Abraham Lincoln and Journalists
Featured Book
Richard J. Carwardine, Lincoln: Profiles in Power
(New York: Longman Publishers, 2003 )
One day in April 1864, President Abraham Lincoln walked across the hall to the office of aide John Hay. Mr. Lincoln “picked up a paper and read the Richmond Examiners recent attack on Jeff Davis,” wrote Hay in his diary. “It amused him. ‘Why’ said he ‘the Examiner seems about, as fond of Jeff as the New York World is of me.” 1 Although the New York World was a Democratic newspaper partly owned by Democratic National Chairman August Belmont, there were many Republican newspapers who also bedeviled the President during the Civil War. President Lincoln tried not to pay too much attention to his press critics but he was kept abreast of what the newspapers were saying. As President, according to journalist Noah Brooks, “Lincoln found time to read the newspapers, or, as he sometimes expressed it, ‘to skirmish’ with them. From their ephemeral pages he rescued many a choice bit of verse, which he carried with him until he was quite familiar with it.”2 Historian Gabor Boritt noted that “a chief means of his listening was the press as digested by his assistants, and it was through the press that he could shape public opinion.” 3
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