The "scourge of war," he explained, was best understood as divine punishment for the sin of slavery, a sin in which all Americans, North as well as South, were complicit. It describes a national moral debt that had been created by the "bondsmen’s 250 years of unrequited toil," and ends with a call for compassion and reconciliation.
Rejecting the South's defense of slavery as “a positive good” and the North's assumption that they bore no responsibility for the peculiar institution, Lincoln used his Second Inaugural Address to propose a common public memory of both the war and American slavery as the basis for restoring national unity.
