Commentary
After the horrors of the American Civil War, and in the aftermath of a bitterly contested election that pitted Abraham Lincoln against George McClellan, one of his former generals (running on a “peace” platform), Lincoln attempted to bind the nation’s war wounds in his Second Inaugural Address: “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.”
