We are Coming, Father Abram: Michigan in the Civil War

Roger Rosentreter, speaker

When Michiganians learned that southerners had fired on the U.S. flag flying over Fort Sumter in the Charleston, South Carolina, harbor, they were not surprised. As Governor Austin Blair had declared weeks earlier, secession was "revolution, and revolution . . . is treason, and must be treated as such." Within weeks, the First Michigan Volunteer Infantry Regiment arrived in the nation’s capital where an appreciative president welcomed them with the words, "Thank God for Michigan." Eventually, more than 90,000 Michiganians served in Union blue, seeing action in all the war’s major battles and hundreds of lesser clashes. As one Detroiter later concluded, they performed the duties "every citizen owes to a free and fraternal government." Roger Rosentreter, Michigan State University history professor, discusses Michigan’s unique contribution to the war effort.

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