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Ties That Bind: Washington, Lincoln and Churchill, Part 1
- By D. CRAIG HORN
- | March 24, 2022
- Category: Explore Understanding Churchill
Part 1: George Washington
“Disinterested and courageous, far-sighted and patient, aloof yet direct in manner, inflexible once his mind was made up, Washington possessed the gifts of character for which the situation called. He was reluctant to accept office. Nothing would have pleased him more than to remain in equable but active retirement…. As always, he answered the summons of duty.… the prestige of Washington lent dignity to the new, untried office.” —Churchill on Washington’s Presidency, 1789-17971
The crises of three centuries
“In war, Resolution. In defeat, Defiance. In victory, Magnanimity. In peace, Goodwill.” This famous phrase is Churchill’s moral to his memoirs of the Second World War. It is also an apt description of the character of three great leaders in successive centuries: George Washington in the 18th, Abraham Lincoln in the 19th, Winston Churchill in the 20th. Each was born within a decade of the passing of his predecessor. Each held his predecessor in high regard for leadership and tenacity. And each cast a long shadow for succeeding generations.
George Washington represented the noble democratic American, strong-willed and skilled, who spoke softly and fought bravely. The father of his country, he returned from retirement to be its first president when duty called. Abraham Lincoln kept the flame of liberty burning, reiterating the principles of the nation. Winston Churchill, half-American while all-British, stood alone for a time against one of the most vile and despotic regimes to have ever threatened liberty.
All three spent long years out of power, until a national crisis propelled them to the center of affairs. For Washington, it was Shay’s Rebellion and the failure of the Articles of Confederation. For Lincoln, it was a desperate war over slavery and the Union. For Churchill, it was the outbreak of the Second World War. All three believed they had been prepared by experience and appointed by history to confront the task before them. That task was nothing less than the salvation of freedom and the maintenance of constitutional government.
In like character
Although all relied heavily on their own manifest experiences, each was a student of history. Learning from the past without living in the past is a difficult challenge, yet they understood the benefits it offers. In 1781 Washington observed: “We should not look back unless it is to derive useful lessons from past errors, and for the purpose of profiting by dearly bought experience.”2 Churchill once advised a young American exchange student: “Study history, study history. In history lie all the secrets of statecraft.”3
At a 2017 Churchill Conference, Lord Watson observed: “Our ignorance of the past can make us reckless with the present and irresponsible in the future.” Surely this was a reference Santayana’s famous aphorism, “Those who cannot remember the past are condemned to repeat it.”
Washington, Lincoln and Churchill alike embodied the determination and commitment to stand for liberty when others thought it lost. Lincoln was the natural successor to Washington, as Churchill was to Lincoln. Their names have become synonymous with a struggle against great odds, of hope in times of storm. Their legacy reminds us that the political principles of free nations must constantly be followed, promoted and defended.
Character, boldness and determination are the hallmarks of leadership: character to do what is right; boldness to stand alone if need be; determination to “never give in,” as Churchill put it, “in nothing great or small, large or petty—never give in, except to convictions of honour and good sense. Never yield to force; never yield to the apparently overwhelming might of the enemy.”4 Those words apply equally to each of these great figures.
Who instructed them?
The historian Geoffrey Best wrote that Churchill learned respect, courage and self-control “in study of great commanders like Marlborough, Wellington and Nelson, [which] ensured that his public face would always be resolute and optimistic.”5 Lincoln studied George Washington, whose composure and self-control, especially under fire, was the standard by which he measured himself.6 Like the others, Lincoln expressed perseverance: “Let us have the faith that right makes might, and in that faith, let us, to the end, dare to do our duty as we understand it.”7
Doing what is right in the face of great pressure to the contrary has long been admired, but not always appreciated. Washington, Lincoln and Churchill were the very personification of standing against the tide. For each of them, victory was never assured, challenges often great, outlooks frequently bleak. Yet even in their time, observers saw the qualities they shared. In the midst of World War II the Saturday Review of Literature declared: “If British democracy wins the war, Winston Churchill will rank with Abraham Lincoln in the annals of freedom.”8 The comparison easily extends to Washington.
