March 2, 1862

March 2, 1862:  Gen. H.H. Sibley’s Army of New Mexico, 2, 500 mounted Texans, leaving Col. Canby’s still-healthy Union army behind them, marches north in order to capture a Federal supply depot in Albuquerque.  The Yankees scoop up as much as they can, and torch the rest.  On this date, horsemen of the 2^nd Texas Cavalry enter Albuquerque, claiming it for the South, but the black pillars of smoke tell them that they are too late to rescue the supplies and food.

---Unionists in Tennessee vote to rescind their secession ordinance and to establish a Provisional Military Government that is pro-Union.  The President appoints Sen. Andrew Johnson as a Brigadier General, and asks him to return home to Tennessee to head up this provisional government.

---On this date, Sec. of State William H. Seward in Washington writes a letter to a “political club” dedicated to making him the next president.  In Seward’s letter, he responds in a surprisingly non-self-serving vein:  “I avail myself of the good will of the club, thus flatteringly manifested, to say that I consider the proceeding as one altogether unwise, and tending to produce only public evil in a crisis when every possible path of danger ought to be carefully avoided. It is a partisan movement, and, worst of all, a partisan movement of a personal character.  . . . It seemed to me, then, that I must necessarily renounce all expectation of future personal advantage, in order that the counsels that I might give to the President in such a crisis should not only be, but be recognized as being, disinterested, loyal and patriotic.”

---Lt. William Thompson Lusk, of the 25^th Massachusetts Infantry, stationed at Beaufort, So. Carolina, writes home, advising his mother not to consider coming down to visit, delicately explaining the effect of women present among men who have not been around women for a long time:

My dear Mother:

In the short letter I wrote you last week, I mentioned that I would not encourage your visiting Beaufort, and will now state my reasons more at length. In the first place, we have here some four thousand men on the island, of whom the best are long separated from the refining influence of home, and, in consequence, the two or three ladies who are visiting here are subject to a deal of coarse remark, to which I would not be willing that any woman should be subjected, where it lay in my power to prevent. . . .

---A clerk in the Confederate War Department in Richmond, John B. Jones, records this military boondoggle at the expense of the Yankees:

MARCH 2D.—Gen. Jos. E. Johnston has certainly made a skillful retrograde movement in the face of the enemy at Manassas. He has been keeping McClellan and his 210,000 men at bay for a long time with about 40,000. After the abandonment of his works it was a long time before the enemy knew he had retrograded. They approached very cautiously, and found that they had been awed by a few Quaker guns—logs of wood in position, and so painted as to resemble cannon. Lord, how the Yankee press will quiz McClellan!