January 26 · This Day in America
Secretary of War Edwin Stanton sends word to the governor of Massachusetts: raise a regiment of men of African descent. With that order, the 54th Massachusetts Infantry begins to gather — one of the first Black regiments in the Union Army, raised in the open, in the North, while the war still hangs in the balance. The recruiters are abolitionists. One of them is Frederick Douglass, who sends his own two sons to the colors. These are men who will fight for a country that does not yet fully count them, to make it the country it said it was. Eighteen months later, the 54th will charge the sand parapet of Fort Wagner into a wall of fire, and the nation will learn their name. But it begins here, with a single letter, and the simple, world-changing idea that a free man may carry a rifle for his own freedom.
Source: www.nps.gov
Also on this day · 1837
Michigan joins the Union as the 26th state, its admission long tangled in a border quarrel with Ohio over a strip of land around Toledo. The compromise: Ohio kept the strip, and Michigan was handed the wild, mineral-rich Upper Peninsula as a consolation prize. It looked like a bad trade. The copper and iron buried up there would help build industrial America.
Source: michiganology.org