It requires a nice distinction on the part of an officer to discriminate in these matters and not run against the regulations of the Treasury Department, and I am sorry to say that some of my command commit blunders enough. I can give them all orders, but I cannot furnish them with brains.

I inclose you all the General Orders* I have issued in regard to trade, and you will see that my plan has been to touch it as lightly as possible, and not go counter to the wishes of the Government. i have also been waiting to see General F. P. Blair, jr., come out with a book on trade generally in these waters, telling how the matter is to be arranged. He says the trade should be free and unrestricted, but he does not say how much of it will go to the rebels and how much to the plantations. I think the whole matter is contained in a nut-shell. The military status must determine the direction of trade. The navy must see the rules enforced along the river. The military commander of posts should be so guarded that neither goods nor provisions should get into the hands of the enemy, and as much through trade to New Orleans allowed as the boats can convoy, the general commanding the department to say when and where traffic is to cease.

I think commerce should be a secondary consideration now; the Government do not get repair for the army of Treasury aids they have appointed. It is very much like setting a rat to watch the cheese to see that the mice don't get at it.

I am more interested in war matters myself, and in holding on to this river, which I know we can do. The rebels are now reduced to their two big armies at Chattanooga and Richmond, and the small squads they have at other places, supplying their armies as rivulets supply the Mississippi. The rivulets are nearly run out, and the rebels cannot, I think, raise 20,000 men with which to trouble the banks of the Mississippi.

These would be scattered about if they attempted it, and in such small parties that the home guards, if once established, could keep them down. Indiscriminate trade will aid these rebel parties very much if once established. There is one place I am little afraid of, and that is Port Hudson. It is kept so poorly guarded, and the guns on the water line are all kept mounted, when there is no use for them there. Port Hudson is only 40 miles from the great northern railroad, and you know that it don't take rebels long to travel 40 miles, especially as half the way is railroad-from Clinton to Port Hudson. Some party of 4,000 or 5,000 men could go into Port Hudson any night and take it. It is a trifling affair altogether; I went all through the works, and there were twenty places where a determined set of men would walk in without trouble. It is manned entirely by negroes, who are not, in my opinion, equal to the old Napoleon Guard, or to the French zouaves I saw in the Crimea.

You would have laughed, I know, had you seen the fortifications about which Banks' army made so much ado. The Army of the Tennessee would not have stopped to dig a ditch before such a place, and yet when General Grant was in New Orleans, the newspaper organ of General Banks was guilty of the bad taste of trying to prove in some very lame articles that Banks was the hero of the Mississippi.

We all know that when Vicksburg fell that Port Hudson fell in

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*Not found.

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