When Abraham Lincoln came to giving his Second Inaugural Address, the country was still in the midst of completing the Civil War. Surely, it was pretty obvious that the war was over, but that did not necessarily mean the struggle would end. General Grant was still stuck outside of Richmond, though General Sherman was moving into North Carolina. Yet, the reasons of the Civil War were not merely something that could easily be done away with. Even with the passage of the 13th Amendment that finally ended slavery in the country, the reason for the civil war lingered. What, exactly, did it mean to live in a Republic? What were the rules? Did not the Founders believe in a level of self-rule that would allow some city, some state to make the decisions they deemed best?
One can make a very compelling case, even in 2011, that the South was right in the point of their conflict. Yet, as we know, the issue was not just a philosophical dispute, but rather touched on moral grounds relative to other human beings. For the Abolitionists, the radicals of their day, they simply would not listen to some arcane governmental argument that the Constitution didn’t give the Federal Government the right to hold up a moral standard. So, the war began, and now, in 1865, there wasn’t really any idea that it would end with General Lee’s surrender in Virginia. As many Southerners would proclaim after the war, the Union army never came into their county, their city and as far as they were concerned, things were just the same. Lincoln had to worry also about whether or not Southern soldiers would really surrender and just go back to their farms, or if the end of war would lead to guerrilla war.
So, when he came to give this speech in early March 1865, he was looking to his God, as he often did. Sadly, he could not have known that little more than a month later, he would be dead. His words are often considered one of the finest speeches ever given in US History.
The Almighty has His own purposes. “Woe unto the world because of offences! for it must needs be that offences come; but woe to that man by whom the offence cometh!” If we shall suppose that American Slavery is one of those offences which, in the providence of God, must needs come, but which, having continued through His appointed time, He now wills to remove, and that He gives to both North and South, this terrible war, as the woe due to those by whom the offence came, shall we discern therein any departure from those divine attributes which the believers in a Living God always ascribe to Him? Fondly do we hope — fervently do we pray — that this mighty scourge of war may speedily pass away. Yet, if God wills that it continue, until all the wealth piled by the bond-man’s two hundred and fifty years of unrequited toil shall be sunk, and until every drop of blood drawn with the lash, shall be paid by another drawn with the sword, as was said three thousand years ago, so still it must be said “the judgments of the Lord, are true and righteous altogether”
With malice toward none; with charity for all; with firmness in the right, as God gives us to see the right, let us strive on to finish the work we are in; to bind up the nation’s wounds; to care for him who shall have borne the battle, and for his widow, and his orphan to do all which may achieve and cherish a just, and a lasting peace, among ourselves, and with all nations