United States are the adherents of the Southern Confederacy. But whether their feelings are reasonable or unreasonable they earnestly desire you to intercede in their behalf and procure for them removal to some point farther west and a speedy exchange or a prompt discharge from the service.

Some 600 more paroled privates are daily expected here, which will include the balance of the Iowa troops captured at Shiloh, making a total of 300 of the Fourteenth and 340 of the Twelfth, for whom also I trust you will use your influence with the Government. I need not say to you that these men performed their duty as soldiers at Shiloh. The Iowa brigade maintained its position, driving back the enemy, until after 5 p. m., and was ordered to fall back with no enemy in view of its front. Nor did the remainder of the Twelfth and Fourteenth surrender until they found themselves surrounded by 15,000 troops and after every other regiment in that part of the field had retreated or surrendered.

But there is another subject to which I earnestly beg Your Excellency's attention. Two hundred and fifty commissioned officers taken at Shiloh are now at Selma, Montgomery, Ala., and Macon, Ga. Among them are the company commissioned and non-commissioned officers of the Fourteenth and Twelfth and the regimental officers of the Fourteenth and Eighth, as well as officers of several other regiments, including Major Stone and Colonel Geddes. These men are receiving less than one-fourth rations of a private in the U. S. Army, and are subjected to all the hardships and indignities which venomous traitors can heap upon them. They are without money or clothing, and a large number of them at Montgomery are imprisoned in a foul and vermin-abounding cotton shed. They are desirous for their discharge, and if bravery and cool and determined behavior deserves it none are more deserving of it than these Iowa men.

Will you not interfere with the President and General Halleck in their behalf? I should have written you before, but expecting to leave here every day I intended to report to you in person. Having experienced the tender mercies of the rebels I beg of you that you will exert yourself for these brave and meritorious men.

Were the officers of the Eighth, Twelfth and Fourteenth exchanged (and men) the three regiments could take the field with little delay. Excuse this hasty letter. I am quite unwell and hardly able to even write.

I am, most respectfully, your obedient servant,

SPECIAL ORDERS,

J. B. DORR, Quartermaster Twelfth Iowa.

HEADQUARTERS MUDLE DEPARTMENT,

I. The following-named officers of the volunteer force of the United States recently escaped from the military prison at Macon, Ga., will proceed to Washington and report in person to the Adjutant-General: Henry W. Mays, first lieutenant, Ninth Kentucky; N. J. Camp, second lieutenant, Twenty-third Missouri; George W. Brown, second lieutenant, Twenty-third Missouri; George H. Logan, second lieuten ant, Company I, Fourteenth Iowa; John S. Agey, first lieutenant, Company D, Fourteenth Iowa; I. N. Rhodes, second sergeant, Company I, Fourteenth Iowa; Milton Rhodes, third sergeant, Company I, Four

teenth Iowa. Maj. James Belger, quartermaster, U. S. Army, will furnish the necessary transportation.

By command of Major-General Wool:

WM. D. WHIPPLE,

Assistant Adjutant-General.

HEADQUARTERS, DABB'S HOUSE,

Near Richmond, Va., July 6, 1862.

Maj. Gen. GEORGE B. MCCLELLAN, U. S. Army,

Commanding Army of the Potomac.

GENERAL: I have been directed by the Secretary of War of the Confederate States to inform you that it is reported in the journals of the United States that Mr. William B. Mumford, of New Orleans, and Col. John L. Owen; of the Missouri State Guard, have been executed by the U. S. authorities-Mr. Mumford for having pulled down the U. S. flag in New Orleans and Colonel Owen upon a charge of bridge burning in Missouri. The former is stated to have been hung, the latter to have been shot.

Mr. Mumford, we are informed, pulled down the flag before the Federal forces had acquired possession of the city. The U. S. vessels were anchored before it and a demand for its surrender had been made but not complied with, the party that hoisted the flag having retired. Under these circumstances if true the execution of Mr. Mumford is considered as a murder of one of our citizens. I inclose the account of his execution from the New Orleans Delta.

Colonel Owen, it appears from the account given in the Missouri papers, as you will perceive from the inclosed slip, was shot without trial. He was a commissioned officer of the Second Division of the Missouri State Guard. Individuals have been put to death by the authority of the Confederate Government for burning bridges within its territory, and persons in military service coming disguised within its lines to destroy railroads have also been executed, but they have had a fair trial. If Colonel Owen entered your lines in disguise we cannot deny your right to try and punish him. But his execution without trial is not considered justifiable, and should he have acted in obedience to orders and not have been in disguise his execution is looked upon as murder.

