The Daily Dispatch, Richmond, Virginia CS
LATER FROM THE NORTH.
DESPONDING VIEW OF AFFAIRS OUT WEST.
The correspondent of the Chicago Times, writing from Memphis, gives the following gloomy summary of Federal affairs in the West:
Arkansas is being overrun by strong guerrilla bands. Hindman has collected a force of twenty-five or thirty thousand, and there are almost as many more ranging the country for spoils. There have been a number of skirmishes, of which nobody seems to have the right accounts, and nothing is know except that strong Federal expeditions have been attacked and overpowered, and that a large number of prisoners and valuable stores have been taken from us. There will probably be some important movements in that locality before long.
A good deal has been said in connection with the Vicksburg affair, about sending troops there and reducing the place by a siege. This is all very well for those who know nothing of the climate and the country; but they who have been there are keenly alive to the merits of that campaign. None have ventured it and come off unscathed. Our flotilla is full of wan countenances, and death has been among its brave men to an alarming extent. Officers and men have both suffered. The former have been seriously ill, and the latter have died like rotten sheep. The soldier fared no better, and some of the regiments went back with almost decimated ranks. This is the true history of the siege of Vicksburg.
The Yazoo river was fitly named by the red-skins hunters who traversed its tortuous channel in days gone by. Yazoo—Death river. What could be more significant? Their symbolical language never falls them, and in this instance it was well applied; for, if it be not a river of death, then none exist. Old settlers tell-me that no man can drink its water in the hot season and live longer than a few months. It is impregnated with such rank vegetable matter, gathered from the tropical luxuriance which borders its banks and those of its tributaries, that its water is conveyed into slow poison, which is sure to destroy human life. If you would find a counterpart to its sombre shades and its stained, murky waters, you must go into the depth of swamps, which it drains, and look upon the green scum and crawling reptiles who shun the sunlight and breed pestilence and death alone.--The simple substance of it is, that an army of twenty-five thousand men would find their graves between now and the first of October without ever facing an enemy. The flotilla has already accomplished its destiny in that line, and, if an army is to be maintained anywhere in that locality it must be removed from the river and provided with pure water — and you might dig until you lost day light in that red-hot soil, and not find enough to wet the palm of the hand.
I suppose by this time you have undergone various surmises in regard to the northern trip which Com. Davis and Gen. Curtis are making. The precise reason for their pilgrimage to the seat of authority are not known, but the nature of their derelictions is public enough. Davis proved himself an infant in conception, and an imbecile in execution, from the moment he left Memphis to besiege Vicksburg until he came away with the indelible disgrace of having been whipped and bullied by the Arkansas into abject submission. The fear of losing a vessel was strong enough to overcome the hope of glory, and there was nothing but folding of hands and crossing of arms. The results of the expedition were these: Gained — nothing. Lost — the Carondolet shot to pieces, the Louisville disabled, the Benton riddled, the Tyler demolished, the Essex and Sumter thrown away, and the rams Lancaster and Queen sent into dry docks for weeks. The loss of the Essex alone to the river flotilla is irreparable. She has been under reconstruction for six months, and has cost a mint of money, and on her first trip she was cut off and compelled to go to New Orleans. The gunboat flotilla is actually ruined, and we shall know it to our sorrow before sixty days pass over our heads.
Gen. Curtis has made himself conspicuous in two or three ways. The unlicensed system which governed his movements in Arkansas has brought misery to thousands of unprotected families, and a corresponding degree of obloquy to the Union cause. He was of course compelled to subsist upon the country through which he passed, but that was no reason why houses should be despoiled and burned, innocent white women outraged, and black ones converted into the instruments of a promiscuous harlotage which it would be hard to find a parallel for. These performances were the work of stragglers and unknown persons, and should not be charged to the main army; but the cause will be made to father it all, and the commander must be held responsible. He should have prevented such discreditable occurrences.