WAR DEPT., PROVOST-MARSHAL-GENERAL'S OFFICE,

Washington, D. C., October 3, 1864.

Major-General HOOKER,

Commanding Northern Department, Columbus, Ohio:

Captain Meriweather, provost-marshal at Jeffersonville, Ind., telegraphs that there is an uprising in Orange and Crawford Counties. Five hundred men assembled to resist draft, armed, and taking horses, arms, and money from citizens and home guards, and have sent runners for re-enforcements. I have no other information in regard to this particular disturbance, but there is abundant evidence to show that there is a large number of bad men in Indiana, partially organized and armed to resist laws not agreeable to them. I sent you by mail last night copy of a report of an operative I now have in Indiana. A regiment of the Veteran Reserve Corps left Albany yesterday for Indiana, to be distributed as guards at headquarters of different provost- marshals. It started without reference to this disturbance. It will report to Colonel James G. Jones, provost-marshal-general at Indianapolis.

JAMES B. FRY,

Provost-Marshal-General.

SOUTH BEND, IND., October 3, 1864.

General FRY:

MY DEAR SIR: Home for a few hours, I find your reply to my telegraph to the President. I have not the time - speaking twice a day for the Government and the cause, as I do - to argue at length inn answer; but must say that your letter to Governor Parker only convinces me I am right. If men, by the fact of being drafted, are in the miliary service at the instant, other men cannot be taken on that draft in their place and the Government at the same time be capturing those who skedaddle as deserters. If the draft, thus construed, does not obtain the men, the plain remedy is the supplemental draft. To use your own illustration, which you acknowledge is extreme - if a district on the Canada border has 1,000 men drafted, and they all skedaddle, and one in the interior sends up 1,000 men to serve, then, if you can arrest the 1,000 in the first who ran, that district has 2,000 in the army and the latter 1,000. Such, hurriedly stated, is the opinion I gave on the law to our Board in this district, after the other construction produced riot, alienation, & c. With this plain construction, it seems hard that a harder one should be loaded on us at this critical moment.

Yours, very truly,

SCHUYLER COLFAX.

WAR DEPT., PROVOST-MARSHAL-GENERAL'S OFFICE,

Washington, D. C., October 3, 1864.

His Excellency WILLIAM M. STONE,

Governor of Iowa, Des Moines, Iowa:

SIR: I have the honor to acknowledge the receipt of a memorial of the Board of Supervisors of Monona County, Iowa, requesting that the citizens of that county be exempted from the present draft, with Your Excellency's indorsement thereon of the 22nd instantn.

48 R R - SERIES III, VOL IV