Supposing then Mr. Mumford to have been executed for an insult to the U. S. flag hoisted in a city not in their possession and Colonel Owen to have been executed without trial the Confederate Government deems it to be its duty to call on the authorities of the United States for a statement of the facts, inasmuch as it is not intended to permit outrages of such a character to be perpetrated without retaliation. Hoping that no necessity may arise for such a course, I have the honor to be, your obedient servant,

[Inclosures--Newspaper slips.]

R. E. LEE,

General.

THE LINCOLNITES IN MISSOURI MURDER A SECESSIONIST.

The following is from the Hannibal (Mo.) Herald of June 10:

Information was brought into camp at Palmyra on Saturday last that Col. John L. Owen, a notorious rebel who has made himself conspicuous in burning bridges, cars and depots, firing into passenger trains, last summer and fall, was secreted at or near

his farm in Monroe. A detachment from Company A, Eleventh Regiment Missouri State Militia (Colonel Lipscomb), under command of Lieutenant Donahoo, was immediately sent out from Palmyra to hunt the outlaw. On approaching the farm of Colonel Owen on Sunday about 12 m. the squad discovered a negro running rapidly from the house toward a piece of brush. The lieutenant and his company immediately started for the brush and going into it discovered the game and soon bagged it. At first the colonel showed a determination to resist his capture, but finding such a proceeding useless he yielded. Preparations were made for his execution. He begged the soldiers to take him prisoner. They informed him that "taking prisoners" was played out. They then placed him upon a stump in front of a file of soldiers and at the word of command eight bullets pierced the body of the rebel, killing him instantly.

Thus has ended the career of a notorious bushwhacker and outlaw. He has met the just retribution of his damning crimes.

THE EXECUTION IN NEW ORLEANS.

The miserable hireling Butler is playing the tyrant with a high hand. His savage instincts are far ahead of the most ferocious native of Dahomey or Patagonia. A week or two since as our readers have already been informed he had William B. Mumford executed for tearing down the flag hoisted on the Mint by Commodore Farragut. He died as a patriot should die-with great coolness and self-possession. An instant before he passed into the presence of his Maker he was calm in his demeanor and on his countenance could be found no trace of the ordeal he was passing through.

Commenting upon the execution the black-hearted scribbler in The Delta has the following remarks which we copy because it speaks the sentiment of the Nero Butler and to show the vapid and sickening stuff now in the once eloquent Southern Delta:

"Mumford, the ill-starred youth whose name and fate will be a terror to all who are inclined to trifle with the Government or its sacred emblems in time to come, justly received the reward of his treason and madness in the presence of thousands of spectators as announced in The Delta of last evening. So far as our knowledge extends in the matter it is the first instance upon record of a man being tried, found guilty and executed for laying violent hands upon our national flag, and the lesson it conveys is a solemn and we trust will prove a salutary one. Mumford though standing only as a representative of parties equally guilty at heart as himself had the misfortune to mingle little more rashness with his treasonable intents than some of his traitor associates and paid the penalty with his worthless life. It is perhaps of very little importance whether this individual so depraved in his nature, so lost to all sense of patriotism and love of country, be dead or alive, and the recompense of forfeiture which he made in the sacrifice of personal existence is in no degree a compensation for the insult which he offered a great and magnanimous people by basely trampling their noble ensign under foot; and the thousands who witnessed the exit of this miserable person from a life he had disgraced must have learned if they had need of such a lesson that it is most dangerous to set at defiance a Government that from its very nature is self-protecting and will at all hazards and under all circumstances vindicate itself and avenge the insult offered its flag. Deluded men may have flattered themselves that because a rabble or mob sometimes rules within the narrow limits of some important town or corporation that there is no power under the Government sufficiently potent to arrest their mad career when their high-handed wickedness extends to a violation of symbols sacred to a great and powerful nation, but the example of yesterday must disabuse them of any such fallacy.

"The hauling down of the flag on the Mint was a much more cowardly act than entering the ranks in open and armed rebellion, for the perpetrator might well flatter himself that in the absence of those who had either the will or the power to redress the insult at the instant his escape in the mêlée of a mob-beleaguered city might be relied upon. But in this he misjudged and never did justice overtake a criminal more abandoned or punish a crime more revolting to the senses of every honorable, high-minded person. There could be no reprieve from the execution of a sentence so just; and forever after so long as time shall continue and the good old national flag floats over the Union-as float it will long after the present race of traitors are dead and buried-let him who would violently lay hands upon it to haul it down count well the cost by remembering the fate of Mumford; and lest by your neglect, citizens of New Orleans, some of your children may come to the same bad end teach them that hauling down the American flag is an act of treason and is synonymous with death."

HEADQUARTERS DEPARTMENT No. 2,

Maj. Gen. H. W. HALLECK,

Tupelo, July 6, 1862.

