The First Minnesota Volunteers at Gettysburg, The 150th Anniversary: Excerpted from "The Last Full Measure: The Life and Death of the First Minnesota Volunteers"

By Richard Moe

The chapter on the First Minnesota's moment of supreme sacrifice at Gettysburg is the best thing of its kind that I have ever read. --James M. McPherson??This excerpted e-short would include a reworked introduction of the regiment, its call-up at Fort Snelling, the powerful chapter on the July 2-3, 1863 Battle at Gettysburg, and a revised prologue.

• Language: English
• Publisher: Minnesota Historical Society Press
• Release date: May 1, 2013
• ISBN: 9780873519038

Richard Moe

Richard Moeis president of the National Trust for Historic Preservation. He is co-author of Changing Places: Rebuilding Community in the Age of Sprawl and contributed the foreword to Minnesota in the Civil War: An Illustrated History.

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Editor’s Introduction

In 1861, Minnesota, three years into statehood on the western frontier of the United States, may have seemed far removed from the conflict tearing the nation apart. While most Minnesotans were not abolitionists, they opposed the spread of slavery outside of the South. They had voted for President Abraham Lincoln, a fellow westerner, whose federal land policies they supported. But when war broke out, Minnesotans committed themselves wholeheartedly to preserving the nation. Governor Alexander Ramsey happened to be visiting Washington on April 13, as news of Fort Sumter’s surrender reached the capital. Acting even before Lincoln issued his call for 75,000 volunteers, Ramsey offered the president a regiment of one thousand men, earning Minnesota the distinction of being the first state to tender volunteer troops to preserve the Union.

In just eleven days, the First Minnesota Volunteer Regiment filled its ten companies, which were organized in St. Paul, Stillwater, Minneapolis, St. Anthony, Red Wing, Faribault, Hastings, Wabasha, and Winona. These new Minnesotans—farmers and frontiersmen for the most part—had been developing precisely those qualities they would need to fight a war. Like soldiers in other western regiments, they persisted through hardship with resourcefulness, hard work, and a conviction that they would ultimately prevail. Their toughness and self-reliance would help them through ordeals they could not yet imagine.

As part of the Army of the Potomac, the First Minnesota was to face some of the most brutal and unforgiving battles of the Civil War. They endured confusion and heartbreak at Bull Run, where more than 20 percent of the regiment became casualties, the heaviest loss sustained by any Union regiment. After various engagements in the Peninsula Campaign, they acquitted themselves well at Antietam, again suffering the North’s highest rate of casualties but shooting coolly as they retreated. They then participated in the Battles of Fredericksburg and Chancellorsville. Their letters and journals demonstrate both their pain and their stoicism.

By the time the First Minnesota faced the Confederates at Gettysburg early in July 1863, the soldiers had spent two years fighting side by side, forming bonds of trust and loyalty. In this decisive engagement of the Civil War, these ordinary men would astonish a nation as they offered their last full measure of devotion.

Gettysburg

All I can give you is a soldier’s grave.

Cut free from its supply line to Virginia, Lee’s army split into three parts, which foraged their way leisurely through southern Pennsylvania. Longstreet’s and A. P. Hill’s corps were twenty-five miles northwest of Gettysburg, at Chambersburg; part of Richard Ewell’s corps was an equal distance north of the city, at Carlisle; and the balance was farther to the east, at York. As usual, Lee was relying on Jeb Stuart’s cavalry to tell him where the enemy was, and since he hadn’t heard from Stuart, he assumed the Union army was nowhere in the vicinity and, doubtless, still south of the Potomac. He learned from a Confederate spy on 28 June, however, that the Northern forces, now commanded by Meade, were less than thirty miles away, at Frederick. Though Lee hadn’t known where Meade was, Meade had a good idea where Lee was, and he was rushing north to engage him.

The Confederate commander became alarmed that his separated forces would be easy prey for the concentrated Army of the Potomac, and he sent couriers to Ewell’s divisions at Carlisle and York with instructions to meet him at Cashtown, on the road from Chambersburg to Gettysburg. Waiting for the army to gather, one of A. P. Hill’s divisions was ordered into Gettysburg to secure a supply of shoes that had been reported there, but on approaching the town on 1 July the Confederates ran into more than they had bargained for. The day before, Gen. John Buford, a savvy and experienced Union cavalryman, had arrived in the town with a division of horsemen and had immediately recognized its strategic value. Not only did roads converge on Gettysburg from all directions but the hills behind it offered ideal defensive positions for the battle he and everyone knew was coming. If only he could hold off the Confederates until Meade occupied those hills, he reasoned, the Union might have an advantage similar to Lee’s at Fredericksburg.

Buford’s dismounted cavalrymen surprised Hill’s men coming down the Chambersburg Road, just outside Gettysburg, and for two hours held back the much larger Confederate force with their new breech-loading carbines. Both sides called for reinforcements, and soon Union and Confederate forces began converging from all directions on this unlikely pastoral town of thirty-five hundred. Neither Lee nor Meade had planned to fight here, but once the fighting started, the town became a giant magnet, pulling both sides irresistibly toward it. Thus the largest battle ever fought on the North American continent, and the most important engagement of the Civil War, began—almost as an accident.

Buford got reinforcements from the First Corps in time to save his small force, but ultimately the greater Confederate numbers pushed the bluecoats back about a mile. At the end of the day it appeared to many of the Southerners that they were on the verge of another decisive victory. Their judgment was premature, however, because they underestimated the significance of Buford’s achievement in keeping the heights behind Gettysburg out of Confederate hands.

On hearing news of the fighting, Meade dispatched Gen. Winfield Scott