Michael Vorenberg's new book, Lincoln’s Peace: The Struggle to End the American Civil War (Alfred A. Knopf, 2025) challenges the narrative of a Civil War that ended neatly with an iconic surrender at Appomattox, Virginia in April 1865. The book examines the many endings and non-endings of the war, from failed peace meetings to emancipation celebrations to presidential proclamations, arguing that the choice of an end date, whether for the Civil War or any war, determines how the war is defined and remembered.
In this Q&A with the history department, Vorenberg delves into his inspiration for writing the book, the process of sifting through archival material, and what he hopes readers will take away from his latest work.
Q: What inspired you to write this book?
Michael Vorenberg (MV): The kernel of the idea came in May 2003. President George W. Bush declared the U.S. war with Iraq over–his infamous “mission accomplished” speech–though most of us knew that many more years of fighting lay ahead. A week after the speech, I was in the archives and learned that the legal end of the Civil War came well over a year after most people think it did, and in the form of a presidential proclamation that sounded much like Bush’s mission accomplished speech. I filed away the parallel in a corner of my mind. Eight years later, in 2011, when President Obama delivered his own end-of-war proclamation for the same U.S.-Iraqi conflict, my kernel of an idea became a full-on commitment to write a book about how wars end yet don’t end, with a focus on the Civil War.
Q: What was the process of delving into archival material / sources like? What did you enjoy the most or what was the most challenging aspect?
MV: A year after northerners celebrated the surrender of Robert E. Lee, a U.S. official who had been tracking insurgency across the South, specifically white supremacist attacks on Black people, wrote a personal note to a friend: “We are in the habit of saying and thinking that war is the abnormal and peace the normal condition of a nation. . . Is that true?” It was exciting to find hundreds of statements like these across dozens of archives, from all sorts of people forced to confront the blurriness of the line between peace and war, especially when the war in question was supposed to be a war to destroy slavery. Of course, many of these same sources, filled with accounts of horrific violence, were also deeply troubling to read.
Q: What do you hope readers take away from the book
MV: Dates seem like such mundane things. We’re forced to memorize them in history classes when we’re young—a reason lots of people don’t like history!—and we’re told that they’re simple facts. They’re not. They structure narratives in very particular ways, whether the narratives are about social movements, economic developments–or wars. Determining the end date of the Civil War, it turns out, is as much an ethical as an empirical enterprise.
Learn more about Lincoln’s Peace: The Struggle to End the American Civil War