Shadow wrote for several newspapers, including the Mobile Advertiser and Register and the Chattanooga Rebel. Scholars have tried for many years to establish a firm ideitity for Shadow, but no one has yet been able to do so with certainity. A study in the late 1990s used the grammer checking capabilities of a word processing package to examine the stylistics of several different writers to determine whether one of them might be Shadow, and the writers came to the conclusion that writing stle of the leading candidate, Henry Watterson, was most similar. Watterson, however, left behind no papers to indicate whether he was this most famous correpsondent.

Shadow worked in the Western Theatre, reporting primarily from the Army of Tennessee. The stories he filed include reports of a knife/gun fight between General Nathan Bedford Forrest and one of his lieutenants that left the lieutenant dead, civilian life in Atlanta, the Battle of Kennesaw Mountain, and most of the other engagements in Confederate General Joseph E. Johnston's agonizing campaign to keep the Gate City (Atlanta's nickname) out of the hands of the Union Army.