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, EDITOR S INTRODUCTION P RESIDENT LINCOLN'S CHIEF WHITE HOUSE SECRETARY, JOHN G. Nicolay, was born in Bavaria in 1832; five years later with his parents he emigrated to the United States. The peripatetic family at first lit in Cincinnati, then moved to Indiana, then to Missouri, and ultimately to Pike County, Illinois. Evidently Nicolay led a hard life, especially after his father died in 1846. Two years later, according to some sources, Zachariah N. Garbutt, editor of the Pike County Free Press in Pittsfield, heard the young Nicolay howling in pain as his mother punished him severely. Garbutt discovered that the woman did not much care for her offspring. The journalist, in effect, adopted the "freckle-faced, redheaded boy in bed-ticking trousers and straw hat" to whom he had taken a liking; Garbutt promised to instruct the lad in the trade of printing. So Nicolay packed a few belongings in a red bandanna and settled in Pittsfield with Garbutt and his wife, who "brought him up as tenderly as they could have done had the child been their own;,l In a third-person autobiographical sketch, Nicolay recalled that "Schools were very scarce in Illinois, affording him only primary instruction , and that for very limited periods. At seventeen he became printer's apprentice in a country newspaper office, in which during his stay of eight years he educated himself, rising through all the grades of employment to those of proprietor, publisher, and editor;,2 The office of The Free Pressbecame a kind of political headquarters where Nicolay got to know some leading public figures of the region, including Ozias M. Hatch of Griggsville.3 In Pittsfield Nicolay also befriended Thomas Wesley Shastid, a boy his own age who remembered that he was "always a modest, perhaps even diffident" person. When they walked about the little town together, the "very, very painfully shy" Nicolay would "shun the streets whereon the elite of the village were most likely to be passing;'4 One day, when Abraham Lincoln asked Shastid where he could get a printing job done Xl EDITOR'S INTRODUCTION quickly, the young man took him to the newspaper office and introduced him to Nicolay.5 This may well have occurred during the 1856 presidential campaign, when, Nicolay recalled, he first met Lincoln.6 The following year, when Nicolay's friend Ozias M. Hatch became secretary of state for Illinois, he hired the young man as his clerk. In Hatch's Springfield office, a favorite gathering place for leading Republicans, Nicolay often saw Lincoln. As Nicolay reported, ''All election records were kept by the Secretary of State, and I, being Mr. Hatch's principal clerk, had frequent occasion to show Mr. Lincoln, who was an assiduous student of election tables, the latest returns or the completed record books."7 The two men often played chess at the library where the records were stored.8 In his spare time Nicolaywrote dispatches about Illinois affairs for the Missouri Democrat in St. Louis.9 Lincoln came to regard the young man highly. In 1858 he recommended Nicolay to Horace Greeley as a correspondent, calling him "entirely trust-worthy:,IO Ayear later he assigned Nicolayto deliver the carefully prepared scrapbook of his debates with Stephen A. Douglas to an Ohio publisher.ll When Lincoln won the presidential nomination in May 1860, Nicolay hoped to write a campaign biography of him and "was greatly disappointed and chagrined"when that task was assigned to an obscure young man with literary ambitions, William Dean Howells. "But;' Nicolay recalled , "my compensation soon came. Only a day or two later Mr. lincoln appointed me as his private secretary, without any solicitation on my part, or, so far as I know, of anyone else.... ,,12 According to one source, Lincoln had told Hatch, "1 wish I could find some young man to help me with my correspondence. It is getting so heavy I can't handle it. I can't afford to pay much, but the practice is worth something:,13 Hatch suggested Nicolay, and Lincoln took the advice. Among his first duties was to make copies of Lincoln's autobiography written for John 1. Scripps and send them to campaign biographers.14 After the election, the president-elect kept Nicolay on as secretary. Not everyone approved of the choice. Herman Kreismann thought it "ridiculous" because Nicolay lacked the necessary polish and savoirfaire : "It wants a man of refinement and culture and thoroughly at home xu 8.224.0...

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