Sold – TR: Lincoln and Washington Exemplified “the…”

Theodore Roosevelt. The centennial of Lincoln’s birth on February 12, 1909, was an important occasion and there were innumerable events scheduled to honor it. The central one took place in Hodgenville, Kentucky at the Lincoln birthplace farm, where President Theodore Roosevelt and a number of dignitaries were in attendance. That farm, recently purchased by the Lincoln Farm Association, had been readied for visitors and a memorial building was designed to be constructed there. On the centennial day, the President and Mrs. Roosevelt, Secretary of War Luke E. Wright, Kentucky Governor Augustus E. Willson and 7,993 other visitors climbed up the hill to where the cabin stood on the site of the memorial building. Then Roosevelt gave the Centenary Address comparing Lincoln to the hallowed Washington, a much greater compliment to Lincoln then than it would seem now. This is an extract from that address. Typed Document Signed, Hodgenville, Ky., Feb. 12, 1909, entitled “Washington -Lincoln.” “As a people we are indeed beyond measure fortunate in the characters of the two greatest of our public men, Washington and Lincoln. Widely though they differed in externals, the Virginia landed gentleman and the Kentucky backwoodsman, they were alike in essentials, they were alike in the great qualities, which made each able to do service to his nation and to all mankind such as no other man of his generation could or did render. Each had lofty ideals, but each in striving to attain these lofty ideals was guided by the soundest common sense. Each possessed inflexible courage in adversity, and a soul wholly unspoiled by prosperity. Each possessed all of the gentler virtues, commonly exhibited by good men who lack rugged strength of character. Each possessed also all the strong qualities commonly exhibited by those towering masters of mankind who have too often shown themselves devoid of so much as the understanding of the words by which we signify the qualities of duty, of mercy, of devotion to the right, of lofty disinterestedness in battling for the good of others. There have been other men as great and other men as good; but in all the history of mankind there are no other two great men as good as these, no other two good men as great. Widely though the problems of today differ from the problems set for solution to Washington and to Lincoln, yet the qualities they showed in meeting these problems are exactly the same as those we should show in doing our work today.” Even with the passage of a century, TR’s characterizations of Washington and Lincoln as comparable in greatness and their qualities as most worthy of emulation remains accurate.