I think often these days about how past American leaders thought the Civil War was divine punishment for the nation’s sins. In his second inaugural address in 1864, Abraham Lincoln framed the struggle against slavery in biblical terms—not to suggest that he was on a holy mission to abolish it, but that the war itself was the result of providence. “Fondly do we hope—fervently do we pray—that this mighty scourge of war may speedily pass away,” he told the assembled crowd.

“Yet, if God wills that it continue until all the wealth piled by the bondsman’s 250 years of unrequited toil shall be sunk,” Lincoln continued, “and until every drop of blood drawn with the lash shall be paid by another drawn with the sword, as was said 3,000 years ago, so still it must be said: ‘The judgments of the Lord are true and righteous altogether.’”

Ulysses S. Grant, the leading Union general and eventual president, saw the tremendous bloodshed as a balancing of accounts for the Mexican-American War, which helped fuel the westward expansion of slavery. “The Southern rebellion was largely the outgrowth of the Mexican war,” he recounted in his memoirs. “Nations, like individuals, are punished for their transgressions. We got our punishment in the most sanguinary and expensive war of modern times.”

Lincoln had also opposed President James Polk’s contrived effort to annex Texas and conquer roughly half of Mexico in the 1840s. In a private letter to a friend in 1848, he criticized Polk for provoking a war with the Mexican government over Texas and then demanding that Congress support it. Lincoln’s friend had suggested that Polk’s actions were valid because the Constitution allows the president to repel foreign invasions.

That did not apply in this case, Lincoln countered, because Texas was not part of the United States when the fighting began. “Allow the president to invade a neighboring nation, whenever he shall deem it necessary to repel an invasion, and you allow him to do so, whenever he may choose to say he deems it necessary for such purpose—and you allow him to make war at pleasure,” the future president warned.

“Study to see if you can fix any limit to his power in this respect, after you have given him so much as you propose,” Lincoln continued. “If, today, he should choose to say he thinks it necessary to invade Canada, to prevent the British from invading us, how could you stop him? You may say to him, ‘I see no probability of the British invading us,’ but he will say to you, ‘Be silent; I see it, if you don’t.’”

Those words proved to be prophetic. Last week, President Donald Trump sent troops into Venezuela to capture Nicolás........

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