Shun the wine cup and company keeping, shun the use of intoxicating drink as you would a foul and venomous serpent . . . The man who will shun those two vices and atend regulerly to the dutys of his relegion will be prosperous and happy no matter what his profession or abiliys may be. One thing more, never for heavens sake let a thought of enlisting in this army cross your mind, it is right and the duty of citizens and those who have lived long enough in this country to become citizens to fight for the maintainence of law and order and nationality, but the country has no claim on you and never bring upon yourself the dangers and hardships of a soldiers life where the country nor cause has no claim on your service.18
The following month, Welsh was with Grant's forces when they crossed the Rapidan River to do battle with Lee's troops. Both Grant and Lee were keenly aware of the Union defeat a year earlier on this same ground, and while Grant hoped to get beyond the Wilderness, the dense forest around Chancellorsville, and engage Lee's troops in the open, Lee intended to strike the Federals in the tangled woods, which would neutralize their numerical superiority. On May 5, 1864, the two armies collided in the Wilderness, sparking two days of slaughter that cost Grant 17,500 casualties to the rebels' 10,000.
Having told Lincoln that "there will be no turning back," Grant then astonished both the enemy and his own troops on May 7 by pressing forward instead of retreating, as all of his predecessors had done after clashing with Lee. Union morale soared that night as Grant struck southward around Lee's right and headed for the village of Spotsylvania, a crossroads that would place the Federals between Lee and Richmond. Lee was forced to drop back to an entrenched position just north of Spotsylvania, where the two armies battered each other for the next five days. Despite fierce, close combat, Grant failed to break decisively through the rebel lines, and by May 12, Union casualties at the Wilderness and Spotsylvania had mounted to 32,000, more than in any single week since the war began three years earlier.19
Sergeant Peter Welsh was wounded that day at Spotsylvania. He was part of a successful thrust by the Federals and reported to his wife: "we licked saucepans out of them. My dear wife i think i can get sent to new york to hospital, if not I will get a sick furlow to go home." However, the supposedly minor wound that had been wrongly diagnosed at the field hospital proved far more serious when examined at the Carver Hospital in Washington, and blood poisoning set in after surgery on his arm, leading to a slow and ghastly death.
Whether his distraught wife, Margaret, reached his side before he died, about ten days later, is not known. She collected his few belongings and telegrammed her uncle, "HE IS DEAD AND WILL BE IN NEW YORK IN MORNING." Welsh was buried in Calvary Cemetery in Woodside, New York. Chiseled in the granite monument at Welsh's grave are words that express the pride of an immigrant at home in his adopted land: "Peter Welsh. Color Sargeant, Co. K 29th Mass. Vol's., Irish Brigade."*
As color sergeant, Welsh had carried the Irish flag into battle as a rallying point for his unit. Welsh had written to his wife: "When we are fighting for America we are fighting in the interest of Irland striking a double blow cutting with a two edged sword . . . striking a blow at Irlands enemy and opressor England hates this country because of its growing power and greatness. She hates it for its republican liberty and she hates it because Irishmen have a home and a government here and a voice in the counsels of the nation that is growing stronger every day."20
Welsh's vision of Irish Americans overcoming nativist prejudice and rising to positions of power and influence in America would soon be realized, particularly in the arena of Democratic politics.
With the number of Union soldiers killed, wounded, and missing after Spotsylvania double that of the Confederates, "the land was thus in mourning under God's chastisement," Maria Daly wrote of the North. Grant spent the next week making further fruitless attacks at Spotsylvania. "Eight days of fighting in Virginia have been without any definite result, except that of driving Lee nearer Richmond," Daly wrote on May 18. Her brother reported from the front that he was unhurt, but that Union prospects were "far from brilliant," Daly noted. "Grant seems confident of final success, but says he may have to fight all summer."21
Pressure mounted on Grant to achieve a breakthrough, to prevent Lee's strategy of swaying public opinion in the North against the Lincoln administration before the election from gaining momentum.22In New York, Democratic power broker Samuel Barlow had already declared, "We shall nominate McClellan . . . and unless there are greater successes in the field than now seem probable we shall win." If Grant failed, Barlow reasoned, no one would forgive Lincoln for the "monstrous crime" of having dismissed McClellan.23
Time was on Lee's side, so Grant allowed no pause in the fighting, making another trek southward, skirting Lee's right flank and forcing him to follow, first to the North Anna River, and then to Cold Harbor, a crossroads some ten miles northeast of Richmond where both armies dug in on June 1.
