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On Monday, Americans will celebrate Presidents’ Day honoring the birthdays of the country’s two greatest presidents: George Washington and Abraham Lincoln. Washington, the aristocratic southern plantation owner, and Lincoln, the log cabin-born mid-western self-made man. They came from starkly different backgrounds and life experiences, and yet they literally shaped America into the nation it ultimately has become. No other presidents have been as formative and inspiring in molding both the American national character and its form of government, not to mention the presidential office itself.
George Washington was indeed the father of the country. He guided the newborn nation successfully through its formative crisis, the Revolution. Overwhelmingly popular as a national hero, having led the Continental Army to victory over the modern world’s first superpower, Great Britain, Washington rejected offers to become a monarch, and refusing to shackle Americans with the prerogatives of European monarchy.
Most historians believe Washington’s greatest gift to his country was to impose upon himself a voluntary two-term limit on presidential service, surrendering political power and retiring to private life in Mount Vernon. This extraordinary, virtually unprecedented, voluntary surrender of political power bequeathed our country the tradition of the restraint of executive power in the federal government that has served America so well for more than two centuries. King George III is reported to have said when he heard that Washington had stepped away from power after only two terms, “Then Washington is truly a great man.”
Almost all Americans would agree. He helped us forge a government of the people, by the people, and for the people.
Abraham Lincoln became president in the midst of the nation’s second great crisis —the split over slavery that descended into a horribly bloody civil war, American against American, for four terrible and destructive years. The entirety of Lincoln’s presidency was filled with preparation for war, war itself, and its bitter aftermath, made yet more bitter by perhaps the worse individual calamity to ever befall the American people —Lincoln’s assassination. In the midst of the terrible bloodletting that was America’s Civil War, Lincoln struggled for answers to provide greater meaning and purpose that would justify the agonizing suffering, tormenting the nation, North and South. Elton Trueblood meaningfully described Lincoln as the “theologian of American anguish.”
Lincoln had been a spiritual skeptic in his youth, but increasingly became a man of deep faith as he walked through the fiery crucible of the Civil War where Americans were killing their fellow Americans in horrifyingly heartbreaking numbers. Lincoln declared, “I have been driven many times to my knees by the overwhelming conviction that I had nowhere else to go. My own wisdom, and that of all about me seemed insufficient for the day.”
SOURCE: Christian Post, Richard Land
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