At a time when victory over secessionists in the American Civil War was within days and slavery in all of the U.S. was near an end, Lincoln did not speak of happiness, but of sadness.
Some see this speech as a defense of his pragmatic approach to Reconstruction, in which he sought to avoid harsh treatment of the defeated rebels by reminding his listeners of how wrong both sides had been in imagining what lay before them when the war began four years earlier.
The words "wringing their bread from the sweat of other men's faces" are an allusion to the Fall of Man in the Book of Genesis.
Lincoln's point seems to be that God's purposes are not directly knowable to humans, and represents a theme that he had expressed earlier.
After Lincoln's death, his secretaries found among his papers an undated manuscript now generally known as the "Meditations on the Divine Will."
Julia Ward Howe's "Battle Hymn of the Republic" expressed sentiments common among the supporters of the U.S. cause, that the U.S. was waging a righteous war that served God's purposes.
Now, at the expiration of four years, during which public declarations have been constantly called forth on every point and phase of this great contest[7] which is of primary concern to the nation as a whole, little that is new could be presented.
To strengthen, perpetuate, and extend this interest was the object for which the insurgents would rend the Union even by war, while the Government claimed no right to do more than to restrict the territorial enlargement of it.
If we shall suppose that American slavery is one of those offenses which, in the providence of God, must needs come, but which, having continued through His appointed time, He now wills to remove, and that He gives to both North and South this terrible war as the woe due to those by whom the offense came, shall we discern therein any departure from those divine attributes which the believers in a living God always ascribe to Him?
Yet, if God wills that it continue until all the wealth piled by the bondsman's two hundred and fifty years of unrequited toil shall be sunk, and until every drop of blood drawn with the lash shall be paid by another drawn with the sword, as was said three thousand years ago, so still it must be said "the judgments of the Lord are true and righteous altogether."
[8] Among those present for this speech was actor John Wilkes Booth, who, on April 14, 1865, just over a month after Lincoln's second inauguration, assassinated him.