Theodore Roosevelt's Greatest Achievement: Abraham Lincoln Has an Answer for President Trump
On July 1, 2026, President Donald Trump stood before an AI-generated avatar of Theodore Roosevelt at the newly inaugurated Theodore Roosevelt Presidential Library in Medora, North Dakota, and asked a simple question: Was the Panama Canal your greatest achievement?
Roosevelt, rendered in artificial intelligence, answered that it was his proudest.
But there was someone else in the room who had something to say.
I am David Soderquist, and I am the owner of the 1899 portrait of Abraham Lincoln that once hung in Theodore Roosevelt's White House, the painting Roosevelt gazed upon during the years of his presidency as he made the decisions that shaped modern America. That painting has been in my care, and for years I have been working to ensure its story is told and its place in our national heritage is honored.
When President Trump turned away from Lincoln to pose his question to Roosevelt, it struck me that Lincoln had been passed over, but Lincoln always has something to say. So I asked what Lincoln would say if he could answer the question himself, speaking not only to Roosevelt's legacy but to the man now sitting in the chair they both once occupied.
What follows is Abraham Lincoln's reply, generated through artificial intelligence but rooted in Lincoln's own voice, his own theology, his own way of measuring the worth of a president's work. It is Lincoln speaking as one president to another across the centuries, weighing Roosevelt's legacy with the care and honesty of a man who has nothing left to gain from flattery and nothing left to lose by telling the truth.
Lincoln's answer is not the canal.
Read it and see if you agree.
David Soderquist
Owner of the Lincoln Portrait
July First, 2026
Mr. President,
You have turned from me now and put your question to my successor in that chair, the man from Oyster Bay who wore the spectacles and carried the big stick, and you have asked him whether the ditch he cut through the isthmus was the greatest thing he did. He has told you it was his proudest. I would not quarrel with a man over what he is proudest of, for pride is a private accounting, and each man keeps his own books before the Lord. But you did not ask him only what he was proudest of. You asked whether it was his greatest. That is a different question, and it is one I am better placed to answer than he is, for a man is seldom the fairest judge of his own largest work, and the years I have had to look upon his labors from the vantage where I now stand have given me a sight he did not have while he lived.
So let me speak of him, and let me speak plainly, as one president may speak of another when both have laid down the burden and neither has anything further to gain from flattery.
He was a great man. I say that at the outset so that nothing which follows may be mistaken for diminishment. He was one of the greatest men ever to hold the office, and the Republic was fortunate in the hour she called him to it. He had courage in a measure that is given to few, and he had it in the body and in the mind alike, which is rarer still. He was sickly as a boy and he made himself strong. He was bookish and he made himself a soldier. He was born to comfort and he chose the harder path in nearly every hour of decision that was set before him. There is much in the man to admire, and I admire it.
Now to your question.
The canal was a mighty work. I will not pretend otherwise. To part two oceans that the Almighty set apart at the creation, and to join them by the hand of man, is the kind of labor that the ancients would have sung of, and it was done in his hour and by his will, and without his will it would not have been done. The ships that pass through it now pass through because he refused to let the thing die in the committee rooms and the treaty chambers where such things usually die. That is no small matter. A president who can force a great work into being against the inertia of nations has done something that most presidents never do, and he did it, and the water flows because he did.
But hear me, sir, for this is the heart of what I would say to you and, through you, to him.
The greatest work of a president is never the thing he builds. It is the thing he preserves, or the thing he sets free, or the thing he plants in the soil of the country that will grow long after his name is forgotten by the schoolchildren. Stone and steel are mighty, but stone crumbles and steel rusts, and the sea itself will one day reclaim the ditch when the Republic that dug it is no longer there to keep the gates. What endures is not the work of the hand. What endures is the work of the spirit, pressed into the character of a people, so that they become something they were not before, and cannot easily become less than they have been made.
By this measure, the canal was not his greatest.
I have looked upon his years in the office, from the September afternoon when he was sworn in beside the body of the man who was shot in Buffalo, to the March morning when he handed the chair to the large gentleman from Ohio, and I will tell you what I see when I look at those years as a whole.
I see a man who took an office that had grown small in the decades after my own death, an office that had been reduced by weak hands and by the ascendancy of the money power, and who by the sheer force of his person made it great again. He did not amend the Constitution to do it. He did not need to. He stood in the office as if it mattered, and because he stood in it that way, it mattered again. That was not the canal. That was something larger than the canal. He restored the presidency to the people at an hour when the people had begun to suspect it belonged to someone else, and every president who has come after him has stood in a chair that he made taller.