The Federals had suffered forty-four thousand casualties in the relentless campaign thus far, but Grant concluded that the rebels were even more shell-shocked and exhausted than his own troops. Moreover, he would lose another twelve regiments in July when their enlistments expired, and needed a decisive victory. On June 3, he ordered an ill-fated assault on the complex network of enemy trenches and suffered seven thousand casualties to the rebels' fifteen hundred. Grant regretted the attack, and Meade, denounced by many for not pouncing on Lee's cornered army after Gettysburg, felt his caution had been vindicated by the disaster.24
"We have lost some of our best generals," Maria Daly noted, "and thousands of heroes whose names are known but to their sorrowing families." She described a rally at Union Square in New York, where her husband, Judge Charles Patrick Daly, "took a prominent part to thank and encourage our soldiers." Northern leaders struggled to maintain both the public's morale and their own faith in the restoration of the Union: "Our nationality will be born anew in blood and tears," Maria Daly wrote, "but we trust it will rise purified and ennobled."25
On the night of June 12, Grant put in motion a new plan, a longer and wider march southward around Lee's right flank, this time across the James River to Petersburg, an important railroad junction south of Richmond. However, when the Union forces arrived, the soldiers—still traumatized by the carnage at Cold Harbor—were intimidated by the elaborate fortifications around Petersburg, and their corps commanders hesitated, squandering the opportunity to storm the lightly defended breastworks and trenches. By the time they had forced the rebels back to a tighter perimeter around Petersburg on June 18, Lee had arrived with the bulk of his army. Further Union attacks were repulsed with heavy losses, so Grant decided to entrench his own lines and give his troops a rest from combat.26
The bloodiest seven weeks of the war came to a close with sixty-five thousand Union casualties. The psychological toll on the northern home front was also debilitating. As Lee had hoped, Union battlefield losses translated into civilian disillusionment and calls for peace. Even the wife of radical Republican general Benjamin Butler questioned the purpose of "all this struggling and fighting . . . This ruin and death of thousands of families . . . What advancement of mankind to compensate for the present horrible calamities?" The army had also lost thousands of troops as their enlistments expired, and recruiters faced a colossal challenge to replace them. Democrats labeled Grant a "butcher" who was throwing away the lives of white soldiers to free black slaves, while bringing ruin on the country.27
However, as both Lee and Lincoln could see, Grant had made tremendous progress at a proportionately high cost to the Confederacy. Lee's much smaller army had lost at least thirty-five thousand men killed, wounded, or missing, while Grant had pressed forward eighty miles to the outskirts of Petersburg and Richmond. By starting to cut off Lee's communications and supply lines to the rest of the South, Grant was turning the nimble Confederate general's game of cat-and-mouse into a siege of the rebel capital.28
With the presidential election just four mon
ths away, however, Lincoln could not afford to strangle the Confederacy slowly; he needed his armies to deliver a crushing blow. Sherman had also gained eighty miles in Georgia during May and June, repeatedly skirting Johnston's left flank, forcing him to fight or fall back. The armies clashed very little, since Johnston stayed on the defensive, depressing southern morale with each retreat. However, on June 27, when Sherman attacked the rebels at Kennesaw Mountain in their heavily fortified position straddling the railroad line twenty miles north of Atlanta, the Federals were thrown back with heavy losses, and the Confederacy rejoiced. Union forces had suffered ninety thousand casualties in two months, and both Grant's and Sherman's campaigns seemed to have petered out just short of their objectives.29
Moreover, Grant's strength in Virginia was diluted by the hurried transfer of his finest troops to Washington in the first half of July to fend off a Confederate raid—a reprise on a smaller scale of Lee's invasion exactly a year earlier. Confederate commander Jubal Early's fifteen thousand troops had bested the Federals at Lynchburg, Virginia, before proceeding through the Shenandoah Valley and across the Potomac. The invaders then routed hastily gathered Union troops near Frederick, Maryland, clearing the path to Washington, where they arrived on July 11. Astonishingly, like Lee before him, Early seemed to have turned the tide of the war, shifting the focus from the outskirts of Richmond to the northern capital, where only the city's fortifications stood between the White House and the rebels.
