Dear Sir: I inclose you a copy of your order of appointment and the order fixing your compensation, with a letter to Generals Sumner,[B] Grant, and Rosecrans, and a draft for one thousand dollars. Having explained the purposes of your appointment to you personally, no further instructions will be given unless specially required. Please acknowledge the receipt of this, and proceed as early as possible to your duties.
Yours truly, Edwin M. Stanton.
C. A. Dana, Esq., New York.
My commission read:
Ordered, That C. A. Dana, Esq., be and he is hereby appointed special commissioner of the War Department to investigate and report upon the condition of the pay service in the Western armies. All paymasters and assistant paymasters will furnish to the said commissioner for the Secretary of War information upon any matters concerning which he may make inquiry of them as fully and completely and promptly as if directly called for by the Secretary of War. Railroad agents, quartermasters, and commissioners will give him transportation and subsistence. All officers and persons in the service will aid him in the performance of his duties, and will afford him assistance, courtesy, and protection. The said commissioner will make report to this department as occasion may require.
The letters of introduction and explanation to the generals were identical:
General: Charles A. Dana, Esq., has been appointed a special commissioner of this department to investigate and report upon the condition of the pay service in the Western armies. You will please aid him in the performance of his duties, and communicate to him fully your views and wishes in respect to that branch of the service in your command, and also give to him such information as you may deem beneficial to the service. He is specially commended to your courtesy and protection. Yours truly,
Edwin M. Stanton.
I started at once for Memphis, going by way of Cairo and Columbus.
I sent my first dispatch to the War Department from Columbus, on March 20th. It was sent by a secret cipher furnished by the War Department, which I used myself, for throughout the war I was my own cipher clerk. The ordinary method at the various headquarters was for the sender to write out the dispatch in full, after which it was translated from plain English into the agreed cipher by a telegraph operator or clerk retained for that exclusive purpose, who understood it, and by another it was retranslated back again at the other end of the line. So whatever military secret was transmitted was at the mercy always of at least two outside persons, besides running the gantlet of other prying eyes. Dispatches written in complex cipher codes were often difficult to unravel, unless transmitted by the operator with the greatest precision. A wrong word sometimes destroyed the sense of an entire dispatch, and important movements were delayed thereby. This explains the oft-repeated "I do not understand your telegram" found in the official correspondence of the war period.