Nicolay, who eventually became Lincoln’s private secretary, may not be well-known today, but he was one of the most significant people working behind the scenes in the Lincoln administration and his efforts on behalf of the 16th president changed the course of American history. Possessed of organizational skills that Lincoln lacked, Nicolay managed White House operations and protected Lincoln’s time, allowing the president to become perhaps the nation’s most active and involved wartime commander-in-chief. Nicolay was devoted to Lincoln and his friendship eased the president’s burdens during the terrible ordeal of civil war. Following Lincoln’s assassination, Nicolay and his friend John Hay worked for years on a massive biography of Lincoln that shaped the president’s image as the good and wise Father Abraham who saved the Union, ended slavery, and gave America renewed freedom. Nicolay helped Lincoln achieve greatness in both life and legend.

Born Johann Georg Nicolai in 1832 in the village of Essingen in what is now Germany, Nicolay was five when his family arrived in the United States, anglicized its last name, and settled in a German immigrant community in Cincinnati, Ohio. When Nicolay’s mother died soon thereafter the family left for a series of western locations, eventually settling in Pike County, Illinois, where they operated a grist mill. While physically frail, the academically inclined George, as he was called, learned English quickly. By the age of 14 he had lost his father and been dismissed from the family mill by his eldest brother. But he soon landed a job at the Pike County Free Press in Pittsfield, the county seat of Pike County, Illinois.

Lincoln at the time was a circuit-riding attorney who often argued cases in the Pike County courthouse, across the street from the newspaper’s offices. Nicolay followed Lincoln’s court appearances and budding political career with growing interest and enthusiasm. Like Lincoln, Nicolay was drawn to the new Republican Party, which opposed slavery’s expansion. And like Lincoln, he was vehemently opposed to Senator. Stephen A. Douglas’s 1854 Kansas-Nebraska Act, which negated the Missouri Compromise of 1820 and permitted slavery anew in territory that had been closed to it.

At the Free Press, Nicolay worked his way up from printer’s apprentice to reporter to sole proprietor. The paper supported Republican candidates in Illinois, including Ozias M. Hatch, who after his election as Secretary of State in 1856 invited Nicolay to become his chief clerk. After selling the newspaper, Nicolay moved to Springfield to join Hatch’s staff in 1857. While executing his duties at the state library and election archives, located directly across the street from Lincoln’s law office, Nicolay finally got to meet Lincoln in person. Although Lincoln was 23 years older than Nicolay they became fast friends, often conversing and playing chess in the State Library.

In 1858, Lincoln ran for Douglas’s senate seat, engaging in the famous Lincoln-Douglas debates that cemented his reputation as a moderate and reasoned anti-slavery voice within the Republican Party. He lost the race, but Republican leaders decided that transcripts of the debates should be published and distributed nationally to promote the party’s cause. Lincoln called on Nicolay to hand deliver the copies to a publishing company in Ohio, writing in his letter of introduction, “Mr. Nicolay is a good Republican … a good man and worthy of any confidence that may be bestowed upon him.” Given these sentiments, it didn’t take long for Lincoln and Nicolay to forge a partnership in politics.

Lincoln’s star was on the rise. Many Republicans thought he’d make a great vice presidential candidate in the 1860 election, but he and Nicolay envisioned something more. In February, 1860, Nicolay began pushing Lincoln’s prospects for a presidential run, writing an editorial endorsing Lincoln for president in the Pike County Free Press. Nicolay was present at the Chicago convention when Lincoln won the nomination. Soon thereafter, Lincoln offered him the position of campaign secretary.  

Lincoln liked Nicolay and admired his abilities, but there was also a political calculation in choosing a widely respected German immigrant to play a key role in his administration. German American voters had been alienated by the Democratic Party’s defense of slavery, as well as by the American (or “Know Nothing”) Party and its anti-immigrant positions. When the “Know Nothings” merged into the coalition forming the new Republican Party, German American voters were unsure where they belonged. By appointing Nicolay his private secretary, Lincoln assured German Americans that he was not a nativist.

As the Private Secretary to the president, Nicolay became the de facto first White House chief of staff. He brought his friend Hay on board as an assistant. Nicolay served as a gatekeeper of access to Lincoln, coordinating daily White House routines that included managing the president’s schedule, handling correspondence, and even ordering filing cabinets for proper storage of the administration’s paperwork (no longer was Lincoln allowed to carry around important documents in his hat). Nicolay served as the principal liaison between the White House and Congress. He sat in on Cabinet meetings and presidential interviews and took careful notes. He drafted important documents and letters. He assisted First Lady Mary Lincoln with state dinners and other matters of protocol, experiencing tense relations with her when she overspent and fudged the accounts. Nicolay and Hay were Lincoln’s sounding boards as the president conducted business in D.C. and went on missions to various parts of the country beyond as the president’s trusted eyes and ears. Nicolay conducted multiple treaty negotiations with Native American tribes. His organization of the president’s schedule freed Lincoln to spend critical hours each day in the War Department’s telegraph office monitoring developments in the field. Without Nicolay’s focus, Lincoln could have been lost in a sea of detail.

