By Stephen Bowman
If the United States can justly be accused of being a country that dismisses history and relishes the gratifying present, what better example than Presidents Day? We honor Washington as president, yet he is remembered largely as a victorious general, though he had only one clear victory in seven years. And Lincoln, who we honor for freeing the slaves, would be surprised to learn we remember him as an icon of abolitionism though it was precisely because he was not an abolitionist that he was elected president.
Yet we persist in revering them. Why? Or rather, why should we? Indeed, if we look deeper, one learns much is lost in our childlike memory of these great men.
Our collective memory of both Washington and Lincoln have been drowned in half-truths and cartoons. Washington did not have wooden teeth, never wore a wig, and never chopped down his cherry tree. He had almost no formal education, and though one of the wealthiest men in the 13 colonies, most of that fortune was amassed through the untimely deaths of relatives and his marriage to Martha, a very wealthy widow. And like most Virginia planters of his time, that wealth was maintained by the toil of hundreds of slaves who were bought, sold, whipped and overworked.
It is perhaps in the field of battle that Washington’s feet are most clearly made of clay. Indeed, it is hard to imagine any general rising to supreme command with less success. Going back to the French and Indian War, he suffered humiliating defeat and ignominious surrender. In the Revolution, as commander of the Continental Army, most of his engagements with the English were either retreats or catastrophic defeats such as New York or Brandywine. Other American generals such as Gates and Arnold claimed victory at Saratoga, and it was the French that made the decisive victory at Yorktown possible. Only Washington crossing the Delaware at Trenton was a clear victory, but that midnight Christmas raid was a minor affair in every way, save for morale.
Happily, Lincoln’s mythology is more deeply rooted in truth. He did grow up in a dirt floor log cabin, split rails, was a voracious reader and self-taught attorney. But he was not born the Great Emancipator. He never befriended a black person, had no reservation representing a slave owner trying to reclaim an escaped female slave, and he firmly believed blacks were intellectually inferior to whites. As recently as 1858, during the famed Lincoln-Douglas debates, he unambiguously opposed blacks voting, serving on juries and running for office, intermarriage, or even blacks and whites living together. And in the first year of the Civil War, he overruled the proclamation of one of his generals, David Wilmot, which freed slaves who supported the Union in Missouri. For this rebuke, one leading U.S. Senator, Benjamin Wade, called Lincoln’s position on slavery typical of one “born of white trash and educated in a slave state.”
So why should we honor Washington and Lincoln? Why should their legacy burn so bright? For me they deserve our awe and respect because they were both thrust into crises for which not only were they unprepared, but for which no one had ever been prepared. Washington, to give birth to a democratic nation though half slave, half free, and Lincoln, to purge that nation for its sins and hypocrisy in a civil war.
It is impossible to overestimate their perseverance and determination. Through years of defeats, Washington led an army that starved, lacked arms and basic clothing. Lincoln’s Union army, though well-equipped, suffered through two years of incompetent leadership. If there is one common experience shared in their journey, it was bleak desolation.
But in a greater sense, the two diverge in their defining use of power. Washington’s greatness was in his relinquishment of power; Lincoln’s in his embrace of it.
What made Washington a man for the ages was his resignation of his positions as the commander of the Continental Army, and the presidency after two terms. In the age of monarchs, this had never happened before. This relinquishment of power lead England’s King George the III to say, “He is the greatest man in the world.”
Lincoln’s legacy was equally historic. By issuing the Emancipation Proclamation, which freed the slaves in the South, he was acting contrary to the U.S. Constitution. That act turned the purpose of the war from bloodless union to vivifying emancipation, and re-established our country’s birthright from legally condoned slavery to universal freedom and equality.
In this way, Washington and Lincoln’s legacies must be seen as a continuum: Washington established a new democratic nation, albeit flawed, through his deference to the rule of law, not power. Lincoln exceeded the letter of that law to resurrect the principals of the Declaration of Independence, upon which that law was erected.
That is why we celebrate Presidents Day.
Stephen Bowman lives in Syracuse.