“On the occasion corresponding to this, four years ago, all thoughts were anxiously directed to an impending civil war. All dreaded it--all sought to avoid it. While the inaugural address was being delivered from this place, devoted altogether to saving the Union without war, insurgent agents were in the city seeking to destroy it without war.... Both parties deprecated war, but one of them would make war rather than let the nation survive, and the other would accept war rather than let it perish--and the war came. One-eighth of the population were slaves, who constituted a peculiar and powerful interest. All knew that this interest was the cause of the war. To strengthen and perpetuate this interest was the object for which the insurgents would rend the Union by war, while the Government claimed right to no more than restrict the territorial enlargement of it.... Both parties read the same Bible and pray to the same God, and each invokes His aid against the other. It may seem strange that any men should dare to ask a just God’s assistance in wringing their bread from the sweat of other men’s faces; but let us judge not that we be not judged. The prayer of both could not be answered. That of neither has been answered fully. The Almighty has His own purposes. ‘Woe unto the world because of offences, for it must needs be that offences come, but woe unto the man by whom the offence cometh.’ If we shall suppose that American slavery is one of these 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 bondman’s 250 years of unrequited toil shall be sunk, and until every drop of blood drawn with the lash shall be requited by another drawn with the sword, as was said 3000 years ago, so it must still be said the judgments of the Lord are true and righteous altogether. With malice toward no one, 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 orphans, to do all which may achieve and cherish a just and lasting peace among ourselves, and with all nations.”