Grant's Sixth Corps arrived in time to forestall an attack, but federal troops in the path of Early's retreat failed to capture him or destroy his forces. After the marauding Confederates had made their way south, burning houses and gathering loot—including huge sums of money from terrified townspeople in Pennsylvania and Maryland—a furious Ulysses Grant promoted cavalry commander Philip Sheridan and ordered him to hunt down Early. Grant encountered further setbacks in his siege of Petersburg, and while Sherman continued to press forward toward Atlanta in July and August, his progress was slow. European confidence in the Confederacy rose once again.30
"I see no bright spot anywhere," lamented George Templeton Strong. "Rebeldom is beginning to bother Sherman's long line of communications. We may expect to hear any day that he is fighting his way back to Chattanooga and that Grant has bid Richmond good-bye. I fear the blood and treasure spent on this summer's campaign have done little for the country." With the election approaching, Strong worried that Lincoln might be defeated, and that "the people may be deluded into electing some so-called War Democrat who will betray the country."31
"Our bleeding, bankrupt, almost dying country . . . longs for peace— shudders at the prospect of fresh conscriptions, of further wholesale devastations, and of new rivers of human blood," Horace Greeley wrote to Lincoln in July 1864.32 Discouraged like many northerners, the formerly hawkish Greeley wanted the president to negotiate with Jefferson Davis, who had sent two representatives, Clement Clay and James Holcomb, to Niagara Falls, Canada.
Lincoln permitted Greeley to meet with the rebel envoys and agreed to consider any written proposal for peace that included emancipation and national reunification. Such conditions were, of course, a nonstarter, but Lincoln knew the rebel agents were not there to negotiate in good faith either. They were part of Hines's network of spies and saboteurs plotting to stir up a massive riot and rebellion on Union soil.33
The spark this time was to have been the return of Clement Vallandigham to Ohio in June, which the plotters assumed would prompt Lincoln to rearrest him for violating his banishment and would provoke rioting.34 Vallandigham met with Hines and Thompson before leaving Canada and expressed reservations about a full-blown insurrection. However, soon after his return to Ohio, on June 15, Vallandigham had encouraged the Confederates with a speech in which he warned "the men in power" that "there is a vast multitude, a host whom they cannot number, bound together by the strongest and holiest of ties, to defend by whatever means the exigencies of the times demand, their natural and constitutional rights as free men, at all hazard and to the last extremity."35Despite the provocation, Lincoln decided not to jail the Copperhead leader, believing martyrdom would only play into his hands. Hines and Thompson were deprived of their riots.36
The conspirators shifted their plans to coincide with the opening of the Democratic national convention in Chicago on July 4, where Vallandigham's popularity and his ability to divide the party were expected to give him leverage at least over the platform if not the selection of the nominee and his running mate. If the government or Republican protesters tried to disrupt the coppery convention, Hines and his allies were ready to turn the rioting into a full-blown insurrection.37Hines's key ally in Chicago was Charles Walsh, the Irish American boss of the Cook County Democratic machine, who claimed to have two thousand armed men ready for action. Hines's accounts show that he budgeted two thousand dollars for "raising the Irish in Chicago."38
Clement Vallandigham
However, because developments on the southern battlefields were in limbo, the Democratic leadership delayed the convention until August 29. Not wanting to wait that long, the Confederate agents reset the date to July 20 since Lincoln was expected to announce a third round of the draft in July and they hoped to take advantage of resentment against the ongoing conscription. Hines and his veterans were to make a disturbance, signaling the various groups of armed Copperheads to join the fray.39
