SPECIAL ORDERS, HDQRS. DEPARTMENT OF MISSISSIPPI, Numbers 41.
Vicksburg, Miss., September 2, 1865.

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III. Company M, Second New Jersey Cavalry, is hereby detailed for service as escort company at these headquarters.

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VII. Company I, Third Maryland Cavalry, is hereby relieved from duty at these headquarters. The commanding officer will turn over, on proper receipts and invoices, to Lieutenant G. A. Hewlett, commanding Company M, Second New Jersey Cavalry, forty horses, with cavalry equipments. The remainder of the horses, surplus camp equipage, and ordnance stores, for which he is responsible, will be turned over to the officers of the proper staff departments at Vicksburg.

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By order of Major-General Slocum:

J. WARREN MILLER,
Assistant Adjutant-General.

WASHINGTON, September 2, 1865.

Major-General THOMAS:

Would it not be well to send some of the colored troops now at Greeneville either to Bristol or down the Mississippi, where their services are more needed?

ANDREW JOHNSON,

President United States.

EXECUTIVE OFFICE,

Washington, D. C., September 4, 1865.

Major General G. H. THOMAS,

Nashville, Tenn.:

I have information of the most reliable character that the negro troops stationed at Greenville, Tenn., are under little or no restraint, and are committing depredations throughout the country, domineering over, and in fact running the white people out of the neighborhood. Much of this is said to be attributable to the officers, who countenance and rather encourage the negroes in their insolence and in their disorderly conduct. The negro soldiery take possession of and occupy property in the town at discretion, and have even gone so far s to have taken my own house and inverted it into a rendezvous for male and female negroes, who have been congregated there, in fact making it a common negro brothel. It was bad enough to be taken by traitors and converted into a rebel hospital, but a negro whore house is infinitely worse. As to the value of the property, I care nothing for that, but the reflection that it has been converted into a sink of pollution, and that by our own forces, is, I confess, humiliating in the extreme. The people of East Tennessee above all others are the last who should be afflicted with the outrages of the negro soldiery. It is a poor reward for their long and continued devotion to the contra through all its perils. It would be far better to remove every negro soldier from East Tennessee, and leave the people to protect themselves as best they may. I hope you will at once give instructions to every officer in command of negro troops to put them under strict discipline and reduce them to order. I also hope, as suggested in a former dispatch, that you will