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On this day 81 years ago, the Soviet Union declared total victory against the Nazi regime, freeing the world from it’s facist ideals.
Though on 30 April, Hitler killed himself, the city’s garrison surrendered on 2 May but fighting continued to the north-west, west, and south-west of the city until the end of the war in Europe on May 9th as some German units fought westward so that they could surrender to the Western Allies rather than to the Soviets.

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January 26th, 1864
President Abraham Lincoln telegraphed an order to Major General John Sedgwick to suspend the execution of several soldiers convicted of desertion. The week prior, Lincoln had been visited by the wife of one of the convicted soldiers bearing a letter from their 16 year old daughter:
“Most Honored and Excellent Sir – How shall a child like me attempt to write to you on such business as this concerning my father, J. W. C, who is sentenced – Oh! how can I write it – to be shot. Spare his poor life, I beseech you, and many thanks shall be given you. If his life is taken my mother cannot stand this heavy blow, and will soon go also. I am the oldest of five children. I have three sisters under eight years. Do not leave us fatherless, I beseech you. I could freely give my life to save his. Virginia C.”

General John Sedgwick

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January 18th, 1831
Union general Edward Ferrero was born in Granada, Spain to wealthy, traveling Italian parents.
When Edward was still a child, the family immigrated to the United States and settled in New York City. There his father opened a dance studio, which Edward took over when his father retired. Edward became a very famous and respected dance teacher, even teaching dance at West Point.
When the war started, Edward personally raised and led the 51st New York Infantry, Ferrero led well and received his first star after performing bravely at Antietam, but the action he’s most remembered for is his dereliction of duty at the Battle of the Crater, where he and James Ledlie spent the battle passing a bottle of rum between the two of them in a bunker whilst their men were slaughtered, he was brevetted a major general anyway.
After the war, he returned to teaching dance and entered politics as an ally of Tammany Hall. He died December 11, 1899 and is buried in Brooklyn.
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Edward_Ferrero

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January 12th, 1861
Florida state troops demanded the surrender of Fort Pickens in Pensacola Bay following Florida’s secession, but the Union garrison, under Lieutenant Adam Slemmer, refused, fortifying themselves inside the key island fortress, setting the stage for a tense standoff that foreshadowed the larger Civil War and kept Fort Pickens a crucial Union stronghold in the South, unlike other seized federal property.
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Fort_Pickens

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January 11th, 1863
Union General John McClernand and Admiral David Porter capture Arkansas Post, a Confederate stronghold on the Arkansas River.
The victory secured central Arkansas for the Union and lifted Northern morale just three weeks after the disastrous Battle of Fredericksburg, Virginia.

Arkansas Post was a massive fort 25 miles from the confluence of the Arkansas and Mississippi rivers. It was designed to insure Confederate control of the White and Arkansas rivers, and to keep pressure off Vicksburg, Mississippi, the last major Rebel city on the Mississippi River. The sides of the square fort were each nearly 200 feet long and the structure was protected by a moat. It sat on a bluff 25 feet above the river. The post was a major impediment to Yankee commerce on the Arkansas.
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Battle_of_Arkansas_Post

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January 10th, 1917
William Frederick “Buffalo Bill” Cody died in Denver, Colorado at the age of 70.
Cody served as a teamster and private in Company H of the 7th Kansas Cavalry during the Civil War, and he, of course, went on to gain worldwide fame founding Buffalo Bill’s Wild West Show in 1883.
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Buffalo_Bill

Wild Bill Hickok (left) with Texas Jack Omohundro (middle) and Buffalo Bill (right)

Bill’s funeral parade

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January 7th, 1863
Private Albert H. Davis of Company K, 6th New Hampshire Infantry Regiment in uniform, shoulder scales, and Hardee hat with Model 1841 Mississippi rifle, sword bayonet, knapsack with bedroll, canteen, and haversack

Faces of the Civil War: Remarkable Portrait Photos From the American Civil War

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January 5th, 1794
Edmund Ruffin, southern fire eater, plantation owner and proponent of slavery, was born in Prince George County, Virginia.
Ruffin claimed he was allowed to fire one of the first shots at Fort Sumter in 1861, the last shot he would ever fire was the one he used to take his own life when his sadness over Lee’s surrender became more than he could bear in June 17th 1865.
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Edmund_Ruffin

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January 4th, 1823
Major General Peter Joseph Osterhaus, one of the more capable Union commanders who never achieved fame due to being relegated to the western theater of war, was born in Koblenz, Rhenish, Prussia.
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Peter_Joseph_Osterhaus

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January 1st, 1863
Abraham Lincoln signs the Emancipation Proclamation. Attempting to stitch together a nation mired in a bloody civil war, Abraham Lincoln made a last-ditch, but carefully calculated, decision regarding the institution of slavery in America.
When Abraham Lincoln’s Emancipation Proclamation went into effect on January 1, 1863, critics claimed that it accomplished nothing. Despite the fact that it freed enslaved people in most Union-controlled southern areas and completely changed the focus of the war, critics of the measure railed against it.
Frederick Douglass saw the effect it had on politics: “The change in attitude of the Government is vast and startling…we can scarcely conceive of a more complete revolution in the position of a nation. It will stand with every distinguished event which marks any advance made by mankind from the thraldom and darkness of error to the glorious liberty of truth.”

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December 30th, 1819
Union General, and 16th Governor of Pennsylvania, John White Geary was born in Westmoreland County, Pennsylvania.
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/John_W._Geary