I made it the organ of the army.
It is not the purpose of these pages to retell the well-known story of the war.

My life became a series of ups and downs--mainly downs--the word being from day to day to fire and fall back; in the Johnston-Sherman campaign, I served as chief of scouts; then as an aid to General Hood through the siege of Atlanta, sharing the beginning of the chapter of disasters that befell that gallant soldier and his army.
I was spared the last and worst of these by a curious piece of special duty, taking me elsewhere, to which I was assigned in the autumn of 1864 by the Confederate government.
This involved a foreign journey.

It was no less than to go to England to sell to English buyers some hundred thousand bales of designated cotton to be thus rescued from spoliation, acting under the supervision and indeed the orders of the Confederate fiscal agency at Liverpool.
Of course I was ripe for this; but it proved a bigger job than I had conceived or dreamed.

The initial step was to get out of the country.
But how?
That was the question.

To run the blockade had been easy enough a few months earlier.