Western and Southern rivers the sum of $1,000,000 in addition to the amount recently asked for for the engineer service.

Very respectfully, your obedient servant,

J. F. GILMER,

[17.] Lieutenant-Colonel of Engineers, in charge of Bureau.

HEADQUARTERS C. S. ARMY IN Kentucky,
Brdstown, Ky., September 26, 1862.

To the PEOPLE OF THE NORTHWEST:

On approaching your borders at the head of a Confederate army, it is proper to announce to you the motives and the purposes of my presence. I therefore make known to you-

First. That the Confederate Government is waging this war solely for self-defense; that it has no designs of conquest, nor any other purpose than to secure peace and the abandonment by the United States of its pretensions to govern a people who never have been their subjects, and who prefer self-government to a union with them.

Second. That the Confederate Government and people, deprecating civil strife from the beginning and anxious for a peaceful adjustment of all difference growing out of a political separation which they deemed essential to their happiness and well-being, at the moment of its inauguraion sent commissioners to Washington to treat for these objects, but that their commissioners were not received or even allowed to communicate the object of their mission; and that on a subsequent occasion a communication from the President of the Confederate States to President Lincoln remained without answer, although a reply was promised by General Scott, into whose hands the communication was delivered.

Third. Tha amoung the pretexts urged for the continuance of the war is the assertion that the Confederate Government desires to deprive the United States of the free navigation of the Western rivers, although the truth is that Confederate Congress, by public act, prior to the commencement of the war, enacted that "the peaceful navigation of the Mississippi River is hereby declared free to the citizens of any of the States upon its borders, or upon the borders of its tributaries", a declaration to which our Government has always and it still ready to adhere.

From these declarations, people of the Northwest, it is made manifest that, by the invasion of our territories by land and from see, we have been unwilligly forces into a war for self-defense, and to vindicate a great principle, once dear to all Americans, to wit, that no people can be rightly governed except by their own consent. We desire peace now. We desire to see a stop put to a useless and cruel effusion of blood and that waste of nataional wealth rapidly leading to, and sure to end in, national bankreptcy. We are, therefore, now, as ever, ready to treat with the United States, or any one or more of them, on terms of mutual justice and liberality. And at this juncture, when our arms have been successful on many hard-fought fields; when our people have exhabited a constancy, a fortitude, and courage worthy of the boon of self-government, we resist ourselves to the same moderate demands that we made at the darkest period of our reverses-the demand that the people of the United States cease to war upon us and permit us in peace to pursue our path to happiness, while they in peace pursue