Pine Bluff daily graphic., 1896-10-26
EXECUTIVE MANSION, " AgYFTNGT0N Nov II f9h3

) Hon. Secretary of War;
 personally wish Jacob Freese of New Jer- sey to be appointed colonel for a colored regi- ment, and this regardless of whether he can tell the exact shade of Julius Cesar's hair Yours, etc, A. LINCOLN.
 In q telegram to General Hooker, June Il, 1863, he displayed military acumen a good deal 1eener than some of his experienced military advisers when he inquired: If the head of Lees army is at Martinsburg and the tail of it on the plank road between Fredericksburg and Charlottesville, the animal must be very slim somewhere. Could you not break him?'
 John Fl. Littlefeld, who was law student i'll the office of Lincoln 6 Herndon in 1858, in a letter written to Mir Herndon iii 1866, tells this incident in connection with the presidents 8 no- tion of the noted Yazoo pass expedition: ''One evening in 1862 Pet Halstead, several others and I called on MT, Lin coln, but found him out of the room, the explanation being that he was suf- fering with the toothache. We sat down in the private secretary's room and remained but few moments, in- tending to depart, when Mr. Lincoln, hearing our voices, came in, sat down beside me, just as he used to in the old office in Springfield, and notwithstand- ing the pain that afflicted him chatted humorously, with here and there flash of real logic, which showed that he comprehended the military situation.
 The Yazoo river expedition, he said, had been receiving a good deal Of his attention of late. He announced, by way of preamble, that he had found it necessary to yield a little here and there in order to keep peace in the mil itary family; that if he interfered in a matter not essentially vital the so called West Pointers-regular army officers who had the execution of all plans, would i'll some way or other defeat or obstruct his scheme, and that therefore, inasmueh as they had to be depended on at last. he found 1t best to trust them at first and rely on events and the pow CT of persuasion to reetify errors. ''In regard to the Yazoo river expedition, :" he said, pointing to large map hang ing on the wall, how can a force go down q river which is only few rods wide when it cannot descend another river a mile wide? And in this case, if it leaves the larger river. it will only wind about in the small stream and come out again into the same river. Following the Yazoo will bring us into the Mississippi, and then what has been accomplished? Nothing has been gained. can't make this clear, ; he said, with a merry twinkle ill his eye, better than to relate an incident that came under my own observation. Out in h. diana, when l was boy, one of our neighbors w~s troubled with an old SOW and her pigs, who in some strange way would break into his cornfield. Again and again the old man and his boys would drive them ont, but the family would soon be found back in the field again. One day, after a thorough search, the old man found a hollow log through which the old sow had made her way i'll. The log was at once taken out, and when replaced i'll the fence was 50 adjusted that nothing could through it gain an entrance to the field. What was the astonishment of the old lady next day to find that she and her family, entering the same log as of old, emerged from it outside of the fence in- stead of inside. It is just so. laughed the president, with the Yazeo river expedition. It comes out of the same side of the fence.
 When appealed to to pardon a soldier