on hand at the principal depot twenty days' subsistence supplies for this army in addition to the supplies now required to be kept on the persons of the troops and in the general supply train.

I am, very respectfully, your obedient servant,

S. WILLIAMS,

Assistant Adjutant-General.

HEADQUARTERS ARMY OF THE POTOMAC, OFFICE OF PROVOST-MARSHAL-GENERAL,
June 19, 1864 - 10 p. m.

[General A. A. HUMPHREYS:]

GENERAL: A colored man named Riley had been sent in from the Second Division, Eighteenth Army Corps. He is very ignorant and makes a very confused statement; ;but the following connected store is elicited from him: He says that up to Friday a week ago he was living in Richmond; that at that time he hired himself as a servant to a Lieutenant Phillips, of the First South Carolina Rifles; that he went with him to where Grant was on the Chickahominy; that on the Monday following went with a wagon train which he understood to belong to Wilcox's division to some place near Malvern Hill; that he understood his master to be in McGowan's brigade; that day before yesterday,at about 6 p. m., "right smart" of troops having moved before, he went, as he was ordered to do, with a wagon train of, say, 100 wagons, which he thinks was the train of Wilcox's division, to a pontoon bridge, which they reached yesterday at 12 o'clock; that after crossing it they came down toward Petersburg, crossing the railroad where it was torn up; that the wagon train encamped last night, and that this morning he came on, leaving Petersburg to the right, till he struck the Appomattox River; that he was fired upon by the rebel and Union pickets and that he swam the river to our lines.

His story has borne the test of a very careful examination, and the First South Carolina Regiment, in McGowan's brigade, was originally a battalion and was known as the First South Carolina Rifles. Our scouts to-day went out on the left to the Jerusalem plank road, the first large road west of the Norfolk and Petersburg Railroad. They followed it southerly to a point where they found a post which was marked as being four miles from Petersburg; they went half a mile beyond, where they found a road going westerly from it. At the intersection was a rebel cavalry picket of about twenty-five men, who fired upon the scouts and they returned. On their was they saw the rebels very busily engaged in the erection of a considerable earth-work, or fort, as they call it, about a mile and a half south of Petersburg and about half a mile westerly of the Jerusalem plank road before alluded to. Between this earth-work and the Jerusalem plank road the rebels had a skirmish line.

Very respectfully,

GEORGE H. SHARPE,

Colonel, &c.

HEADQUARTERS ARMY OF THE POTOMAC, June 19, 1864.

Lieutenant Colonel E. GOULD,

Commanding Dismounted Cavalry, General Supply Train:

SIR: Your letter of the 17th instant reached me this morning and has been laid before the major-general commanding, by whom I am