WASHINGTON, Sept. 25 [1862].

Hon. Eli Thayer’s scheme for colonization by armed men of Southern States meets with much favor by the President, Secretary of war and others.  It has been discussed several times in Cabinet meetings, and will probably soon receive formal official sanction.

The project contemplates an expedition of 10,000 colonists enlisted for 6 months and supplies with transportation, subsistence, arms and a guard by the government, whose business it shall be to hold, occupy and possess the public lands of Florida and other lands belonging to rebels, and seized under the law of the last session of Congress for non-payment of direct tax.

Mr. Thayer promises, if allowed to carry out his plan entire, to bring Florida into the Union as a free State by the first February next.  Texas and Virginia are already talked of as States to be subjected to the same process.

This, like the proclamation of this morning, will be another step in the path of a more vigorous policy which the Administration, in its proclamation of freedom, advertised that it should henceforth pursue.

Surgeon General Hammond has returned from the battle-field of Antietam, where he has been stopping at McClellan’s headquarters.  He thinks the whole number of Union killed will come within 1,200, and from a careful inspection of hospitals and lists of those brought off, judges that the wounded will not exceed 6,000.  Maj. Davis, Assistant Inspector General, informed him that he himself had caused to be buried 3,000 of the rebel dead left on the field from which he estimates their wounded to be at least 10,000.

S[u]rgeon General Hammond saw, as a part of the fruits of our victory, twenty-seven standards, which we captured from the rebel regiments, and also reports among our spoils twenty or thirty thousand small arms, mostly those left by the enemy along the line of their retreat.

A man signing himself R. P. Noble communicated to this evening’s Star a statement, which he professes to make on direct information, that Col. Ford did not evacuate Maryland Heights until he had received the fourth and peremptory order from Col. Miles to do so—and besides, his long range ammunition has been exhausted.  He asks a suspension of opinion.

SOURCES:  The Union Sentinel, Osceola, Iowa, Saturday, October 18, 1862, p. 2, the right side of the article was caught be the seam of the bound newspaper volume and torn on the right side of the column leaving only an average of about 3 to 4 words per line. I was able to do a search on Newspapers.com and found the same article in the Muscatine Weekly Journal, Muscatine Iowa, Friday, October 3, 1862 p. 1. It is this article that I have here transcribed.