Booknotes: Lincoln's Peace

New Arrival:

• Lincoln's Peace: The Struggle to End the American Civil War by Michael Vorenberg (Knopf, 2025).

In the broadest sense, Lincoln's Peace: The Struggle to End the American Civil War represents author Michael Vorenberg's "journey to find the end of the Civil War." Big, lengthy, and destructive wars like the American Civil War tend to not conclude in a neat and tidy manner, and even the end date is frequently a source of debate among historians. From the description: "Was it April 9, at Appomattox, as conventional wisdom holds, where Lee surrendered to Grant in Wilmer McLean’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”?"

But that's not the only major theme or objective involved. The book also seeks "to expand our understanding of the nature of war itself and how societies struggle to draw the line between war and peace." As the title suggests, Lincoln himself, acting in the capacity of the nation's chief executive, strove to be the leading force in shaping the societal and political reconstruction that followed the guns going silent. Lincoln's Peace thus explores "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 Lincoln’s untimely death."

It also appears that Vorenberg's analysis engages with debates surrounding the modern conceptualization of the "long war." More: "To say how a war ends is to suggest how it should be remembered, and Vorenberg’s search is not just for the Civil War’s endpoint but for its true nature and legacy, so essential to the American identity. It’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."