addition to his general duties, is to take charge of those of McPherson and Sherman. There is still a lamentable deficiency of engineer officers.

No further news from Joe Johnston. It is certain that he is waiting only for his new re-enforcements from Bragg. His attack will bee made immediately on their arrival. We have no details of the late operations of General Banks. The report of his success, which I telegraphed the other day as brought by a gunboat, was certainly false. Admiral Porter has a later report that the SECOND assault has, like the first, been disastrously repulsed, but how true it is no one here can tell.

C. A. DANA

Honorable E. M. STANTON.

Secretary of War.

NEAR Vicksburg, June 29, 1863-9 a. m.,

VIA MEMPHIS, July 1-10 p. m.

(Received July 4-8 p. m.)

Two separate parties of deserters from Vicksburg agree in the statement that the provisions of the place are near the point of total exhaustion; that rations have now been reduced lower than ever; that extreme dissatisfaction exists among the garrison, and that it is agreed on all hands that the city will be surrendered on Saturday, July 4, if, indeed, it can hold on so long as that. Colonel C. R. Woods, who holds our extreme right on the Mississippi, has got out five of the thirteen guns of the sunken gunboat Cincinnati, and this morning opens three of them from batteries on the bluff. The others, including those still in the vessel, he will place as rapidly as possible in a battery he has constructed on the river half a mile in the rear of his lines. Though this battery has no guns in it, yet the enemy has been firing its heaviest ordnance at it for several days past, and has done to the embrasures some little damage, easily repairable. It commands the whole face of the town. On McPherson's front a new mine is now nearly completed, and will at furthest be ready to spring at daylight to tomorrow. It is intended to destroy internal rifle-pits with which the rebels still hold the fort whose bastion was overthrown by McPherson's former mine. If successful, it will give us complete possession of that fort, as the narrowness of the ridge on which it stands and the abruptness of the ravine behind it made it impossible that it should be defended by any THIRD line in the rear of that now being undermined. The new line in Sherman's front will probably not be ready so soon, but the engineer's morning report has not been made. No news from Joe Johnston.

C. A. DANA.

Honorable E. M. STANTON,

Secretary of War.

NEAR Vicksburg, MISS., June 30, 1863-2 p. m.,

VIA MEMPHIS, July 5.

(Received July 8-9. 20 a. m.)

General Grant this morning held a council of war with his army corps commanders to take their judgment on the question of trying another general assault, or leaving the result to the exhaustion of the garrison. The conclusion of the council was in favor of the latter policy, and as General Grant had himself previously strongly inclined to that course, it will, no doubt, be adhered to.