It’s “Presidents’ Day,” a relatively modern (1971) holiday that merged a celebration of the birthdays of George Washington (Feb. 22) and Abraham Lincoln (Feb. 12) for the purpose of giving workers and school children more three-day weekends.

Although this day ostensibly honors all U.S. presidents, we’re traditionalists who prefer to consider it a celebration of just the two aforementioned POTUSes.

The patrician Washington is believed to have been our wealthiest president: he owned over 8,000 acres of prime Virginia farmland tended by more than 300 slaves, with an estimated net worth in today’s dollars of $525 million.

Despite his personal wealth and popularity, he did more than any of his successors to honor the Constitutional role of the office of president as he believed the drafters and ratifiers of that document intended, refusing to stretch or contract its powers to suit his personal or political purposes: “The Constitution is the guide which I will never abandon.”

Washington wisely and humbly recognized that he “walk[ed] on untrodden ground” and that “[t]here [was] scarcely any part of [his] conduct which may not hereafter be drawn into precedent.” Accordingly, while he could have been president for life, he chose to relinquish the office after two terms – a precedent that stood until Franklin Delano Roosevelt, in 1940, believed his leadership to be indispensable in this country’s run-up to World War II.

Only a leader as exceptional and well-respected as Washington could have chosen for his Cabinet, and then struck the necessary balance between, two of the greatest intellects – and their competing philosophies of government – this country ever has known: Thomas Jefferson and Alexander Hamilton. The result has been an enduring Constitutional republic in which Hamilton’s central government has shown itself to be strong enough to unify and protect the various states, but not so strong as to unconstitutionally infringe on the rights of each sovereign state and its people that Jefferson championed.

In contrast to the patrician Washington, Lincoln was the rough-hewn rustic whose background and appearance belied his uncommon sense and practical genius – embodied perhaps most notably in his taking of Washington’s Jefferson/Hamilton precedent one step farther and selecting some of his own political opponents as Cabinet members, a strategy that served as the focus of Doris Kearns Goodwin’s magnificent book, Team of Rivals.

Unlike Washington, Lincoln rose from some of the humblest of beginnings, moving with his family from Kentucky to Indiana and finally to Illinois as his father sought to scratch out a living for his family. That father taught him to split rails while his stepmother taught him to read, the latter skill helping him to pretty much teach himself enough law that, when combined with his well-honed intellect and home-spun folksiness, made him a formidable trial lawyer…reportedly, however, only in those cases where he believed in the righteousness of his client and his cause.

Although considered the prototypical Republican, for most of his political life Lincoln was a member of the Whig Party, one primary goal of which was to promote economic development and the upward mobility of individuals like himself. Only when the Whig Party began breaking apart following passage of the Kansas-Nebraska Act that repealed the Missouri Compromise did Lincoln follow the lead of several prominent Illinois Whigs and join the new and rabidly anti-slavery Republican Party

His leadership kept the country from splitting in two, albeit at the cost of more than 600,000 American lives. His Emancipation Proclamation freed the slaves. And his Whig-based support of the railroads as vital to the nation’s economic development set in motion their expansion westward.

He held to the belief that “[i]mportant principles may, and must, be inflexible.” Despite his economic-development philosophy, however, he famously stated that “Republicans are for both the man and the dollar, but in case of conflict the man before the dollar.”

So on this Presidents’ Day, contemplate the virtues and the leadership of these two giants who were, perhaps, our two greatest presidents.

Then consider the midgets currently vying for the Democrat and Republican nominations for that office, and remember Benjamin Franklin’s warning in response to a question about the form of our new government:

“A republic, if you can keep it.”

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