Abraham Lincoln said publicly that he thought the Civil War was God’s judgment on America for slavery. In his second inaugural address, after asking how to reconcile the horror of war with the “divine attributes” of God—his answer was that the war would continue “until all the wealth piled by the bondsman’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.’”
