at least 250 of them and lost about 120 killed and wounded, and that the town was burned. PAP, citing historical sources, gives at least 300 insurgents killed and 500 wounded. Either way it was a Polish defeat.²³

Grochowiska, 18 or 19 March 1863. Langiewicz's last battle as dictator. The insurgents held the field against Russian attacks, but the losses on both sides were heavy. Langiewicz broke up his corps soon after and left for Galicia.²⁴

Żyrzyn, 8 August 1863. The parties of Michał Heydenreich (Heidenreich), called Kruk, routed a Russian column. An insurgent officer writing in L'Illustration claimed the capture of a battery, a cash chest of 200,000 roubles and 246 prisoners. Artur Śliwiński's history of 1919 gives 150 prisoners and 198,000 roubles. It was one of the clearest insurgent victories of the war.²⁵

Iłża and Opatów, January and February 1864. In the last winter of the rising Traugutt tried to build regular corps, and only General Józef Hauke-Bosak's corps in the Kielce region took shape. On 17 January 1864 its Stopnica regiment under Karol Kalita, called Rębajło, ambushed a Russian column near Iłża and chased it back into the town. The regional museum in Iłża records that the same regiment was broken at Opatów the following month. Our article on the Battle of Iłża tells the day in full.²⁶

The January Uprising in Lithuania and Belarus

For Lithuanians and Belarusians this was their uprising too. In Vilnius the Reds formed a Movement Committee in summer 1862, which became the Lithuanian Provincial Committee under Konstanty Kalinowski (Kastus Kalinouski in Belarusian, Konstantinas Kalinauskas in Lithuanian). On 1 February 1863 it proclaimed itself the government of Lithuania and Belarus and issued its own manifesto and land decrees. Kalinowski also published Mużyckaja Prauda (The Peasants' Truth), a paper for peasants in Belarusian.²⁷

Fighting began on 2 February 1863 in the Marijampolė district. The priest Antanas Mackevičius (Antoni Mackiewicz) led one of the first bands in Kaunas province, where many peasants joined, especially in Catholic Samogitia. In Orthodox Belarus the peasants were more distrustful. Zygmunt Sierakowski, a former Russian army officer, arrived in Vilnius in April and gathered about 2,500 men, but they were beaten near Biržai on 7 to 9 May 1863. Sierakowski was wounded, captured and executed in Vilnius.²⁸

Kalinowski led the rising in Lithuania and Belarus from summer 1863 and tried to keep it going until the spring of 1864. He was arrested at the turn of January and February 1864 and hanged on Lukiškės Square in Vilnius on 22 March 1864. The Lithuanian encyclopedia counts 321 battles and skirmishes in Lithuania. In Volhynia and Right-Bank Ukraine the rising was weak and short-lived, and the local peasants often helped the Russians.²⁹

The National Government and the underground state

The most remarkable creation of 1863 was not an army but a state. On 10 May 1863 the Central National Committee renamed itself the National Government. In its name officials collected taxes, conscripted men for the parties, ran courts, published newspapers and carried out sentences on traitors. The IPN calls it the first Polish underground state in history.³⁰

Its seal joined the White Eagle of Poland, the Pursuer of Lithuania and the Archangel Michael of Ruthenia, the symbol of a Commonwealth of three nations. The struggle between Reds and Whites for control of the government never stopped. In September 1863 the Reds took over again, and that month bombs were thrown from the Zamoyski Palace at the carriage of the new viceroy, Count Fyodor Berg. Berg was unhurt. Russian soldiers sacked the palace and threw out of a window a piano that had belonged to Fryderyk Chopin.³¹

Did Britain, France or Austria help the insurgents?

Public opinion and the press in Western Europe sided with the Poles, but military help never came. Prussia moved first, the other way. On 8 February 1863 General Gustav von Alvensleben signed a convention in St Petersburg that let Russian troops pursue insurgents across the Prussian border. The British ambassador in Berlin reported that Bismarck was “greatly annoyed at the reprobation with which the Convention has been received in Prussia and in Europe”.³²

France, Britain and, more hesitantly, Austria sent notes to St Petersburg in April and June 1863, asking for an amnesty, a national administration for the Kingdom and a conference of the powers that had signed the treaties of Vienna. Russia rejected them. Foreign Minister Gorchakov answered that the rising was the work of foreign revolutionaries, not a national movement. With the Schleswig-Holstein crisis looming, the powers let the matter drop.³³

Austria at first tolerated the movement in Galicia, through which men and arms passed. It interned Langiewicz in March 1863 and in February 1864 declared a state of siege in Galicia. In the IPN's words, the three partitioning powers were united once again against the Polish cause.³⁴

How did Russia see and fight the uprising?

