re: #329 thedopefishlives

The thing that’s interesting to me about the 1st Minnesota is that I always knew it was a very small regiment, but it took me a while to realize why. The state had only been admitted to the Union 3 years before the war started, and to top it all off, they were busy fighting the Sioux at home. It’s a pretty selfless gesture to round up whatever hardy fighting men you can spare and send them to a war way off to the southeast when you could just as easily have used them in your own internal affairs.

Yep. A large quantity of the troops came from more heavily populated, and generally eastern, states. New York and Pennsylvania obviously for the Union (though by the end of the war I believe that the US Army had recruited at least one regiment from all the pre-war states, northern and southern.)

Minnesota was still out-and-out frontier at that stage.

There’s also an anecdote of a wit serving picket duty during the Petersburg siege telling the Confederates that he was in the 151st Rhode Island regiment while they were gabbing back and forth.