Page:Cambridge Modern History Volume 7.djvu/634

602 Lincoln on slavery as the cause of the war. [1862 of April 11, after a discussion of questions of reconstruction, he used these significant words: "In the present situation, as the phrase goes, it may be my duty to make some new announcement to the people of the South. I am considering, and shall not fail to act when satisfied that action will be proper. 1 " With what earnest solicitude President Lincoln had, during four years, traced out the causes and consequences of the great national transformation from slavery to freedom with what high purpose and under what solemn sense of responsibility he had wrought and guided the grand act of liberation to success and fulfilment can, after all, be best understood from the words of his second Inaugural Address, in which he applied the eternal law of compensation to the sin and the atone- ment of American slavery. Premising that "the institution"" was the origin of the civil conflict, he concluded : " Neither party expected for the war the magnitude or the duration which it has already attained. Neither anticipated that the cause of the conflict might cease with or even before the conflict should cease. Each looked for an easier triumph, and a result less fundamental and astounding. Both 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 prayers 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 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 bondman'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 by 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 lasting peace among ourselves, and with all nations.""