150th Anniversary of the Emancipation Proclamation

 One hundred and fifty years ago this week on September 17, 1862, Union and Confederate soldiers fought one of the bloodiest battles of the Civil War near Antietam Creek in northwest Maryland.

The battle--Antietam--with its outcome as a Union victory provided President Abraham Lincoln with the necessary confidence to promulgate the preliminary Emancipation Proclamation which ultimately freed blacks enslaved in the Confederacy.

Before this first step of Emancipation, though, was contemplation of the carnage of Antietam. James McPherson points out in “Battle Cry of Freedom” (Oxford University Press, 1988) the 6,000 dead and 17,000 wounded in one day of combat at Antietam was four times the number of casualties suffered by American forces on the Normandy beaches on June 6, 1944.  Bruce Catton in “The Army of the Potomac: Mr. Lincoln's Army” (Doubleday & Company, 1962) quotes a member of the 9th New York regiment describing the Antietam battlefield: “The mental strain was so great that I saw at that moment the singular effect mentioned, I think, in the life of Goethe on a similar occasion--the whole landscape for an instant turned slightly red.” The nation's great divide between Constitution and Confederacy; emancipation and slavery; and north against south had reached a crescendo of combat.

Into this maw near Sharpsburg, Maryland, stepped the First Minnesota Volunteers.  Their story begins with Minnesota's second governor, Alexander Ramsey, who happened to be in Washington, D.C. when news came of the surrender of Fort Sumter after its bombardment by South Carolina militia.  Ramsey tendered an offer of 1,000 Minnesota soldiers to the Secretary of War.  Thus, Minnesota became the first state, as noted by Richard Moe, to offer troops to defend the Union and the First Minnesota was the first Minnesota regiment raised (“The Last Full Measure: The Life and Death of the First Minnesota Volunteers,” Minnesota Historical Press. 1993).

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