One historian’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 peace

LOS ANGELES TIMES “TOP TEN BOOKS TO READ IN 2025”

“Eye-opening, disturbing, moving and at times jaw-dropping . . . Once in a great while a book arrives that allows us to rediscover the strange inexhaustibility of the Civil War. Lincoln’s Peace is such a book.” —Tony Kushner

“Lincoln’s Peace does something remarkable: It makes us think about familiar questions in an entirely new and engaging way. A marvelous achievement.” —Jon Meacham

“Helps us understand what the war was all about and whether in some ways it is still being fought.” —Eric Foner

We set out on the James River, March 25, 1865, aboard the paddle steamboat River Queen. President Lincoln is on his way to General Grant’s headquarters at City Point, Virginia, and he’s decided he won’t return to Washington until he’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 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”? 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 Spielberg’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 Lincoln’s untimely death. 

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.

“Lincoln’s Peace is a vivid introduction to the complexities of what we call Reconstruction, and to the maddening difficulty of bringing a war to a close. Perhaps, as T.S. Eliot remarked about the English Civil War, it may be that no serious civil war ever really ends.” —Allen C. Guelzo, The Wall Street Journal

“Fascinating . . . Potent . . . Reminds us of the cost in lives in failing to resolve—peacefully and diplomatically—arguments with deep social and moral implications.” —Jeff Rowe, Associated Press

“[Vorenberg] astutely interrogates the notion that modern America is uniquely mired in ‘forever wars,’ suggesting instead that today’s political scientists are likely idealizing the past. Expert analysis and eloquent prose make this a must-read for U.S. history buffs.” —Publisher’s Weekly (starred review)

“Throughout Lincoln’s Peace, readers are provided a fascinating analysis of historical events that generally have been either overlooked or disconnected from one another . . . Written with a combination of thorough research and a deftness for narrative history, Vorenberg’s book is one that will challenge commonly held beliefs . . . most historians, or general readers, should come away from this skillfully written book with new perspectives about facts they thought were settled truths but actually never happened.” —Greg M. Romaneck, Emerging Civil War

“As he demonstrated with his magnificent Final Freedom: The Civil War, The Abolition of Slavery and The Thirteenth Amendment, Michael Vorenberg has a gift for illuminating vast historical terrain by posing a central yet unasked question and answering it with scholarly exactitude, penetrating insight and a brilliant narrative style. In Lincoln’s Peace, he offers an account, eye-opening, disturbing, moving and at times jaw-dropping, of the myriad ways in which the forces that ignited the American Civil War retained implacable vitality and destructive energy long after Appomattox, resisting and ultimately thwarting the dream of a just and lasting peace. Once in a great while a book arrives that allows us to rediscover the strange inexhaustibility of the Civil War—its meanings, its implications, its ongoing relevance to the fate and future of the American democratic project. Lincoln’s Peace is such a book.” —Tony Kushner, Pulitzer Prize–winning playwright and screenwriter

“Original, absorbing, and illuminating, Michael Vorenberg’s Lincoln’s Peace does something remarkable: It makes us think about familiar questions in an entirely new and engaging way. A marvelous achievement.” —Jon Meacham, author of And There Was Light: Abraham Lincoln and the American Struggle

“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: How the Civil War and Reconstruction Remade the Constitution

“A brilliant work and a vital contribution to the canon . . . Vorenberg exhibits scholarship of the first order. The history is vividly written and thoroughly researched. His reasoned questioning, skepticism, and analysis of accepted tropes and conclusions about the Civil War will prove meaningful to those who study the philosophy and psychology of war, peace, and American culture and identity.” —Kirkus Reviews (starred review)