Politics & Power Quote by John George Nicolay

It reads like a roll call of destiny, but the real move is smaller and shrewder: Nicolay is manufacturing a birthplace for greatness. By anchoring Illinois's national significance in the legislature at Springfield, he turns a routine civic setting into an incubator where "genius" supposedly gathered of its own natural force. That word "then first" is doing heavy lifting. It implies an origin story, a before-and-after hinge in which political apprenticeship becomes historical inevitability.

Nicolay, a writer best known for his proximity to Lincoln as secretary and later biographer, is never just describing a scene. He's curating the mythology around it. "Splendid group" and "young men of genius" flatter the cohort while also flattering the institution that convened them. The subtext is that the state didn't merely produce talent; it assembled it, recognized it, tested it. This is civic boosterism with an archivist's polish: a way of claiming that Illinois mattered early, organically, and in the most American of ways-through politics.

The sentence also hides its exclusions. "Young men" is not incidental; it signals whose ambitions counted as history, whose careers were legible as "phenomenal". "Distinguished services" wraps power in virtue, smoothing over the messier realities of faction, patronage, and the brutal compromises of antebellum governance. Nicolay's intent is to elevate a network (and by extension Lincoln's world) into a coherent, almost providential cast list. The effect is to make state politics feel like the first act of a national epic.