July 20. — The Chamber of Commerce, at Cincinnati, Ohio, at a business meeting, expelled thirty-three members of their body for refusing to take the oath of allegiance.—At New-York City a large meeting of merchants was held, to adopt measures for the relief of the negro sufferers by the riots. Speeches were made by Jonathan Sturges, Richard Warren, A. F. Dow, and others; and resolutions were adopted, pledging the protection of the merchants to the negroes, in pursuing their customary avocations.
—Colonel Bussey, Chief of Cavalry of the army under General Sherman, returned to Jackson, from an expedition to Canton and beyond. At Canton, on the eighteenth, he met Jackson’s rebel cavalry division, four thousand strong, with three pieces of artillery, and, after a severe engagement, drove him across the Pearl River. The National force consisted of four thousand cavalry, under Busscy, and one thousand infantry, commanded by Colonel Wood, of the Seventy-eighth regiment of Ohio. They destroyed the railroad bridge over the Big Black, one mile of trestle-work between the Big Black and Canton, burning Way’s Bluff Station, destroying six miles of the track of the Jackson and New-Orleans and Mississippi Central Railroad, five locomotives, fifty cars, thirteen large manufacturing establishments and railroad buildings; completely destroyed the Dixie Works, and burned a large quantity of lumber. At Canton, they also destroyed the railroad, burned two locomotives, twenty-five cars, the depot, and a large lot of cotton. At Calhoun, they destroyed a pontoon-bridge, the ferry at Grant’s Mills, and several railroad bridges. They captured nearly one hundred prisoners, and lost twenty in killed and wounded.—(Doc. 138.)
