John Harrison Wilson, The life of Charles Henry Dana

[315] Constitution to legalize the abolition of slavery, about the admission of Nevada as a State, and generally about where to get the necessary votes in Congress to carry through the various policies of his administration. It was a matter of prime importance that the leading newspapers should give him their support, that Greeley and Bennett especially should not oppose his measures; and to this end he frequently consulted Dana, who was a newspaper man himself, and knew them well. In his capacity to control men, or to neutralize their opposition, Lincoln was without a rival, and made no mistakes. The unerring judgment, and the consummate patience with which he acted when the time arrived, constituted a quality which, so far as Dana knew, had not been exhibited to a higher degree by any other man in history, and which proved him to have been intellectually one of the greatest of rulers.

Another interesting fact which Dana was among the first to mention was that Lincoln had finally developed into a great military man — that is, into a man of supreme military judgment. This conclusion he supported by the following statement:

... I do not risk anything in saying that if one will study the records of the war ... and the writings relating to it, he will agree with me that the greatest general we had, greater than Grant or Thomas, was Abraham Lincoln. It was not so at the beginning; but after three or four years of constant practice in the science and art of war, he arrived at this extraordinary knowledge of it, so that Von Moltke was not a better general or an abler planner or expounder of a campaign than President Lincoln. To sum it up, he was a born leader of men. He knew human nature; he knew what chord to strike, and was never afraid to strike when he believed that the time had arrived.

Dana, Recollections of the Civil War, p. 181.