'Poisonous thorns': The times Abraham Lincoln got mad — like, really mad — at the Chicago Tribune
CHICAGO - 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.
"I confess," Lincoln wrote, the consternation dripping, "it astonishes me."
It wasn't the first time Lincoln had fumed at what he read in the Tribune. A few weeks earlier he'd written a longer letter, reprimanding
