Abraham Lincoln: A Private Life

Abraham Lincoln writes here in the closing weeks of the American Civil War, with victory near, the Union preserved, and peace still uncertain.

In this imagined private account, Lincoln reflects on the burdens of command, the political bargains behind emancipation, the cost paid by soldiers and families, and the strange loneliness of leadership when every decision carries the weight of lives unseen. He considers ambition, grief, timing, mercy, and the uneasy truth that history celebrates outc...