or reverse traverses to keep your casemate batteries from being destroyed. I will send some submarine mortars down to be placed on the keys, near Letel [?] Island. They may be of service.

Very respectfully,

W. H. C. WHITING,

Brigadier-General.

HEADQUARTERS,
Golding Place, January 25, 1863.

Major HILL, Assistant Adjutant-General:

A dispatch sent by Major Nethercutt to General Robertson (and brought here by mistake), dated 10 o'clock p. m. to-day states that the enemy had passed Trenton on their way toward Kinston. Nothing is said as to the force. The cavalry had passed before Nethercutt wrote.

JOHN A. BAKER,

Colonel, Commanding Forty-first North Carolina Infantry.

[Indorsement.]

JANUARY 26, 1863.

General SMITH:

The above just received.

W. H. C. WHITING,

Major-General, Commanding.

NAVAL COMMANDANT'S OFFICE,

Wilmington, N. C., January 26, 1863.

Honorable JAMES A. SEDDON,

Secretary of War:

I have the honor to acknowledge receipt of your letter of 22nd instant, and in compliance with its request inclose extract copy of my communication of 2nd December, 1862.*

The threatening attitude of the enemy has confined me to this place, where we have great naval interests at stake; but if the men were furnished they might undergo preparatory training at the battery erected on the right bank of Cape Fear river for the protection of the iron-clad gunboats we are constructing, and, as part are drilled, detailed for the movable batteries to which my letter refers.

I am, very respectfully, your obedient servant,

W. F. LYNCH,

Flag-Officer.

GOLDSBOROUGH, January 26, 1863.

Honorable JAMES A. SEDDON,

Secretary of War, Richmond:

MY DEAR SIR: Since writing you last I have visited Wilmington, Magnolia, and Kinston. The fortifications at the former place are very strong and we will be enabled to make very effective resistance against an attack by land. With the troops from General Beauregard, General Whiting can hold them until our forces from Magnolia and this place can be brought to his relief. The matter to be apprehended at Wilmington is the passage of the iron-clads past the forts, which would

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*No inclosure found. See letter from Lynch to Seddon, December 2, 1862, p. 789.

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