Unknown Soldier

Here Rests In Honored Glory An American Soldier Known But To God

I have been reading a book about the American Civil War called April 1865: The Month That Saved America

In it, it is clear that the seeds for the Civil War were sown in the American Revolution and came to harvest 85 years later.

Without getting too in-depth, issues of succession and secession were to be resolved not in debate but on the battlefield. Slavery, seen as a property right in the South, was the powder keg.

There seemed to be no other way to solve the dispute but by arms. Neither the North or the South ever anticipated at the onset of how bloody, brutal, and long, the Civil War would last. "If war were not so terrible," Robert E. Lee observed as he watched the slaughter at Fredericksburg, "we should grow too fond of it."

Lincoln said in his second Inaugural Address:

"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 avert 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—seeking to dissolve the Union and divide effects by negotiation. 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."

Lincoln continued, "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 itself 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 offenses; for it must needs be that offenses come, but woe to that man by whom the offense cometh."

He concluded, "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."