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Rh complained to Stanton of the publication of this "contraband news", and in an answering telegram Stanton admitted that the department could not prevent such disclosures. After certain Memphis papers had published the location of guns which Grant had secretly placed for his operations against Vicksburg, a Confederate major, while conferring with Sherman over the exchange of prisoners, facetiously requested that the Federals should not "open those batteries to-morrow night", explaining that it was his intention to give a party and he did not wish to be disturbed. Grant was furious at this disclosure, but it was the sort of thing that one should have expected, considering the laxness of control over such matters.

While Sherman was operating in Georgia, the Indianapolis Journal published a statement that Sherman had returned to Atlanta on a given date with five corps of his army, leaving two corps in Tennessee to watch Hood, that he had destroyed certain sections of railroad, and was marching for Charleston. Sherman sent a hot telegram asking the authorities to catch "that fool" and have him sent to work on the forts, advising further that misleading accounts be published to produce mystification as to his programme.

So bitter was Sherman's feeling against newspapers that he is said to have refused an introduction to, explaining that Greeley's paper had caused him a heavy loss of men in his Carolina campaign of 1865. By clever feints he had concealed his plans until the Confederate general got hold of a copy of the New York Tribune which contained a most obliging editorial. At last the editor "had the satisfaction to inform his readers [General Hardee was one of the readers] that General Sherman would next be heard from about Goldsboro because his supply vessels from Savannah were known to be rendezvousing at Morehead City". This disclosure cost the Union commander a fight which he had hoped to avoid.

There is ample evidence of the close scrutiny of the Northern papers by Confederate generals. This was particularly true of General Lee, who constantly perused the columns of these journals with the eye of a military expert on the lookout for information as to developments within the lines of the Army of the Potomac. On one occasion he noted a statement of the Philadelphia Inquirer regarding McClellan's movements which convinced him that a with-