President Abraham Lincoln sits between John George Nicolay (left) and John Hay (right) in Washington, D.C., in November 1963. Hay wrote in his diary, “We had a great many pictures taken … Nico & I immortalized ourselves by having ourselves done in a group with the Prest.” Courtesy of the Library of Congress.

Nicolay continued working for Lincoln through the president’s 1864 election to a second term, but decided he wanted to depart the White House shortly thereafter. Living in Washington had meant enduring long periods of separation from the love of his life, Therena Bates, who remained in Pittsfield, and Nicolay was growing weary of confrontations with Mrs. Lincoln. He accepted Lincoln’s offer of an appointment as American consul at Paris, but was still in his White House job—returning from a mission to Cuba—when he learned that the president had been assassinated. Devastated, he remained in his secretary post until he and Hay had organized Lincoln’s presidential papers and made the presidential office ready for Lincoln’s successor, Andrew Johnson.

Nicolay and Bates got married and headed off for a new life in Paris in June of 1865. Their daughter, Helen, was born there the following year. Nicolay served as consul at Paris until he was replaced by an appointee of President Grant in 1869. He returned to the U.S. and became a naturalized American citizen on October 12, 1870. (Apparently no one, including President Lincoln, had known that Nicolay wasn’t a citizen.) In 1872 he was selected to be Marshal of the U.S. Supreme Court. This enabled Nicolay and his family to live in Washington, D.C., and allowed him to begin the legacy-cementing literary work he really wanted to do: prepare a history and biography of Abraham Lincoln and his era.

Nicolay and Hay worked with Robert Todd Lincoln, the president’s son, who gave them access to Lincoln’s presidential papers. Doing painstaking research, Nicolay and Hay shunned hearsay and undocumented tales about Lincoln and relied on credible documentation for every aspect of their 10-volume, 4,800-page work, Abraham Lincoln – A History, which was published by the Century Company in 1890. The work was more than a mere biography of Lincoln. It assembled a detailed military history of the Civil War and reported on the machinations of the cabinet, Congress, and the military. It portrayed Lincoln as a witty and wise man who loved to tell stories. It detailed how Lincoln bore the suffering of war on his shoulders while his faith in God grew deeper, and the ways he saw beyond the immediate ups and downs of war, keeping the ultimate goal of preserving the Union ever in his mind. It was the first scholarly validation of the president’s greatness and became the foundational work for all the scholarly writing on Lincoln to follow.

This massive effort was not viewed as flawless, but it was widely praised when it was published, and it shaped a heroic image of Lincoln that persists to this day. In Nicolay and Hay’s telling, Abraham Lincoln could do no wrong. His motives were always pure, his fairness, kindness, and wisdom were without parallel, and only he possessed the qualities of mind and character needed by the nation in its moment of gravest crisis. The book was a work of filial love, scholarly yet biased, by two men who, in their early manhood, had viewed Lincoln as an all-wise father figure who could do no wrong, the man who had saved the nation and ended slavery.

The self-effacing Nicolay—the Father of Lincoln Scholars—is practically invisible in the volumes. He always chose to work behind the scenes for his hero, mentor, and friend.

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On May 24, 1883, the Brooklyn Bridge—after 14 years of construction—was opened at last. The mayor of Brooklyn, Seth Low, had declared the day a public holiday in his city; on the New York side, there was a “strong expression of sentiment” in favor of closing the Stock Exchange early. The president of the United States, Chester A. Arthur, along with future president Grover Cleveland, governor of New York, made a ceremonial crossing from New York to Brooklyn, which at the time were two separate cities that soon would become one. That night there would be a fireworks display of terrifying grandeur, 14 tons of explosives let off from the bridge itself, serpents of fire, flowers of fire, showers of fire.

Then there were speeches, including two giving thanks to the Roeblings, the German family who had built it.

First to be praised was John Roebling, a German immigrant who had conceived the bridge—but had died suddenly in 1869, before work had even begun. Then came a nod to his son, Washington, born in the United States, but who had grown up in a German-speaking community, not learning English until he was 11.

Washington Roebling had taken over the immense project at the age of 32 and had, in the words of the politician-industrialist Abram Hewitt, “braved death and sacrificed his health to the duties which had devolved upon him, as the inheritor of his father’s fame, and the executor of his father’s plans.”

The prominent clergyman Richard Storr rose and said: “It was not to a native American mind that the scheme of construction carried out in this bridge is to be ascribed,” he said, “but to one representing the German people . . . the skill which devised, and much, no doubt, of the labor which wrought them, came from afar.”

Washington Roebling—in his foreign heritage, his ingenuity, and his longevity—defined as much as anyone what it meant to be American, at least in the 19th and early 20th centuries. Born in 1837, in western Pennsylvania when it still was the frontier, he died in 1926, in the Jazz Age. He was not only an engineer but also a scientist, a musician, a linguist, a husband and father. He served four long years in the Union Army during the Civil War, promoted from lowly private to colonel by the war’s end, and was known as Colonel Roebling to the end of his days.

