[CHAP.XII. OPERATIONS IN KENTUCKY AND TENNESSEE.

of indulgence pursued you will find must be charged; sooner or later it must be changed. This you will find; I think the sooner the better. I don't think I am disposed to tyranny, but a sensible, firm, efficacious, decisive, and prompt authority is necessary to the occasion. I make suggestions, believing that I may do so without offense; always obedient, however, to my superiors.

I hope you will pardon my liberty with you in thus writing to you direct rather than through the adjutant, as my correspondence is not intended to be classified as reports.

Respectfully, yours, &c.,

J. L. ALCORN, Brigadier-General.

HEADQUARTERS WESTERN DEPARTMENT,

Bowling Green, October 22, 1861.

HonorableJ. P. BENJAMIN, Secretary of War:

SIR: I have the honor to acknowledge the receipt of your letter of the 16th instant.

Since the receipt of your instructions by telegram on the 11th instant, directing me to draw no more commissary stores from the depot at Nashville, I have conferred to them, and am now taking measures to purchase in open market or by contract all the flour, beef, pork, and forage necessary to supply the troops here, and if there should be a surplus of those items of the rations, to secure that for other corps. There is, however, an embarrassment in the accomplishment of this object, from the refusal of the farmers for their flour, &c. of any but gold or Kentucky paper money. While private dealers company with their demands, we are unable to do so. We have only Confederate or Tennessee paper. We are at present without money in the subsistence department, and I submit to you to judge and decide if it would not be better to procure coin, gold or silver, for the present, until kin the progress of trade. This result, I think, would occur if the restrictions of the law prohibiting the importation of certain productions "except by seaport" could be removed so far as to allow the introduction of certain, accept cotton and military stores, of absolute necessity, in the district of country occupied by our troops. It might first be tried for specified productions of the South under special license.

It is necessary that the money for the purchase of supplies should be remitted as early as possible, and I desire that it be deposited in some bank in Nashville, ot the credit of Captain T. K. Jackson, chief commissary at my headquarters, who, for the responsible duties that devolve upon him, should be appointed brigade commissary in the Provisional Army. He was an officer of the United Army and a graduate of West Point.

Nashville is the most proper place for the accumulation of supplies of this corps. I shall therefore establish a depot at that point for supplies, under my control, separate from the one under charge of Captain Shaff, leaving him subject only to the orders of the Commissary-General, which will prevent confusion and better divide the labor.

In making the call for troops, I asked from the governors of Tennessee, 30,000; Mississippi, 10,000; Arkansas, 10,000; confining my call strictly to those States. The call upon Mississippi was small compared with that on Tennessee, as only a part of that State is within the limits of