George Washington, Thomas Jefferson, Abraham Lincoln and Haman

American Presidents and Haman

References to this ageless story of God’s divine intervention against evil have been made on several occasions by early American presidents.  

On December 17, 1778 (then General) George Washington wrote to Joseph Reed, newly-elected President of Pennsylvania:

“I would to God that one of the most atrocious of each State was hung in Gibbets upon a gallows five times as high as the one prepared by Haman.”   

Thomas Jefferson in a letter to Maria Cosway in 1786 wrote:

“If our country, when pressed with wrongs at the point of the bayonet, had been governed by its head instead of its hearts, where should we have been now?   Hanging on a gallows as high as Haman’s.”  

Finally in a letter written by Abraham Lincoln in 1848 when he was a member of the House of Representatives of the U.S. Congress, he states:

“The [Mexican] war is now to them the gallows of Haman, which they built for us, and on which they are doomed to be hanged themselves.”  

“The war is now to them, the gallows of Haman…” Abraham Lincoln, June 12, 1848