His name is mostly forgotten, but he made an American icon: a bridge that has served New York’s commuters and tourists and lovers for nearly 150 years while inspiring poets and painters and photographers from Hart Crane to Georgia O’Keefe to Walker Evans.

Washington’s father John had been born in 1806 in Saxony; Johann August Roebling was his name until he emigrated to America in 1831. He trained in Berlin as a surveyor and an engineer, but Prussian bureaucracy stymied the ambition of this visionary and energetic man, and he resolved to make a new life for himself across the ocean.

He would do all that and more. In 1842 he patented a design for making rope from wire, a development that made his, and his family’s, fortune. Wire rope would be the foundation of his great engineering works, not least his suspension bridge across Niagara Falls—strong enough to carry a locomotive—and the John A. Roebling Bridge across the Ohio River, which still connects Cincinnati and Covington, Kentucky today.

John and his brother Carl were two of the 150,000 people who left what we now know as Germany between 1831 and 1840. They acquired land in western Pennsylvania; they and their fellow immigrants swiftly built a lovely little town, still intact today, which they called Saxonburg. It was here that Washington was born, and where he lived, in a wholly German-speaking community, until he went to school in the late 1840s and learned to speak English.

It was around this time too that John Roebling’s wire rope business outgrew rural Saxonburg; he bought land in Trenton, New Jersey, just then becoming an industrial center, well-situated between Philadelphia and New York. Washington would later note that the land his father bought in Trenton for $100 per acre was worth $22,000 per acre in 1894. Eventually, wire made by John A. Roebling’s Sons company would be incorporated not only in suspension bridges such as the George Washington and the Golden Gate, but also into the Wright Brothers’ and Charles Lindbergh’s airplanes. The wire also made it into nearly all of Mr. Otis’ elevators. This is the stuff of the American dream—a dream, like those of so many, with immigrant roots.

Washington was born an American, but raised in an immigrant culture. His father had chosen America, though John understood too that it was not a perfect place. He saw that, in his own words, “the all-disturbing European” had displaced a native population; he despised the evil of slavery, and Washington would join the Union Army in the earliest days of the war to fight against that evil. (Washington’s name was not as patriotic as it sounds. He was not named for George Washington but for a fellow surveyor, Washington Gill, whom his father met in his first years in the United States. Washington always disliked his mouthful of a name.)

For all his life, Washington worked with men who had come from afar to be Americans; these were the men who built the Brooklyn Bridge. William Kingsley, a wealthy Brooklyn contractor who promoted the project, had been born in Ireland; as had Thomas Kinsella, editor of the Brooklyn Daily Eagle, the newspaper which ardently supported the bridge and Washington Roebling’s work. Wilhelm Hildenbrand, one of Washington’s most loyal and talented assistant engineers, had emigrated from Germany in the years after the Civil War; before his work on the Brooklyn Bridge he had designed the great train shed for New York’s Grand Central Depot (demolished in 1903 to make way for the structure that stands now).

And, as Richard Storr had so correctly remarked at the bridge’s opening, the men who worked in the deep foundations of the bridge, who cut the stone and set the great cables in place, who did the most dangerous work on site, came from all over the world. How many men died during the construction of the Brooklyn Bridge? It is hard to settle on an exact figure, since records were not kept in the same way they are now.

In the rolls of the dead we can find James McGarrity, born in Ireland, who died in 1871 when a derrick collapsed. William Hines died in the same accident; he was Scottish by birth. Peter Koop, born in Germany, was 20 when he died in 1873; his foot got caught in some machinery. Harry Supple, a rigger renowned for his high-wire feats on the cables, was born in Newfoundland and had been a sailor; he died when a strand of cable snapped in 1878 (as Brooklyn historian Maggie Blanck has written about in detail).

Washington Roebling himself was very nearly a casualty. The towers of the bridge were built using “caissons,” chambers of compressed air sunk down into the river’s bed. Men, including the chief engineer, who worked in these chambers were stricken with “caisson disease,” now called decompression sickness, its cause not yet understood. During the worst years of Washington’s illness, his wife, Emily Warren Roebling—whose own family had come to America on the Mayflower—would become the de facto project manager for the bridge, and she is rightly honored with a plaque on one of the great towers.

The great East River bridge remains a monument both to the men who lost their lives, and to the engineers who envisioned and built it. It demonstrated that an audacious and beautiful bridge could be constructed in the aftermath of a dreadful civil war, an embodiment of unity and progress in steel and stone.

John Roebling often told his oldest son that his success would never have been possible in Germany. John’s newfangled rope enabled the construction of a suspension aqueduct in Pittsburgh in 1844-45, his first big engineering success.

In recalling his father’s breakthrough, Washington later wrote: “The dignity and pride of the supervising engineer would have ground down the ambitious attempt of the young engineer in even proposing such a structure which had no precedent America was the goal which all young men aimed to reach then as well as now.”

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