Pardon me for calling your attention to their present unhappy condition. I know your multiplicity of business and feared perhaps you might not have had sufficient time to look after this matter. I deeply sympathize with all our civil officers from Governors of States up to Cabinet members and President in these time of great care, unceasing anxieties and unending toil, having not only the ordinary labors and cares of office but all the additional labor and care of war times. We pray for you all. We feel that the Lord can sustain you all and overrule our present afflictions for our national and individual good.

This war properly conducted will renovate, ennoble and bless our nation. We shall yet be a free and happier people. Only let us carefully observe the working and directions of Providence. Who can tell but like Esther in the Eastern court our present State and national officers have been called to the kingdom for just such a time as this; and though your labors, cares, anxieties, &c., may be greater than any of your predecessors for years yet the reward will be in proportion. It is nothing to build a ship compared with the skill, exposure and labor to run her safe among reefs, shoals, rocks, sands while the waves foam and lash and the tempest howls and beats furiously upon her and yet at last in spite of all land her safe in the desired haven. Our fathers did a great and good work to form and build up this beloved country but the men who will save it will accomplish a far greater.

Please pardon the trespass upon your time. I should not have presumed so much but for the fact that by birth and rearage we are both Marylanders; by adoption Iowans and profession patriots, and purpose death to traitors.

Yours,

J. H. BUSER.

[Inclosure Numbers 2.]

MIDDLETOWN, IOWA, July 18, 1862.

Honorable SAMUEL J. KIRKWOOD.

DEAR SIR: Inclosed with this I take the liberty of sending you a letter I this day received from a brother in the Fourteenth Iowa the paroled prisoners at present at Benton Barracks, Saint Louis. You are acquainted I presume with the movements of these Iowa paroled prisoners since they entered the Union lines. It appears that they have got into some difficulty with the military authorities in regard to the performance of garrison duty which has been assigned them. It pains us to know that men who braved death on the battle-field in defense of their country and endured the hardships and sufferings of prisoners in the hands of their enemies should be subjected to more humiliating and degrading treatment from their own Government (or those who represent it) than they did from their did from the rebels. [The] Government should certainly require no duty of our paroled prisoners that could be constructed as bearing arms against the rebel States, or which they (the prisoners) believed to be a violation of their oath. And if our Government wants 300,000 more troops it should see that its present volunteers were not treated as convicts. If the boys are wrong in the position which they have taken they are honestly and conscientiously wrong [and] measures should be taken that would be calculated to convince them of the fact.

They have not been paid since January and have been entirely destitute of funds since they returned to our lines, and it was only by great exertion they raised the necessary funds to pay for a dispatch to you in reference to their condition while at Nashville. The only apology which I shall make for troubling you with this is the interest I feel for these