History's what people are trying to hide from you, not what they're trying to show you. You search for it in the same way you sift through a landfill: for evidence of what people want to bury.-Hilary Mantel Husband, Father, Teacher, Vet 🇺🇸 stand with 🇺🇦
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than ever.
"5
Some foreign-born soldiers expressed such convictions with even
greater intensity. In 1863 an Irish-born carpenter, a private in the
Twenty-eighth Massachusetts Infantry of the famous Irish Brigade,
rebuked both his wife in Boston and his father-in-law in Ireland for
questioning his judgment in risking his life for the Lincoln adminis
tration's war aims. "This is the first test of a modern free govern-
ment in the act of sustaining itself against internal enemys," he wrote
almost in echo of Lincoln. "If it fail then the hopes of milions fall
and the designs and wishes of all tyrants will succeed the old
cry
will be sent forth from the aristocrats of europe that such is the
common lot of all republics. ... Irishmen and their descendants
have . . . a stake in [this] nation. . . . America is Irlands refuge
Irlands last hope destroy this republic and her hopes are blasted.” In
1864 a forty-year-old Ohio corporal who had immigrated from En-
gland wrote to his wife explaining his decision to reenlist for a sec-
ond three-year hitch: "If I do get hurt I want you to remember that
it will be not only for my Country and my Children but for Liberty
all over the World that I risked my life, for if Liberty should be
crushed here, what hope would there be for the cause of Human
Progress anywhere else?" Later that summer, in the Atlanta cam-
paign, he gave his life for these convictions.6
Perhaps it is not surprising that Americans both native and
adopted felt this way. They had never hidden their self-proclaimed
5. Josiah Perry to Phebe Perry, Oct. 3, 1862, Josiah Perry Papers, Illinois
State Historical Library, Springfield; Robert T. McMahan diary, entry of Sept.
3, 1863, State Historical Society of Missouri, Columbia.
6. Peter Welsh to Mary Welsh, Feb. 3, 1863, Peter Welsh to Patrick Prender-
gast, June 1, 1863, in Irish Green and Union Blue: The Civil War Letters of Peter
Welsh, ed. Laurence Frederick Kohl and Margaret Cosee Richard (New York,
1986), p…](https://cdn.bsky.app/img/feed_thumbnail/plain/did:plc:5ydp4m3dqfdlnjp2gjjsrzi4/bafkreicqpjfdjqls2e7eye5zgtksnm3ljezf5dwucghc2v4zx6q7awnoem)
