Lincoln’s Informer: Charles A. Dana and the Inside Story of the Union Struggle

In a current ballot of main historians, Charles A. Dana was named among the many “Twenty-5 Most Influential Civil Struggle Figures You’ve In all probability By no means Heard Of.” Should you
have heard of Dana, it was in all probability from his basic
Recollections of the Civil Struggle (1898), which was ghostwritten by muckraker Ida Tarbell and riddled with errors cited by unsuspecting historians ever since.
Lincoln’s Informer in the end units the report straight, giving Charles A. Dana his due in a narrative that rivals one of the best historic fiction.

Dana didn’t simply report historical past, Carl J. Guarneri notes: he made it. Beginning out as managing editor of Horace Greeley’s
New York Tribune, he led the newspaper’s cost in opposition to proslavery forces in Congress and the Kansas territory. When his criticism of the Union’s prosecution of the struggle turned an excessive amount of for Greeley, Dana was drafted by Secretary of Struggle Edwin Stanton to be a particular agent—and it was on this capability that he actually made his mark. Drawing on Dana’s studies, letters, and telegrams—“probably the most outstanding, attention-grabbing, and instructive assortment of official paperwork regarding the Revolt,” in accordance with the custodian of the Union struggle data—Guarneri reconstructs the Civil Struggle as Dana skilled and noticed it: as a journalist, a confidential informant to Stanton and Lincoln, and, most controversially, an administration insider with shocking affect. Whereas reporting many of the struggle’s main occasions, Dana additionally had a hand in army investigations, the cotton commerce, Lincoln’s reelection, passage of the Thirteenth Modification, and, most notably, the making of Ulysses S. Grant and the breaking of different generals.

Dana’s reporting and Guarneri’s vigorous narrative present contemporary impressions of Lincoln, Stanton, Grant, and different Union struggle leaders.
Lincoln’s Informer reveals us the unlikely position of a little-known confidant and informant within the Lincoln administration’s army and political successes. A outstanding inside have a look at historical past unfolding, this e-book attracts the primary full image of a captivating character writing his chapter within the story of the Civil Struggle.