As Lincoln took greater control of his administration, he had little time to relax. In January, when chided for inaccessibility, he said that he simply could not accommodate everybody who wanted to see him and exclaimed: “I have not looked into a newspaper for a month!” He told his Illinois friend George W. Rives “that he had no time to read many letters & none to read newspapers.” Some mistakenly interpreted these remarks as a scandalous admission that the president cared little for public opinion. As John Hay noted, Lincoln “read very little. Scarcely ever looked into a newspaper unless I called his attention to an article on some special subject. He frequently said ‘I know more about that than any of them.’ ” Hay’s coadjutor, John G. Nicolay, reported that except for telegraphic dispatches in the Washington press, “the President rarely ever looks at any papers, simply for want of leisure to do so.” Nicolay and Hay’s assistant, William O. Stoddard, recalled that Lincoln “cared little” for newspaper opinion. In 1861, the president instructed him to prepare a digest of the most significant editorials in prominent journals. Stoddard complied for a few weeks but eventually quit because Lincoln ignored his handiwork. The president “knew the people so much better than the editors did,” Stoddard explained, “that he could not bring himself to listen with any patience to the tissue of insane contradictions which then made up the staple of the public press.”
Source: Abraham Lincoln ∶ A Life ▫𓂃
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