At a banquet given in his honor on Washington’s birthday, in New York,
February 22, 1897, the eloquent and gifted Chauncey M. Depew made the
following comparison between America’s two greatest heroes:
“This February, for the first time, both Washington’s and Lincoln’s
birthdays have been made legal holidays. Never since the creation of man
were two human beings so unlike, so nearly the extremes of opposition
to each other, as Washington and Lincoln. The one an aristocrat by
birth, by breeding, and association, the other in every sense and by
every surrounding a democrat. As the richest man in America, a large
slave-holder, the possessor of an enormous landed estate, and the leader
and representative of the property, the culture, and the colleges of the
colonial period, Washington stood for the conservation and preservation
of law and order.
“And yet millionaire, slaveholder and aristocrat, in its best sense, that
he was, as he lived, so at any time he would have died for the immortal
principle put by the Puritans in their charter, adopted in the cabin
of the Mayflower, reënacted in the Declaration of Independence, of the
equality of all men before the law and of the equal opportunity for all
to rise. Lincoln, on the other hand, was born in a cabin, among that
class known as poor whites in slaveholding times, who held no position
and whose condition was so helpless as to paralyze ambition and effort.
His situation so far as his surroundings were concerned had considerable
mental but little moral improvement by the removal to Indiana and
subsequently to Illinois.
“Anywhere in the Old World a man born amidst such environments and
teachings, and possessed of unconquerable energy and ambition and the
greatest powers of eloquence and constructive statesmanship, would have
been a Socialist and the leader of a social revolt. He might have been
an Anarchist. His one ambition would have been to break the crust above
him and shatter it to pieces. He would see otherwise no opportunity for
himself and his fellows in social or political or professional life. But
Lincoln attained from the log cabin of the poor white in the wilderness
the same position which Washington reached from his palatial mansion
and baronial estate on the Potomac; he made the same fight unselfishly,
patriotically, and grandly for the preservation of the republic that
Washington had done for its creation and foundation. Widely as they are
separated, these two heroes of the two great crises of our national
life stand together in representing the solvent powers, the inspiring
processes, and the hopeful opportunities of American liberty.”