Question
Passage 1: Remarks by the President at the National Lincoln Sesquicentennial Dinner
by Dwight D. Eisenhower
1 Ninety-eight years ago today the President-elect of the United States boarded a train in Springfield, Ill., to start the long journey to his Nation’s Capital. That same day a Washington newspaper reported the election in Montgomery, Ala., of another President, Jefferson Davis, and from Fort Sumter came a report of “preparations for attack.”
2 In bidding farewell to Springfield, Lincoln shared his innermost thoughts with old friends. In part, he said: “I now leave, not knowing when or whether ever I may return, with a task before me greater than that which rested upon Washington. Without the assistance of that Divine Being who ever attended him, I cannot succeed. With that assistance I cannot fail.”
3 Four years and two months later Abraham Lincoln was dead—but the Union again united. “Now,” said Secretary of War Stanton, “he belongs to the ages.”
4 But Abraham Lincoln belongs not only to the ages, but to all humanity. Immortality is his in the hearts of all who love freedom everywhere in the world.
5 Each year 2 million people visit the Lincoln Memorial in Washington.
6 In New Delhi, a Lincoln Society is establishing a museum in his honor. High school students in Tokyo last summer ranked him as the most respected of all world figures.
7 “Of all the great national statesmen of history,” Russia’s Tolstoy thought, “Lincoln is the only giant.”
8 In the Caucasian mountains, a wild chieftain asked of a visitor, “Tell us about the greatest ruler in the world. We want to know something about this man who was so great that he even forgave the crimes of his greatest enemies and shook brotherly hands with those who had plotted against his life.”
9 The first President of modern China, Sun Yat-sen, found his three basic principles of government in Lincoln’s Gettysburg Address.
10 For many years India’s Prime Minister Nehru has kept, on the study table, a brass mold of Lincoln’s right hand. “I look at it every day,” Nehru tells us; “it is strong, firm, and yet gentle . . . it gives me great strength.”
11 The birth, 150 years ago, which we here honor, gave the Nation a son who a half-century later was summoned to lead our Republic through the tragedy of civil war. And as Lincoln fought for union and liberty, he insisted always that “the struggle of today is not altogether for today—it is for a vast future also.”
. . .
12 That the spirit of Lincoln be close at hand as we meet each successive challenge to freedom is the earnest hope of all Americans—indeed it is the hope of freedom’s sentinels wherever they stand.
13 Pushing always ahead in our quest for a just peace and freedom for all men, we can do no better than live by his prescription: “By the best cultivation of the physical world, beneath and around us; and the intellectual and moral world within us, we shall secure an individual, social, and political prosperity and happiness, whose course shall be onward and upward, and which, while the earth endures, shall not pass away.”
Excerpt from “Remarks by the President at the National Lincoln Sesquicentennial Dinner” by Dwight D. Eisenhower, from Abraham Lincoln Sesquicentennial, 1959–1960: Final Report by the Lincoln Sesquicentennial Commission. In the public domain.
Passage 2: Remarks to Students from Hine Junior High School on Abraham Lincoln
by Ronald Reagan
14 Abe Lincoln was born in 1809 in a log cabin in the western wilds of Kentucky. And he spent his entire youth and boyhood in poverty, in frontier places where men hewed down endless trees, forcing the forest with their own muscles to give up its poor land for crops; where women cooked over open fires and washed their clothes in creeks. Formal education was impossible, but young Lincoln pored over the few books he could find, studying the Bible in particular, probably the only book that his family owned. And I’m sure you must have heard that sitting by the open fire as a boy, he would work out arithmetic problems and so forth with a piece of charcoal on a wooden shovel that was there by the fireplace. The first lesson that the life of Abraham Lincoln has to teach is: You don’t have to be rich to love learning and make something of yourself.
15 Before he became President, Lincoln succeeded as a lawyer in only a modest way; and in politics, he failed repeatedly. . . . Even as President, Lincoln at first seemed a loser. The Union armies met defeat in the crucial early engagement of the Civil War, then frittered away time drilling on their campgrounds when they should have been pursuing the enemy. In England, the most powerful nation in Europe, informed opinion sided with the Confederacy and held that it would be a matter of months before the North lost the war and the crude, backwoods President was forgotten. That’s the second lesson Mr. Lincoln can teach us: If you are in the right, ignore defeat. Persevere. For in persevering, Lincoln saved the Union and won freedom for the more than one-tenth of the population that had been kept down in bondage.