For the Russian government the rising was a rebellion of the tsar's own subjects, and official language and pre-1917 Russian historians called it the “Polish rebellion”. St Petersburg could consider autonomy for the Kingdom, but the Whites' demand to add Lithuania and Ruthenia went against a firm Russian conviction that these lands were part of the Russian state itself. Coleman writes that no tsar could ever have granted it.³⁵

Russian leaders were divided over how to fight it. Grand Duke Konstantin tried legal methods in Warsaw, and his ally, the education minister Aleksandr Golovnin, wrote to him in June 1863 that the role of ruler in Warsaw had become “the role of an executioner, as for example M. N. Muravyov in Vilnius”. After Russian setbacks in the summer the grand duke left Warsaw in August 1863, and conferences at Tsarskoye Selo changed course. Count Fyodor Berg, a Baltic German trained under Paskevich, took over the Kingdom and ruled it until 1874.³⁶

In Lithuania and Belarus the new governor general Mikhail Muravyov, appointed in mid-1863, crushed the rising with public hangings, confiscations and deportations. Poles called him the Hangman, and the Lithuanian encyclopedia notes that his repression also aimed to destroy Polish influence in Lithuania. His policies drew protests even from Britain, and Lord Napier's letters on the outrage in England survive among the papers kept in the Russian State Historical Archive.³⁷

Russia's most effective weapon was land. Nikolai Miliutin was sent to the Kingdom in 1863 to draft an agrarian reform that would make another gentry rising impossible. On 2 March 1864 Alexander II decreed that the peasants of the Kingdom owned the land they worked, free of labor dues, on terms close to those the National Government had promised a year earlier. The landlords were paid in bonds and the new village communes gave the peasants a strong voice. The decree won the peasants over to the tsar and took away the insurgents' last hope of a mass rising.³⁸

Who was Romuald Traugutt, and how did the uprising end?

Romuald Traugutt was born in 1826 in Grodno province, in today's Belarus, and served as an officer in the Russian army. He had left the army before the uprising and at first kept away from the conspiracy. In spring 1863 he led a party near Kobryn in Polesie, and on 17 October 1863 he took over the National Government as dictator, under the cover name Michał Czarnecki.³⁹

Traugutt removed incompetent leaders, organized the parties into corps on a regular model, enforced taxes and tried to win the peasants by sending agents to explain the land decree. He planned to hold out until spring 1864 and to raise a general levy then. Only the corps of Hauke-Bosak in the Kielce region took shape.⁴⁰

On the night of 10 to 11 April 1864 the Russian police arrested Traugutt in his Warsaw lodgings after a denunciation. He was held in the Pawiak prison and in the Tenth Pavilion of the Citadel and did not betray his comrades. A Russian military court sentenced him to death on 19 July, and on 5 August 1864 he was hanged on the slopes of the Warsaw Citadel with Rafał Krajewski, Józef Toczyski, Roman Żuliński and Jan Jeziorański. The education ministry and dzieje.pl speak of a crowd of 30,000, the IPN of several thousand.⁴¹

Small parties fought on into the autumn of 1864. The last was led by the priest Stanisław Brzóska, chief chaplain of the uprising, in Podlasie. Captured in spring 1865, he was hanged with his adjutant Franciszek Wilczyński in the market square of Sokołów Podlaski on 23 May 1865, before a crowd of about 10,000.⁴²

How many died, and what did the defeat cost?

The toll is known only roughly. The IPN gives 10,000 to 20,000 insurgents killed. The Lithuanian encyclopedia gives about 30,000 people killed and more than 7,000 taken prisoner. Death sentences are put at about 670 by the Lithuanian encyclopedia and at least 669 by dzieje.pl, while the IPN says close to 1,000 people were executed. About 38,000 people were sentenced to penal servitude or exile in Siberia and the interior of the empire, according to the IPN, dzieje.pl and the Lithuanian encyclopedia, while the Soviet historian M. V. Misko, cited by Sugako, counted about 18,000. Emigration is estimated at 5,000 to 10,000. The education ministry sums the Kingdom's losses at 46,000 people out of 6.5 million inhabitants.⁴³

The Lithuanian encyclopedia counts about 1,800 estates of insurgents confiscated in the Kingdom and mostly handed to Russians, and a war levy of 20 million roubles, while Misko, cited by Sugako, gives 1,660 confiscated estates. Many small towns lost their town charters as a punishment, and Russification began in earnest.⁴⁴

The last remains of the Kingdom's separate institutions were abolished. Berg remained viceroy until his death in 1874, but his successors were only governors general, and from the 1870s the Kingdom was officially called the Vistula Land. Russian became the language of schools and offices, and the Main School was closed in 1869 and replaced by an Imperial University. In Lithuania the government banned books printed in the Latin alphabet in 1864.⁴⁵

Why does the January Uprising matter?

