President writes Gen. Hunter about Gen. Fremont and his difficulty in Dept. of West: "Gen. Fremont needs assistance. . . . His cardinal mistake is that he isolates himself, & allows nobody to see him; and by which he does not know what is going on in the very matters he is dealing with. He needs to have, by his side, a man of large experience. Will you not, for me, take that place? Your rank is one grade too high to be ordered to it; but will you not serve the country, and oblige me, by taking it voluntarily?" Abraham Lincoln to David Hunter, 9 September 1861, CW, 4:513.

Discusses problems of building ironclad boats with Cornelius S. Bushnell, Connecticut industrialist. George H. Robinson, "The Builders of the First Monitor," Century Magazine, XLI, 156; West, Welles, 151.