Albert Deane Richardson

Albert Deane Richardson
Portrait from The Secret Service (1865).
Born	(1833-10-06)October 6, 1833 Franklin, Massachusetts
Died	December 2, 1869(1869-12-02) (aged 36) New York City, New York

Albert Deane Richardson (October 6, 1833 - December 2, 1869) was a well-known American journalist, Union spy, and author. Among his works is his noted biography of Ulysses S. Grant. Richardson was shot on two separate occasions, the second time fatally, by a jealous husband of the women Richardson was in love with.

Richardson wrote for the New York Tribune owned by Horace Greeley, and traveled to battlefields during the American Civil War to report on the war, often with fellow journalist Junius Henri Browne.

Richardson and Browne were imprisoned for 20 months in seven different prisons, confined successively at Vicksburg, Jackson, Atlanta, Richmond, and Salisbury, North Carolina, prisons. On December 18, 1864, after 20 months of imprisonment, he escaped from Salisbury, along with Browne. They traveled together more than 400 miles through hostile country, and reached the Union lines on January 14, 1865. His list of Union soldiers who died at Salisbury, published in the Tribune, is the only authentic account of their fate.

Richardson was one of the best known reporters of his age, due to his abilities as a writer and his services (during the American Civil War) as a Union spy. Unfortunately his reputation is recalled as the victim of a homicide that gained considerable notoriety in the Gilded Age. Richardson's wife and daughter had died during the war, and he subsequently met Abby Sage McFarland, an actress married to one Daniel McFarland. McFarland claimed to be a major businessman and politician, but basically he was a violent husband and alcoholic with connections with Tammany Hall. Richardson and Abby Sage McFarland lived together, their friends and acquaintances (including Horace Greeley) understanding Richardson was protecting the woman he loved while she was trying to get a divorce, something that was not well received generally by the public in the 1860s.