This would seem to be more a product of your fantasies than Darwinian. Karl Marx never set foot in the U.S., and he was never a correspondent for The Times. The Times correspondent in the U.S. at the time of the Southern rebellion and the Lincoln Administration would have been William Howard Russell.
If I were going to invent on this subject, on a conservative website, it would have made more sense to suggest that Lincoln was the apple of Marx's eye. The actual fact was that even Marx had no use for Lincoln.
Revise your sentence to insert "a London Times correspondent" for "the London Times correspondent."
If the correspondent to whom you refer was surnamed Russell, he was probably the son of Lord Russell and therefore an unlikely press agent for Lincoln as well. Either Lord Russell or, more likely, Lord Palmerston then owned the London Times. Neither Lord Russell nor Lord Palmerston (Tory MPs who took turns as PM and Foreign Secretary during the Second War for Independence) were particular fans of Abraham Lincoln. It took Prince Albert of Coburg, Victoria's hubby, on his death bed to dissuade Palmerston and Russell of recognizing the Confederacy solely on the question of slavery, but not before the British laird Shipyards built and launched the magnificent Confederate rams Alabama and Tennessee.
What were your credentials as a conservative, if any??????