In a recent poll of leading historians, Charles A. Dana was named among the “Twenty-Five Most Influential Civil War Figures You’ve Probably Never Heard Of.” If you have heard of Dana, it was probably from his classic Recollections of the Civil War (1898), which was ghostwritten by muckraker Ida Tarbell and riddled with errors cited by unsuspecting historians ever since. Lincoln’s Informer at long last sets the record straight, giving Charles A. Dana his due in a story that rivals the best historical fiction. Dana didn’t just record history, Carl J. Guarneri notes: he made it. Starting out as managing editor of Horace Greeley’s New York Tribune, he led the newspaper’s charge against proslavery forces in Congress and the Kansas territory. When his criticism of the Union’s prosecution of the war became too much for Greeley, Dana was drafted by Secretary of War Edwin Stanton to be a special agent—and it was in this capacity that he truly made his mark. Drawing on Dana’s reports, letters, and telegrams—“the most remarkable, interesting, and instructive collection of official documents relating to the Rebellion,” according to the custodian of the Union war records—Guarneri reconstructs the Civil War as Dana experienced and observed it: as a journalist, a confidential informant to Stanton and Lincoln, and, most controversially, an administration insider with surprising influence. While reporting most of the war’s major events, Dana also had a hand in military investigations, the cotton trade, Lincoln’s reelection, passage of the Thirteenth Amendment, and, most notably, the making of Ulysses S. Grant and the breaking of other generals. Dana’s reporting and Guarneri’s lively narrative provide fresh impressions of Lincoln, Stanton, Grant, and other Union war leaders. Lincoln’s Informer shows us the unlikely role of a little-known confidant and informant in the Lincoln administration’s military and political successes. A remarkable inside look at history unfolding, this book draws the first complete picture of a fascinating character writing his chapter in the story of the Civil War.

Understanding Lincoln's influence on twenty-first century law and politics

Have you ever wondered what was really going on in the inner-plays, secret overhearing, and tacit observations of early modern drama? Taking on the shadowy figure of the early modern informer, this book argues that far more than mere artistic experimentation is happening here. In case studies of metadramatic plays, and the devices which Shakespeare and Jonson constantly revisit, this book offers critical insight into intrinsic connections between informers and authors, discovering an uneasy sense of common practice at the core of the metadrama, which drives both its self-awareness and its paranoia. Drama is most self-revealing at these moments where it reflects upon its own dramatic register: where it is most metadramatic. To understand their metadrama is therefore to understand these most seminal authors in a new way.

Reprint of the original, first published in 1875.

Reprint of the original, first published in 1875.