SHINGTON, November 30, 1862.

MAJOR-GENERAL CURTIS, Saint Louis, Missouri:

Frank Blair wants Manter's Thirty-second, Curly's Twenty seventh, Boyd's
Twenty-fourth and the Ninth and Tenth Cavalry to go with him down the
river. I understand it is with you to decide whether he shall have them
and if so, and if also it is consistent with the public service, you will
oblige me a good deal by letting him have them.

A. LINCOLN.

ON EXECUTING 300 INDIANS

LETTER TO JUDGE-ADVOCATE-GENERAL.

EXECUTIVE MANSION, WASHINGTON, December 1, 1862.

JUDGE-ADVOCATE-GENERAL.

SIR:--Three hundred Indians have been sentenced to death in Minnesota by
a military commission, and execution only awaits my action. I wish your
legal opinion whether if I should conclude to execute only a part of them,
I must myself designate which, or could I leave the designation to some
officer on the ground?

Yours very truly,

A. LINCOLN.

ANNUAL MESSAGE TO CONGRESS, DECEMBER 1, 1862.

FELLOW-CITIZENS OF THE SENATE AND HOUSE OF REPRESENTATIVES--Since your
last annual assembling another year of health and bountiful harvests
has passed; and while it has not pleased the Almighty to bless us with a
return of peace, we can but press on, guided by the best light he gives
us, trusting that in his own good time and wise way all will yet be well.

The correspondence touching foreign affairs which has taken place during
the last year is herewith submitted, in virtual compliance with a request
to that effect, made by the House of Representatives near the close of the
last session of Congress.

If the condition of our relations with other nations is less gratifying
than it has usually been at former periods, it is certainly more
satisfactory than a nation so unhappily distracted as we are might
reasonably have apprehended. In the month of June last there were some
grounds to expect that the maritime powers which, at the beginning of
our domestic difficulties, so unwisely and unnecessarily, as we think,
recognized the insurgents as a belligerent, would soon recede from that
position, which has proved only less injurious to themselves than to
our own country. But the temporary reverses which afterward befell the
national arms, and which were exaggerated by our own disloyal citizens
abroad, have hitherto delayed that act of simple justice.

The civil war, which has so radically changed, for the moment, the
occupations and habits of the Americ