thus doing, they have causelessly murdered non-combatants by hanging, by shooting, by cutting their throats, and by divers other cruel, inhuman, and outrageous methods. They have fired into railroad trains, killing and maiming soldiers and citizens, and placing in imminent peril the lives of women and children. They have burned and destroyed railroad bridges, thereby causing trains filled with non-combatants to be precipitated into streams, killing, drowning, and wounding many persons, including women and children. They have, in the darkness of night, summoned citizens to the doors of their dwellings and there shot them dead. They have deliberately, and without provocation, fired into dwellings, placing in extreme jeopardy the lives of innocent and helpless persons therein. They have abducted citizens from their dwellings and families and murdered them secretly, and by methods unknown to the community at large. They have practiced inhuman and diabolical cruelties upon prisoners in their hands by brutally whipping and hanging them until nearly dead. And all this has been done for no other reason than that the parties thus murdered and outraged were, and had been, true and faithful in their allegiance to the United States. More than this, they have robbed the loyal citizens of Northern Missouri of hundreds of thousands of dollars' worth of property, taking in numerous instances the only horse from a needy and dependent family. They have stripped thousands of families of clothing, money, grain, cattle, wagons, arms, and ammunition, and, in short, of everything which their cupidity could lead them to cover or their wants to desire. Nor have these operations been confined to a few or remote localities. Every county, every community, has thus been scourged, until scarcely a loyal family has remained untouched. Thus these desperadoes desolated the whole land, establishing a reign of terror. Under this scourge many loyal citizens have fled from the State to preserve their lives; many have been forced to abandon their families and take refuge in the Federal army, and for weeks and months thousands have been nightly driven to the woods and fields to find shelter from the fury of these prowling fiends.

Your Excellency will not, however, understand that during all this time the United States and State Governments have been inactive in their efforts to crush out rebellion in this section of the State. Many thousand troops have occupied and held the various important points in Northern Missouri, and at no time have these guerrillas been able to Northern Missouri, and at no time have these guerrillas been able to withstand, in open conflict, by any combination of their forces, the regularly organized troops of the Government. But the character of their warfare and their intimacy with the topography of the country have been such that eighteen months' experience has demonstrated that organized troops, in however large bodies, simply holding isolated points, with ample power to control any given point, but governed only by the rules and methods of ordinary and regular warfare, could not check the outrages referred to, nor assure peace and safety to the loyal people. Experience long since convinced the military authorities of this department that something more was necessary than the mere occupancy of the country by Federal troops and the dispersion of aggregated bands of marauders. Hence the orders of General Halleck and Schofield, the point of which was that all guerrillas taken in arms should be shot. Had those orders in every instance been strictly carried out, it cannot be doubted that the effect would have been most happy. But too many such persons fell into the hands of our military authorities, who lacked the nerve to administer the required penalty. The result was thousands of these desperadoes were released on parole and bond; the country was