by John Beauchamp Jones
OCTOBER 26TH.—No news from our armies. The President was in Mobile two days ago.
Gen. Rosecrans has been removed from his command, and Grant put in his place. Meade, it is said in Northern papers, will also be decapitated, for letting Lee get back without loss. Also Dalgren, at Charleston, has been relieved. And yet the Northern papers announce that Richmond will soon and suddenly be taken, and an unexpected joy be spread throughout the North, and a corresponding despondency throughout the South.
The weather is cloudy and cold. The papers announce that all clerks appointed since October 11th, 1862, by order of the Secretary of War, are liable to conscription. This cannot be true; for I know a Secretary who has just appointed two of his cousins to the best clerkships in the department—both of conscript age. But Secretaries know how to evade the law, and “whip the devil round the stump.”
How long will it be after peace before the sectional hatred intensified by this war can abate? A lady near by, the other night, while surveying her dilapidated shoes, and the tattered sleeping-gowns of her children, burst forth as follows: “I pray that I may live to see the United States involved in a war with some foreign power, which will make refugees of her people, and lay her cities in ashes! I want the people ruined who would ruin the South. It will be a just retribution!”
