Politics & Power Quote by John George Nicolay

Nicolay’s line has the quiet sting of someone who knew the machinery from the inside. “Thus became a lawyer” nods to Lincoln’s celebrated self-making story: the frontier striver who earns legitimacy through the law. But the sentence refuses to let that credential launder his ambitions. “He did not cease to remain a politician” is the tell: politics isn’t a phase Lincoln outgrows; it’s the constant that absorbs every new role.

The intent is corrective. Nicolay, Lincoln’s longtime secretary and later biographer, is pushing back against the comforting myth that law is neutral and politics is grubby. In mid-19th-century America, becoming a lawyer was one of the most reliable on-ramps to power. The bar conferred status, access to networks, fluency in institutions, and an arena to practice persuasion. Nicolay’s phrasing implies that Lincoln’s legal career was not an escape from politics but an upgrade in political equipment.

The subtext is also a defense of Lincoln’s strategic coherence. Rather than portraying him as a reluctant statesman summoned by destiny, Nicolay frames him as someone with sustained, deliberate political identity. That matters because it changes how we read Lincoln’s later greatness: not as accidental virtue but as practiced leadership. The sentence’s mildness is its bite; it sounds like a simple biographical note, yet it punctures romantic narratives and reminds us that professional respectability and political calculation have always been close cousins in American public life.