It is very strong language, I admit, to say that Sherman never won a battle, but considerately so, for if the purely tactical operations of General Sherman be critically examined, it will be found that they were almost invariably failures. He was the chief in command, the central and controlling power, in the battles of Chickasaw Bayou, Resaca, Kenesaw Mountain, and Jonesboro, all of which, with the bare exception of the latter, where his overpowering force and strategic march of the night before insured victory, were tactically great failures. The failure of the co-operative movements of Grant at Chickasaw Bayou doubtless caused Sherman's defeat at that point--at least it has served to explain it away, and stands as the excuse for it; but all will remember how signal a failure it was. The battle of Resaca was a still greater failure. Doubt, delay, and inaction lost Sherman the great advantage which his strategic march through Snake Creek Gap had given him in placing him in the rear of the enemy's position, and he ought to have captured every gun and wagon of the enemy, and dispersed the army which subsequently retarded his advance in Atlanta; but the battle was begun too late and pushed too feebly. Sherman's strategy had at one time rendered a battle unnecessary, and it was forced on him through another's indecision (I believe that General McPherson admitted before his death that that fault was his), but certainly it was the fault of Sherman that the battle, when fought, was indecisive. Every body will remember the Kenesaw Mountain battle and its useless sacrifices, and every body will remember, too, the candor with which Sherman wrote that it was a failure, and that the fault was his. All the minor engagements of his great campaign against Atlanta were either positive defeats or negative advantages, and yet that wonderful campaign was won, and all the advantages which could have under any circumstances accrued from it were gained to us without the losses which a great battle would have caused. The strategic marches executed during that campaign are now chapters in the theory and history of war, and the close student of the art will see more to admire in the passage of the Chattahoochee River, the march through the gorge of Snake Creek Gap, and across the Allatoona Mountains, and the flank movements around Kenesaw and Atlanta, than in the more dashing but less skillful marches through Georgia and the Carolinas. The campaign of Atlanta was made in the face of the enemy commanded by their most skillful general, while during the other and more famous marches no enemy was met. The campaign through Georgia was merely extensive; that against Atlanta was both grand in conception and difficult in execution. One was accomplished at a stride, the other step by step. The campaign of Atlanta gave rise not only to a new system of warfare, but even to a new system of tactics. Never before in the history of