Early June 1864 was a bleak time for Washington and the Union cause. What began that spring as a determined Federalist push to crush the Confederacy was moving at a grinding, bloody pace. In Virginia, Ulysses S. Grant and the Army of the Potomac endured a painful reversal at Cold Harbor. As tens thousands of Union troops fell before the defenses of Richmond, William Tecumseh Sherman was still laboring to reach the outskirts of Atlanta. A month earlier a Union offensive meant to seize upper Louisiana was turned back and abandoned. Progress elsewhere was either absent or fleeting. Meanwhile, the
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