I see a man who looked upon the wilderness of this continent, the forests and the rivers and the high places and the creatures that lived in them, and understood, as few men in his hour understood, that a nation which spends its inheritance in a single generation has robbed its grandchildren of a country. He set aside the lands. He planted the parks. He drew the lines on the map that said, this shall not be sold, this shall not be cut, this shall not be dug up for the profit of a few while the many are left with a bare and used-up land. Two hundred million acres, sir. Two hundred million. That is not a policy. That is a covenant with generations he would never meet, and those generations are meeting it now every time a father takes his son to see a canyon or a grove of trees older than the Republic itself. The canal moves ships. The parks move souls. I will let you weigh which is the greater cargo.
I see a man who looked upon the great combinations of capital that had risen up in the years after my war, the trusts and the monopolies that had begun to eat the small men and the small towns and the small farms, and who said, plainly and in the hearing of the whole country, that no combination of wealth stands above the law of the Republic. He did not destroy capital. He was not that kind of man, and it was not that kind of hour. But he made the government of the United States the equal of the largest fortune within it, and he made it so in a manner that could not easily be undone. That was a restoration of something I had feared was slipping. In my hour the danger to the Union came from the slaveholders who believed themselves above the common law of the country. In his hour the danger came from a different quarter, but it was the same danger in a new coat, and he met it in the same spirit in which I met mine, which is to say, with the plain declaration that the Republic is one and her law is one and no man and no company stands outside of it.
I see a man who took the sword of the Republic, newly forged after the war with Spain, and who used it with a restraint that most men of his temperament could not have mustered. He spoke loudly, as the saying goes, and he did carry the great stick, but he did not swing it as often as lesser men would have swung it in his place. He ended a war between Russia and Japan by the labor of his own diplomacy, and he was given the Nobel prize of the Norwegians for the doing of it, the first American ever so honored. A man who can stop a war he is not fighting has done a thing that a man who wins a war he is fighting has not done. I know the difference. I fought mine to the end because there was no other end available to me. He found an end for other men's war, and the world was quieter because he did.
And I see, running through all of it, a man who believed, as I believed, that the office he held was under the eye of the Almighty, and that the Republic was not the invention of clever men in Philadelphia but a gift of Providence to be stewarded and handed on. He was not a theologian, and he was not always a patient churchman, but he knew the difference between a nation that stands under judgment and a nation that imagines itself the judge, and he governed like a man who knew it.
Now, weigh these things.
The canal is a great work, but it is one work, in one place, upon one narrow strip of ground. What I have described to you is not one work. It is a reshaping of the office, a covenant with the land, a restoration of the law over the money power, a bringing of peace to distant nations, and a stewardship of the Republic under God. Any one of these, standing alone, would be the making of a lesser man's legacy. He did all of them, and he did them in seven and a half years, and he did them while raising a house full of children who tore through the White House like a company of small cavalry, and he did them without ever once losing the appetite for the next fight or the next book or the next expedition into the next wilderness.
If you ask me, then, what was his greatest, I will not name the canal.
I will name the conservation of the American land, because in that work he did something no president before him had done and few after him have matched. He looked past his own generation. He looked past the appetites of his own hour. He looked past the men who wanted the timber and the coal and the copper right now, and he heard the voices of Americans not yet born, and he legislated on their behalf against the greed of the living. That is the hardest thing a president ever does, sir. To govern for the unborn against the demands of the voters in front of him. Any president can give the living what they want. Only a great one can defend the inheritance of those who cannot yet vote and cannot yet speak. He did it. The land bears witness. It will bear witness long after the canal has silted and the locks have rusted and the ships have found some other passage.
That is his greatest, in my accounting. Not the ditch. The covenant.
And now, since you have come to me twice in one hour, let me press one thing further upon you, for I do not know when you will stand before this canvas again.
Every president is tempted, in the middle years of his tenure, to ask what his monument will be. It is a natural question and it is not a shameful one. But the monument a president chooses for himself is almost never the monument history assigns him. He built the canal, and he was proud of it, and he was right to be. But the thing history will hand him, when all the ledgers are closed, is not the thing he pointed to. It is the thing he did when he was not thinking about monuments at all. It is the parks he set aside because he loved the country. It is the trusts he broke because he loved the law. It is the peace he made because he loved the peace. It is the office he restored because he loved the Republic.
So do not spend your hours, sir, hunting for your monument. Spend them doing the work that is set before you, in the fear of the Lord, with an honest eye to the generations that will come after you and cannot yet defend themselves against your choices. The monument will be built by other hands than yours, and it will be built out of the materials you did not know you were leaving behind. That has been true of every man who has held that chair. It was true of him. It was true of me. It will be true of you.
Fondly do I hope, and fervently do I pray, that when the Almighty at last totals the ledger of your own years, the entry in the great column will not be the thing you were proudest of, but the thing you did when no one was watching, for the sake of Americans you will never meet, in the fear of the God who set you where you stand.
Yours, in the long communion of this office, and under the same Providence that held us all,
A. Lincoln
