any boats come within your jurisdiction with exemptions from Government service, you will not respect such exemptions in cases of necessity.

Third. As soon as your cavalry has recruited after its fatiguing campaign on the Mississippi River above, you will direct its operations toward that river in your front. You will endeavor to get possession of all able-bodied negroes, horses, mules, and transportation in those districts or settlements along the Bayou Macon, Tensas River, Mississippi, and intermediate lakes and bayous which are of ready and easy access to the enemy. The negroes will be sent to these headquarters, and their owners will be paid the time established by the captain or quartermaster for the district, when they can be returned.

All surplus mules and horses will at once be sent here. You will take particular care to break up the enemy's colonization system of renting of abandoned plantations to agents of the U. S. Treasury Department. In such cases all the negroes and teams will be taken, and such other measures taken as will effectually prevent the culture of cotton. In cases where plantations are under cultivation by their owners or for their benefit, you will leave as much labor and teams as may be necessary to cultivate supplies of grain, but will in all cases take such steps as will prevent the culture of cotton for the enemy's market. There will undoubtedly come under your observation cases where simulated transfers have been made to Federal citizens or agents, and you will regard such cases as bona-fide transfer. The end of chief importance, however, is to break up the enemy's Government plantations (as they are called), and secure the negroes and teams for our own use.

Fourth. The major-general commanding further directs that you pay especial regard to the subject of passports, permitting no person to pass in or out of your lines without a passport from or vised at these headquarters. Passport from department headquarters must in all cases be vised at these headquarters, and persons coming into your lines with passes from or under pretense of going to Shreveport will be sent under guard to this place, as will all other persons who may be arrested by your command without passports or with other than those emanating from or vised at these headquarters. Passports have been given to Messrs. Stevenson and Menard to ship cotton by boat under certain conditions to the enemy's lines. Your attention is called to your previous instructions in regard to these cases. No other passports have been given, and none will be respected by you derived from other authority than these headquarters. The same rule which applied to passport for individuals will be applied to passport or permits to ship cotton.

Fifth. The Government divested itself of all proprietary right in cotton lying in the Macon and Tensas Rivers, not being able to remove it, and Lieutenant-Colonel Broadwell, chief of cotton bureau, is desirous of procuring more cotton for the Government in the same localities. He has been informed of the major-general's opinions in reference to this, and the major-general commanding directs that no impressment of private cotton for the use of the Government will be permitted within your jurisdiction, nor will you permit any other course to be pursued tending to force alienation of private cotton for Government use. He desires that you furnish him an estimate of the amount of cotton in private hands east of the Ouachita River, and report t him as far as you are able, its condition, whether in