March 14, 1863, The New York Herald
There are symptoms of a coming movement in General Hooker’s army. The transportation resources are being cut down, and officers have been notified that all superfluous baggage must be sent home. The officers of the line are to be allowed nothing in the shape of camp equipage, except shelter tents which they can carry on their backs. This means an active and probably arduous campaign. The roads have dried up in that vicinity considerably within the past few days, and everything now looks favorable for a forward movement.
On the rebel side equally active preparations appear to be going on. Charleston is awaiting calmly for an attack, and General Beauregard has revoked all furloughs and recalled absentees to their posts.
A despatch from Memphis reports a fight on the Yazoo river, in which seven thousand prisoners and eight transports are said to have been captured. It was known at Washington that such a movement by our gunboats was in contemplation with the intention of cutting off the supplies of the rebels, and therefore it is quite probable that a battle has taken place, although the particulars have not yet reached us.
There is nothing later from Vicksburg.
Rumors were rife in Cairo yesterday and reached this city by telegraph that Fort Donelson and Fort Henry had been captured by the rebels; but the reports are not credited. A gentleman who arrived in Cincinnati on Thursday from Savannah says that immense armies are massed in Tennessee – one to hold General Rosecrans in check while the other flanks him, enters Kentucky, and moves direct on Louisville and Cincinnati. They are only waiting for the rivers to fall and the roads to dry to commence operations.
General Granger’s force, who went in pursuit of Van Dorn, returned to Franklin on Wednesday. The rebels fled beyond Duck river, as we before reported. There were several cavalry skirmishes, and some three hundred ragged fellows were picked up in the pursuit.
Colonel Richardson and some four hundred of his rebel guerillas were surrounded and captured at Covington, Tenn., by a body of Union troops on Monday last.
By the arrival of the Australasian at this port yesterday evening we have dates from Europe to the 1st instant – two days later. The despatch of Mr. Seward, rejecting the French proposal for mediation, provokes the criticism of the London journals. The Times says that it is quite consistent with all Mr. Seward has previously written upon the subject, and that the Secretary of State is either preternaturally right or incomprehensibly wrong. The Post – Pamlerston’s organ – is more bitter, and declares that, emanating, as this document, does from the federal Cabinet, it is truly incredible that that body should have sunk so low as to endorse as its own in the face of the world so much arrant falsehood and absurd nonsense.
The Morning Star considers the document unanswerable; it is greatly pleased with it, and that henceforth not even the mildest form of interference can have the least hope of acceptance.
The Paris Pays treats the matter somewhat indifferently, merely stating the purport of Mr. Seward’s response, that in the opinion of the Cabinet at Washington a more practicable means would be for deputies from the dissentient States to come to Congress, where projects of arrangement could be discussed, and, if adopted, submitted to the sanction of a National Convention.
The London correspondent of the Manchester Guardian says that the Confederate loan has been all freely taken on the Continent, and that England will have no more of it than it can get from foreign markets.