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Mr. Dana wrote these Recollections of the civil war according to a purpose which he had entertained for several years. They were completed only a few months before his death on October 17, 1897. A large part of the narrative has been published serially in McClure's Magazine. In the chapter about Abraham Lincoln and the Lincoln Cabinet Mr. Dana has drawn from a lecture which he delivered in 1896 before the New Haven Colony Historical Society. The incident of the self-wounded spy, in the chapter relating to the secret service of the war, was first printed in the North American Review for August, 1891. A few of the anecdotes about Mr. Lincoln which appear in this book were told by Mr. Dana originally in a brief contribution to a volume entitled Reminiscences of Abraham Lincoln by Distinguished Men of his Time, edited by the late Allen Thorndike Rice, and published in 1886.

Although Mr. Dana was in one sense the least reminiscent of men, living actively in the present, and always more interested in to-morrow than in yesterday, and although it was his characteristic habit to toss into the wastebasket documents for history which many persons would have treasured, he found in the preparation of the following chapters abundant material wherewith to stimulate and confirm his own memory, in the form of his official and unofficial reports written at the front for the information of Mr. Stanton and Mr. Lincoln, and private letters to members of his family and intimate friends.

Charles Anderson Dana was forty-four years old when his appointment as Assistant Secretary of War put him behind the scenes of the great drama then enacting, and brought him into personal relations with the conspicuous civilians and soldiers of the war period. Born in New Hampshire on August 8, 1819, he had passed by way of western New York, Harvard College, and Brook Farm into the profession which he loved and in which he labored almost to the last day of his life. When Secretary Stanton called him to Washington he had been engaged for nearly fifteen years in the management of the New York Tribune, the journal most powerful at that time in solidifying Northern sentiment for the crisis that was to come. When the war was over and the Union preserved, he returned at once to journalism. His career subsequently as the editor of The Sun for thirty years is familiar to most Americans.

It is proper to note the circumstance that the three years covered by Mr. Dana's Recollections as here recorded constitute the only term during which he held any public office, and the only break in more than half a century of continuous experience in the making of newspapers. His connection with the Government during those momentous years is an episode in the story of a life that throbbed from boyhood to age with intellectual energy, and was crowded with practical achievement.

New York, October 17, 1898.

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