After a conference at Louisville between Stanton and Grant, Rosecrans was relieved and Thomas became commander of the Army of the Cumberland. A fine soldier and a modest man, Thomas was disinclined to supplant a superior.
“You have got me this time,” he said to Dana, “but there is nothing for a man to do in such a case but obey orders.”
Dana’s despatches had made Stanton realize the importance of holding Chattanooga, and the Secretary of War ordered Thomas to defend it at all hazards.
“I will hold the town till we starve!” replied Thomas.
Dana was not only a useful eye for the government, but he was a valued companion for General Wilson and other officers who went with him on his missions. He knew more poetry than any other man in the army except General Michael Lawler, an Illinois farmer, whose boast it was that on hearing any line of standard English verse he could repeat the next line. Dana, the compiler of the “Household Book of Poetry,” would try to catch Lawler, but in vain. Dana was not so literal as the Illinois general, but General Wilson says that he “seemed never to forget anything he had ever read.”
The great advantage of Dana’s despatches to Stanton was that they gave a picture of the doings in his field of work that was not biased by military pride or ambition. He wrote what he saw and knew, without counting the effect on the generals concerned. For one illuminating example, there was his story of the final attack in the battle of Missionary Ridge. To read Grant or Sherman, one would suppose that the triumphant assault was planned precisely as it was executed; but Dana’s account of that fierce day is the one that must be relied upon:
The storming of the ridge by our troops was one of the greatest miracles in military history. No man that climbs the ascent by any of the roads that wind along its front could believe that eighteen thousand men were moved up its broken and crumbling face, unless it was his fortune to witness the deed. It seems as awful as the visible interposition of God. Neither Grant nor Thomas intended it. Their orders were to carry the rifle-pits along the base of the ridge and capture their occupants; but when this was accomplished, the unaccountable spirit of the troops bore them bodily up those impracticable steeps, over bristling rifle-pits on the crest, and thirty cannon enfilading every gully. The order to storm appears to have been given simultaneously by Generals Sheridan and Wood, because the men were not to be held back, dangerous as the attempt appeared to military prudence. Besides, the generals had caught the inspiration of the men, and were ready themselves to undertake impossibilities.
No wonder that even when Lincoln was confined to his chamber by illness, Dana’s despatches were brought to him; “not merely because they are reliable,” as Assistant Secretary of War Watson wrote to Dana, “but for their clearness of narrative and their graphic pictures of the stirring events they describe.” A conservative tribute to the best reporter of the Civil War.
Dana returned to Washington about the beginning of 1864 to take up office tasks, and particularly the reorganization of the Cavalry Bureau. Dishonest horse-dealers were plundering the government, and Dana never rested until he had sent enough of these rogues to prison to frighten the rest of the band. Dana was a good office man; he worked, says James Harrison Wilson, “like a skilful bricklayer.” And as he relieved Stanton of much of the routine of the War Department, the Secretary supported him in his assaults on dishonest contractors, even when the political pressure brought to bear for their protection was at its highest.
Lincoln sent Dana to report Grant’s progress in the Virginia campaign that opened in May, 1864. On the 26th, three weeks after the march began, he was able to notify Washington of an entire change in the morale of the contending armies: