John Harrison Wilson, The life of Charles Henry Dana

There is of course no way of ascertaining what use Stanton made of the information contained in these letters, but he probably kept them close at hand for reference as long as necessary, and thereafter made but few mistakes in regard to the officers to whom they referred. Looking back upon the period of the great war, with its widely scattered armies and hundreds of thousands of soldiers, commanded mostly by generals of but little military experience drawn from every walk of life, I cannot suppress the thought that the country would have been greatly benefited had the secretary directed Dana to visit every department and army and send him a sketch of every important officer connected with them. It could not have failed to place in his hands fresh and exact information of a kind in which the records were singularly deficient. It can scarcely be believed, but it is the truth, that there was no regular system in use by which the habits, character, and efficiency of even the highest officers were regularly made known to the general-in-chief or to the Secretary of War. Everything in relation thereto was hap-hazard and largely a matter of chance, or, what was worse, was left to the newspapers, or to the partiality of personal and political friends. Even Dana, who was constantly with the army till the end of the war, when any great campaign was on refrained from sending in such sketches as those from Cairo, and confined himself thenceforth mainly to reporting operations and important events. That this course was marked out for him by his official superior there can be but little doubt.