Satisfied by the persistence of Cameron on this point that the government was not disposed to second his views of conducting the affairs of the Department, Sherman asked to be relieved and ordered to duty in the field. Cameron gladly acquiesced in his wishes, and he was relieved by Buell, November 30, 1861. On the same evening of the famous interview between Cameron and Sherman, the latter paid his customary visit to the Associated Press-rooms at Louisville. Here, while still in a bad humor over the result of the interview, he was approached by a man who introduced himself as an attache of a New York paper, and asked permission to pass through the lines to the South in the capacity of a correspondent. Sherman replied that he could not pass. The correspondent, with unwarrantable impertinence, replied that Secretary Cameron was in the city, and he would get a pass from him. Sherman at once ordered him out of his department, telling him that he would give him two hours to make his escape; if found in his lines after that hour he "would hang him as a spy." The fellow left the city immediately, and on reaching Cincinnati very freely expressed his opinion that the general was crazy. A paper published in that city, on learning the story of the interview between Cameron and Sherman, which soon became public, employed the fellow to write up the report which was thus first circulated of Sherman's lunacy. His opinion that two hundred thousand men were required to clear Kentucky of rebels was quoted as proof of it by this man, and thus the story came into existence. Subsequent events revealed the fact that Sherman did not much exaggerate the force necessary to carry on the war in the central zone of the field of military operations. Although we have never had a single army numbering two hundred thousand men in the West, much larger armies have been necessary to the accomplishment of the campaign of the Mississippi and Tennessee Rivers than any person other than Sherman thus early in the war imagined. The army of Grant at Fort Donelson and Shiloh, combined with that of Buell, was not over eighty thousand men. That of Halleck before Corinth numbered exactly one hundred and two thousand. Sherman left Chattanooga in May, 1864, with one hundred and twenty thousand men, the largest army ever gathered in one body in the West. At the same time, he had under his command at different points on the Mississippi River and in Kentucky an additional force of about fifty thousand, while the forces operating under other commanders in the West would, if added to his, make a grand total of two hundred and fifty thousand men operating on the Mississippi River, every one of whom was necessary to the conquest and retention of the Mississippi Valley.