July 19, 1864
Navy Secretary Gideon Welles writes in his diary: “At the Cabinet-meeting to-day, the President brought forward specially the riot in Coles County, Illinois [on March 28, 1864] , and the controversy between Governor Peirpont and General Butler, with especial reference in the latter case to affairs at Norfolk, where the military authorities have submitted a vote to the inhabitants where they will be governor by martial law. Of course the friends of civil administration, who denied the validity of the whole proceeding, would not vote, and the military had it all as they pleased. This exhibition of popular sovereignty destroying itself pleases Butler. He claims to have found large quantities of whiskey, which he seized and sold. But all the whiskey in Norfolk is there under permits issued by himself. While Butler has talents and capacity, he is not to be trusted. The more I see of him, the greater is my distrust of his integrity. All whiskey carried to Norfolk is in violation of the blockade.”
President Lincoln appoints three members of board of directors of Union Pacific Railroad and Telegraph company – Jesse L. Williams of Indiana, former Congressman George Ashmun of Massachusetts, and Charles Sherman of Ohio.
President Lincoln writes out a statement in regard to a Republican conflict in Philadelphia involved Congressman William D. Kelley and Postmaster Cornelius A. Walborn: “We the undersigned citizens of Philadelphia, state that, after considerable investigation, and inquiry, we believe there are in the Philadelphia Post-Office between two hundred and fifty and three hundred employees under the Post-Master, and that no one of them openly supports the renomination of Judge Kelly for Congress, and that several of them say and intimate privately that it is because they are restrained by the Post-Master.”
Abraham Lincoln and the Civil War 
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