Richard Moe - Last Full Measure: The Life and Death of the First Minnesota Volunteers

M ilitary historians are fond of the hoary old adage that, on the day of battle, naked truths are there for the seeing; very soon they put on their uniforms. Those of us who served as combat historians in the Pacific were well aware of this warning; hence we interviewed and observed soldiers before, during, and right after the fighting. This made for much more authentic history. Even so, something was lacking. The fighting men had their brief moments of glory and misery, of victory and death, and then passed from the scene. There was little recording of them as personsas human beings with individual and regional backgrounds, earlier civilian and military successes and failuresor of what happened to them after their brief combat appearances on the stage of history.

It is this personal background of human beings in war that Richard Moe presents so feelingly in his treatment of the First Minnesota Volunteers. With his own deep roots in Minnesota, the author takes us back to a fort named for its designer, Col. Josiah Snelling, and located on a fine military site originally scouted out by an expedition sent by President Jefferson. We read about the migration into Minnesota of families from the East and from Europe and about the hardening of the menfarmers, trappers, loggers, and the likewho would supply some of the toughest troops for the coming ordeals of the Civil War.

We follow these troops out of their homes and villages, into the hullabaloo and optimism of the mustering-in process, the choosing of most small-unit officers through political meansfrom Washington patronage to election by the troopsas well as through merit, and the soldiers introduction to the most ancient military experiencespoor food, inadequate equipment, hurry up and wait. And we follow them further as they journey down the Mississippi, take trainsthe first experience for manyto Chicago, and move through cheering villages and then a hostile Baltimore to Washington. They arrive in ample time to experience the devastating defeat and retreat of Bull Run.

The truths in this narrative do not take on uniforms, as Richard Moe pictures the long three-year involvement of the Minnesotans in the bloodiest battles of the Civil War. They do not, because he uses remarkably revealing and moving letters and diaries written by soldiers before, during, and after combat, as well as newspaper dispatches from the front. The letters have a freshness and an immediacy that make us feel close to the human beings who are trying to come to grips with the strangeness and horror of war. But we see more than war through their eyeswe see them looking scornfully at the different agricultural world of Virginia, with soil far inferior to the deep sod of their home state. We view their first encounters with blacks, who were hardly known back homeinitially seeing them as wretches far worse off than any people they had known, then finding the humanity and the hope in the black men and women they talked with.