Noah Brooks

Biography

Noah Brooks (1830–1903) was an American journalist, author, and one of the closest personal friends of Abraham Lincoln during the Civil War years. Born in Castine, Maine, Brooks worked as a journalist in Boston and Illinois before moving to California during the Gold Rush era. He became Washington correspondent for the Sacramento Daily Union in 1862, gaining extraordinary access to Lincoln and the wartime White House. Lincoln confided in Brooks and reportedly planned to appoint him as his personal secretary before the assassination. Brooks’s journalism and later books, including Washington in Lincoln’s Time (1895) and Abraham Lincoln and the Downfall of American Slavery (1894), provide invaluable eyewitness accounts of Lincoln and the Civil War. Beyond his political writing, Brooks was a prolific author of fiction for young readers, including Our Baseball Club and How It Won the Championship (1884), one of the earliest baseball novels, and The Boy Emigrants (1876). He served as editor of several newspapers including the New York Times and the Newark Daily Advertiser.