beneath the tramp of hostile armies. The convention of Missouri made for her a similar history and her fields are drenched with the blood of her sons!

We have addressed you thus freely in plain words that thee may be no misunderstanding. We have not stooped to pick the delicate phrases of a new-fangled loyalty.

We do not counsel treasonable acts or combinations; we do not advise violence in conduct or unkindness in feeling; we abet no resistance to the law or its constituted authorities. But we think and say that we should not consult our fears rather than our consciences; we should not volunteer our substance to the taxgatherer or our hands to the fetters. If we are doomed let us not be suicides. Whilst we are permitted to speak let us speak boldly for the truth and justice and civil liberty; whilst we are permitted to vote let us declare by our bolts that we cling to State rights as the only barrier to oppression and that we know no necessity superior to the Constitution.

Let us continue to advise as the Union party did in February last "that if it be found we cannot live together in harmony under the Constitution our fathers framed let us as brethren agree to part in peace," and to disclaim indignantly the doctrine of coercion by arms.

If we cannot command let us at least invoke the blessings of peace--peace to a distracted land which partisan sectionalism has summoned to hatred and slaughter! Peace for the sake of those republican institutions which our forefathers left us and which are sinking fast in the red abyss of civil war! Peace for the sake of palsied labor and idle trade! Peace for our good old State, distracted and prostrate, doomed else to be the prize as she is daily more and more the victim of war!

H. D. FARNANDIS.

JOSHUA WILSON.

WM. B. STEPHENSON.

HEADQUARTERS ARMY OF THE POTOMAC,
Washington, October 29, 1861.

Major General N. P. BANKS,

Commanding Division, Muddy Branch, Md.

GENERAL: There is an apprehension among Union citizens in many parts of Maryland of an attempt at interference with their rights of suffrage by disunion citizens on the occasion of the election to take place on the 6th of November next.

In order to prevent this the major-general commanding directs that you send detachments of a sufficient number of men to the different points in your vicinity where the elections are to be held to protect the Union voters and to see that no disunionists are allowed to intimidate them or in any way to interfere with their rights.

He also desires you to arrest and hold in confinement till after the election all disunionists who are known to have returned from Virginia recently and who show themselves at the polls, and to guard effectually against any invasion of the peace and order of the election. For the purpose of carrying out these instructions you are authorized to suspend the habeas corpus. General Stone has received similar instructions to these. You will please confer with him as to the particular points that each shall take the control of.

I am, sir, very respectfully, your obedient servant,

R. B. MARCY,

Chief of Staff.