Lincoln about the Civil War of 1864

On June 16, 1864, President Abraham Lincoln made one of his rare wartime departures from Washington. He spoke in Philadelphia at a fund-raising fair for the United States Sanitary Commission, a national soldiers' aid society. The preceding six weeks had seen the bloodiest fighting in the Civil War so far, at the carnage-strewn Virginia battlefields of The Wilderness, Spotsylvania, Cold Harbor, and Petersburg. "War, at the best, is terrible," Lincoln told the crowd, "and this war of ours, in its magnitude and duration, is one of the most terrible. . . . It has destroyed property, and ruined homes. . . . It has carried mourning to almost every home, until it can almost be said that 'the heavens are hung in black.'" When would this cruel war be over? many were asking. "We accepted this war for an object," said the president, "a worthy object of restoring the national authority over the whole national domain." The war would end only "when that object is attained." During the battle of Spotsylvania, Union General Ulysses S. Grant had said that he intended to fight it out on that line if it took all summer. Lincoln added: "I say we are going through on this line if it takes three years more."

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