BY WAR’S END, BROWN’S prophecy before the gallows would also be fulfilled. And it was Lincoln, yet again, who recapitulated Brown’s vision, that the “crimes of this guilty land” could only be purged with blood. The president echoed this most eloquently in March 1865, after four years of battle and the deaths of over 600,000 men. “This mighty scourge of war,” he said, was the “woe due” the nation for slavery. If God willed that the carnage continue “until every drop of blood drawn with the lash, shall be paid by another drawn with the sword,” then this was the true and righteous judgment of the
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