“The sun had gone down and in the darkness we hurried, stumbled over the field in search of our fallen companions, and when the living were cared for, laid ourselves down on the ground to gain a little rest, for the morrow bid fair for more stern and bloody work, the living sleeping side by side with the dead. Thousands had fallen, and on the morrow, they would be followed to their long home by thousands more.”

– Sgt. Alfred Carpenter, First Minnesota Volunteers, 1863

“In self-sacrificing desperate valor, this charge has no parallel in any war.”

– From the inscription on the monument to the First Minnesota Volunteers at Gettysburg , erected by the people of Minnesota, 1897

The rushing Minnesotans made a thin blue line, barely 100 yards from one end to the other, rolling toward the Confederates. The Rebels, 1,600 Alabamans who up to now had been chasing skedaddling Yanks, suddenly faced a row of bayonets coming at them like a scythe.

They stopped in their tracks, stunned at the sight. Surely there must be thousands more Yankee troops hidden in the smoke and haze behind this pathetically small number of men moving steadily toward them. It would be madness for fewer than 300 men to try to stop the swarms of Confederates.

There were no other Yankees – only these 262 men of the First Minnesota, a sliver of a once-brawny regiment from the western frontier of the Union. Unless they somehow broke the Confederate attack, buying time for Union commanders to hurry more troops to the scene, the Rebels would stream through the center of the Union lines, roll up the flanks, and drive the Union Army of the Potomac back to Washington.

The only men among the 90,000 federal troops at Gettysburg who came from west of the Mississippi, the Minnesotans represented just a tiny fraction of the blue uniforms on the field, about one-third of one percent of the Union troops. Now fate – and self-sacrifice – would turn that tiny fraction into a potent, tide-turning force. Minnesotans would absorb the full force of the Confederate attack, buying time with their blood.

`I wanted to see it’

A white van with Illinois license plates pulls to the side of the Park Service road across from the monument to the First Minnesota at the Gettysburg National Military Park.

Seven loud, laughing men jump out, buttoning blue wool jackets and placing replica Union forage caps on their heads. Approaching a Park Service marker next to the Minnesota monument, the men suddenly become quiet. Before them is a copy of a painting by Rufus Zugbaum – the original is in the governor’s reception room in the Minnesota State Capitol – showing the First Minnesota’s fateful fight on July 2, 1863.

Their leader – the only somber one in the bunch – is an 18-year-old Civil War re-enactor from Glenview, Ill., who insisted his companions (all older) stop at the Minnesota monument. On a battlefield dotted with hundreds of monuments, the First Minnesota’s handsome statue of a running rifleman is often overlooked by battlefield tourists. But to many who have studied the pivotal battle that occurred here 135 years ago, the monument marks a place of special importance.

“I told you so,” young Tim Blackwelder says reprovingly. “See – the First Minnesota lost 82 percent. That kind of sacrifice is just incredible. It’s not as talked about as much as what some other regiments did. But it’s the most important thing that happened here, and I wanted to see it.”

“Awesome,” says one of the others.

The group is quiet now, all easy chatter at an end. The men, in their blue uniforms, which smell as if they have been worn a long time, peer reverently toward the west, where the sun is beginning to set, its golden rays slanting through the haze of a hot summer’s evening in Gettysburg .

Toward that setting sun, 135 years ago, charged the First Minnesota.

Two implacable foes

“The men were never made who will stand against leveled bayonets coming at them with such momentum and evident desperation,” Sgt. William Lochren would write after the battle.

As the Minnesotans came at them, the first line of Rebel soldiers broke and retreated through the ranks of the line behind them. The whole Confederate advance began to grind to a halt, letting Rebel riflemen and artillery try to keep those bayonets at bay. Alone in front of thousands of Confederates, the Minnesotans were easy prey.

More than 100 of the Minnesotans had fallen, dead or wounded, before the regiment even fired its first volley. Now, the survivors had reached the empty bed of Plum Run, taking cover behind rocks and bushes, trying to hold off the Rebels. The Confederate advance had stalled, and Union reinforcements were on the way. But for an agonizing eternity that was probably only about an hour, the remaining Minnesotans struggled to stay alive.

Many of the survivors would remark later that the Alabamans they had faced fought with equal courage. There had been 1,700 Alabamans in the attack. By the end of the day, after overwhelming other Union regiments, then being halted by the First Minnesota, there were only about 1,000 left. It’s doubtful that two more implacable, or worthy, foes met anywhere in the Civil War.

“There is no mistake but what some of those Rebs were just as brave as it is possible for human beings to be,” Sgt. John Plummer wrote. From a Civil War soldier, there might be no higher compliment.

Dusk began to turn toward darkness. Regiments of New Yorkers began to take the field near the Minnesotans, firming up the position and allowing the battered remnant of the First Minnesota to withdraw at last. Some of the Minnesotans still didn’t want to leave. They didn’t want to back down.

The regiment’s commander, Col. William Colvill, had been severely wounded by an exploding shell (“Then came a shock like a sledge-hammer” is how he would describe it later) and lay in a slight hollow, hugging the ground and listening to bullets whizzing past.

Three other officers had also fallen, leaving the remains of the regiment under the command of Capt. Nathan Messick. Three color bearers had fallen, but each time another soldier picked up the battle flag of the First Minnesota and carried it forward.

It may only have been nightfall that prevented the unit’s elimination. The long day – started when the First Minnesota was wakened before dawn and moved to the battlefield, where it had stood and waited all day before being thrown into battle at dusk – was finally over.

The Union position had been saved. The Union army would survive to fight a third, decisive, day at Gettysburg . But the First Minnesota was a shadow of what it had been that morning.