Lincoln called for more troops on July 18, a half million volunteers, with any shortfall in each state's quota to be made up by the draft.40* However, the promised uprising fizzled two days later, when the Copperheads informed Hines that their preparations were not complete and asked for a postponement. Military leadership was not enough to mobilize untrained civilians, and Hines began to have doubts about the Copperheads. "There was a reluctance on their part to sacrifice life for a cause," he wrote. "Some sort of violence was needed to make them act . . . We were determined to bring that about."41
The frustrated southerners retreated to their base in Canada, where Hines, Thompson, and Clay met with Vallandigham and agreed that another attempt was to be made on August 29, the first day of the Democratic convention. Hines envisioned the streets packed with crowds of visitors that he could provoke into rioting, and while the authorities were distracted by the chaos, Copperheads were to attack Camp Douglas, outside of Chicago, and free its five thousand inmates. Arming them from caches of weapons in and around Chicago, including one in Walsh's house, the growing force was to take over the city before proceeding by train and on horseback to liberate Camp Morton at Indianapolis and two other prison compounds.42
For his part, Lincoln's call for more troops on July 18—and announcement of another round of the draft—seemed to seal his political doom. The Republicans had renominated Lincoln unanimously a month earlier, with Andrew Johnson, a War Democrat from Tennessee, as his running mate. Calling themselves the "Union party," the Republicans hoped to expand their base of support with the new ticket. However, many in the party were still considering alternatives, though like Greeley and William Cullen Bryant, who were no longer on speaking terms, they had trouble agreeing on a candidate. New York City's mercantile community, led by William Dodge, wavered in its support for Lincoln's reelection and still wanted a compromise to preserve slavery and bring the South back into the Union.43Lincoln's decision to let Greeley meet with Confederate envoys at Niagara Falls, Canada, only made matters worse.
On the day Lincoln announced the new draft call, Greeley and John Hay, the president's private secretary, met with Confederate agents Clay and Holcomb. On behalf of the president, Hay offered them safe conduct to Washington for peace negotiations, but only based on the terms Lincoln had already spelled out to Greeley: reunion of the North and South, and abolition of slavery. Predictably, the conference ended abruptly. Lincoln had hoped to achieve a propaganda coup by getting the rebel agents to counter his conditions with two of their own, namely that Confederate independence and the continuation of slavery
must be the starting point for negotiations.
Lincoln hoped this would deal a heavy blow to the Democrats by showing northerners that the South had no intention of coming back into the Union, even while Lee and his agents encouraged that hope among the peace faction. Lincoln's message to the North was that only a vigorous prosecution of the war would preserve the Union. Instead of countering the president's terms, however, the rebel agents cleverly fed news of the meeting to the Associated Press, and newspapers in both the North and South soon carried reports that made Lincoln appear intransigent. Democrats attacked him for undermining peace efforts and prolonging the war, while Republicans questioned his judgment in handling the affair.44
Coincidentally, Lincoln had also authorized his own peace mission, sending the Tribunes James Gilmore, recently become a freelance journalist, and James Jaquess, colonel of an Illinois regiment and a Methodist clergyman, south to make a peace proposal to Jefferson Davis. The two men were not official envoys, but Davis and Confederate secretary of state Judah Benjamin met with them anyway, having to please peace advocates in the Confederacy.
However, when Gilmore and Jaquess put forward Lincoln's terms, including restoration of the Union, emancipation, and the amnesty he had offered in December 1863, Davis launched into a tirade about fighting to the death for Confederate independence. Gilmore's report and Greeley's Niagara meeting appeared in the northern press at the same time, and Davis's inflexibility helped blunt the outcry against Lincoln. It also undermined the Copperheads' calls for reunification through a peace treaty instead of by military victory. Lee's divide-and-conquer strategy of bolstering the northern peace faction by falsely holding out the possibility of reunion had been thwarted by Davis's impassioned rhetoric.45
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