Why isn't Minnesota's sacrifice at Gettysburg better remembered?

The fortitude of Minnesota soldiers charging at Confederates during the battle of Gettysburg is enshrined in one of the most vivid memorials on that legendary battlefield — a bronze statue of a stoic Union soldier running double-quick, gripping his rifle, bayonet fixed.

The First Minnesota Volunteer Infantry regiment's bold attack on an Alabama brigade nearly six times its size on July 2, 1863, bought the Union a precious few minutes to shore up its broken line. But it came at a huge cost: Four out of every five Minnesotans were either killed or wounded, the highest casualty rate of any Union regiment in a single action during the war.

If it weren't for the First Minnesota, some believe the North may have lost at Gettysburg — and, given the importance of that battle, perhaps even the war itself.

Which is why Robert Haupert, a software developer from Zimmerman, Minn., and Rob Robertson, an Eden Prairie business owner, each asked Curious Minnesota — the Star Tribune's reader-powered reporting project — why we don't hear more about the First Minnesota. Another reader griped that the regiment wasn't even mentioned in the 1993 film "Gettysburg."

"If it had gone wrong, we might have had a split nation," Haupert said. "It doesn't seem like it ever gets mentioned anywhere."

'Eager to prove themselves'

When the Civil War broke out in April 1861, Minnesota had been a state for only three years and counted only 172,000 residents. But it was the first state to offer troops to President Abraham Lincoln. Gov. Alexander Ramsey happened to be in Washington when the South fired on Fort Sumter and immediately pledged 1,000 soldiers to defend the country. The First Minnesota was born.

Eleven infantry regiments were ultimately organized in Minnesota, most of them destined to fight in Tennessee, Mississippi and Arkansas — or at home during the Dakota War of 1862. But only the First Minnesota fought in the famed eastern battles of First Bull Run, Antietam, Fredericksburg, Chancellorsville and Gettysburg.

On the second day at Gettysburg, Gen. Winfield Scott Hancock ordered the regiment of 262 Minnesotans — mostly farm youth, loggers and clerks — to charge the brigade of 1,500 Alabamians that threatened to overrun the Union troops. The Confederates needed to be stalled long enough for Hancock to bring up reinforcements, and he had nowhere else to turn.

"Charge those lines!" he yelled to Col. William Colvill, the Red Wing attorney who led the First.

The Minnesotans attached bayonets to the end of their rifles and drove down the slope at the Alabamians. When the fighting ended 15 minutes later, only 47 of them were left standing. Seventy men were dead, another 145 wounded. But they had blunted the Confederate thrust, and the Union center held.

The next day, those Minnesotans still able to fight helped turn back Confederate Maj. Gen. George Pickett's famous charge and captured a Virginia regimental battle flag. (Gov. Jesse Ventura refused to return the flag when the Virginia Legislature asked for it in 2000; it's now stored at the Minnesota Historical Society.)

"They were eager to prove themselves," said Richard Moe, a Duluth native and former president of the National Trust for Historic Preservation whose 1993 book, "The Last Full Measure: The Life and Death of the First Minnesota Volunteers," is considered one of the Civil War's best regimental histories.

Remembering the First Minnesota

Has the First Minnesota been forgotten? Not at Gettysburg, where the Minnesota monument remains a popular stop on the battlefield's auto tour route.

And at the State Capitol in St. Paul, Moe said, "You can't go three feet without running into some kind of [Civil War] memorabilia." A large canvas in the Governor's Reception Room portrays the First Minnesota's charge at Gettysburg, and a statue of Colvill occupies a niche in the rotunda.

Still, Moe said that while working on his book he was "just amazed that this story really hadn't gotten out in a more dramatic way."

Part of the reason may be that Minnesotans simply paid more attention to the several regiments fighting the Dakota, in places like New Ulm and Fort Ridgely, than they did to the Civil War battles fought hundreds of miles away in distant states.

In recent decades, regiments other than the First Minnesota have captured the Gettysburg spotlight. Notable among them is the Twentieth Maine, whose daring charge on Little Round Top was made famous in the 1975 novel "The Killer Angels" by Michael Shaara and the popular 1990 Civil War documentary by Ken Burns.

In a 2018 article, Prof. Brian Matthew Jordan, a Civil War scholar at Sam Houston State University in Huntsville, Texas, listed the First Minnesota among Gettysburg's five most overrated performances. That's not to diminish the grit of the Minnesotans, he said in an interview, but only to point out that other regiments fought with similar bravery.

"What the First Minnesota accomplished was absolutely heroic," Jordan said. "The casualties suffered by them make them stand out. But the larger point is that that sort of courage and nearly suicidal self-sacrifice was not at all uncommon."

The Minnesotans who survived Gettysburg reunited several times to reminisce about the bloody battle. In 1897, about 160 First Minnesota veterans boarded trains in Minneapolis to dedicate the state memorial at Gettysburg.

Sixteen years later, nearly 50 of the veterans attended a reunion at the courthouse in Minneapolis before again taking a train to Gettysburg for the battle's 50th anniversary. They lingered at the spot where the regiment had fought.

A Duluth man, Albert Woolson, was the last known living Union veteran when he died in 1956 at the age of 106. Moe, now retired and living in Washington, D.C., met Woolson while growing up in Duluth and wrote in his book that the war no longer seemed quite so ancient after meeting one of the 22,000 Minnesotans who had actually served in it.

"A lot of them were immigrants, others were new arrivals in Minnesota," Moe said. "The rush to enlist was patriotism but also adventure. They knew it was going to be the most significant thing they did in their lifetime."

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