not too much to say that it was Mr. Dana's reports which first convinced the government that two of its greatest generals were Sherman and Grant, which proved that McClernand should be dropped, and which showed that Grant and Thomas should take hold of the army which Rosecrans had demoralized.
To know men, to see everything that went on, and to describe all fully, was, then, Mr. Dana's chief business. In the course of it he was an observer of several of the great spectacular episodes of the war. He watched the gunboats running the batteries of Vicksburg; saw Pemberton standing out on the fortification of that city, while his army stacked their arms in sign of surrender; was driven from the field of Chickamauga in the terrible panic of September 20, 1863; beside Grant, watched the battle of Missionary Ridge; was at Cold Harbor and Petersburg. The descriptions of these events, written at the time, are surpassingly brilliant, and they are perfectly clear. One feels the roar and clash of the battle in them, and one understands what it is all about.
An intimate acquaintance with a great number of officers was naturally forced on Mr. Dana by his position. Probably no man in the War Department at that time studied so many different generals face to face as he did, and certainly nobody else wrote so fully and frankly his opinions of the men he studied. Not only did Mr. Dana know the officers of the army; in the dull times between campaigns, he remained in Washington as an assistant to Secretary Stanton. There he saw much of Mr. Lincoln and his Cabinet and of the members of Congress. His work there was scarcely less in interest than that at the front, and much of it was as truly warfare, though of a bloodless kind. It was incessant skirmishing with contractors who were watching for opportunities to cheat the government, with deserters and blockade-runners, with Confederate agents in Canada, and spies from within the enemy's lines. Often the skirmishing developed into pitched battles.
His reminiscences of this unique war experience Mr. Dana has never published save now and then a fragment, and it is with great satisfaction that the editors of McClure's Magazine announce that in the November number they will begin the publication of a series of articles by him on his life as the private war reporter of Mr. Lincoln and Mr. Stanton.
In preparing these reminiscences Mr. Dana has not trusted to his memory alone. The great mass of documents he prepared for the eyes of Mr. Lincoln and Mr. Stanton has been freely used; so have his voluminous correspondence with military governors and provost-marshals, carried on at the period when he was in Washington, the reports of special investigations he made for the War Department (reports never published, though influential in determining large questions of policy), and private correspondence with friends, including private letters from Mr. Stanton, General Sherman, and others. In fact, he has opened a great private storehouse of historical matter and condensed it in these reminiscences. In the work he has had free access to the great collection of Stanton papers in the hands of the Hon. George B. Gorham, and to the files of the War Department, Mr. Gorham having turned over to Mr. Dana all of the Stanton papers that could be of use to him in this connection, and the War Department having extended innumerable courtesies and aided the work in every possible way. To insure perfect accuracy in the details of military movements, the manuscript has been read by Mr. Leslie J. Perry, the well-known expert of the War Records Commission.
A narrative of a man's own experiences in such scenes and relations as those in which Mr. Dana figured through the war could not fail to be of interest even if he were rather a commonplace man. When coming from one of the keenest observers and most trenchant writers of our times, a man who from the first was the confidant of the government and had access to every secret source of information, both the historic and literary value of the story is apparent. Since the appearance of General Grant's "Personal Memoirs" no such contribution to the literature of the Civil War has been made as these reminiscences of Mr. Dana.
