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Articles
Ties That Bind: Washington, Lincoln and Churchill, Part 2
- By D. CRAIG HORN
- | March 31, 2022
- Category: Explore Understanding Churchill
Part 2: Abraham Lincoln
Character and integrity are synonymous with the name Abraham Lincoln. Born less than a decade after Washington died, Lincoln extended his ideals of liberty. If George Washington was the father of his country, Abraham Lincoln was surely its son.
Churchill believed he shared much with Abraham Lincoln, most importantly a firm belief in the sovereignty of the people. He saw as essential the political harmony of the United States and British Commonwealth. Their differences, he wrote, “are more apparent than real,” more geographical “rather than any true division of principle.”25
Law, language, and literature unite the English-speaking world, and all sorts of other things are happening which fortify these mighty traditions with ever-growing practical considerations of safety and survival. The rule of law, calm, without prejudice, swayed neither to the right nor to the left however political tides or party currents may flow, is the foundation of freedom. The independence of the judiciary from the executive is the prime defence against the tyranny and retrogression of totalitarian government. Trial by jury, the right of every man to be judged by his equals, is among the most precious gifts that England has bequeathed to America.26
Tests of Freedom
What is the definition of freedom? Redolent of Lincoln and Washington alike were the tests Churchill offered to the Italian people after visiting Italy in 1944:
- Is there the right to free expression of opinion and of opposition and criticism of the government of the day?
- Have the people the right to turn out a government of which they disapprove?
- Are constitutional means provided by which they can make their will apparent?
- Are there courts of Justice free from interference by the Executive and from threats of mob violence?
- Are they free of all association with particular political parties?
- Will these courts administer open and well-established laws which are associated in the human mind with the broad principles of decency and justice?
- Will there be fair play for poor as well as rich, for private persons as well as government officials?
- Will the rights of the individual, subject to his duties to the State, be maintained and asserted and exalted?
- Is an ordinary workman, who is earning a living by daily toil and striving to bring up a family, free from fear that some grim police organization, under the control of a single party, like the Gestapo started by the Nazi and Fascist parties, will tap him on the shoulder and pack him off without fair or open trial to bondage or ill-treatment?27
At Gettysburg 80 years earlier, Abraham Lincoln had spoken of government of, by and for the people. Seventy years before that, George Washington was of the same mind: “The basis of our political system is the right of the people to make and alter their constitutions of government.”28
Traits of leadership
Washington, Lincoln and Churchill fiercely opposed injustice and inhumanity. At the core of their statesmanship was an unceasing drive to build upon healthy political principles. Those are legacies of the Anglo-American tradition. Churchill drove this point home at Harvard in 1943: “The price of greatness is responsibility,” he said. A nation cannot become “in many ways the leading community of the civilized world without being involved in its problems, without being convulsed by its agonies and inspired by its causes.”29
I am often asked what I believe to be the greatest trait of leadership. This is a serious question for thoughtful people. Churchill wrote, “Courage is rightly esteemed the first of all human qualities because, as has been said, it is the quality that guarantees all others.”30 His old colleague Anthony Eden, Earl of Avon, expanded the idea, applicable to Abraham Lincoln and George Washington as well:
…courage is never easy to define. Sometimes it is shown in the heat of battle; and that we all respect. But there is that rarer courage which can sustain repeated disappointment, unexpected failure, and even shattering defeat. Churchill had that, too; and he had need of it…. Looking back now at the war, victory may seem to have been certain. But it was not always certain; and when news is bad, it is very lonely at the top.31
That was the courage of a Washington, a Lincoln and a Churchill. It personified their amazing strength of character.
“In Victory, Magnanimity”
There is no glory in war and no victory in retribution, as these three leaders acknowledged. Washington warned against aggravating the Patriot-Loyalist divide, lest it destabilize the new nation. Lincoln took the precept to sublime heights: “With malice toward none; with charity for all; with firmness in the right, as God gives us to see the right, let us strive on to finish the work we are in; to bind up the nation’s wounds…”32 As the Civil War waned, Lincoln’s “10% plan” for Reconstruction reflected magnanimity, as he told his generals, “Let them up easy.”33 During victory celebrations he asked bands to play “Dixie,” reportedly saying, “I always thought it was a dandy tune.”
Churchill’s life was replete with the trait he recognized in Lincoln. “To those who spoke of hanging Jefferson Davis,” Churchill wrote, “Lincoln replied, ‘Judge not that ye be not judged.’”34 Four days before his assassination “he proclaimed the need of a broad and generous temper and urged the conciliation of the vanquished.”35
We live in a highly charged, dangerously divisive time. It can only end if we come together over shared principles. Lincoln saw that after America’s greatest convulsion. Churchill had been sacked from office in 1946, but he saw it too: “We must never cease to proclaim in fearless tones the great principles of freedom and the rights of man which are the joint inheritances of the English-Speaking world and which, through Magna Carta, the Bill of Rights, the Habeas Corpus, Trail by Jury, English Common Law, are in their most famous expression, The American Declaration of Independence.”36 By applying those principles, “we have maintained our communion with the powerful Commonwealths our children have established beyond the seas.”37
“Why are we here?”
