Shows history in the making and personalities at their most unguarded: Lincoln, Secretary of War Edwin Stanton, Andrew Carnegie, General George McClellan, and others. The reader is with Lincoln at the scene of dramatic tidings: of the Northern disasters at Bull Run, of Meade's victory at Gettysburg, of Grant's capture of Richmond.

Wartime human-interest anecdotes, the wonder of the new technology, the unraveling of ciphers and codes, conspiracies and rumors, a heightened sense of onrushing events, the tragedy of Good Friday 1865 - all are conveyed in this classic of "Lincolniana". Introducing "Lincoln in the Telegraph Office" is James A. Rawley, Carl Adolph Happold Professor Emeritus of history at the University of Nebraska-Lincoln. His works include "Turning Points of the Civil War", also available as a Bison Book.