Review
"Everyone knows the Civil War ended with Robert E. Lee’s surrender at Appomattox. But as Michael Vorenberg shows in this fascinating and original narrative, the situation was actually much more complicated, and a full account of the war’s end has all sorts of ramifications, legal, military, and racial. Vorenberg’s account helps us understand what the war was all about and whether in some ways it is still being fought." —Eric Foner, author of The Second Founding
"In this powerful and provocative book, Michael Vorenberg vividly dramatizes how America was 'caught between a state of war and a state of peace' after Appomattox. With careful attention to legal and political debates, and to the themes of insurgency, occupation, conquest, and freedom, Vorenberg traces the prolonged national struggle to end the Civil War—and asks us to contemplate why our myths of a definitive peace persist." —Elizabeth R. Varon, University of Virginia, author of Longstreet: The Confederate General Who Defied the South
"In a bracing challenge to the received wisdom that America’s Civil War ended with Lee’s surrender at Appomattox, Lincoln’s Peace sheds a brilliant light on the liminal space between what was no longer outright war nor yet a realized peace. Vorenberg’s sparkling narrative tells of ongoing conflict, violence, legal disputation, international imbroglios, and—above all—contested freedom. In sum, a masterly and original work." —Richard Carwardine, author of Righteous Strife: How Warring Religious Nationalists Forged Lincoln's Union
"A provocative and disquieting counter-narrative to the long-held and widespread assumption that the Civil War ended with the Appomattox Surrender. Rather, the author argues, the often-bloody aftermath known as ‘Reconstruction’ was a continuation of violent conflict, and thus war, albeit of a different kind. It was waged not only in states of the former Confederacy but also across the West. Drawing on an impressive range of sources and interweaving military, racial, legal, and political dynamics, Vorenberg’s arresting narrative will provide readers with much food for thought." —Joan Waugh, author of U.S. Grant: American Hero, American Myth
"Vorenberg leads us on an often surprising journey through the twilight time between Lee's surrender at Appomattox Court House and the elusive end of hostilities between North and South, long after the Civil War was traditionally thought to have ended. In this fast-unfolding account, he presents the nation's leaders in compelling close focus as they struggle to find their way through a labyrinth of political, legal, and military ambiguities, while hopes for a clear-cut peace evaporate and the shape of a new postwar America comes painfully into being." —Fergus M. Bordewich, author of Klan War
"Lincoln’s Peace is the finest account of how the Civil War ended—yet didn’t really end—that I have ever read. In a compelling, wide-ranging, fast-flowing, narrative Michael Vorenberg first takes the reader to the supposedly final battles, negotiations, surrenders and skirmishes that ought to have concluded the most violent war of insurrection in American history; he then describes the sad mess that followed—assassination, pardons, dropped treason trials, escapes from justice and disputed versions of guilt and responsibility that make the work a must-read for all of us today."—Nigel Hamilton, author of Lincoln vs Davis: The War of the Presidents
About the Author
MICHAEL VORENBERG is the author of Final Freedom: The Civil War, the Abolition of Slavery, and the Thirteenth Amendment, which was a finalist for the Gilder Lehrman Lincoln Prize and was used as the basis for the screenplay of Stephen Spielberg’s 2012 film, Lincoln. He is also the author of The Emancipation Proclamation: A Brief History with Documents, as well as a number of essays on legal and constitutional history. His writings have appeared in the Chicago Tribune, the New York Times, Politico, and the Washington Post. He teaches at Brown University in Providence, Rhode Island.
