CHARLESTON, December 23, 1864.

(Received 24th.)

General S. COOPER,

Adjutant and Inspector General:

Your attention is respectfully invited to the fact that orders for the collecting of subsistence stores and forage be executed unless the agents of bureau at Richmond be instructed to fill requisitions of the commissary and quartermaster in this army. Please give this matter your early attention.

G. T. BEAUREGARD,

General.

[First indorsement.]

DECEMBER 24, 1864.

Quartermaster-General Commissary-General, for special attention. Every effort should be made to fill the requisitions.

J. A. SEDDON,

Secretary of War.

[Second indorsement.]

DECEMBER 24, 1864.

Respectfully returned.

I do not understand the dispatch, as all officers of this department collecting forage in South Carolina and Georgia are instructed to furnish General Beauregard's command, and no complaint has recently come to me. I think the dispatch is not written out as sent by General Beauregard.

A. R. LAWTON,

Quartermaster-General.

[Third indorsement.]

Respectfully returned.

Organic law, as well as the enactments of this Confederacy, warrant the commanding general of an army defending a country to impress subsistence necessary for his troops, and General Beauregard has the power to enforce the impressments made by his order, and it is to be inferred, under present circumstances, that he has the good will of the people generally to aid him. The country his army is depending on is plentiful compared with Virginia, where General Lee's army is operating, and the latter can get nothing except from the collections of this bureau; but the officers of this bureau can no longer impress, because they have no power to enforce it, and the people will not surrender their stores. Virginia is ravaged and drained, and General Lee's army must be supplied from the Carolinas by what the bureau officers can collect. Recently General Beauregard required the chief commissary of subsistence to furnish 15,000 men with sixty days' rations, and the order to assist in supplying Virginia was started by the chief commissary of subsistence to be impossible. Has was directed to send on what had been ordered for here, which would still have left General Beauregard's army in far better condition than was or is General Lee's. General Beauregard can exercise his legal powers to supply his army. The circumstances have arisen for which the law was made. This bureau has for a great been stating that, under the existing condition of the