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re: 150 years ago this day...

Posted on 1/13/14 at 8:50 pm to
Posted by BadLeroyDawg
Member since Aug 2013
848 posts
Posted on 1/13/14 at 8:50 pm to
Thursday, 14 January 1864

Following in the footsteps of W.R. Browne and the USS Restless, Acting Master Sherrill and his USS Roebuck took over the task of terrorizing the salt suppliers of South Florida, or at least making life miserable for the parties transporting the valuable preservative. On this day, patrolling in Jupiter Inlet, Sherrill used small boats to pursue the British sloop Young Racer. This vessel, tragically for her captain, crew and owners, lived up to neither half of her name, and was overhauled in a short time. Before she could be captured, though, she was set on fire by her crew. Overloaded with salt, she sank rapidly.

The CSS Alabama, commanded by Captain Raphael Semmes, captured and burned the ship Emma Jane off the coast of Malabar, southwest India.

Having failed in efforts to pull the grounded USS Iron Age off the beach at Lockwoods Folly Inlet, the Federal blockaders applied the torch and blew her up. "As an offset to the loss...." reported Lieutenant Commander Stone, "I would place the capture or destruction of 22 blockade runners within the last six months by this squadron [the North Atlantic Blockading Squadron]."

The USS Union--a screw steamer built at Mystic, Connecticut, and commissioned at Philadelphia, Pennsylvania, on 16 May 1861, commanded by Acting Lieutenant Edward Conroy--captured the blockade running steamer Mayflower near Tampa Bay, Florida, with a cargo of cotton.

The blockade-runner, steamer schooner Cumberland, with a cargo of cotton from the coast of Florida, arrived at Havana, Cuba. She had been chased by the United States gunboat USS De Soto, a fast wooden-hulled, side-wheel steamship, but to no avail.

Major General R. B. Vance, made a raid toward Terrisville, Tennessee, and captured a train of twenty-three wagons. He was pursued by Colonel Palmer, who recaptured the wagons, and took one ambulance, loaded with medicines, one hundred and fifty saddle-horses and one hundred stand of arms. General Vance and his assistant adjutant-general and inspector general are among the prisoners captured.--General Grant's Report.

A force of about two hundred Confederates made an attack on a party of Union Cavalry, stationed at Three Miles Station, near Bealeton, Virginia, but were repulsed and driven off, after several desperate charges, leaving three dead and twelve wounded. The Federal casualties were two wounded, one severely.

The official correspondence between the agents of exchange of prisoners of war, together with the report of Mr. Robert Ould, Confederate chief of the bureau, was made public. Prior to the War, Ould was a District Attorney in Washington, DC, in which office one of his first duties was the prosecution of (later to be Union General) Daniel E. Sickles for the killing of Philip Barton Key, son of Francis Scott Key. Sickles defended himself by adopting a defense of temporary insanity, the first time the defense had been used in the United States.

The body of a Union soldier was found hanging at Smith Mills, Virginia, with the following words placarded upon it: “Here hangs private Samuel Jones, of the Fifth Ohio regiment, hung by order of Major General Pickett, in retaliation for private David Bright, of the Sixty-second Georgia regiment, hung December eighteenth, by order of Brigadier General Wild.”

The Richmond Examiner held the following language: “Surely British-protection patriots of the Emerald Isle here, have, we are credibly informed, recently shouldered their shillelaghs, and cut stick for the land of Lincoln. Sundry others, too, born this side of the Potomac, have wended their way in the same direction, all leaving their families behind them to sell rum or make breeches and other garments for the clothing bureau. When mothers and sisters, sweethearts and wives, thus intentionally, and by a cunning arrangement, left behind, present themselves at the clothing bureau for a job, they represent, with the most innocent faces imaginable, that their male protectors are in General Lee's army, and thus enlist sympathy, and sponge on the Confederacy. To poor females every kindness and aid should be extended as long as they and. those belonging to them are true to us; but it is past enduring that able-bodied fellows should go North, and leave as a charge here people whom we are under no obligations to support, and who, by false representations, shut out the wives and other female relatives of gallant fellows, who are confronting our ruthless enemies.”

