During the Civil War, few outside Abraham Lincoln's immediate circle of family, friends, and advisors had as much access to the president as young California journalist Noah Brooks, who first met Lincoln in Illinois. As the Washington correspondent for the Sacramento Daily Union during the Civil War, Brooks met with Lincoln nearly daily between 1862 and 1865 and was privy to many of the president's decisions and thoughts. Brooks's dispatches, letters, and personal reminiscences—collected here for the first time by noted Lincoln scholar Michael Burlingame—offer an intimate portrait of Abraham Lincoln himself as well as an engrossing account of life and politics in wartime Washington.