Perhaps the best tribute to Abraham Lincoln on Thursday night was not the speeches, nor samples of Lincoln’s favorite white-on-white cake, nor the stove
pipe-hatted imitator orating the Gettysburg Address from memory. At the end of the inspirational and sometimes somber event, Mark Sargeant of Orem was so overcome with emotion that he could hardly speak. “I am just so grateful for the U.S. Constitution, and for great men like Washington and Lincoln, and if there was a time when we needed the help of the Lord, it is now, for President Obama,” Sargeant said. Sargeant said he had visited the Lincoln Memorial in Washington, D.C., with his son in November. “It is great because of the image of Lincoln but perhaps more so because of what is written on the walls,” he said. The words of Lincoln were not in short supply in Provo on Thursday night. Provo Mayor Lewis K. Billings quoted from the earliest known writings of Lincoln, found in the margins of his childhood arithmetic book.
“Lincoln is my name and with my pen I wrote the same,” Lincoln scribbled as a boy. “I wrote it both with haste and speed and left it here for fools to read.”