It might be just as well that George Washington’s birthday got folded into Presidents Day (Feb. 20 this year), but so did Abraham Lincoln’s. While they are commonly ranked among the greatest U.S. presidents, or the greatest, they couldn’t have been more different.
Washington was a man of little learning and fewer words although he was a demonstrably gallant and brave soldier, having served already under British command when the Continental Congress named him the commander-in-chief of Patriot forces in 1775, whereupon he took up his new role at Boston.
Washington was a land surveyor when he wasn’t hunting foxes or overseeing the overseers of his plantations and slaves, and crucially, he was a Southerner, from the Virginia gentry, which the Patriots, especially from New England, thought would help knit the infant country together. It was also Virginia and the South then that had the lion’s share of colonial wealth, which came from enslaved labor and agricultural exports.
Washington had several grudges against the British: He had been passed over for promotion in Britain’s Regular Army, and in 1763 the king had banned American settlement west of the Allegheny Mountains. It was in those farthest reaches of the 18th-century American colonies that Washington hoped to make an even greater fortune through his own land claims.
The Revolutionary War dragged on for six long years and then some, most of it not taken up with combat but with waiting — for supplies, funds, intelligence, political support, and allies, as in most wars. During some of that down time, to judge from his correspondence, Washington, usually far from Virginia, worried principally about two things: the fate of his land claims, which would be lost if his war was, and his slaves, some of whom ran away, which he took as a personal insult.
He was not a brilliant general. The decisive Battle of Yorktown, in 1781, was a near thing that was saved by the French, particularly their royal navy. So why was Washington almost universally revered in his day and why has he been memorialized ever since?
It was because he knew when to quit. When King George III was told that Washington would resign his post after the conclusion of war rather than making himself a king or a dictator, which most observers half expected, the king said, “If he does that, he will be the greatest man in the world.” Then, after two terms as the first president, when Washington likely could have remained for life at that post, sustained by his countrymen’s affection, he retired again, this time almost for good.
Abraham Lincoln was a horse of a different color. Raised with virtually no formal education, in poverty, he was hired out by his father as a laborer, which would give him some insight into the burning question of his day, slavery. While Lincoln, as a self-taught lawyer and a politician, held that slavery was lawful, as it indeed was, and protected by the Constitution, it did not keep him from the expressed conviction that slavery was morally wrong — and that it corrupted the enslaver.
Lincoln was much ridiculed in his day by people from across the political spectrum who thought he was crude and coarse. Southern fire-eaters and abolitionists took turns abusing him incessantly. George Templeton Strong, the New York lawyer and diarist, called Lincoln “a barbarian.” The first commanding general of the Union armies, George McClellan, called him “the original gorilla” (when this sentiment got back to him, Lincoln skillfully hid whatever hurt he might have felt and said it didn’t matter). Elizabeth Cady Stanton, the abolitionist and feminist, habitually referred to him as “Dishonest Abe” and opposed his reelection in 1864; writing to her ally Susan B. Anthony, she said that if Lincoln did somehow win a second term, “I shall immediately leave the country for the Fijee Islands.” (She didn’t.)
Read Lincoln’s papers today and what you see is a man laboring, like all fine writers, through revisions in search of simplicity. His prose is lapidary, modern, almost timeless; but in his day, when gaseous oratory was preferred, it was considered by many to be coarse. We must pity them.
We love Lincoln today for some of the same reasons he was hated in his own day, which is one kind of verdict. But even more, we adore Lincoln in memory because, despite the ignorance, the insults and the disloyalties around him, there was no quit in him.