March 26.
President Lincoln issued a proclamation specifying the persons to whom the benefits of the Amnesty Proclamation of December last were intended to apply. He also authorized every commissioned officer in the United States service, either naval or military, to administer the oath of allegiance, and imposed rules for their government, in the premises.--(Doc. 113.)
General Rosecrans, from his headquarters at St. Louis, Mo., issued the following special orders:
The attention of the General Commanding has been called to various articles of an incendiary, disloyal, and traitorous character, in a [57] newspaper entitled the Metropolitan Record, without ecclesiastical sanction, called a “Catholic family newspaper,” published in New York March twenty-sixth, 1864. The articles on “ Conscription,” the “Raid upon Richmond,” “Clouds in the West,” and the “Address of the Legislature of Virginia,” contain enough to satisfy the General Commanding that the reasonable freedom, nor even license, of the press, suffice for the traitorous utterances of those articles. They are a libel on the Catholics, who as a body are loyal and national; no man having a drop of Catholic charity or patriotism in his heart could have written them, expressing, as they do, hatred for the nation's efforts to resist its own dissolution, and friendship for those who are trying to destroy the great free government under which so many have found an asylum from oppression in other lands. The Provost-Marshal General will cause to be seized all numbers of the Metropolitan Record containing those articles; and venders of them, if found guilty of having sold or distributed them, knowing their traitorous contents, will be punished. To protect the innocent from imposition, the circulation of this paper is prohibited in this department until further orders.
An official announcement from Washington was made, that Illinois was twelve thousand four hundred and thirty-six “ahead of all quotas under the calls of President Lincoln for more troops.”
