Today is the 150th anniversary of Gen. Lee's surrender to Gen. Grant at Appomattox Court House, VA which effectively ended the Civil War. The Civil War of course had huge ramifications for our nation's history, namely turning the United States from a plural term to a singular (I stole that one from a Ken Burns' film, I love that line). It also had a major impact on black Americans but it would take another 100 years for them to get full civil and voting rights.
Our prayer, thus, this morning was the final paragraph of President Lincoln's second inaugural address which he made about a month before Appomattox:
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.
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