Diary of John Beauchamp Jones: October 15, 1863

To-day, at 12 M., I saw a common leather-wing bat flying over the War Department. What this portends I do not pretend to say, perhaps nothing. It may have been dislodged by the workmen building chimneys to the offices of the department.

The order of the government conscribing all foreign residents who have acquired homes in this country, and the expulsion of the British consuls, will immediately be followed by another exodus of that class of residents. Already passports are daily applied for, and invariably granted by Mr. Assistant Secretary Campbell. The enemy, of course, will reap great benefit from the information conveyed by these people, and the innumerable brood of blockade-runners.

Gen. Lee has sent down between 600 and 700 prisoners captured in recent cavalry engagements. He took their horses and equipments also. And there is an account of an engagement in the West, near Memphis, in which the Confederate troops inflicted injury on the enemy, besides destroying the railroad in several places.

SOURCE: John Beauchamp Jones, A Rebel War Clerk's Diary at the Confederate States Capital, Volume 2, p. 71