Chicago Daily Journal

The Chicago Daily Journal (Chicago Evening Journal from 1861–1896) was a Chicago newspaper that published from 1844 to 1929.

Originally a Whig paper, by the late 1850s it firmly became a Republican paper, and a strong supporter of Abraham Lincoln. Editor Charles L. Wilson made the motion to nominate Lincoln as the Republican candidate for U.S. Senate for Illinois in 1858. And Wilson (with others) helped Lincoln draft his challenge to Stephen A. Douglas to conduct the Lincoln–Douglas debates.

In later years, after a 1904 sale, it became a Democratic paper.

The Journal was the first newspaper to publish the story (now believed false) that a cow owned by Catherine O'Leary was responsible for the Chicago fire in 1871.

In 1875, reporter Newton S. Grimwood died as the sole passenger in a balloon flight with noted balloonist Washington Harrison Donaldson.

When screenwriter Ben Hecht was a young reporter for the paper in the 1910s, he dug a trench in Lincoln Park for a photograph to support a hoax story that the city had suffered a great earthquake.

The Library of Congress identifies the official titles of the paper over its lifetime as: Chicago Daily Journal (1844-1853); Daily Chicago Journal (1853-1855); Chicago Daily Journal (1855-1861); Chicago Evening Journal (1861-1896); Chicago Journal (1896-1904); Chicago Daily Journal (1904-1929).

In April 1844, a group of men bought the two-year-old Chicago Express. A few days later, publishing out of the former office of the Express, the Journal was first published, three years prior to the start of the Chicago Tribune.