Another large squad of veterans and the most of the
remaining officers left for Ohio yesterday. Recruiting seems to be active in
Ohio. I think we shall get our share.*
Plan of spring campaign from Kanawha Valley. — Ten or
fifteen thousand men can move from the head of navigation on the Kanawha River
(Loup Creek) via Fayette, Raleigh, Flat Top, and Princeton to the Virginia and
Tennessee Railroad between New River and Wytheville, a distance of one hundred
and thirty-nine miles, in a week or ten days; spend a week on the railroad
destroying New River Bridge and the track for twenty-five miles; return to Loup
Creek in one week more and be carried in steamers into the Ohio, and thence
East or South for other operations. One week is time enough to convey such a
force to Loup Creek from the Potomac or the West. The roads and weather will
ordinarily allow such a column to move April 20. Supplies and transportation
should be provided at Fayette during February and March. The utmost secrecy
should be observed so that the first information the Rebels would have would be
the approach of the force. Such a destruction of the railroad would effectually
cut the communications of Longstreet and Jones in east Tennessee and compel him
[the enemy] to abandon that country. The Rebels could not reconstruct the
railroad during the next campaign. It would perhaps compel the evacuation of
Richmond.
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*A Columbus dispatch of February 14, in the Cincinnati Gazette,
had this paragraph: — “It has been ascertained at the muster-in office,
that the Twenty-third Ohio, Colonel R. B. Hayes, Department of West Virginia,
was the first regiment from this State to enlist as veterans. Several regiments
have claimed that honor.”
SOURCE: Charles Richard Williams, editor, Diary and
Letters of Rutherford Birchard Hayes, Volume 2, p. 450-1
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