Seeing God in the Sting

The 1st Minnesota's charge at Gettysburg, July 2, 1863

• On July 2, 1863, the second day at Gettysburg, the Union Third Corps under Daniel Sickles was broken and retreating through a gap in the Union line, and a fresh Alabama brigade the manuscript gives as fifteen hundred men came across the swale (a low dip in the ground in front of the ridge); General Winfield Scott Hancock, who commanded that part of the line, with maybe five minutes to plug the gap, ordered the 262 men of the 1st Minnesota to charge a brigade six times their size, buying the line a handful of minutes to reform (the fifteen-hundred figure is the manuscript's; not itemized in the notes files)
• 215 of the 262 men fell (killed, wounded, or missing) — 82 percent, the highest casualty rate any surviving American military unit has taken in a single engagement, before or since; Hancock said of the charge, "no more gallant deed recorded in history" (confirmed 2026-09-09 as a real, widely documented quote)
• Philip Hamlin (the final manuscript calls him a young sergeant; the one notes source that names his rank, Windhauser's Minnesota History article quoted in notes/research/first-minnesota-sources-slot-hunt.md, calls him a corporal) survived the charge only to die the next day in the repulse of Pickett's Charge. His last letter home, dated June 25, 1863, closes: "I know that whatever befalls me, all is well for I am in safe hands. Oh, it is sweet to trust in the All Seeing One..." — sourced to killedatgettysburg.org's dedicated Hamlin biography, which draws on his actual wartime letters; his comrade Sergeant James Wright's tribute ("an honest, earnest, consistent, Christian man," his faith "open, unostentatious, frank, manly") is correctly named and quoted, correcting an earlier draft's vague, unattributed paraphrase (the added "open, unostentatious, frank, manly" words are in the current manuscript and are not itemized in the notes files)
• In early June 1865, in Richmond, on Communion Sunday at St. Paul's Episcopal Church, a tall, well-dressed Black man walked to the communion rail while the white congregation stayed seated; Robert E. Lee then rose, walked to the rail, and took communion next to him (the final manuscript's wording), and other people followed. The manuscript adds that St. Paul's is the church where Jefferson Davis had been sitting two months earlier when a messenger brought word that Richmond was about to fall, and that in a white Southern church of the time Black worshipers were expected to wait until every white person had gone up for communion (neither point is cited in the manuscript or the endnotes). Thomas Broun, a Confederate veteran, was in the room and told the story forty years later; historian Philip Schwarz studied both of Broun's accounts and says nobody can know what Lee was thinking, and notes Broun's words can be read as Lee showing his own dignity more than welcoming anyone. The man's name is not known (Broun, "Negro Communed at St. Paul's Church," Richmond Times-Dispatch, April 16, 1905, p. 5; Confederate Veteran 13, no. 8, August 1905, p. 360; Schwarz, "General Lee and Visibility," 2000, rev. 2006, all as cited in the manuscript; no notes file covers this passage; the endnote in book/endnotes/part-4.md says it was read through Schwarz only and both 1905 originals should be pulled before print)
• Lee's own words and acts, as the manuscript tells them: in a December 1856 letter to his wife he called slavery as an institution "a moral & political evil in any Country" (the manuscript adds that the same letter calls it a greater evil to white people than to Black people, and that the rest of it does not read well today); in December 1862 he signed the papers freeing the people his father-in-law's will had left in his charge; in February 1865 he wrote a Confederate congressman that enslaved men should be allowed to fight and that those who did should be freed. The manuscript pairs these with the communion scene and says that, whatever Lee fought for, that Sunday his feet went toward a more Christian future than the one he had defended (Robert E. Lee to Mary Anna Randolph Custis Lee, December 27, 1856, Lee Family Papers, Virginia Museum of History & Culture; deed of manumission for the Custis estate, December 29, 1862, Richmond Hustings Court; Lee to Ethelbert Barksdale, February 18, 1865, all as listed in book/endnotes/part-4.md; no notes/research file covers them)
• Gettysburg also left the story of Charlie Coulson, as told by the surgeon Max Rossvally, who was born Mordecai Rosenthal in Germany and raised in the Jewish faith. After the battle, in a field hospital, Rossvally treated a seventeen-year-old drummer named Charlie Coulson, whose arm and leg had to come off; Coulson refused chloroform and brandy because he wanted a clear mind to meet his Savior, lived a few more days, and before he died told the doctor he had been praying for him and asked him to trust Jesus too. The manuscript says that about ten years later, in New York, a barber's talk of Jesus coming for the lost sheep of Israel and then a revival meeting in Washington led Rossvally to become a Christian; he spent the rest of his life telling his own people about Jesus, in New York and later in Leeds, England, where he died in 1892. The manuscript notes we have the story because Rossvally wrote it down himself in a tract (M. L. Rossvally, Charlie Coulson, the Drummer Boy, n.d.; birth name and Leeds life per "Leeds Veterans of the American Civil War (Part 2)," The Secret Library, Leeds Libraries Heritage Blog, July 2, 2024, both as listed in book/endnotes/part-4.md; no notes/research file covers this passage and it is not in the endnote audit)
• A follow-up research pass cross-checked the casualty figures against an independent source (a documentary fundraising proposal citing ~220 rather than 215 losses) and judged the discrepancy likely imprecision in a rough, uncited document, not a correction; the manuscript's already-confirmed 215-casualty, 82-percent figure stands

partly verified