Commanding U. S. Forces, &c., Corinth, Miss. GENERAL: On the 15th and 16th of June I had occasion to address you according to the usages and forms of civilized war three several communications, one at least of which, concerning Surgeon Benjamin, C. S. Army, in my judgment called for the easy courtesy of an answer which up to this date has not reached me. You are of course the suf ficient judge as to the comity to be observed by you while commanding the Federal Army on my front, but I cannot permit your silence to pass without this record of my own sense of what is due to me from our relative positions and what I expected from a trained soldier. This said I have now to acquaint you with the chief purpose of this letter, to wit:

I have been informed from a number of sources that bands of your soldiery especially along the line of the Memphis and Charleston Railroad in the vicinity of Grand Junction are traversing the country with the avowed object of burning or otherwise destroying the property of those citizens of Mississippi and Tennessee who in obedience to the wishes of their Government, the orders of these headquarters and a substantially unanimous public sentiment have chosen to burn their own cotton; that is, their own property. I have been informed further that the property of more than one of our loyal citizens has been destroyed by these detachments. These acts might not excite surprise if done by men under certain commanders of Federal armies, officers inexperienced in the long-established usages of war or regardless of its amenities and animated by a spirit of fell vindictiveness, but I must be permitted to express my astonishment that such measures should have been resorted to by the army of an educated, experienced commander.

In view therefore of these flagrant violations of well-known rules of war touching the private property of citizens of belligerents on land involved in the causes now brought to your notice I shall instruct all officers under my command to execute any Federal officer of whatsoever rank who shall fall into our hands against whom it may be clearly established that he had commanded or been instrumental in the wanton destruction of any planter's immovable property. Further any officer or soldier caught in the act shall be summarily put to death. I shall profoundly regret any occasion for the exercise of this severity, and therefore do earnestly invoke your vigorous interference with your subordinates especially in the vicinity of Grand Junction and on the Mississippi River to stop conduct so unlike any ever tolerated by reputable officers in previous wars.

Respectfully, your obedient servant,

B. BRAGG.

HEADQUARTERS, Fort Columbus, July 6, 1862.

Col. WILLIAM HOFFMAN,

Commissary-General of Prisoners, Detroit, Mich.

COLONEL: Agreeably to your request I inclose herewith a list of the last detachment of Pulaski prisoners of war received at this post. I wrote to Colonel Dimick June 26 ultimo requesting to be furnished

*Not found.

with a list of prisoners of war and political prisoners transferred from this post to Fort Warren in October last. He writes in answer to that: "I have just forwarded to Colonel Hoffman a list of all the prisoners now at this post including the prisoners sent here by you." It is therefore presumed that a list from me will not be required. He also states that he has not the original list of the Hatteras prisoners which I sent him. I have this day received some 500 prisoners of war among which are some fifty officers. Will you not order these officers sent to Sandusky?

Very respectfully, your obedient servant,

G. LOOMIS,

Colonel Fifth Infantry, Commanding.

The prisoners of war that have been received to-day are very destitute of clothing and need a supply especially of underclothing for cleanliness. Will you authorize an issue from your stock on hand at this post! G. LOOMIS, Colonel Fifth Infantry, Commanding.

HEADQUARTERS ROLLA DIVISION,

Rolla, Mo., July 6, 1862.

Brigadier-General SCHOFIELD,

Commanding District of Missouri.

GENERAL: I trust you will pardon the delay of my reply to your letter of 1st instant referring to me for investigation the execution of Best (alias Morris or Morrison) by Major Tompkins, of the Thirteenth Cavalry Regiment, Missouri State Militia. The press of business, the confusion and disorder among a portion of the troops at this post and the attention to be given to the rebel force under Colonels McBride and Coleman constitute my only apology.

After a hurried investigation, general, I would respectfully report the following facts and conclusions collected from various sources and in part from the accompanying documents herewith submitted, marked A, B, C, D, E and F, together with a letter from Major Tompkins to myself, viz: That about 12 o'clock (m.) Sunday, 22d June, Major Tompkins, and with considerable danger to himself, in person and alone arrested a man calling himself Morrison, who said he was returning from Price's army, passing stealthily through our lines along the by-paths of the worst guerrilla communities, being armed and having upon his person a large package of letters from rebels to their friends at home, inciting them to guerrilla warfare, the said letters being inflammatory and treasonable in the highest, revealing the facts that Morris or Morrison was Best, and that he had before acted in the same capacity, and was to return South again and consequently to communicate all he should learn within our lines, showing that he was not simply a regular soldier of the Confederate Army returning home but that he was at least a spy. That before the letters were read he was identified as Old Best, of Livingston County, Mo., by one George Irving, private in Company F, First Illinois Cavalry, whose influence had resulted in the death of more Union men than of any one man in that section of the State. Best stated he had no other business than to convey said letters.

I learn that Major Tompkins after the arrest of Best delayed his execution only to satisfy himself clearly what was the character of the man and his own duty under General Schofield's Orders, No. 18. To do