Fort Snelling Part One-1st Minnesota

We finished up our reading in our summer history studies last week, and made a field trip as a family out to Historic Fort Snelling yesterday. Costumed re-enactors usually portray life at the fort during the period of 1820-1840. However, this weekend, re-enactors from The First Regiment of Minnesota were on hand to give a glimpse into the life of the civil
war soldiers and to bring this period in history to life through various field demonstrations, including an 1860's baseball game!

The men of the 1st Minnesota are most remembered for their actions on July 2, 1863, during the second day's fighting at Gettysburg, resulting in the prevention of a serious breach in the Union defensive line on Cemetery Ridge. Major General Winfield S. Hancock, commander of the II Corps of the Army of the Potomac, ordered the regiment to assault a much larger enemy force (a brigade commanded by Brig. Gen. Cadmus Wilcox) in an effort to buy time while other forces could be brought up. During the charge, 215 members of the 262 men who were present at the time became casualties, including the regimental commander, Col. William Colvill, and all but three of his officers.

"In self sacrificing desperate valor this charge has no parallel in any war."

The unit's flag fell five times and rose again each time. The 47 survivors rallied back to General Hancock under the senior surviving officer, Captain Henry C. Coates. The 82 percent casualty rate stands to this day as the largest loss by any surviving military unit in American history during any single engagement. The unit's flag is now in the Minnesota Capitol's rotunda.

It is so difficult to wrap my brain around the sacrifice these men were willing to make. Or the terror they surely must have felt as their friends and brothers fell around them.It simply astounds me. And these were only a handful of Americans who stood up in defense of what they believed and lost their lives for the sake of it. I have a renewed appreciation now for the words of the Gettysburg address, after leaning so much of the story of the First Minnesota. You rocked it, Abe!

Four score and seven years ago our fathers brought forth on this continent, a new nation, conceived in Liberty, and dedicated to the proposition that all men are created equal.

Now we are engaged in a great civil war, testing whether that nation, or any nation so conceived and so dedicated, can long endure. We are met on a great battle-field of that war. We have come to dedicate a portion of that field, as a final resting place for those who here gave their lives that that nation might live. It is altogether fitting and proper that we should do this.

But, in a larger sense, we can not dedicate -- we can not consecrate -- we can not hallow -- this ground. The brave men, living and dead, who struggled here, have consecrated it, far above our poor power to add or detract. The world will little note, nor long remember what we say here, but it can never forget what they did here. It is for us the living, rather, to be dedicated here to the unfinished work which they who fought here have thus far so nobly advanced. It is rather for us to be here dedicated to the great task remaining before us -- that from these honored dead we take increased devotion to that cause for which they gave the last full measure of devotion -- that we here highly resolve that these dead shall not have died in vain -- that this nation, under God, shall have a new birth of freedom -- and that government of the people, by the people, for the people, shall not perish from the earth.