EXECUTIVE DEPARTMENT,

Austin, April 7, 1864.

Major General J. B. MAGRUDER:

SIR: This letter will be handed you by Colonel D. B. Culberson, adjutant and inspector general of the State. Colonel Culberson is fully authorized to issue any orders that may be necessary, after seeing you, to aid in the organization of the troops, and upon the plan, or nearly so, proposed in your letters. I think, as before stated to you, that the conscript element under forty-five years of age should be allowed to form companies wherever they prefer doing so, and, as information is conveyed slowly over the State, that there should be as much liberality in giving them time to volunteer as possible, so that they may certainly receive information or notice that they must do so or lose the opportunity. Those who are to compose the serve corps proper should have secured to them all the privileges afforded by the recent act of conscription. I will be necessary that as much liberality shall be exercised as possible in detailing or exempting for agricultural, mechanical, and other pursuits. The details for every purpose already issued from the officer of the adjutant and inspector general should be respected. Those details embrace physicians, mechanics, blacksmiths, tanners, laborers in workshops of the State, &c., and some for hauling cotton with. Number detailed for the latter purpose from the adjutant-general's office by my authority are but few, and I was surprised at the statement contained in one of your letters as to the great number of men detailed for hauling cotton for State, for, if made at all, they were without my authority and knowledge. I shall expect that every civil officer of the State, from the highest to the lowest, who may be now in the service shall be dropped from the organization.

The organization proposed by you virtually deprives the State of troops and places her entire military force, or nearly so, into Confederate service; liberality, therefore, upon the subjects mentioned, will be expected from the Confederate authorities, and I have no doubt will be deemed by them but just and proper. The State is now beginning to manufacture powder. She is perfecting the machinery and appliances necessary to make a good article. She will soon turn out, as I hope, some complete batteries from her own foundry. She is now completing carriages, caissons, ammunition chests, &c., to make available for the field some cannot of her own, to be placed in the possession of Brigadier-General Ford. She is having constructed machines for spinning cotton yarn, and carrying on through contract to a limited extent the manufacture of arms, pistols, &c. She is encouraging individuals and companies, and protecting them in the employment of their capital for the introduction of machinery for the manufacture of cotton and woolen goods, carding reels, manufacture of iron, &c.

In the prosecution and encouragement of all these enterprises she should be sustained, her policy respected, her requests readily granted. In my view the highest interacted, her requests readily granted. In my view the highest interests of the country require it. Stripped as she will be of military force and means, she may still do much by proper concessions made from the Confederate authorities, and none of them but what she has a right to claim. As to the number of State troops in the field, or rather in camp, your information is very different from mine, and I have information