CARL GUARNERI
speaks about
"Lincoln's Informer: Charles A. Dana and the Inside Story of the Union War"
A copy of the materials displayed
during his presentation is available HERE or visit
Civil War Round Table of the District of Columbia
Via Zoom
on May 25, 2021
About the Topic:
Charles A. Dana was a consummate insider who had a uniquely varied and influential Civil War career. Starting out as managing editor of Horace Greeley’s New York Tribune, Dana led the newspaper’s hardline position on antislavery and secession. When his criticism of the Union’s lax war effort became too much for Greeley, Dana was drafted by Secretary of War Edwin Stanton to be a special agent—and this capacity he truly made his mark.
Drawing on Dana’s reports, letters, and telegrams, we can reconstruct his career as a government investigator, a confidential informant to Stanton and Lincoln, and an administration insider with surprising influence. While reporting most of the war’s major events, Dana also had a hand in Union espionage, 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. This overview, based on Carl Guarneri's book on Dana, corrects his faux memoir, Recollections of the Civil War (1898), which was ghostwritten by muckraker Ida Tarbell, and uncovers many more sources and episodes, providing the first complete portrait of a behind-the-scenes operator who played a crucial part in organizing Union victory. Carl J. Guarneri is the Brother James Ash Professor of History at Saint Mary’s College of California, where he has taught since 1979 after receiving his Ph.D from Johns Hopkins University.
Dr. Guarneri is the author or editor of ten books, several of which pursue transnational approaches to the study of nineteenth-century American history. Having taught courses on the Civil War for more than three decades, he set out to make an original contribution to the field, and the result is Lincoln’s Informer: Charles A. Dana and the Inside Story of the Union War (University Press of Kansas, 2019).
The book was a 2020 top ten selection of Civil War Books and Authors (https://cwba.blogspot.com/2020/12/2020-civil-war-books-and-authors-year.html) and won the 2020 Albert Castel Award of the Kalamazoo Civil War Round Table for best book on the western theater of the Civil War (https://kcwrt.com/albert-castel-book-award).
For more information about Dr. Guarneri's book, visit https://kansaspress.ku.edu/978-0-7006-2846-9.html