“The bloodied field was in our possession, but at what a cost,” Sgt. Alfred Carpenter wrote. “The ground was strewed with dead and dying, whose groans and prayers and cries for help and water rent the air.”

Richard Moe, author of “The Last Full Measure: The Life and Death of the First Minnesota Volunteers,” sums up the situation as darkness fell:

“For the Minnesotans, the fighting of July 2 was over, but not the dying.”

On Thursday, the anniversary of the First Minnesota’s charge, a steady stream of visitors stopped at the regiment’s monument to pay homage and to contemplate the meaning of that sacrifice in their own lives.

Watching the visitors come and go is almost like watching people come into church. Without a doubt, this is a holy place. There are ghosts on this battlefield.

“We want to be here – on the anniversary – at the exact same moment they made their charge,” says Robert Niemela, an English teacher at Harding High School in St. Paul. “We want to feel what it’s like: how it looks, the time of day, the location. The experience.”

Niemela and three other Harding teachers – Bob Wicklem, Ron Knox and Will Williams – are sitting in the shade at the base of the Minnesota monument, waiting for the sun to lower in the sky, waiting to wade through the hip-high grass covering the field where the First Minnesota made its charge. At home in St. Paul, they belong to a Civil War roundtable that meets regularly to discuss the war and its meaning. Here, at Gettysburg , they feel humbled.

“I just get a bit of a feeling of awe,” says Williams, whose great-grandfather was in the Second Minnesota Regiment. “Being here gives me a sense that, in some way, I’m there … back then. I feel a strong connection.”

“The math teachers in our group figured out that there’s been more than 48,000 days since the First Minnesota made its charge,” Niemela says. “And in all that time, I don’t think there’s been a day that’s gone by that someone hasn’t stopped here to marvel at what they did.”

`Where is Isaac?’

Struggling in the dark to help the wounded off the field, Sgt. Henry Taylor – a school teacher who had left his job to enlist in the First Minnesota – could think of only one thing:

What had happened to his brother, Isaac?

“I help our Colonel off the field but fail to find my brother who, I suppose, is killed,” Henry wrote in his journal. “I rejoin the regiment and lie down in the moonlight, rather sorrowful. Where is Isaac?”

Henry had looked for Isaac for more than an hour in the dark. Another soldier said he had seen Isaac near the end of the fight, while most of the others were withdrawing, still firing away at the Confederates. And smiling.

Early the next morning, Henry got the news he had feared. A soldier had found Isaac on the field; he takes Henry to the spot.

“I find my dear brother dead!” he wrote in his journal. “A shell struck him on the top of his head and passed out through his back, cutting his belt in two. The poor fellow did not know what hit him.”

Henry retrieved Isaac’s pocket watch for a keepsake, then wrapped his brother in the half-tent soldiers carried to shelter themselves. With the help of some comrades, he then buried his brother on the spot, putting up a board marked “I.L. Taylor, 1st Minn. Vols.” He wrote on it:

No useless coffin enclosed his breast,

Nor in sheet nor in shroud we bound him,

But he lay like a warrior taking his rest,

With his shelter tent around him.

“Isaac has not fallen in vain,” Taylor told his parents when he wrote to inform them of his brother’s death three days later. “What though one of your six soldiers has fallen on the altar of our country, ’tis a glorious death; better die free than live slaves.”

In another letter to his sister, Henry described the burial:

“As we laid him down, I remarked, Well, Isaac, all I can give you is a soldier’s grave … I was the only one to weep over his grave – his Father, Mother, brothers and sisters were all ignorant of his death.”

On the same side now

Another visitor stops to pay homage at the First Minnesota monument. This one is wearing a T-shirt with a Rebel battle flag on it.

He turns out to be a soldier from Alabama – a real one.

“Major Kevin Gray,” he says, introducing himself with military efficiency. “First Battalion, 152nd Armor, Alabama National Guard.”

He tells me he has a special reason for visiting the Minnesota monument. Until now, his armored unit has been part of a separate brigade. But in its wisdom, the U.S. Army (the modern one) has decided in 1998 to assign his unit to the 34th Infantry Division.

God – and generals – must have a sense of humor. The 34th Infantry Division traces its lineage back to a heroic regiment of soldiers from a frontier state that earned fame and glory at Gettysburg : the First Minnesota.

“We’re all on the same side now,” Gray says, pointing across the field to where Alabamans and Minnesotans clashed 135 years ago. “Those guys over there – and you guys over here – we’re all in it together. I can’t wait ’til we go to field exercises against each other. We’ll see if we can’t break out a few Confederate flags and put ’em on our tanks. That ought to be interesting.”

The final 100

Finished burying their dead and removing their wounded to field hospitals, the men of the First Minnesota were moved about a third of a mile north and stationed along a fence in a line of approximately 9,000 Federal troops.

Reunited with three companies of the regiment that had been detached for other duties the day before and thus had not taken part in the charge, they waited with the other exhausted Union soldiers.

Counting survivors of the charge – only 47 of the 262 men had escaped death or injury – there were barely 100 Minnesotans left on the field.

All was quiet until early afternoon. Then all hell broke loose.

Three hundred cannons opened up in the largest cannonade ever in this hemisphere. For two hours, the ground shook and men and horses died. Then, when the cannons fell temporarily quiet, 12,000 Confederate soldiers stepped out from among the trees along Seminary Ridge and headed straight at the Union lines a mile to the east, hunkered down along Cemetery Ridge.

It would go down in history as Pickett’s Charge. And once again, the First Minnesota would stand in the way.

Note: This story first appeared as Part 3 in a five-part series in the St Paul Pioneer Press in 1998.