We were paid to-day in $5 bills. I gave $20 for half a cord of wood, and $60 for a bushel of common white cornfield beans. Bacon is yet $8 per pound; but more is coming to the city than usual, and a decline may be looked for, I hope. The farmers above the city, who have been hoarding grain, meat, etc., will lose much by the raiders.
March 3d.—Bright and frosty. Confused accounts of the raid in the morning papers.
During the day it was reported that Col. Johnson’s forces had been cut up this morning by superior numbers, and that Butler was advancing up the Peninsula with 15,000 men. The tocsin was sounded in the afternoon, and the militia called out; every available man being summoned to the field for the defense of the city. The opinion prevails that the plan to liberate the prisoners and capture Richmond is not fully developed yet, nor abandoned. My only apprehension is that while our troops may be engaged in one direction, a detachment of the enemy may rush in from the opposite quarter. But the attempt must fail. There is much excitement, but no alarm. It is rather eagerness to meet the foe, and a desire that he may come.
The Department Battalion returned at 2 p.m. to attend the funeral of Capt. Ellery, and expect to be marched out again this evening toward Bottom’s Bridge, where the enemy is said to be in considerable force.
Custis, though detailed to duty in the department, threw down his pen to-day, and said he would go out and be in the next fight. And so he left me suddenly. The Secretary, to whom I communicated this, said it was right and proper for him to go—even without orders. He goes without a blanket, preferring not to sleep, to carrying one. At night he will sit by a fire in the field.
Some of the clerks would shoot Mr. Memminger cheerfully. He will not pay them their salaries, on some trivial informality in the certificates; and while they are fighting and bleeding in his defense, their wives and children are threatened to be turned out of doors by the boarding-house keepers.
March 4th.—Bright and frosty in the morning; warm and cloudy in the afternoon. The enemy have disappeared.
On the 17th inst., Gen. Lee wrote the Secretary of War that he had received a letter from Gen. Longstreet, asking that Pickett’s Division be in readiness to join him; also that a brigade of Gen. Buckner’s Division, at Dalton, be sent him at once. He says the force immediately in front of him consists of the 4th, 11th, 9th, and 23d corps, besides a large body of cavalry from Middle Tennessee. Gen. Lee says the railroad from Chattanooga to Knoxville, being about completed, will enable the enemy to combine on either Johnston or Longstreet. He (Gen. Lee) says, however, that the 4th and 11th corps are small, and may have been consolidated; the 23d also is small; but he does not know the strength of the enemy. He thinks Pickett’s Division should be sent as desired, and its place filled with troops from South Carolina, etc., where operations will probably soon cease. The Secretary sent this to the President. The President sent it back to-day, indorsed, “How can Pickett’s Division be replaced?—J. D.”
Henley’s Battalion returned this evening; and Custis can resume his school, unless he should be among the list doomed to the rank in the field, for which he is physically incapable, as Surgeon Garnett, the President’s physician, has certified.
March 5th.—Clear and pleasant, after a slight shower in the morning.