"How, in God's name, do you let such paragraphs into the Tribune?"

[David Lockmiller]

I believe that tomorrow (Sunday, June 9, 2019) my former hometown newspaper, the Decatur Herald & Review, will print a story with this thread's title as a quote from Abraham Lincoln, who then was running for U. S. Senator from Illinois.

'Poisonous thorns': The times Abraham Lincoln got mad — like, really mad — at the Chicago Tribune

According to the article:

Abraham Lincoln was mad. Really mad.

"How, in God's name, do you let such paragraphs into the Tribune?" he furiously scribbled in Springfield on June 27, 1858, firing off a gruff note to Charles H. Ray, the editor-in-chief of the Chicago Press & Tribune, then in business for only 11 years.

"Does Sheahan write them?" Lincoln sneered, a sarcastic reference to James Sheahan, editor of the Chicago Times, a Democratic Party paper and the Tribune's chief rival. . . .

In his far angrier June 27 letter, Lincoln is enraged the paper had allowed a column that encouraged Republicans to vote for an independent Democrat for Congress in Indiana (over his "doughface" opponent) because of the Democrat's opposition to a constitution for Kansas that protected slavery.

Lincoln would have been "absolutely furious" over the idea appearing in his Republican Tribune, according to Dr. Christian McWhirter, a historian at the Abraham Lincoln Presidential Library and Museum in Springfield. His famed Democratic rival, Stephen A. Douglas, had also broken with his party against what was known as the Lecompton Constitution. As Lincoln figured it, if it were all right for Republicans to vote for incumbent Democrats who opposed the pro-slavery constitution in Indiana, might they vote for the incumbent Douglas _ and not him _ in the 1858 election in Illinois?