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).
Following battles with the South at Bull Run, Edwards' Ferry and the Peninsula, the First Minnesota found itself in the West Woods section of Antietam. A fierce Confederate attack had routed much of the Union line in the vicinity of positioning of the First Minnesota. The Minnesota regiment, though, retreated in good order and demonstrated "steadiness and reliability under heavy fire" according to Moe. The First Minnesota suffered a casualty rate of 28%. (A year later, the First Minnesota would suffer an 82% casualty rate at Gettysburg attacking a Confederate force five times larger in an effort to buy a few minutes of time to stabilize the Union position on Cemetery Ridge.) Stories of bravery abound from the First Minnesota. Governor Al Quie recalls hearing stories about his grandfather from his aunts and uncles of Halvor Quie fighting for the First Minnesota through 13 battles until he was wounded at Antietam. Governor Quie has wondered ever since the reason one risks his life for people he never met as his grandfather, a Norwegian immigrant, did for African American slaves.
For the Minnesotans and the rest of the Union Army under the command of George McClellan, Antietam was considered a "qualified" victory. The Union had badly mauled Robert E. Lee's army but had missed an opportunity to destroy it.
As Britain and France weighed recognition of the Confederacy, Lincoln acted upon this battlefield success after a succession of battlefield defeats in the first two years of the Civil War. As related by McPherson, Lincoln convened his cabinet on September 22, 1862,--five days after Antietam. He told the cabinet he had a made a covenant with God. If the Union Army drove the Confederate Army from Maryland he would issue the Emancipation Proclamation.
Lincoln's attitude towards emancipation of the slaves was an evolutionary process which fluctuated with the conduct of the war within in his overarching goal of preservation of the Union and continued supremacy of the Constitution. "The Reader's Companion to American History" (Houghton Mifflin, 1991) notes that by the summer of 1862, Lincoln was favoring a proclamation issued as commander in chief freeing slaves in stares waging war against the Union. Yet, in a letter to journalist Horace Greeley on August 22, 1862, Lincoln wrote: "the paramount objective is to save the Union and is not either to save or destroy slavery." Earlier in 1862, Lincoln had advised black residents of Washington, D.C. to consider emigration to save themselves from discrimination and/or mitigate the circumstances of emancipation if there were fewer blacks in the United States receiving their freedom.
