To William A. Hammond [1]
Submitted to the Surgeon General, with the request that he will report to me any contemplated action of his in the premises & his reasons. A. LINCOLN
July 3. 1863
Annotation
[1] AES, DLC-RTL. Lincoln's endorsement is written on a letter from Henry Hopkins, John A. Bowman, Chauncey B. Thomas, Thomas G. Carver, and Rodney Gage, chaplains of the army hospitals in Alexandria, Virginia, July 3,Page 314
protesting the proposed reduction of the number of chaplains to one per division. On July 7 Hammond returned the letter with a lengthy endorsement disapproving the request on the basis that under the proposed reduction each chaplain would have to minister to approximately six hundred men, which ``is no greater than that [number] embraced commonly in a parochial charge.''