Many leaders talk a good line but seldom measure up to when the chips are down. We love it when public officials stand tall, provided they stand for what we believe. Washington, Lincoln and Churchill stood for principles that at first had few supporters. They overcame severe, almost overwhelming challenges; yet they persevered, even at cost to themselves personally. That showed the strength of their individual character.
Washington the indispensable
To know the United States, one must know George Washington. He was truly the indispensable man. Nearly two decades before the Civil War, Lincoln declared Washington “the mightiest name of earth, long since mightiest in the cause of civil liberty; still mightiest in moral reformation.”9
Churchill took a similar view. It was no easy task, he wrote, for Washington “simply to have kept his army in existence…. It was probably Washington’s greatest contribution to the Patriot cause. No other American leader could have done as much.10 Almost alone, his staunchness in the War for Independence held the American colonies to their united purpose.”11
Churchill’s affinity for Washington began in his youth. Early on, he rehearsed speeches standing in front of the so-called Lansdowne portrait of Washington by Gilbert Stuart, and a painting of Napoleon. “He would use them as a chorus,” a family member remarked.12
Churchill had a family connection with Washington’s army. In 1952 he was inducted into the Society of the Cincinnati, qualifying through “his great-great-grandfather Lieutenant Reuben Murray of Connecticut, who had marched with General Washington.”13 In accepting the blue and white ribbon of the Order, Churchill remarked, “I was on both sides in the war between us and we.”14 To Adlai Stevenson Churchill quipped: “My mother was American, my ancestors were officers in Washington’s army; so I am myself an English-Speaking Union!”15
America’s title deeds
Churchill had profound respect for America’s founding documents. Addressing Congress in 1941, he declared:
I am a child of the House of Commons. I was brought up in my father’s house to believe in democracy. “Trust the People”—that was his message…. Therefore I have been in full harmony all of my life with the tides which have flowed on both sides of the Atlantic against privilege and monopoly and I have steered confidently towards the Gettysburg ideal of “government of the people, by the people and for the people”…. In my country, as in yours, public men are proud to be the servants of the State and would be ashamed to be its masters.16
The principles of the Declaration of Independence were “shaped to meet the particular needs of America,” Churchill wrote. Yet they “lost thereby none of their historical or philosophic integrity. They retained “the fundamental nature of the British sources from which they were drawn.”17 America’s “specific constitutional forms” were “not as important as the principles that animate them.”18
Comparatively, Churchill preferred Britain’s unwritten constitution and unspecified terms of office. America’s fixed terms, he thought, kept bad politicians in office and good ones distracted running for their next term. When cornered on the contrasts, however, he was careful not to be dismissive. “No constitution,” he remarked of America’s, “was written in better English.”19 What mattered was principle:
…all these constitutions have the same object in view, namely that the persistent resolve of the people shall prevail without throwing the community into convulsion and disorder by rash or violent, irreparable action and to restrain and prevent a group, sect or faction from assuming dictatorial power.20
“Democracy is not a caucus…”
Addressing the constitutional need for separation of powers, Churchill praised the American approach. This was different from Britain’s, he said, but it led to the same object:
The great men who founded the American Constitution embodied this separation of authority in the strongest and most durable form. Not only did they divide executive, legislative and judicial functions, but also by instituting a federal system they preserved immense and sovereign rights to local communities, and by all these means they have preserved—often at some inconvenience—a system of law and liberty under which they have thrived and reached the physical and, at this moment, the moral leadership of the world.21
There was good reason for this separation, he stated. “Democracy is not a caucus, obtaining a fixed term of office by promises and then doing what it likes with the people.” The relationship between “the rulers and the people” must be constant. “‘Government of the people, by the people, and for the people’ still remains the sovereign definition of democracy.”22
Churchill did admit that the system wasn’t perfect: “It has been said that Democracy is the worst form of government except for all those other forms that have been tried from time to time.”23 As a practitioner in elective government, I have also come to appreciate H.L. Menken’s rather more cynical observation that “democracy is the art and science of running the circus from the monkey cage.”24
Continued in Part 2…
Endnotes
1 Winston S. Churchill (hereinafter WSC), History of the English-Speaking Peoples, vol. 3, The Age of Revolution (New York: Dodd Mead, 1957), 260.
