As we noted last year:
150 years ago today the Union was saved. It's hard to decide if it was the 20th Maine at one end of the line or the New Yorkers at the other or the boys in the middle but 150 years ago today the entire course of world history was changed.There were 47 men and boys, of the 262 who had stepped up, able to help turn back Pickett on the third day of the battle.
Here's a post from a few years ago on those "boys in the middle" who, by suffering the worst casualty rate of any U.S. forces, stopped the Confederate advance which led, on July 3rd to Pickett's charge and the doom of the secessionists.
That 82% casualty rate is the highest ever sustained by a surviving U.S. military unit.
By making the suicidal charge and trading their lives for minutes the "boys in the middle" turned the tide at Gettysburg, establishing the high-water mark of the confederacy and guaranteed that Lincoln's toothless Emancipation Proclamation would come into force.
They also guaranteed that "government of the people, by the people, for the people shall not perish from the earth" for at least another 15 decades.
A Bit of History: July 2, 1863
The 1st Minnesota Infantry Regiment fought, relatively unbloodied, at
Bull RunOne month after Chancellorsville they were pretty much destroyed as a cohesive unit and they may have saved the Union.
Antietam
Fredericksburg
and Chancellorsville
Bruce Catton stated in Glory Road:
“The whole war had suddenly come to a focus in this smoky hollow, with a few score westerners trading their lives for the time the army needed…They had not captured the flag that Hancock had asked them to capture, but they still had their own flag and a great name…”Lt. Col. Joseph B. Mitchell in his Decisive Battles of the Civil War said:
“There is no other unit in the history of warfare that ever made such a charge and then stood its ground sustaining such losses.”They were ordered to attack into 5:1 odds-against-them.
And they charged, with bayonets fixed.
"They had not taken the Alabama flag, but they had held on to their own,' Historian Shelby Foote wrote. "And they had given Hancock his five minutes plus five more for good measure."General Hancock wrote of the First Minnesota's charge: "There is no more gallant deed recorded in history"
In 1928 President Coolidge said: "Colonel Colvill and those eight companies of the First Minnesota are entitled to rank as the saviors of their country."
By suffering casualties at the rate of one every two seconds they stopped the Confederate advance and forced Lee into the desperate gamble:
Gettysburg was the price the South paid for having Lee. The first day's fighting was so encouraging, and on the second day's fighting he came within an inch of doing it. And by that time Longstreet said Lee's blood was up, and Longstreet said when Lee's blood was up there was no stopping him... And that was that mistake he made, the mistake of all mistakes. Pickett's charge was an incredible mistake, and there was scarcely a trained soldier who didn't know it was a mistake at the time, except possibly Pickett himself, who was very happy he had a chance for glory....William Faulkner, in "Intruder in the Dust", said that for every southern boy, it's always within his reach to imagine it being one o'clock on an early July day in 1863, the guns are laid, the troops are lined up, the flags are out of their cases and ready to be unfurled, but it hasn't happened yet. And he can go back in his mind to the time before the war was going to be lost and he can always have that moment for himself.
-Shelby Foote in Ken Burns' "The Civil War"
Kinda makes this stock market stuff seem a bit sordid in comparison.
