Lincoln read only a tiny percentage of the letters that poured into the White House, for most business correspondence was routed to the appropriate departments. At his request, White House secretaries summarized the incoming mail for him. “Mr. Nicolay, please run over this & tell me what is in it,” he endorsed a 15-page missive. One of those secretaries, William O. Stoddard, recalled that “there never was on earth such another omnium gatherum as the President’s mail.” It consisted of “applications for office, for contracts, for pardons, for pecuniary aid, for advice, for information, for autographs, voluminous letters of advice, political disquisitions, religious exhortations, the rant and drivel of insanity, bitter abuse, foul obscenity, slanderous charges against public men, police and war information, military reports,” and a “large number of threatening letters.” Stoddard could not get the president to take seriously the threats, which averaged one a day. If Lincoln bothered to notice them at all, he responded with “contemptuous ridicule.”
Source: Abraham Lincoln ∶ A Life ▫𓂃