In the short run the defeat was total. Stefan Kieniewicz, the uprising's leading historian, wrote that the Polish question seemed to have “reached the bottom”. Galician conservatives such as Józef Szujski blamed the conspirators, and the next generation turned to organic work. Yet the rising also shaped the generation that won independence in 1918.⁴⁶

Artur Grottger's drawing cycles Polonia and Lituania and Jan Matejko's Polonia, Year 1863 fixed its image as a national martyrdom. Józef Piłsudski lectured and wrote on 1863 and built a cult of Traugutt. On 21 January 1919, on the eve of the first anniversary in a free Poland, he issued an order honoring the surviving veterans, and from December 1919 they had the rights of soldiers of the Polish Army and a special uniform. Communist Poland claimed the Reds and the peasant reform, while the anti-communist opposition used the uprising's symbols.⁴⁷

Memory in Lithuania and Belarus has its own course. Interwar Lithuania viewed a rising for the joint Commonwealth with skepticism, Soviet historians recast it as class struggle, and since 1990 Lithuania has seen it as a fight for freedom from Russian rule. In Belarus Kalinowski is a national hero. The remains of Kalinowski, Sierakowski and other leaders were found on Gediminas Hill in Vilnius in 2017 and reburied on 22 November 2019 in the presence of the presidents of Lithuania and Poland and a deputy prime minister of Belarus. In January 2024 the exiled Belarusian opposition leader Sviatlana Tsikhanouskaya said in Vilnius that the uprising had “witnessed the political birth of the Belarusian nation”.⁴⁸

The historiography is huge. Mariusz Kulik counts more than ten thousand works and source editions. The first histories came from participants such as Agaton Giller, while Russian studies such as those of N. V. Berg were written to order and drew on Russian archives. In the Soviet period Moscow and Warsaw published the documents of the uprising jointly, under close party control.⁴⁹

Battles of the January Uprising in our articles

Our articles on the battles of the January Uprising, in chronological order.

1. 1864
   Battle of Iłża, 1864Polish insurgents (3rd Stopnica Infantry Regiment) vs Russian Empire

   On 17 January 1864 Karol Kalita Rębajło's insurgents ambushed a Russian column in deep frost near Iłża and fought their way into the town, a rare late win of the January Uprising.

   

Timeline of the January Uprising

1. 27 February 1861
   Russian troops kill five demonstrators in Warsaw.⁵⁰
2. 14 October 1861
   Martial law in the Kingdom of Poland.⁵¹
3. June 1862
   Wielopolski heads the civil government under Grand Duke Konstantin.⁵²
4. 14 to 15 January 1863
   The branka, a targeted conscription, in Warsaw.⁵³
5. 22 January 1863
   Manifesto of the Provisional National Government. Attacks on Russian garrisons that night.⁵⁴
6. 3 February 1863
   The Battle of Węgrów.⁵⁵
7. 8 February 1863
   The Alvensleben Convention between Prussia and Russia.⁵⁶
8. 24 February 1863
   Langiewicz defeated at Małogoszcz.⁵⁷
9. March 1863
   Langiewicz's short dictatorship, Grochowiska and his internment in Galicia.⁵⁸
10. 7 to 9 May 1863
    Sierakowski defeated near Biržai.⁵⁹
11. 10 May 1863
    The Committee becomes the National Government.⁶⁰
12. 8 August 1863
    Insurgent success at Żyrzyn.⁶¹
13. August 1863
    Grand Duke Konstantin leaves Warsaw. Berg takes over.⁶²
14. 17 October 1863
    Traugutt becomes dictator.⁶³
15. 17 January 1864
    The Battle of Iłża.⁶⁴
16. 2 March 1864
    The tsar's decree gives the peasants of the Kingdom their land.⁶⁵
17. 22 March 1864
    Kalinowski hanged in Vilnius.⁶⁶
18. 10 to 11 April 1864
    Traugutt arrested in Warsaw.⁶⁷
19. 5 August 1864
    Traugutt and four members of the National Government hanged on the slopes of the Citadel.⁶⁸
20. 23 May 1865
    Father Stanisław Brzóska hanged in Sokołów Podlaski.⁶⁹

Where to read next

For the wider story, see our guides to the military history of Poland, the military history of Lithuania and the military history of Russia. The volunteers of 1863 fought under the old slogan told in For your freedom and ours, and the road from the uprising's veterans to 1918 runs through the rebirth of Poland in 1918.