Love & Passion Quote by John George Nicolay

Nicolay writes like someone polishing a monument while pretending he is just dusting it. By stacking “stature and strength” alongside “intelligence and ambition,” he offers a full-body portrait that makes Lincoln legible to every audience at once: the men who prized physical competence on the frontier, and the women presumed to be swayed by the same bundle of virtues reframed as romance. The line’s neat trick is its compression: “in short” signals a confident summary, but it’s also a narrative shortcut, converting messy social life into an orderly résumé of attractiveness.

The subtext is Victorian biography doing crowd control. Nicolay, a close Lincoln aide and later his official biographer, is intent on presenting Lincoln as naturally, almost inevitably, beloved. Popularity becomes proof of character; attention from “the fair sex” becomes a kind of moral certification. That phrase - “fair sex” - is doing ideological work: it flattens women into a collective mirror reflecting male worth, and it makes heterosexual appeal a public metric, not a private complication. Lincoln’s interior life is less important than the consensus forming around him.

Context matters: New Salem is the pre-presidential proving ground, and Nicolay is building a throughline from small-town charm to national destiny. The sentence reassures readers that greatness didn’t arrive abruptly in Washington; it was visible early, in the way a village supposedly agreed on his value. It’s hagiography with a smile: intimate detail used to make legend feel like reportage.