Embracing documents received too late for insertion in proper sequence.

UNION CORRESPONDENCE, ETC.

WASHINGTON CITY, September 28, 1862.

The PRESIDENT:

My apology for addressing you this communication is in fact that you were placed to invite it. Conscious of my inability to impart any information upon a subject with which you are already familiar, all I can hope to do is to quicken the interest and action of the military authorities upon a matte of acknowledged and urgent importance.

Now the rebellion may be most speedily and effectual put down involves as inquiry as to the methods best adapted to that end. Origination, as it did, in the Cotton States, and believing that the sentiment which still sustains it more inveterate in these States than in any others, I would carry the war into heart, not only for the purpose of crushing the rebellion itself, but as the quicken and surest way to reopen the Mississippi River; indeed, the reopening of that river is one of the first steps I would take in subduing the rebellion. Both in a military and commercial aspect this step is eminently important. It is important in a military view, first, because it would afford the means of cheap and easy communication between our troops disposed at different points on the Mississippi River and its navigable tributaries, and because it would facilitate the concentration of them at any one or more of those points; secondly, because it would cheapen the cost of supplying our men and animals at ore near New Orleans with provisions and forage. It would do that by subsisting the overflowing granaries of the Northwest for the remoter sources of such supplies in the East, and thirty, because, in securing to us the command of the Mississippi River, it would enable us to stop the communication between the revolted States and their armies east and west of that river, thus isolating each section as to the other, destroying the unity of their plans and combination, and cutting off the rebel forces of the river from their wonted source of supplies in Texas.

Commercially, the whole nation is deeply interested in the measure, and particularly so that people inhabiting Mississippi Valley. They are painfully anxious upon the subject. They have not yet complained that the hostile obstacles, shutting them and their commerce out from New Orleans and the Gulf, and so the commerce of Europe by the same channel from that valley, and virtually truing the Mississippi into a dry bed, have not yet been removed. They have appreciated the difficulties surrounding the national Government, and, while emulating the most zealous and liberal in supporting it, have patiently waited for the auspicious period when their great interest would be liberated. Nay, they are grateful for what the Government has done, rather complaining

54 R R-VOL XVII, PT II