Endorsement; and, more than nce before his death Expressed the wish that Mr Dawson's biography. of him should go to the public with the clacup of his own and approbation. Having Read. The additions

authorization

which complete the history of his incensparable services and spotless life, I unhesitatingly gur my approval to their publication Mary I Logan

PREFACE.

THE enthusiasm kindled in the Chicago Convention of June, 1884, by the presentation of his name as the candidate of Illinois for the Presidential nomination, and the extraordinarily unanimous vote by which he was nominated for the Vice-Presidency, showed plainly enough the estimation in which General Logan was held by Republican men of affairs. But despite his admitted popularity and strength throughout the country-among the workingmen for whose interests he had so sturdily worked, among the Union soldiers of the war whom he had so often led in battle, among the colored people whose champion he had been on the tented field, in the Congressional forum, and upon the stump -his life-work covered so many fields, during more than a quarter of a century, that much of it is unknown to the younger men of the present day. I have therefore thought that a biographical sketch of this remarkable man would meet a public necessity, and help to place the General in military and political history in that true light which his own modesty denied him. In preparing this work I enjoyed all the advantages which full access to the General's scrapbooks, private papers, and military order-books could give me, in addition to the Rebellion Records and other official information accessible at Washington, and also freely consulted, and in some instances quoted from, the military works of the Comte de Paris, General Sherman's Memoirs, and Badeau's" Military History of Grant," besides securing authentic narrations of battle-scenes in which the General was engaged, from other active participants in the same. It is to these sources of information, therefore, and not to any qualities of my own, that I attribute whatever of dash