Colonel of the 4th Iowa Infantry

He was severely wounded in the Battle of Pea Ridge, Arkansas in 1862, and in the Atlanta campaign in 1864

Served as Chief of Intelligence for the army of General U.S. Grant

He fought against the Sioux, Cheyenne and Arapaho Indians in 1865

United States Congressman from Iowa

(1831-1916) Born in Danvers, Massachusetts, he graduated from Norwich University with a degree in civil engineering in 1851. He settled in the Missouri River city of Council Bluffs, Iowa, and for the next 10 years, was involved in surveying for railroads, including the Union Pacific. He organized a militia company called the "Council Bluffs Guards" in 1856, and when the Civil War broke out in 1861, he joined the Union army, and he was sent by Governor Samuel Kirkwood of Iowa to Washington, D.C., where he secured 6,000 muskets to supply Iowa volunteers. On July 6, 1861, he was commissioned colonel of the 4th Iowa Infantry. He was wounded in the left leg, near Rolla, Missouri, in 1861, when a pistol in his coat pocket accidentally discharged. He commanded the 1st Brigade, 4th Division, in the Army of the Southwest, at the Battle of Pea Ridge, where he had 3 horses shot out from under him, and he was severely wounded in the side and hand. For his gallant services at the battle, he was promoted to brigadier general of volunteers, and placed in command of the forces at Corinth, Mississippi. Following the repulse of Confederate General Earl Van Dorn at the Second Battle of Corinth, in October 1862, General Dodge's command fought successful engagements near the Hatchie River, and then turned to West Tennessee where he captured a band of Confederate guerrillas near Dyersburg. On February 22, 1863, troops from Dodge's command attacked Tuscumbia, and the rear column of Van Dorn's column, capturing a piece of artillery, 100 bales of cotton, 100 prisoners, and Van Dorn's supply train. Dodge served as General Ulysses S. Grant's Intelligence Chief in the western theater of the war, and became a pioneering figure in military intelligence during the Civil War. Dodge created a highly effective intelligence gathering network which later proved vital to General Grant's operations and was a precursor to the modern Intelligence Corps of the United States Army. It was one of the largest of the war, funded by the proceeds of captured Confederate cotton, with over 100 agents, and was so effective that their identities remain a mystery. It was perhaps the most accurate and comprehensive intelligence gathering network in history up to that time. His organization, which later became part of the Union Bureau of Military Information, helped Dodge in short order defeat General John B. Villepigue near the Hatchie River, capture Colonel W.W. Faulkner's command of partisan rangers near Island Number Ten, defeat General Earl Van Dorn at the Battle of Tuscumbia during his service with the Army of the Mississippi, and he was vital in the capture of Vicksburg under General Grant. General Dodge's network also led to the capture of Confederate spy Sam Davis, who was known as the "Nathan Hale of the Confederacy," and also as the "Boy Hero of the Confederacy." His efforts led to one of the unit's major successes which was the discovery and disruption of "Coleman's Scouts," the elite secret service unit of Confederate General Braxton Bragg. Dodge would utilize human intelligence from female spies, runaway slaves and unionists living in Confederate territory. He created a "Corps of Scouts" for special reconnaissance from units of loyal residents of the south, and ex-slaves. He also employed more technical intelligence gathering disciplines such as signals intelligence and counter intelligence by tapping telegraph wires while enciphering the Union Army's own dispatches. He was infamously obsessed with operational security and corresponded by courier rather than telegraph. His agents were trained to avoid exaggerations by innovative methods such as measuring the length of a column along a road. At its peak, his network ran from Georgia, to Alabama, to Tennessee, to Mississippi, where information would be reported to Dodge, to General Richard Oglesby, to General Stephen Hurlbut in Memphis, then to General Grant himself, a process of about ten days. Dodge would later report directly to Grant during the Vicksburg campaign, where he even had agents open the mail of Confederate General Joseph E. Johnston. General Dodge's agents would report solely to him, and him alone, but on May 16, 1863, when intelligence indicated Grant could turn his forces away from Johnston and concentrate on General John C. Pemberton's forces at Vicksburg, "to achieve timely delivery of information, Dodge violated his own rules of communications security and had his agents report directly to Grant," resulting in the capture of one of his agents and the death of two others. In 1863, General Grant wrote to Dodge saying that "you have a much more important command than that of a division in the field." Dodge was promoted to major general on June 7, 1864, and he commanded the 16th Corps during General William T. Sherman's Atlanta campaign where he was again wounded. At the Battle of Atlanta, the 16th Corps happened to be placed in a position which directly intercepted General John B. Hood's flank attack. During the fighting General Dodge rode to the front and personally led General Thomas W. Sweeny's division into battle. This action outraged the one-armed Sweeny so much that he got in a fistfight with Dodge and fellow division commander General John W. Fuller. General Sweeny received a court-martial for this action while Dodge continued to lead the corps at the Battle of Ezra Church. During the ensuing siege of Atlanta, while looking through an eye hole in the Union breastworks a Confederate sharpshooter spotted him and shot him in the head. He ended his Civil War service commanding the Department of the Missouri. As the Civil War was coming to a close, General Dodge's Department of the Missouri was expanded to include the Departments of Kansas, Nebraska, and Utah, and during the summer of 1865, Sioux, Cheyenne, and Arapaho Indians had been raiding the Bozeman Trail, and overland mail routes. He ordered a punitive campaign to quell these raids, which came to be known as the "Powder River Expedition." Field command of the expedition was given to General Patrick Edward Connor, who commanded the District of Utah. Connor's men inflicted a decisive defeat on the Arapaho Indians at the Battle of the Tongue River, but the expedition in general was inconclusive and eventually escalated into Red Cloud's War. During the 1865 campaign in the Laramie Mountains in Wyoming, known then as the Black Hills, while escaping from a war-party, Dodge realized he had found a pass for the Union Pacific Railroad, west of the Platte River. In May 1866, he resigned from the military and, with the endorsement of Generals' Grant and Sherman, became the Union Pacific's chief engineer and thus a leading figure in the construction of the Transcontinental Railroad. Dodge's job was to plan the route and devise solutions to any obstacles encountered. Dodge had been hired by Herbert M. "Hub" Hoxie, a former President Lincoln appointee, and winner of the contract to build the first 250 miles of the Union Pacific Railroad. He served as U.S. Congressman from Iowa, 1867-69. He was a delegate to the Republican National Convention in Chicago in 1868, and again at the 1876 convention in Cincinnati. After his term in office expired, he returned to railroad engineering. During the 1880s and 1890s, he served as president or chief engineer of dozens of railroad companies, and he went to New York City to manage the growing number of businesses he had developed. Dodge was appointed to head a commission investigating the conduct of the Army during the Spanish–American War. The commission traveled to several cities in Dodge's personal railroad car, and the report was published as a Senate document titled "Report of the Commission appointed by the President to investigate the Conduct of the War Department during the war with Spain." This commission came to be known as the "Dodge Commission." Dodge returned home to Iowa and died in Council Bluffs in 1916. He is buried there in Walnut Hill Cemetery. His home, the Grenville M. Dodge House, is a National Historic Landmark.

Signature With Place: 6 1/2 x 2, in ink, G.M. Dodge, Danvers, Mass. Light age toning and wear. Very desirable Union Civil War general.