On September 1862, weeks before he issued the preliminary Emancipation Proclamation, Abraham Lincoln wrestled with the enormous dilemma of whether to change the stakes of the Civil War…In a private document found after his death, the president struggled to understand what God expected of him and of the nation. “The will of God prevails,” Lincoln began. “In great contests each party claims to act in accordance with the will of God. Both may be, and one must be wrong. God can not be for, and against the same thing at the same time. In the present civil war it is...