Your ranks cannot be filled by the present draft. It is almost a failure, as nearly everybody is exempt. It takes more soldiers to enforce it than we get by it. A more complicated, defective, and impracticable law could scarcely have been framed. Moreover, the copperheads of the North have done everything in their power to render it inoperative.

Yours, truly,

H. W. HALLECK.

[30.]