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
Spoken byAbraham Lincoln1809–1865 · 16th President of the United States
Lincoln spoke these words in the closing paragraph of his Second Inaugural Address, delivered at the United States Capitol on 4 March 1865, with the Civil War weeks from its end. The wording is authentic — the full text is on record at the Avalon Project ↗ — but the popular quotation stops mid-sentence: Lincoln kept going, “to care for him who shall have borne the battle…”
“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” Abraham Lincoln, Second Inaugural Address, 4 March 1865. Genuine; the sentence continues "to care for him who shall have borne the battle and for his widow and his orphan…" It is from the Second Inaugural, not the Gettysburg Address.
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Evoking the world of Abraham Lincoln — 16th President of the United States. Theme: "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". Atmospheric and restrained, cinematic directional light, a muted period-appropriate palette, fine grain and texture. Compose with generous empty space for the quote and a small credit line. No lettering in the image itself.
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Provenance
Second Inaugural Address, 4 March 1865
Work
Second Inaugural Address
Delivered
4 March 1865 · United States Capitol, Washington, D.C.
Speaker
Abraham Lincoln, 16th President of the United States
Passage
Closing paragraph — the final sentence of the speech
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.
Closing paragraph
Printed texts of the address differ in punctuation. The Avalon Project ↗ sets the sentence with commas, as above; Wikisource ↗ and Teaching American History ↗ set the same words with semicolons and an em dash. The words are identical; only the pointing moves.
4 March 1865 — the speech. Lincoln closes his second inaugural with this sentence. The full text, dated to the day, is published by the Avalon Project at Yale Law School ↗ and by Wikisource ↗.
c. March 1865 — Lincoln writes it out by hand. The Shapell Manuscript Foundation ↗ holds an autograph quotation in which Lincoln copied this closing passage out in his own hand and signed it — the author’s own attestation of his own line.
15 March 1865 — Lincoln grades his own speech. Writing to Thurlow Weed, he predicted the address would “wear as well as—perhaps better than—any thing I have produced; but I believe it is not immediately popular.” The letter is transcribed at House Divided, Dickinson College ↗.
The verdict in the room. Frederick Douglass, at the inaugural reception that evening, told Lincoln: “Mr. Lincoln, it was a sacred effort.” Douglass’s account is reproduced by the Shapell Manuscript Foundation ↗, which cites Allen Thorndike Rice’s Reminiscences of Abraham Lincoln by Distinguished Men of His Time (1888).
✓Public domain
The Second Inaugural Address was delivered and printed in March 1865 — far earlier than the 1931 threshold for US copyright, and a work of a sitting US President in office. The text is freely reproducible, and is published in full by Wikisource ↗ and the Avalon Project ↗.
Rights status is our research, not legal advice — and copyright varies by country and edition. For commercial or published use, confirm with the rightsholder. See terms.
Fact-check
What people get wrong
This one is real — unusually so for a Lincoln quotation, since he is among the most heavily faked authors on the internet. Every problem here is about sourcing and wording, not authorship.
These words are from the Second Inaugural Address of 4 March 1865, not from Gettysburg. The mix-up is easy to make because both speeches are carved into the walls of the Lincoln Memorial, as the National Park Service ↗ notes — so the two texts are read side by side and remembered as one. Gettysburg was delivered in 1863 and contains no such line.
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Usually quotedThe sentence, cut short at “wounds” Truncated
The popular version ends at “to bind up the nation’s wounds” — but that is a comma, not a full stop. Lincoln continued: “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.” The full sentence is at Wikisource ↗. The clipped version turns a concrete promise about veterans, widows and orphans into a general sentiment.
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Wording drift“With malice towards none” Variant
The British-form towards is a very common slip, including in official and commemorative use. The primary texts read toward, without the s — see the Avalon Project ↗ and Teaching American History ↗.
✓Genuine Lincoln, genuine wording — from the Second Inaugural Address, 4 March 1865, and confirmed by an autograph copy the President wrote out and signed himself ↗. Just quote the whole sentence, and don’t call it Gettysburg.
Context
Why it mattered
By March 1865 the Union had effectively won. A re-elected president had every licence to gloat, and the country expected him to. Instead Lincoln used his second inaugural to argue that the war had been a judgement on both sections for slavery — and then closed by refusing the victor’s privilege altogether. “With malice toward none” is not a greeting-card sentiment; in context it is a policy position on Reconstruction, delivered before Reconstruction had a name.
It did not land well at first, and Lincoln knew it. Eleven days later he wrote to Thurlow Weed that the speech would “wear as well as—perhaps better than—any thing I have produced; but I believe it is not immediately popular,” because “men are not flattered by being shown that there has been a difference of purpose between the Almighty and them.” He was right on both counts. Six weeks after delivering it he was dead, shot on 14 April 1865, and the closing sentence became an epitaph.
Mr. Lincoln, it was a sacred effort. — Frederick Douglass, at the inaugural reception that evening
The line Lincoln kept going past
The most-quoted form of this passage stops at “wounds.” Lincoln did not. The sentence continues “to care for him who shall have borne the battle and for his widow and his orphan” — a clause that later supplied the motto of the US Department of Veterans Affairs, and which grounds the whole peroration in a specific obligation rather than a mood.
Frederick Douglass attended the inauguration and the reception that followed, where he was at first turned away at the door until Lincoln intervened. Asked by the President what he thought of the address, Douglass answered that it was “a sacred effort.” He recorded the exchange in the account reproduced by the Shapell Manuscript Foundation ↗, drawn from Allen Thorndike Rice’s Reminiscences of Abraham Lincoln by Distinguished Men of His Time (1888).
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Filed under
More provenance-checked quotes on the same theme, each with its reuse status.
Abraham Lincoln was born 12 February 1809 and served as the 16th President of the United States from March 1861 until his death on 15 April 1865, the day after he was shot at Ford’s Theatre. He led the Union through the Civil War and is remembered as much for his prose as his politics — the Gettysburg Address and the Second Inaugural are both carved into the walls of the Lincoln Memorial ↗. He delivered this address barely six weeks before his assassination, which is why it reads to posterity as a last testament rather than a second-term agenda.
For writers & researchers
Cite this
Cite this
Abraham Lincoln, “Second Inaugural Address,” Washington, D.C., 4 March 1865, closing paragraph. Full text: The Avalon Project, Lillian Goldman Law Library, Yale Law School, https://avalon.law.yale.edu/19th_century/lincoln2.asp; also Wikisource, https://en.wikisource.org/wiki/Abraham_Lincoln%27s_Second_Inaugural_Address.
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Quotle.info. “Who really said ‘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’?” Last verified 4 Aug 2026. https://quotle.info/who-said/with-malice-toward-none-with-charity-for-all-with-firmness/