972 MO., ARK., KANS., IND. T., AND DEPT. N. W. [CHAP. XXV.

IX. He is in hopes that a long life of ease and rest, after the establishment of a peace, will reward them for the immense labor they have undergone, in riding to the North Fork and back, in making several trips to their homes in Texas, at the expense of the Government, and in being cruelly compelled to half work for half a day something less than one day in twenty. Sic itur ad astra. It is by so heroic labors, and by hardships so incredible, nobly, patiently borne, that men ascend to the stars, and their glory becomes eternal.

X. Above all, he assures the men of his profound penitence and contrition for not being able to lend them, and use in purchasing provisions and forage for them, and in paying sick soldiers discharged, all his own moneys, and to keep the same moneys on band at the same time, to use in some other way for their benefit.

XI. He apologizes to them for not being able to create a world out of nothing, and to transport money to the Choctaw Nation, out of a treasury guarded by Mr. Memminger; upon a simple request transmitted by telegraph. He equally apologizes for having permitted superior officers and a horde of vagabonds to take and appropriate to themselves the arms and supplies, for the want of which the white men of his command are unarmed, lean and haggard with hunger and destitution; their horses skeletons, and themselves naked, barefoot, and destitute of everything.

XII. He apologizes to them for being in command of the Indian country; for the necessity of doing anything to secure that country to the Confederacy; for the outrage committed upon them by Providence, in making any Indian country at all; for his severity and harshness in punishing them without sentence of court-martial, for the most innocent and even laudable actions; for inclosing himself with a chain of sentinels, and allowing no soldier to have access to him; for listening to no complaints, giving them no information, and refusing to prepare papers for them, and relieve them and their officers from duty; and especially for his own idleness, while they have reared so many monuments of their industry, until their toils and hardships have brought upon them a premature old age.

XIII. He is greatly grieved that they have been compelled to remain so long in the service, and regrets that each of them could not have been fortunately blessed with some one of the diseases so prevalent at Fort McCulloch, and for which many less deserving citizens have been discharged; and he has been profoundly impressed with a sense of the unjust partiality of Providence, in bestowing on so many others, and not on them, the welcome boons of inguinal hernia, pulmonalis, hepatitis chronicus, gastritis chronicus, and general debility, by which each of the fortunate recipients of these blessings in disguise was unfit for duty precisely forty days.

XIV. He regrets that there is nothing in the Regulations, or the Articles of War, that enables all the free citizens of a country to be in the army and at home at the same time, to have money paid them when there is none, to relieve them from eating beef at all and give them bacon every day in the week, and to enable them to toil and fight for their independence by proxy. Re condoles with them for these unheard-of cruelties, admires their cheerful constancy and patience under them, and is profoundly penetrated with a sense of their unprecedented gratitude.

XV. He regrets the unheard-of hardships to which the men have been subjected in performing picket duty and standing guard, and the ruinous consequences to their health and constitution of the immense labor