practice of cooking and eating in the rooms should be discontinued. It produces filth and confusion. In one room at Myrtle street I found two men roasting pork over the stove, the fumes filling the room and the fat soaking the floor. Tables should be provided; the meals cooked by regular details, served at regular hours, and no article of food of drink allowed in the rooms. Personal cleanliness. - This should be rigidly enforced. Every man on entering the prison should have a bath, his hair cut close, and be vaccinated, and afterward be compelled to keep his body clean. More ample facilities for washing are needed. Sleeping bunks. - The present sleeping bunks are worn out, dirty, and filled with vermin. Permanent bunks should be erected (of planed stock, that they may be washed) and placed at least three feet from the walls, and the lower berth eighteen inches from the floor. Each man should rise at a certain hour, take his bedding out to air, and then fold his blankets neatly and pile them at the head of his bunk. Suitable benches to sit on should be provided and all use of the bunks in the daytime strictly forbidden. Racks for clothing. - Racks should be built, so that each man may have a place to keep his effects, which should never be allowed to be kept about his bed. Police. - The floors should be scrubbed by hand (not flooded with water as now) every day, and disinfectants freely used. The walls and ceilings should be whitewashed at least once a month. Water. - The privies should be arranged and a fire-plug placed so that the vaults and sewers can be flooded every day.

The above suggestions embody the result of my immediate observations. Further report will be made when I shall have examined more minutely the prison routine. I desire to add that the commander and officers of the prison concur in these suggestions, and are most anxious to aid in securing some improvement in the sanitary condition of the prison.

Very respectfully, your obedient servant,

B. B. BREED,

Surgeon, U. S. Volunteers,

In Charge of Gratiot Street Military Prison Hospital.

SPECIAL ORDERS,
ADJT. AND INSP. GENERAL'S OFFICE, Numbers 47. Richmond, February 26, 1864.

* * * * * * *

XXXV. Colonel A. W. Persons, Provisional Army, C. S., is assigned to duty as commandant of the post at Andersonville, Ga.

He will have command of the prison guard and charge of the Federal prisoners at Camp Sumter, near that post.

* * * * * * *

By command of the Secretary of War:

JNO WITHERS,
Assistant Adjutant-General.

HEADQUARTERS DEPARTMENT OF NORTH CAROLINA,

Petersburg, Va., February 26, 1864.

General S. COOPER, Adjutant and Inspector General:

GENERAL: I have the honor to inclose copies of letter from Generals Peck and Palmer, and my answers; likewise my letter to you of

63 R R-SERIES II, VOL VI