2 George Washington to John Armstrong, 26 March 1781. George Washington Papers, Series 3, Varick Transcripts, 1775-1785, Subseries 3H, Personal Correspondence, 1775-1783, Library of Congress, https://bit.ly/3oK9hyp, accessed 10 February 2022.
3 WSC to James Humes, 27 May 1953, in Humes, Churchill: Speaker of the Century (New York: Stein & Day, 1980), vii.
4 WSC, Harrow School, 29 October 1941, in Robert Rhodes James, ed., Winston S. Churchill: His Complete Speeches 1897-1963, 8 vols. (New York: Bowker, 1974), VI: 6498.
5 Geoffrey Best, Churchill: A Study in Greatness (New York, Oxford University Press) 2003, 180.
6 Lewis E. Lehrman, Lincoln and Churchill: Statesmen at War (Guilford, Conn.: Stackpole Books, 2018), 114.
7 Abraham Lincoln, Cooper Union Address, 27 February 1860.
8 John Ramsden, Man of the Century: Winston Churchill and His Legend Since 1945 (New York: Columbia University Press, 2002), 333.
9 Abraham Lincoln, Springfield Washington Temperance Society, 22 February 1842, in Collected Works of Abraham Lincoln, 9 vols. (Montclair, N.J.: Rutgers University Press, 1955) I: 279.
10 WSC, Age of Revolution, 167.
11 Ibid., 281.
12 Michael Sheldon, Young Titan, The Making of Winston Churchill (New York: Simon & Shuster, 2013), 46. The “Lansdowne” portrait of Washington is now in the Smithsonian’s National Portrait Gallery. In remarking about his Napoleon portrait, Lord Roseberry told young Winston, “I find it sometimes coming out of the canvas.” Rosebery to WSC, 5 September 1901, in Martin Gilbert, The Churchill Documents, vol. 3 (Hillsdale, Mich.: Hillsdale College Press, 2007), 79.
13 Robert H. Pilpel, Churchill in America 1895-1961 (New York: Harcourt Brace Jovanovich, 1976), 247.
14 WSC, Washington, 16 January 1952, Churchill by Himself, 122.
15 WSC to Adlai Stevenson, 29 July 1953, Churchill by Himself, 510.
16 WSC, “A Long and Hard War,” Washington, 26 December 1941, Complete Speeches, VI: 6536.
17 WSC, Age of Revolution, 154.
18 Justin D. Lyons, “Champion of Liberty: Winston Churchill and His Message to America” (Washington: Heritage Foundation, Series Report #5, Anglo-American Special Relationship, 2 June 2015).
19 WSC, St. Stephen’s Hall, London, 27 March 1953, Churchill by Himself, 127.
20 WSC, House of Commons, 11 November 1947, Complete Speeches VII: 7569.
21 WSC, Huddersfield, 15 October 1951, Complete Speeches VIII: 8268.
22 WSC, House of Commons, 11 November 1947, Complete Speeches VII: 7565.
23 Ibid., 7566.
24 Mark J. Perry, “H.L. Mencken on Democracy, Government and Politics,” Washington: American Enterprise Institute, 18 January 2013, https://bit.ly/34zG2aJ, accessed 10 February 2022.
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.
Further reading
Lewis E. Lehrman, “Lincoln and Churchill,” Part 1 and Part 2, 2016.
Larry P. Arnn, “American Principles and Public Policy,” 2019.
William John Shepherd, review of Lewis E. Lehrman, Lincoln and Churchill: Statesmen at War, 2018.