For forty years Benjamin Wood edited the widest-circulating daily in the United States, the New York Daily News. Wood and the Daily News were virtually synonymous: the paper, which was struggling when Wood acquired it, began its meteoric rise seven years after he purchased it and prospered until shortly before his death in 1900. Without Wood the paper was not the same, and publication ceased forever only six years after he died. During the Civil War Wood actively participated in national politics as a member of the United States House of Representatives, and through his paper he became a leading national spokesman for the Peace Democrats, or "copperheads," as they were popularly called. After the war, Wood's political activity lessened with each passing year, but he continued to direct the Daily News until the week before his death.

Wood's family was of Quaker and Welsh descent, with the first...