Lieutenant Gates, with a party of the Third Arkansas cavalry, made a reconnaissance near Clinton, Arkansas, and succeeded in capturing twelve prisoners, whom he surprised at Cadson's Cave.
Posted by BadLeroyDawg
Member since Aug 2013
848 posts
Posted on 1/14/14 at 8:25 pm to
Friday, 15 January 1864

Most Southern newspapers in this year were somewhat becoming propaganda outlets for the Confederacy and its war effort. Exhortations for the people to stand fast, and gird for the struggle to come, were necessary. Off the public stage, Confederate Secretary of the Navy Stephen Mallory ordered Commander James W. Cooke to command the massive new warship CSS Albermarle, which was nearing completion in Halifax, North Carolina. Under Cooke's guidance she was rapidly readied for service and played a major role in Albemarle Sound from April until her destruction in October. President Abraham Lincoln, on the other hand, was attending to more and more to plans for re-incorporating seceded states into the Union as soon as possible after they were occupied by Federal forces.

“The utmost nerve,” said the Richmond Whig, “the firmest front, the most undaunted courage, will be required during the coming twelve months from all who are charged with the management of affairs in our country, or whose position gives them any influence in forming or guiding public sentiment.” “Moral courage,” says the Wilmington Journal, “the power to resist the approaches of despondency, and the faculty of communicating this power to others, will need greatly to be called into exercise; for we have reached that point in our revolution which is inevitably reached in all revolutions, when gloom and depression take the place of hope and enthusiasm — when despair is fatal and despondency is even more to be dreaded than defeat. In such a time we can understand the profound wisdom of the Roman Senate, in giving thanks to the general who had suffered the greatest disaster that ever overtook the Roman arms, ‘because he had not despaired of the Republic.’ There is a feeling, however, abroad in the land, that the great crisis of the war — the turning-point in our fate — is fast approaching. Whether a crisis be upon us or not, there can be in the mind of no man, who looks at the map of Georgia, and considers her geographical relations to the rest of the Confederacy, a single doubt that much of our future is involved in the result of the next spring campaign in Upper Georgia.”

Regarding Southern Red River defenses, Major General Taylor, CSA, wrote to Brigadier General William R. Boggs: "At all events, we should be prepared as far as possible, and I trust the remaining 9-inch gun and the carriages for the two 32-Dahlgrens will soon reach me. For the 9-inch and 32-pound rifle now in position at Fort De Russy, there were sent down only 50 rounds of shot and shell; more should be sent at once. The Missouri, I suppose, will come down on the first rise.

Commodore H. H. Bell wrote confidentially to Commander Robert Townsend, piloting the USS Essex, off Donaldsonville, Louisiana: "The rams and ironclads on Red River and in Mobile Bay are to force the blockade at both points and meet here [New Orleans], whilst the army is to do its part. Being aware of these plans, we should be prepared to defeat them. The reports in circulation about their ironclads and rams being failures may be true in some degree; but we should remember that they prevailed about the redoubtable Merrimack before her advent." Of the ironclads, however, only the CSS Tennessee could be regarded as formidable.

The USS Beauregard, under Acting Master Francis Burgess, captured the blockade running British schooner Minnie, of and from Nassau, south of Mosquito Inlet, Florida, with a cargo including salt and liquor.

The Fifty-second regiment of Illinois volunteers, under the command of Colonel J. S. Wilcox, re-enlisted for the war, returned to Chicago.

The blockade-runner Isabel arrived at Havana. She ran the blockade at Mobile, and had a cargo of four hundred and eighty bales of cotton, and threw overboard one hundred and twenty-four bales off Tortugas, in a gale of wind.
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