Organized at Fort Snelling in the fall of 1861, the Third Minnesota Veteran Volunteer Infantry Regiment was unique. The third-largest Minnesota infantry unit, it had the most men die of disease (239) and the third-highest number of deserters (most of them prisoners of war who returned to service by 1863). It also had the most men promoted as officers into United States Colored Troop units (eighty-two), making it one of the top ten sources of USCT officers. Noted for their discipline and hardiness, the men of the Third twice repulsed cavalry charges while in line of battle rather than in a bayonet-armed square formation.
The Third Minnesota are best known for their surrender to Col. Nathan Forrest at Murfreesboro, Tennessee, on Sunday, July 13, 1862. The Third, awakened by shots Forrest’s men had fired at pickets, moved from their camp west of Stone’s River to a field before the Murfree house on the east bluff. Here, they encountered and repulsed two attacks by the Second Georgia Cavalry. Their camp defenders withstood two attacks before being overrun by Forrest, who burned the officers’ tents. Forrest reported that, “After some parlay[,]” the captive brigade commander, “Colonel Duffield[,] surrendered the infantry and artillery”—Lester’s Third and the attached artillery battery. Duffield then instructed Lester to surrender his force by conducting an officers' council to vote surrender, thus transferring blame from Duffield to Lester and his Minnesotans.
Held at Benton Barracks as prisoners of war, the Third were sent to Minnesota to fight in the US–Dakota War in late August 1862. One detachment buried massacred settlers and then fought at Wood Lake (September 23), where they triggered a planned ambush by Ta Oyate Duta (His Red Nation, also known as Little Crow). Another detachment defended Fort Abercrombie from a Dakota attack on September 26. After burying settlers massacred at Lake Shetek, the Third “foraged” upon New Ulm and returned to Fort Snelling. When the Army failed to pay them, they rioted in St. Paul.3
Reorganized, the regiment went south in January 1863 and served in Brig. Gen. Alexander Asboth’s expedition to retake Fort Heiman on the Tennessee River. Under Maj. Hans Mattson’s command, the regiment conducted counter- and anti-guerrilla operations on the Tennessee River. During one “scout” that departed from Fort Heiman, Cpl. Jesse Barrick of Company G earned the Medal of Honor—the last medal conferred for Civil War service, awarded by a review board in 1917. At Fort Heiman, the Third began organizing US Colored Troop units.
In June, the Third went to Vicksburg to protect the Union’s siege forces. After the city fell, they were sent to Helena, Arkansas, to join Maj. Gen. Frederick Steele’s Arkansas Expedition to take Little Rock. The Third were the first infantry unit to enter Little Rock, and they became Provost Guards. Most of the regiment re-enlisted for three years or the duration of the war (becoming a “veteran” regiment), and four companies went home on veteran furlough.4 The remaining six companies fought an engagement at Fitzhugh’s Woods on April 1, 1864, when Confederate Brig. Gen. Dandridge MacRae’s cavalry attacked them near a plantation. Hastily assembled in lines of battle, the Third punished the attackers with aimed volley fire. Col. Willis Ponder (Twelfth Missouri, Confederate States) later said they were “the hardest lot of men…that he ever ran against.”
Part of the Pine Bluff garrison, the Third lacked medicines and had so many men die they could not bury their own. Recovering at DuVall’s Bluff, they resumed anti-guerrilla operations in October 1864. As Confederate units began surrendering in Spring 1865, they shifted to occupation duty in north central Arkansas until early September, when they began their journey home. They were discharged at Fort Snelling on September 16, one of the last regiments to return.