trtnewss

  On March 4, 1865, President Abraham Lincoln addressed a nation in the final days of America’s divisive Civil War. With the war nearly won, the president turned his speech to confront the difficult process of recovering from such a bitter feud. “With malice toward none, with charity for all, with firmness in the right as God gives us to see the right,” Lincoln told the crowd, “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 nation.. In 1959, the Civil War-era affirmation of the government’s role in caring for veterans and the loved ones they leave behind was made into the motto   of the Veterans Administration, now called the Department of Veterans Affairs. Plaques with Lincoln’s promise “to care for him who shall have borne the battle and for his widow, and h