He is a lawyer by profession, a townsman of Grant, and has great influence over him, especially because he watches him day and night, and whenever he commits the folly of tasting liquor, hastens to remind him that at the beginning of the war he gave him [Rawlins] his word of honor not to touch a drop as long as it lasted. Grant thinks Rawlins a first-rate adjutant, but I think this is a mistake. He is too slow, and can’t write the English language correctly without a great deal of careful consideration. In spite of this criticism, Dana admired Rawlins. Without him, he said, Grant would not have been the same man. After Vicksburg and Gettysburg, Dana returned to Washington. He was now an Assistant Secretary of War, and his success as an official reporter on the conduct of the Army of the Tennessee had been so great that Stanton sent him to cover, in the same way, the operations of the Army of the Cumberland, going first to General Rosecrans at Chattanooga. Dana saw the hottest of the great fight at Chickamauga, and galloped twelve miles to send his despatches about it to Stanton. He made blunt reports to the government on the unfitness of Rosecrans: I consider this army to be very unsafe in his hands, but I know of no one except Thomas who could now be safely put in his place. 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.”