Gen. Rosecrans has been removed from his command, and Grant
put in his place. Meade, it is said in Northern papers, will also be
decapitated, for letting Lee get back without loss. Also Dalgren, at
Charleston, has been relieved. And yet the Northern papers announce that
Richmond will soon and suddenly be taken, and an unexpected joy be spread
throughout the North, and a corresponding despondency throughout the South.
The weather is cloudy and cold. The papers announce that all
clerks appointed since October 11th, 1862, by order of the Secretary of War,
are liable to conscription. This cannot be true; for I know a Secretary who has
just appointed two of his cousins to the best clerkships in the department—both
of conscript age. But Secretaries know how to evade the law, and “whip the
devil round the stump.”
How long will it be after peace before the sectional hatred
intensified by this war can abate? A lady near by, the other night, while
surveying her dilapidated shoes, and the tattered sleeping-gowns of her children,
burst forth as follows: “I pray that I may live to see the United States
involved in a war with some foreign power, which will make refugees of her
people, and lay her cities in ashes! I want the people ruined who would ruin
the South. It will be a just retribution!”
SOURCE: John Beauchamp Jones, A Rebel War Clerk's
Diary at the Confederate States Capital, Volume 2, p.
82
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