Knowledge of the past is the only foundation we have to peer into and measure the future. Churchill said: “Expert knowledge however indispensable is no substitute for a generous and comprehensive outlook upon the human story with all its sadness and unquenchable hope.”38 “Why are we here?” he asked: “What is the purpose of life?”39 He was writing in the 1930s, but could as easily been referring to modern times when he counseled:
It is therefore above all things important that the moral philosophy and spiritual conceptions of men and nations should hold their own amid these formidable scientific evolutions…. Projects undreamed-of by past generations will absorb our immediate descendants; forces terrific and devastating will be in their hands; comforts, activities, amenities, pleasures will crowd upon them, but their hearts will ache, their lives will be barren, if they have not a vision above material things.40
On Churchill’s death President Dwight Eisenhower wrote words that were at once eloquent and challenging:
On that gray and moving winter day when his soul was committed to the hands of God amid stately pageantry, I knelt in St. Paul’s Cathedral. Around me were old flags, old shields, old prayers, all the evidence of Britain’s long continuity. And I wondered if we in the United States, with our devotion to the new at the expense of the old, to the future at the expense of the past, are not forsaking something precious. For only a nation steeped in history and pride could produce a Churchill.41
Yet surely Eisenhower had no cause to wonder. His nation had produced George Washington and Abraham Lincoln. And to paraphrase a famous Churchill secretary, that they died is unimportant, for we all must pass away. That they lived was momentous to the destiny of humankind. They are not gone. They live wherever people are free.42
His daughter Mary told Sir Winston at the end of his life: “In addition to all the feelings a daughter has for a loving, generous father, I owe you what every English man, woman and child does: liberty itself.”43 Lincoln and Washington as well.
Endnotes
25 Winston S. Churchill (hereinafter WSC), American Bar Association Dinner, Guildhall, London, 31 July 1957, in Robert Rhodes James, ed., Winston S. Churchill: His Complete Speeches 1897-1963, 8 vols. (New York: Bowker, 1974), VIII: 8683.
26 WSC, accepting an honorary doctorate of law from the University of State of New York, 10 Downing Street, 7 April 1954, Complete Speeches VIII: 8559.
27 WSC, 28 August 1944, in Triumph and Tragedy (London: Cassell, 1954), 111-12.
28 George Washington, Farewell Address, 1796, in James D. Richardson, ed., Messages and Papers of the Presidents 1789-1897 (Washington: Government Printing Office, 1896), I: 217.
29 WSC, “Anglo-American Unity,” Harvard, 6 September 1943, Complete Speeches VII: 6823.
30 “Alfonso the Unlucky,” The Strand Magazine, July 1931, in Richard M. Langworth, ed., Churchill by Himself (New York: Rosetta, 2016), 14.
31 Earl of Avon, House of Lords, 25 January 1965, in Hansard, 1067, accessed 16 February 2021.
32 Abraham Lincoln, Second Inaugural Address, Washington, 4 March 1865, Abraham Lincoln Online, https://bit.ly/3sMsGQn, accessed 17 February 2022.
33 Lincoln’s blueprint for reconstruction included the “10% Plan,” officially the “Proclamation of Amnesty and Reconstruction,” developed in 1863 following Union victories at Gettysburg and Vicksburg. It specified that a secessionist state could be readmitted to the Union after 10% of its enrolled voters swore an oath of allegiance.
34 “President Lincoln Enters Richmond, 3 April 1865, Eyewitness to History, https://bit.ly/3uYk1gz, accessed 17 February 2022.
35 WSC, History of the English-Speaking Peoples, vol. 4, The Great Democracies (New York: Dodd Mead, 1958), 262.
36 WSC, “The Sinews of Peace,” Fulton, Missouri, 5 March 1946, Complete Speeches VII: 7285
37 WSC, Liberty Day Meeting, London, 4 July 1918, Complete Speeches III: 2614.
38 WSC, University of Miami, 26 February 1946, Complete Speeches VII: 7285.
39 WSC, “Life in a World Controlled by Scientists,” in News of the World, 7 November 1918; reprinted in Thoughts and Adventures, 1932 (London: Leo Cooper, 1992), 203-04.
40 WSC, “Fifty Years Hence,” in The Strand Magazine, February 1931, reprinted in Thoughts and Adventures, 203, 204.
41 Dwight D. Eisenhower, “The Churchill I Knew,” National Geographic, vol. 128, no. 2, August 1965, 156.
42 Grace Hamblin, “Chartwell Memories,” Dallas, 30 October 1987, in Churchill by Himself, xii.
43 Martin Gilbert, Churchill: A Life (London: Heinemann, 1991), 959.
The author
The Hon. D. Craig Horn DHL, President of the Churchill Society of North Carolina, served five terms in the North Carolina House of Representatives, representing District 68, Western Union County. He is currently serving as Mayor of Weddington, North Carolina. This essay was first presented to the Daughters of the American Revolution, Halifax Chapter, Charlotte, N.C., on 13 October 2016.
Further reading
Larry P. Arnn, Churchill’s Trial: Winston Churchill and the Survival of Free Government (Nashville: Nelson Books, 2015).
Larry P. Arnn, “American Principles and Public Policy,” 2019.
Lewis E. Lehrman, “Lincoln and Churchill,” Part 1 and Part 2, 2016.
William John Shepherd, review of Lewis E. Lehrman, Lincoln and Churchill: Statesmen at War, 2018.