. . .
16 This is Lincoln’s greatest lesson, this lesson in liberty. He understood that the idea of human liberty is bound up in the very nature of our nation. He understood that America cannot be America without standing for the cause of freedom. He had often asked himself, Mr. Lincoln once said, what great principle or idea it was that held the Union together for so long. “It was not,” he said, “the mere matter of the separation . . . from the motherland.” It was something more. It was “. . . something in that Declaration of Independence giving liberty, not alone to the people of this country, but hope to the world . . . it was that which gave promise that in due time the weights should be lifted from the shoulders of all men.”
17 In other countries, young men and women your age look back on the histories of their nations to emperors and kings, glorious figures raised in palaces, attended upon by servants, given every refinement of education by the most eminent scholars of the day. You as Americans look back on a different kind of figure; a poor man; a humble man of the frontier and prairie whose parents could neither read nor write; a man polite society looked down on because he told too many jokes. Yet, for all that, a man who shook the world by consecrating himself and his nation to liberty. You know, I have to tell you something about that joking thing. A great many people criticized him. They thought he laughed too much and had jokes. He had an answer for them. He said, “I couldn’t perform the duties of this job for 15 minutes if I couldn’t laugh.” . . .
18 Perhaps you and I can best honor Abraham Lincoln by continuing his work. . . . [I]n our own lives let us strive to live up to Mr. Lincoln’s example: his respect for gentleness, for knowledge; his humor; his tolerance of his fellow men; his abiding love for America.
How does Passage 1 differ from Passage 2 in its presentation of Abraham Lincoln?(1 point)
Responses
Passage 1 promotes the advancement of Lincoln’s vision.
Passage 1 promotes the advancement of Lincoln’s vision.
Passage 1 elaborates on Lincoln’s goals during his presidency.
Passage 1 elaborates on Lincoln’s goals during his presidency.
Passage 1 focuses on the global impact of Lincoln’s leadership.
Passage 1 focuses on the global impact of Lincoln’s leadership.
Passage 1 describes how Lincoln advocated for liberty and freedom.
by Dwight D. Eisenhower
1 Ninety-eight years ago today the President-elect of the United States boarded a train in Springfield, Ill., to start the long journey to his Nation’s Capital. That same day a Washington newspaper reported the election in Montgomery, Ala., of another President, Jefferson Davis, and from Fort Sumter came a report of “preparations for attack.”
2 In bidding farewell to Springfield, Lincoln shared his innermost thoughts with old friends. In part, he said: “I now leave, not knowing when or whether ever I may return, with a task before me greater than that which rested upon Washington. Without the assistance of that Divine Being who ever attended him, I cannot succeed. With that assistance I cannot fail.”
3 Four years and two months later Abraham Lincoln was dead—but the Union again united. “Now,” said Secretary of War Stanton, “he belongs to the ages.”
4 But Abraham Lincoln belongs not only to the ages, but to all humanity. Immortality is his in the hearts of all who love freedom everywhere in the world.
5 Each year 2 million people visit the Lincoln Memorial in Washington.
6 In New Delhi, a Lincoln Society is establishing a museum in his honor. High school students in Tokyo last summer ranked him as the most respected of all world figures.
7 “Of all the great national statesmen of history,” Russia’s Tolstoy thought, “Lincoln is the only giant.”
8 In the Caucasian mountains, a wild chieftain asked of a visitor, “Tell us about the greatest ruler in the world. We want to know something about this man who was so great that he even forgave the crimes of his greatest enemies and shook brotherly hands with those who had plotted against his life.”
9 The first President of modern China, Sun Yat-sen, found his three basic principles of government in Lincoln’s Gettysburg Address.
10 For many years India’s Prime Minister Nehru has kept, on the study table, a brass mold of Lincoln’s right hand. “I look at it every day,” Nehru tells us; “it is strong, firm, and yet gentle . . . it gives me great strength.”
11 The birth, 150 years ago, which we here honor, gave the Nation a son who a half-century later was summoned to lead our Republic through the tragedy of civil war. And as Lincoln fought for union and liberty, he insisted always that “the struggle of today is not altogether for today—it is for a vast future also.”
. . .
12 That the spirit of Lincoln be close at hand as we meet each successive challenge to freedom is the earnest hope of all Americans—indeed it is the hope of freedom’s sentinels wherever they stand.
