The Senate has passed a new Conscription Act, putting all
residents between the ages of eighteen and fifty-live in the military service
for the war. Those over forty-five to be detailed by the President as
commissary quartermasters, Nitre Bureau agents, provost guards, clerks, etc.
This would make up the enormous number of 1,500,000 men! The express companies
are to have no detail of men fit for the field, but the President may exempt a
certain class for agricultural purposes, which, of course, can be revoked
whenever a farmer refuses to sell at schedule prices, or engages in speculation
or extortion. Thus the President becomes almost absolute, and the Confederacy a
military nation. The House will pass it with some modifications. Already the Examiner
denounces it, for it allows only one owner or editor to a paper, and just
sufficient printers,— no assistant editors, no reporters, no clerks, etc. This
will save us, and hasten a peace.
Mr. G. A. Myers, the little old lawyer, always potential
with the successive Secretaries of War, proposes, in a long letter, that the
Department allows 30 to 40 foreigners (Jews) to leave the Confederate States, via
Maryland, every week!
Mr. Goodman, President of the Mississippi Railroad, proposes
to send cotton to the Yankees in exchange for implements, etc., to repair the
road, and Lieut.-Gen. (Bishop) Polk favors the scheme.
Commissary-General Northrop likewise sent in a proposal from
an agent of his in Mississippi, to barter cotton with the Yankees for
subsistence, and he indorses an approval on it. I trust we shall be independent
this summer.
To-day it is cool and cloudy, but Custis has had no use for
fire in his school-room of nights for a week—and that in January. The warm
weather saved us a dollar per day in coal. Custis's scholars are paying him $95
the first month.
I shall hope for better times now. We shall have men enough,
if the Secretary and conscription officers do not strain the meshes of the
seine too much, and the currency will be reduced. The speculators and extortioners,
in great measure, will be circumvented, for the new conscription will take them
from their occupations, and they will not find transportation for their wares.
The 2000 barrels of corn destroyed by the enemy on the
Peninsula, a few days ago, belonged to a relative of Col Ruffin, Assistant
Commissary-General! He would not impress that—and lo! it is gone! Many here are
glad of it.
SOURCE: John Beauchamp Jones, A Rebel War Clerk's Diary at the
Confederate States Capital, Volume 2, p. 138-9
