Below is an act of Congress, passed last session, intended to exclude applicants not entitled to seats, but which, there is reason to fear, will be used to exclude some who are entitled.  Please get with the Governor and one or two other discreet friends, study the act carefully, and make certificates in two or three forms, according to your best judgement, and have them sent to me, so as to multiply the chances of the delegation getting their seats.  Let it be done without publicity.  Below is a form which may answer for one.  If you could procure the same to be done for the Oregon member it might be well.

A. Lincoln.

Telegram to general Meade. 
Executive Mansion, Washington, D. C., October 30, 1863.

Major-general Meade, Army of Potomac: 

Much obliged for the information about deserters contained in your dispatch of yesterday, while I have to beg your pardon for troubling you in regard to some of them, when, as it appears by yours, I had the means of answering my own questions.

A. Lincoln.

MEMORANDUM.

Executive Mansion,
Washington, October 31, 1863.

The Provost-Marshal-General has issued no proclamation at all.  He has in no form announced anything recently in regard to troops in New York, except in his letter to Governor Seymour of October 21, which has been published in the newspapers of that State.  It has not been announced or decided in any form by the Provost-Marshal-General, or any one else in authority of the Government, that every citizen who has paid his three hundred dollars commutation is liable to be immediately drafted again, or that towns that have just raised the money to pay their quotas will have again to be subject to similar taxation or suffer the operations of the new conscription, nor it is probable that the like of them ever will be announced or decided.

Telegram to W. H. Seward. 
War department, Washington, D. C., November 1, 1863.

Hon.  W. H. Seward, Auburn, N.Y.: 

No important news.  Details of Hooker’s night fight do great credit to his command, and particularly to the Eleventh Corps and Geary’s part of the Twelfth.  No discredit on any.

A. Lincoln.

TO POSTMASTER-GENERAL BLAIR.

Executive Mansion,
Washington, November 2, 1863.

Hon.  Montgomery Blair.