What Abraham Lincoln found reading the Book of Job amid civil war
Sergio LopezNovember 03, 2020
In 1863 the Confederate Army was “flushed with victory.” Throughout the summer of that year, the Union had been taking brutal losses. The cost in human lives was high. “Sometimes it looked,” Elizabeth Keckley later recalled, “as if the proud flag of the Union, the glorious old Stars and Stripes, must yield half its nationality to the tri-barred flag that floated grandly over long columns of gray.” These were our nation’s darkest days.
For the man leading the Union, they were just as dark. The previous year, he had lost his beloved son to illness. Now, the potential unraveling of the Union under his administration, with hundreds of thousands of lives already lost, weighed heavily on President Abraham Lincoln, inducing an exhaustion that he could feel in his bones. His eyes were hollowed out, wrinkles lining his face. “These were sad, anxious days to Mr. Lincoln,” Ms. Keckley wrote, “and those who saw the man in privacy only could tell how much he suffered.”
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Abraham Lincoln had grown up reading the King James Bible from an early age, but already the war had forced him to reconsider some of his most deeply held beliefs.
https://www.americamagazine.org/faith/2020/10/27/abraham-lincoln-book-of-job-civil-war-bible-united-states
