Trading with the enemy is prohibited under all circumstances.

Traveling to and from New Orleans and other places occupied by the enemy is forbidden. All passengers will be arrested. Citizens going to those places and returning with the enemy's usual passport will be arrested.

I submit it to your candor if with this proclamation before me I had not a right to suppose that my order was in strait accordance with your views, and whether I had not a right to expect, if occasion required it, your cordial co-operation in enforcing it?

The question whether citizens could properly be tried under any circumstances by a military tribunal is left open in the order, to be decided at the proper time and by the proper authority. This question is one of some difficulty, and is, I fear, likely to result in serious embarrass meant to the military authorities and determined to the public service.

It has been held in Congress and elsewhere that military courts have not jurisdiction over citizens in any case, and that they cannot even try persons charged with being spies for the enemy unless they are foreigners, alien enemies, or belong to the Army, the Navy, or to the military in actual service of the Confederate States. The same doctrine has been recently asserted by high judicial authority in this State, where it has been held that a citizen who has bene convicted by a military commission of having acted as a spy and guide for the enemy must be turned over to the civil authorities, to be tried in the parish or county where the offense was committed. This was in the case of William Burlingame, a citizen of the parish of Sain Tammany, Louisiana, who, being arrested by my order and sent to this city for trial, was taken out of military custody on a writ of habeas corpus, and is now, I believe, in the jail in this county awaiting your requisition.

However great the evils likely to arise from this doctrine, I have thought it my duty to conform to these authoritative expositions of the law, and have in several instances ordered such persons to be turned over to the civil authorities.

While in Richmond I was handed a copy of your letter to the President on the subject of my order No. 2, in which I find the following paragraph:

It is with regret that I find myself continually brought as it were into conflict with the military authorities, whom I am most desirous to assist in every possibly way, but a wide-spread ignorance of the rights of citizens or indifference to them often renders it imperative.

For the implied censure of my conduct contained in this paragraph I was not prepared, as I was not aware that any conflict had ever arisen between myself and the civil authorities, and I was certainly ignorant that my personal and official relations with yourself had been in any manner unsatisfactory. If I have ever failed cordially to co-operate with you or promptly to respond to any of your wishes I am not aware of it, and am at a loss to know to what instances of conflict your letter refers.

While in command of the Louisiana Brigade at New Orleans and subsequently of a division at Corinth I am not conscious of ever having failed in treating you with that consideration demanded alike by your personal character and official position; and when at a latter period I was assigned to the command of Eastern Louisiana one of my first acts was to exert myself to cause the restoration of certain arms belonging to the State of Louisiana which had been seized for Confederate use. It may be that my administration of this district was not in accordance with your views, but I can hardly be censured for this when it is recollected that you were at Opelousas and I at Camp Moore, and that the