August 27—Returned at 7 this morning, went out again at dark, went through four houses of bad repute, but found not one deserter. Went twelve miles this night.
Tuesday, August 27, 2013
August 27 — We were relieved from picket this evening, and came back near Culpeper Court House to camp.
27th. Breakfasted and moved out at 7. Passed the 44th, 104th, 103rd, 57th and 12th Ky. Watered and went into camp. Forage party detailed and started and then ordered back. Roads still among the hills, through woods. Pioneer corps finds work. Went on 1½ miles and camped with orders to muster. Boys returned with little forage. Read some in “Barnaby.” Ate dinner at Commissary.
Vicksburg, Thursday, Aug. 27. Did not get up for roll call. Did not feel well. Headache and rheumatism quite bad in limbs. Feverish all day. Cleared off in the afternoon, fine and pleasant in the evening.
Thursday, 27th—Leaving our Oak Ridge bivouac early this morning we journeyed fifteen miles more and stopped for the night on the banks of Bayou Said, only seven miles from Monroe, our destination. During the day we crossed another ridge known as Pine Ridge, which is eight miles across and about twenty feet above the surrounding land. It is beautifully covered with yellow pine, growing so straight and tall, seventy-five to one hundred feet. We noticed a few small clearings with log huts. This is the worst bivouac we have yet occupied. It is full of poisonous reptiles and insects, centipedes, jiggers, woodticks, lizards, scorpions and snakes of all kinds—I have never seen the like. Some of the boys killed two big, spotted, yellow snakes and put them across the road—they measured about fifteen feet each. The ground is covered with leaves ten inches deep, and the water of the bayou has a layer of leaves and moss fully two inches thick.[1]
[1] This proved to be our most dangerous Journey in all our four years’ service. The natives told us the next morning that no Southern soldiers could have been hired to do what we did. I have often wondered and would like to know, just as we did then, why we were sent into this forsaken section of the country, and during the most sickly time of the year, at that! The natives we saw were a white-livered set; they were all ardent sympathizers of the secession cause.—A. G. D.
by John Beauchamp Jones
AUGUST 27TH.—There is trouble in the Conscription Bureau. Col. Preston, the new superintendent, finds it no bed of roses, made for him by Lieut.-Col. Lay—the lieutenant-colonel being absent in North Carolina, sent thither to compose the discontents; which may complicate matters further, for they don’t want Virginians to meddle with North Carolina matters. However, the people he is sent to are supposed to be disloyal. Gen. Pillow has applied to have Georgia in the jurisdiction of his Bureau of Conscription, and the Governors of Georgia, Alabama, and Tennessee unite in the request; also Generals Johnston and Bragg. Gen. Pillow already has Mississippi, Tennessee, Alabama, etc.—a much larger jurisdiction than the bureau here. Col. Preston, of course, protests against all this, and I believe the Secretary sympathizes with him.
Prof. G. M. Richardson, of the Georgia Military Institute, sends some interesting statistics. That State has furnished the army 80,000, between the ages of eighteen and forty-five years. Still, the average number of men in each county between sixteen and eighteen and forty-five and sixty is 462, and there are 132 counties: total, 60,984. He deducts 30 per cent. for the infirm, etc. (18,689), leaving 42,689 men able to bear arms still at home. Thus, after putting some 500,000 in the field (if we could put them there), there would yet remain a reserve for home defense against raids, etc. in the Confederate States, of not less than 250,000 men.
Gen. Winder sent to the Secretary of War to-day for authority to appoint a clerk to attend exclusively to the mails to and from the United States—under Gen. Winder’s sole direction.
Major Quantrel, a Missouri guerrilla chief, has dashed into Lawrence, Kansas, and burnt the city—killing and wounding 180. He had Gen. Jim Lane, but he escaped.
Gen. Floyd is dead ; some attribute his decease to ill treatment by the government. [click to continue…]
August 27.—John B. Floyd, a General in the rebel service, died at Abington, Virginia.—A portion of Colonel Wilder’s cavalry, belonging to the army of the Cumberland, encountered a rebel force at Hanover, Ala., and succeeded in defeating them, killing three, and capturing one. —A Government train of twenty-eight wagons was captured by a party of rebel guerrillas, at a point about six miles from Philippi, on the road to Beverly, Va.—The battle at Bayou Metea, Ark., between a large infantry and cavalry force of rebels, and General Davidson’s division of National cavalry, took place this day.—(Doc. 156.)
