Journal of the Senate of the United States of America, December 5, 1865;

"...Fellow-citizens of the Senate and House of Representatives:

To express gratitude to God, in the name of the people, for the preservation of the United States, is my first duty in addressing you. . . . To form a more perfect Union," by an ordinance of the people of the United States, is the declared purpose of the Constitution. The hand of Divine Providence was never more plainly visible in the affairs of men than in the framing and the adopting of that instrument...."

"...Who of them will not now acknowledge, in the words of Washington, that "every step by which the people of the United States have advanced to the character of an independent nation seems to have been distinguished by some token of Providential agency?" Who will not join with me in the prayer, that the invisible hand which has led us through the clouds that gloomed around our path will so guide us onward to a perfect restoration of fraternal affection, that we of this day may be able to transmit our great inheritance, of State governments in all their rights, of the general government in its whole constitutional vigor, to our posterity, and they to theirs through countless generations?

ANDREW JOHNSON.
Washington, December 4, 1865.