HEADQUARTERS SECOND BRIGADE,
February 8, 1862.

General FLOYD:

SIR: We have heard firing down the river. As we are on the outpost it becomes my duty to inform you of the fact at once. I have posted the necessary infantry pickets, and would suggest that a cavalry detachment be sent over immediatelyand sent as a scouting party down the railroad in the direction of the bridge recently destroyed by the enemy. I have also heard that the enemy are landing troops at that point. These facts and suggestions are respectfully submitted for your consideration.

Respectfully, your obedient servant,

John McCAUSLAND,

Colonel, Commanding Second Brigade.

[7.]

General FLOYD,

Clarksville:

General Beauregard recommends you to make as many small traverses as possible in your works for protection against shells. Construct them of sand-bags if you have them; otherwise of timber filled in with earth.

W. J. HARDEE,

Major-General.

[7.]

KNOXVILLE, TENN., February 10, 1862.

Honorable JEFFERSON DAVIS,

President, &c.:

SIR: Let me suggest that your Government has the meat of 100,000 hogs at several points along our railroad from Pistols to Chattanooga. If East Tennessee is invaded (which I fully believe can be done in any forty-eight hours under an enterprising leader and a force of cavalry) these stores of provisions ought to be sent to upper Georgia, or certainly to Chattanooga, by steam-boat or rail, or both, or some one should be authorized to burn and destroy it rather thatn to allow the enemy to get it. Let me suggest, too, that the forces here be not removed to any point out East Tennessee. I hear that Colonel Gillespie's regiment expects in a few days to join General Crittenden's headquarters via Nashville. When he takes thus one-third of our small force from this point it will invite the enemy to make an immediate raid upon us, capture this post, take possession of our roads, bridges, and supplies. Can you not therefore contermand any order by which Colonel Gillespie, or any other commander here in East Tennessee, is directed to march his troops out of this threatened section? I hope a formed suggestion has been received and acted upon, viz, to send some effecient commander to this point. We, the secessionists not regularly enrolled, have determined to act as minutement when the invasion takes place, and there is no one here fitted by experience and position, &c., to rally around. The country is perfectly defenseless, not troops, enough to guard the public stores, below 3,000 men all told, and one fourth of these unarmed, and these not concentrated, but at Cumberland Gap, or at our bridges, or scouting near the largest passes across the mountain. Then, two-thirds of the