13 Pushing always ahead in our quest for a just peace and freedom for all men, we can do no better than live by his prescription: “By the best cultivation of the physical world, beneath and around us; and the intellectual and moral world within us, we shall secure an individual, social, and political prosperity and happiness, whose course shall be onward and upward, and which, while the earth endures, shall not pass away.”
Excerpt from “Remarks by the President at the National Lincoln Sesquicentennial Dinner” by Dwight D. Eisenhower, from Abraham Lincoln Sesquicentennial, 1959–1960: Final Report by the Lincoln Sesquicentennial Commission. In the public domain.
Passage 2: Remarks to Students from Hine Junior High School on Abraham Lincoln
by Ronald Reagan
14 Abe Lincoln was born in 1809 in a log cabin in the western wilds of Kentucky. And he spent his entire youth and boyhood in poverty, in frontier places where men hewed down endless trees, forcing the forest with their own muscles to give up its poor land for crops; where women cooked over open fires and washed their clothes in creeks. Formal education was impossible, but young Lincoln pored over the few books he could find, studying the Bible in particular, probably the only book that his family owned. And I’m sure you must have heard that sitting by the open fire as a boy, he would work out arithmetic problems and so forth with a piece of charcoal on a wooden shovel that was there by the fireplace. The first lesson that the life of Abraham Lincoln has to teach is: You don’t have to be rich to love learning and make something of yourself.
15 Before he became President, Lincoln succeeded as a lawyer in only a modest way; and in politics, he failed repeatedly. . . . Even as President, Lincoln at first seemed a loser. The Union armies met defeat in the crucial early engagement of the Civil War, then frittered away time drilling on their campgrounds when they should have been pursuing the enemy. In England, the most powerful nation in Europe, informed opinion sided with the Confederacy and held that it would be a matter of months before the North lost the war and the crude, backwoods President was forgotten. That’s the second lesson Mr. Lincoln can teach us: If you are in the right, ignore defeat. Persevere. For in persevering, Lincoln saved the Union and won freedom for the more than one-tenth of the population that had been kept down in bondage.
. . .
16 This is Lincoln’s greatest lesson, this lesson in liberty. He understood that the idea of human liberty is bound up in the very nature of our nation. He understood that America cannot be America without standing for the cause of freedom. He had often asked himself, Mr. Lincoln once said, what great principle or idea it was that held the Union together for so long. “It was not,” he said, “the mere matter of the separation . . . from the motherland.” It was something more. It was “. . . something in that Declaration of Independence giving liberty, not alone to the people of this country, but hope to the world . . . it was that which gave promise that in due time the weights should be lifted from the shoulders of all men.”
17 In other countries, young men and women your age look back on the histories of their nations to emperors and kings, glorious figures raised in palaces, attended upon by servants, given every refinement of education by the most eminent scholars of the day. You as Americans look back on a different kind of figure; a poor man; a humble man of the frontier and prairie whose parents could neither read nor write; a man polite society looked down on because he told too many jokes. Yet, for all that, a man who shook the world by consecrating himself and his nation to liberty. You know, I have to tell you something about that joking thing. A great many people criticized him. They thought he laughed too much and had jokes. He had an answer for them. He said, “I couldn’t perform the duties of this job for 15 minutes if I couldn’t laugh.” . . .
18 Perhaps you and I can best honor Abraham Lincoln by continuing his work. . . . [I]n our own lives let us strive to live up to Mr. Lincoln’s example: his respect for gentleness, for knowledge; his humor; his tolerance of his fellow men; his abiding love for America.
How does Passage 1 differ from Passage 2 in its presentation of Abraham Lincoln?(1 point)
Responses
Passage 1 promotes the advancement of Lincoln’s vision.
Passage 1 promotes the advancement of Lincoln’s vision.
Passage 1 elaborates on Lincoln’s goals during his presidency.
Passage 1 elaborates on Lincoln’s goals during his presidency.
Passage 1 focuses on the global impact of Lincoln’s leadership.
Passage 1 focuses on the global impact of Lincoln’s leadership.
Passage 1 describes how Lincoln advocated for liberty and freedom.
Answers
GPT-4o mini
Passage 1 focuses on the global impact of Lincoln’s leadership. It highlights his significance and legacy not only within the United States but also around the world, as evidenced by references to international figures, societies, and how people across different nations perceive and honor him. In contrast, Passage 2 emphasizes Lincoln's personal qualities, experiences, and lessons learned from his life, particularly in terms of perseverance and the conception of liberty.