arent as early as 1863: the South would not feed the
armies--the North must. That plan, so far as the Atlantic coast States
were involved, was foiled at Gettysburg. The only resource left was in
the West, the watershed of the Ohio, which Sherman was wrenching out
of General Johnston's fingers. In a military point of view, the great
Confederate strategist was right: he was conducting the campaign on
the principle Lee so admirably adopted in Virginia. But President
Davis had more than a military question to solve. If he could not
seize the granaries of the watershed, the Confederacy would die of
inanition.

That was what caused the change of commanders in Georgia, and the
desperate invasion that blew to pieces at Nashville; and it introduces
a little scouting incident upon which the event of that campaign
may have partially turned. General Hood was in camp at Jonesborough:
Forrest and Wheeler were detached to destroy Sherman's single thread
of supplies. Prisoners pretended to have been on half rations, and the
sanguine opinion at head-quarters was that Sherman was on the grand
retreat. That able strategist had disappeared, enveloping himself in
impenetrable vidette swarms of cavalry. He had pocketed one hundred
thousand men in the Georgia hills, and no one could find them; at
least, General Hood could not.

But others were not sanguine about Sherman's falling back. General
Jackson selected a major, a trusted scout, with twenty-five men, with
instructions to find Sherman. Again and again the scout and his little
band tried to pierce that impenetrable cloud, and could not. Then he
tried another plan. He snapped up a Federal squad, clothed a select
part of his little band in their uniform, and sent the others back
with the prisoners. Then he plunged boldly into the cloud, a squad
of Federals, bummers, pioneers. Does the reader reflect upon the
fine fibre of the material requisite for such an exploit? It is not
strength, courage or tactical cunning that is most wanted, but that
most difficult art, to be able to put off your own nature and put on
another's--to play a part, not as the actor, who struts his hour in
tinsel and mouths his speeches as no mortal man ever walked or talked
in real life, but as one who stakes his life upon a word, an accent;
requiring subtlety of analytic sense and quickness of thought.
Polyglot as was the speech of the Federal forces, suspicion, started
by that test, would run rapidly to results. Th