The Much-Needed Lessons That Washington, Lincoln Offer the Nation
Opinion Advocates for ideas and draws conclusions based on the author/producer’s interpretation of facts and data.
By Michael Gold
George Washington was born on Feb. 22, Abraham Lincoln on Feb. 12, but we simply commemorate their lives and achievements on Presidents’ Day, the third Monday in February. We’ve turned it into a day to go to the mall and buy goods at a discount. You can get up to 50 percent off on a sofa.
I don’t begrudge anyone the chance to save money on necessary household items, but perhaps we can carve out 10 minutes of Presidents’ Day to appreciate why Washington and Lincoln remain so profoundly important in defining who we are and what we aspire to be.
Washington upheld the principle of government as an instrument of the people in his farewell address as President.
Lincoln preserved the Union, articulated the common attributes we all share and affirmed the American ideals of justice, mercy and compassion.
President Washington’s thoughts, composed with the help of James Madison and Alexander Hamilton, made it plain that the federal government is “the offspring of our own choice.” In other words, we the people voted for those we wanted to represent us in Congress and as President. Because the government is what the people choose it to be, we should have confidence in its ability to enact laws that serve to improve peoples’ lives and that of the nation, and we can appropriately adjust the ship of state as circumstances require.
Washington stated, “The basis of our political systems is the right of the people to make and to alter their constitutions of government.” I think what Washington meant by “constitutions” in this sentence was who would fill the offices of federal, state and local governments and what laws they would author in response to political needs.
But he was careful to mention that the Constitution was the ultimate authority in how the nation would conduct its business, with this comment, “But the Constitution, which at any time exists, until changed by an explicit and authentic act of the whole people, is sacredly obligatory upon all. The very idea of the power and the right of the people to establish government presupposes the duty of every individual to obey the established government.”
The departing President was making it clear that America is a nation of laws which all, even those in the highest offices, are obliged to follow.
President Lincoln affirmed the unity of the nation in his first inaugural address.
“Physically speaking, we cannot separate. We cannot remove our respective sections from each other nor build an impassable wall between them…They cannot but remain face to face…and intercourse, either amicable or hostile, must continue between them.”
In the Gettysburg Address in 1863, he reinforced the founders’ ideals, that the country was “conceived in liberty, and dedicated to the proposition that all men are created equal.” Then he announced his hope that when the war ended, we should enjoy “a new birth of freedom, and that government of the people, by the people, for the people, shall not perish from the earth.”
The implication in his words was clear. Citizens had the power to uphold our democratic culture, with liberty available to all. But, with liberty comes responsibility. We have to work together to preserve the freedoms that the revolutionary generation dedicated themselves to fighting so valiantly for.
In Lincoln’s second inaugural address in 1865, as the Civil War dragged on, he evoked the commonality of all people, with the statement: “Both read the same Bible and pray to the same God…It may seem strange that any men should dare to ask a just God’s assistance in wringing their bread from the sweat of other men’s faces but let us judge not that we be not judged.”
This is a brilliant piece of rhetoric. It’s anti-slavery, yet restrained in its judgment of the Southern insurrectionists, perhaps because Lincoln did not want to demonize his adversaries and thus further inflame their passion for war.
He then applies what is perhaps a biblically inspired standard of mercy and compassion to the South, while never mentioning them, saying, “With malice toward none, with charity for all, with firmness in the right as God gives us to see the right to let us strive on to finish the work we are in to bind up the nation’s wounds…”
Even in the midst of the assaults of war, Lincoln had extended a hand of brotherhood to the South in an attempt to heal the savage injuries the Union had suffered, to motivate the nation to “achieve and cherish a just and lasting peace among ourselves and with all nations.”
Washington and Lincoln remind us that the American experiment is still a unique one, that we are on a journey toward freedom that never ends but must be renewed with every generation.
Pleasantville-based writer Michael Gold has had articles published in the New York Daily News, the Albany Times Union, The Virginian-Pilot, The Palm Beach Post and other newspapers, and The Hardy Society Journal, a British literary journal.
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