These were our nation’s darkest days and 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.”  Read more at americamagazine.org