that it is much better to lose your men for thirty or sixty days than altogether.

Your own letter presents, in a striking manner, the fact that we have but a choice of evils. I will do my best to aid you; but you can scarcely conceive the difficulties which encompass me in this task. The enormous masses of the enemy threading us in the West; his naval expeditions hovering over the coats of North Carolina, South Carolina, Georgia, Florida, Alabama, Mississippi, Louisiana, and Texas; his force below us on the Peninsula; the invasion of Western Virginia, all combine to assail me with burly demands for re-enforcements, and prevents my withdrawing troops from any of the points named, and our citizens themselves, with natural weakness, refuse to volunteer for distant service while their homes are threatened.

The Department can only trust to the skill and prudence of our generals and the indomitable spirit of our people to maintain a struggle in which the disparity of numbers, already fearful, becomes still more threatening from the impossibility of adding to our stock of arms.

I am, your obedient servant,

J. P. BENJAMIN,

Secretary of War.

JANUARY 25, 1862.

Brigadier-General LORING,

Commanding Army of the Northwest:

GENERAL: The undersigned officers of your command beg leave to present their condition to your consideration as it exists at Romney. I is unnecessary to detail to you,who participated in it all, the service performed by the Army of the Northwest during the last eight months. The unwritten (in will never be truly written) history of that remarkable campaign would show, if truly portrayed, a degree of severity, of hardship, of toil, of exposure and suffering that finds no parallel in the prosecution of the present war, if indeed it is equaled in any war. And the alacrity and good-will with which the men of your command bore all this hardship, exposure, and deprivation would by death and disease, the remainder were about preparing quarters to shield them from the storms of winter in a rigorous climate. Many had prepared comparatively comfortable quarters, when they were called upon to march to Winchester and join the force under General Jackson. This they did about the 1st of December, with the same alacrity which had characterized their former conduct, making a march of some 140 miles at that inclement season of the year..

After reaching Winchester, as expected, was ordered in the direction of the enemy, when all cheerfully obeyed the order, with the confident expectation that so soon as the object of the expedition was attamed they would be marched to some comfortable position, where they could enjoy a short respite and recruit wasted energies for the spring campaign.

The terrible exposure and suffering on this expedition can never be known to those who did not participate in it. When men pass night after night in the coldest period of a cold climate without tenths, blankets, or even an as to cut wood with, and without food twenty-four hours, and with some of the men nearly two days at a time, and attended by.