duce. Louisa is well aware of my feelings inthis matter, and my wife and family are all that have prevented my leaving here to fight against this miserable, fanatical horde of abolitionists. Louisa was here when my cousin from Michingan was and knows that I assisted him for a certain consideration to build a certain ---. It is completed and works most admirably. If you can suggest any way that I can plainly write and thus give you a description of it I will do so most cheefully. At all events I am ready to dispose of it South. She (Lou) can give you the particulars, as she saw the model and knows to what I refer. * * *

EDWARD B. WILDER.

NEW YORK, September 11, 1861.

Honorable WILLIAM H. SEWARD, Secretary of State.

SIR: Referring to the communication of Russell Sturgis, esq., in behalf of Mr. E. B. Wilder, a prisoner in Fort Lafayette, herewith submitted, I beg leave to say that I have known Mr. Sturgis intimately for many years and I have to ask that you will give his statement in this case a candid consideration. He is one of our most highly respected merchants, of unimpeachable integrity, as firm as a rock in his Union sentiments and I am sure would be the very last man to disguise the truth to serve the best friend on earth. I have no personal knowledge of this case, but possessing the fullest confidence in Mr. Sturgis' representation I commend it earnestly to your attention.

Very respectfully, your obedient servant,

C. H. MARSHALL.

[Indorsement.]

I concur in ever word expressed above.

M. H. GRINNELL.

[Inclosure.]

NEW YORK, September 11, 1861.

Honorable W. H. SEWARD, Secretay of State.

SIR: I take the liberty to address you on behalf of a Mr. Edward B. Wilder now confined in Fort Lafayette, New York Harbor. Mr. Wilder I have known for many years and he has during the space of time been much in my employ. Mr. Wilder has property in North Carolina where he resided for some years, and some two years since removed from North Carolinaon account as I will know of his and his family's very great dislike to slavery and its institutions. This has always been his sentiment often repeated to me in conversation, and I truly believe that both himself and Mrs. Wilder possess very strong Northern feeling, they both being natives of the North.

Mr. Wilder's cousin invented a rifle battery which they exhibited to me some time since and I recommended his showing it to Government, which (by a letter I have received from the fort under date of 8th instant, a copy of which I now inclose) I notice he did. It is true I cannot reconcile the statement of his motives for his peculiar communication to his Southern friends that he gives in his letter to me to what I have though to be his upright and manly character. But yet I cannot disbelieve what he names to me to have been his motive for so