Lincoln’s Peace – Michael Vorenberg

One historianÂ’s journey to find the end of the Civil War—and, along the way, to expand our understanding of the nature of war itself and how societies struggle to draw the line between war and peaceWe set out on the James River, March 25, 1865, aboard the paddle steamboat River Queen. President Lincoln is on his way to General GrantÂ’s headquarters at City Point, Virginia, and heÂ’s decided he wonÂ’t return to Washington until heÂ’s witnessed, or perhaps even orchestrated, the end of the Civil War. Now, it turns out, more than a century and a half later, historians are still searching for that end.  Was it April 9, at Appomattox, as conventional wisdom holds, where Lee surrendered to Grant in Wilmer McLeanÂ’s parlor? Or was it ten weeks afterward, in Galveston, where a federal commander proclaimed Juneteenth the end of slavery? Or perhaps in August of 1866, when President Andrew Johnson simply declared “the insurrection is at an end”? That the answer was elusive was baffling even to a historian of the stature of Michael Vorenberg, whose work served as a key source of Steven SpielbergÂ’s Lincoln. Vorenberg was inspired to write this groundbreaking book, finding its title in the peace Lincoln hoped for but could not make before his assassination. A peace that required not one but many endings, as Vorenberg reveals in these pages, the most important of which came well more than a year after LincolnÂ’s untimely death. To say how a war ends is to suggest how it should be remembered, and VorenbergÂ’s search is not just for the Civil WarÂ’s endpoint but for its true nature and legacy, so essential to the American identity. ItÂ’s also a quest, in our age of “forever wars,” to understand whether the United States“s interminable conflicts of the current era have a precedent in the Civil War—and whether, in a sense, wars ever end at all, or merely wax and wane.