In their opposition to the impeachment of Trump, more than one House Republican cited this excerpt form Lincoln’s 2nd 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.”
What they forgot is that Lincoln understood that the prerequisite for that moral invocation was the decisive military defeat of the insurrectionists in the South. And General Sherman with Lincoln’s full support at that same moment was doing exactly that as he and his army marched through the Deep South laying waste to the Confederate Army and Confederacy.
