Tuesday, January 7, 2014

January 9, 1864---The Battle of Loudon Heights, VA; a bad augury



JANUARY 9, 1864:   

The Battle of Loudon Heights: 

The North American continent is locked in subzero cold as far south as Memphis, Tennessee. All Americans, though particularly Southerners, are suffering from the truly arctic conditions, especially with shortages of firewood and coal. John Singleton Mosby’s vaunted Rangers choose this day to launch a surprise attack against Union troops stationed in Loudon County, Virginia. For the first time, Mosby’s Rangers are decisively repulsed. Although casualties are light on both sides, one of the dead is Willie Mosby, the brother of The Gray Ghost.



In a measure of how dire the South’s military manpower needs have become the Richmond Daily Dispatch reports that:

In Georgia there have been exempted — civil officers, 522; railroad employees, 616; telegraph employees, 13; newspaper employees, 174; ministers of the gospel, 274; shoe makers, 504; tanners, 377; blacksmiths, 590; wagonmakers, 266; millers, 409; factory employees, 554; school teachers, 266; salt manufacturers 151; overseers, 201; ferrymen, 10; physicians, 486; militia officers, 397 (?); (N. C. 3,437;) aliens, 628; (Va. 69;) express company, 13; cadets, 12; manufacture of dental instruments, 3; batters, 14; nitre and mining service, 120; mail contractors and carriers, 4; shepherds, 107; physical disability, 1,499; substitutes 7,000.

Altogether, this number makes up a bare fraction of the number under arms. That the Confederacy is counting so closely is a bad augury. The number of Exempts (6,711 minus the disabled) almost equals the number of Substitutions (7,000). “Aliens” includes citizens of other Confederate States (are their own States looking for them?)
 

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