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?)

 

January 8, 1864---A new Union Government in Louisiana

JANUARY 8, 1864:    

A Unionist Convention meets in New Orleans to organize the Reconstruction government of Louisiana. 

January 7, 1864---Two pardons and a funeral

JANUARY 7, 1864:  

President Lincoln (U.S.A.) and President Davis (C.S.A.) both pardon two young deserters from their respective armies, commuting the men’s death sentences to terms of imprisonment. The two Presidents, who had been born months apart in adjoining counties in Kentucky, both shared a horror of sending frightened young men to stand in front of firing squads, and pardoned or commuted the sentences of many a young man despite the objections of their field commanders, who felt that pardons and commutations undermined military discipline. 

  

Caleb Blood Smith, President Lincoln’s former Secretary of The Interior and now a Federal Judge, dies at age 55 in Indianapolis. Smith was an unpopular Secretary, described as a man with "neither heart nor sincerity about him." As Secretary of The Interior he had been chiefly responsible for Indian Affairs, and the disastrous Sioux War of 1862 had erupted on his watch, ultimately forcing him from office.

January 6, 1864---Massapequa answers the call!

JANUARY 6, 1864:   

John G. Floyd, a scion of the Floyd family of South Oyster Bay (Massapequa) New York, after having enlisted in the Union Army in 1862 and having fought at Frederick, Maryland, Harper’s Ferry, West Virginia, Fairfax, Virginia, Burnside’s Mud March, and Anderson, Tennessee,  is mustered out of the U.S. Army as a Captain.

In New Mexico Territory, Kit Carson begins a war against the Navajo Nation.

 

January 5, 1864---"Shame on every skulking fellow . . ."

JANUARY 5, 1864:   

Unknowingly echoing (somewhat) the ideas in General Patrick Cleburne’s private letter to General Joseph Johnston,  the Confederate Union of Milledgeville, Georgia issues a call for “Negro nurses, negro teamsters” to assume support services in the Confederate Army, and pronounces, “Shame on every skulking fellow who is loafing at home or absent from his duty.” Other than Substitutions, recently called to service, the reality is that few absent “fellows” are either skulking or loafing. Most deserters who avoid the firing squad or the stockade are just struggling to keep themselves and their families alive in these bitter days. The large majority of men at home are elderly, ill or infirm.