3 O'clock P.m.
— Three proclamations have just been issued! One (a joint one) from the
President and the Governor, calling upon everybody to organize themselves into
companies, battalions, and regiments, when they will be armed. They say “no
time is to be lost, the danger is great.” The Mayor, in his document, warns the
people in time to avoid the fate of New Orleans. He says the enemy is advancing
on the city, and may assail it before Monday morning. This is Saturday. The
third proclamation is by E. B. Robinson, one of my printers, twenty years ago,
at Washington. He calls upon all natives of Maryland and the District of Columbia
to report to him, and he will lead them against the enemy, and redeem them from
the imputation of skulking or disloyalty cast upon poor refugees by the
flint-hearted Shylocks of Richmond, who have extorted all their money from
them.
Besides these inflammatory documents, the militia colonels
have out notices for all men under forty-five years of age to meet in Broad
Street to-morrow, Sunday.
I learn, however, that there are some 25,000 or 30,000 of the
enemy at Yorktown; but if we can get together 12,000 fighting men, in the next
twenty-four hours, to man the fortifications, there will not be much use for
the militia and the clerks of the departments, more than as an internal police
force. But I am not quite sure we can get that number.
SOURCE: John Beauchamp Jones, A Rebel War Clerk's
Diary at the Confederate States Capital, Volume 1, p. 361-2
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