I learn an order has been issued to conscribe all commissary
and quartermasters' clerks liable to military service. There will be, and ought
to be, some special cases of exemption, where men have lost everything in the
war, and have women and children depending on their salaries for subsistence;
but if this order be extended to the ordnance and other bureaus, as it must be,
or incur the odium of injustice, and the thousand and one A. A. Gr.'s, there
will soon be a very important accession to the army.
Major Joseph B——, who was lately confined with over 1000 of
our officers, prisoners, on Johnson Island, Lake Erie, proposes a plan to the
Secretary of War whereby he is certain the island can be taken, and the
prisoners liberated and conveyed to Canada. He proposes that a dozen men shall
seize one of the enemy's steamers at Sandusky, and then overpower the guards,
etc. It is wild, but not impracticable.
We hear nothing to-day from the enemy on the Rappahannock or
at Fortress Monroe.
Our army in Western Louisiana captured some forty Yankee
cotton-planters, who had taken possession of the plantations after driving
their owners away. The account states that they were “sent to Texas.” Were they
not sent into eternity?
SOURCE: John Beauchamp Jones, A Rebel War Clerk's
Diary at the Confederate States Capital, Volume 2, p.
15
