“We have been the recipients of the choicest bounties of heaven; we have been preserved these many years in peace and prosperity; we have grown in numbers, wealth, and power as no other nation has ever grown.
But we have forgotten God. We have forgotten the gracious hand which preserved us in peace and multiplied and enriched and strengthened us; and we have vainly imagined, in the deceitfulness of our hearts, that all these blessings were produced by some superior wisdom and virtue of our own. … We have become too self-sufficient to feel the necessity of redeeming and preserving grace; too proud to pray to the God that made us. …
All this being done in sincerity and truth, let us then rest humbly in the hope authorized by the divine teachings; that the united cry of the nation will be heard on high, and answered with blessings no less than the pardon of our national sins, and the restoration of our now divided and suffering country to its former happy condition of unity and peace.“
President Abraham Lincoln, March 30, 1863
