John Locke Scripps

Who was John Locke Scripps?

John Locke Scripps was an attorney, journalist, and author. He wrote the first published biography of Abraham Lincoln in 1860. He was the first cousin once removed of E.W. Scripps, the founder of E. W. Scripps Company.

John Locke Scripps was born in Cape Girardeau, Missouri to George Henry Scripps, a merchant who was licensed as a Methodist preacher, but never followed the trade.

John was educated at McKendree College, in Lebanon, IL. He settled in Chicago in 1847 to practice law, but soon turned to journalism. He was the founder of the Chicago Democratic Press, which was bought by the Chicago Tribune in 1858. The paper was known as The Chicago Press and Tribune until 1860, when the name was changed to the Chicago Daily Tribune. Scripps was for some years the chief editor of the Tribune.

Scripps was later named Postmaster General of Chicago by President Lincoln. As Postmaster, Scripps was an innovator, conceiving and implementing the use of the streetcar system to help move the mail.

During the presidential campaign of 1860 he wrote a biography of Lincoln which appeared in the Chicago tribune on 19 May 1860, the day after the convention. Lincoln then approached Scripps to expand upon the biography for a campaign publication. Lincoln himself gave assistance in the writing of the biography. It is widely considered to be the first published biography of Lincoln. While it was published by the Lincoln campaign and Lincoln himself contributed, it was not an authorized biography. When Scripps finished writing, he had too little time before publication to submit the book to Lincoln himself for fact checking. In fact, in a list of books that Lincoln read as a child, Scripps added Plutarch's Lives of the Noble Greeks and Romans. In a letter to Lincoln, Scripps asked Lincoln to read it at once if he had not, so as to make Scripps' statement true.