A lesson learned from LINCOLN'S PEACE: THE STRUGGLE TO END THE AMERICAN CIVIL WAR, by Michael Vorenberg
Wars often leave scars far beyond "peace" declarations.
It's no surprise to anyone that to this day I still snatch up every book on the American Civil War that I can find; those who've known me forever know that I have a fascination with the topic that dates back to high school, and that ultimately was the focus of my MA thesis (I'm proud of it--especially as professional historians really began tackling my chosen topic just a few years later--but I'm also glad I stopped there, as I really wasn't meant for a life of research, AND it's way too dull for me to ever recommend it to normies! Back to our main topic...). However, whereas most old white guys just want to talk battles and military strategy (a fascinating topic, don't get me wrong), I was always drawn to all of the war's social and political implications--in particular, how America has never really healed from some of its scars, and how the war's aftermath continues to this day to drive deep divisions across the country. Michael Vorenberg's fascinating new book does a deep dive into this topic, particularly with a focus on how even Americans of the Civil War generation couldn't even agree on when the war actually ended, much less on what exactly the terms of peace were supposed to be.
Vorenberg has some fun with the recurring legends and debates about the end of the Civil War. Of course, the war's main military fighting ended with the surrender of Lee's army at Appomattox in April 1865, and that moment has been enshrined into American History textbooks as the symbolic end of it all; in reality, mop-up battles and operations against official Confederate armies dragged out well into May, and Vorenberg points out multiple historical monuments scattered around the country that claim to be the place where the war ACTUALLY ended. Even official government proclamations did not agree on an exact end date for the war, with Congress claiming some degree of military jurisdiction over Southern areas all the way into the 1870's. With this often comical journey, Vorenberg brings up a larger question--when are wars actually over, and who really has the authority to make that proclamation? The question haunted American History well into our modern era, as presidents on multiple occasions declared "peace" in places like Korea, Vietnam, Iraq, and Afghanistan only to find out those regions would experience anything but that in the coming years.
Of course, any discussion of "peace" following the Civil War would not be complete without a discussion of Reconstruction, the era when the nation debated what exactly the war was about and on what terms the wayward South could be readmitted into the Union, often in a violent and brutal manner. To many white Southerners, the war only meant they had to give up the word "slavery" without actually surrendering any of their violent privileges that came along with it, and much of the ensuing decade following the "official" war saw African-Americans and their white allies try to resist that impulse, with ultimately only limited success. Vorenberg tackles the thorny question my MA thesis examined, as to how different Reconstruction might have been in the hands of a visionary leader like Lincoln rather than the bumbling bigot like Andrew Johnson. It's a question whose answer can never be known, but was likely somewhere between "there's no way it could NOT have ended better," and the sad reality that there was likely only so much a 19th-century American government could have achieved in trying to heal the war's racial violence and divisions. Vorenberg also wisely does not ignore the fact that the Indian Wars continued to rage in the middle of the American Civil War, and that the country had no interest in treating the Indian Nations with peace and justice even as some white people were opening up their minds to the potential of African-Americans.
Vorenberg's book is a fast and entertaining read, and a must-read for anyone who loves the American Civil War beyond the "ooooh, the Battle of Gettysburg!" obsessions of people like those who follow that Channel That Calls Itself History. Because America never really came to grips with the legacy of the Civil War and the botched peace process that followed, the failures of that era have continued to haunt us right into our deeply disturbed present moment. Ultimately, healing can never truly occur until, as a wise man once put it, we can actually figure out how to achieve "a just and lasting peace amongst ourselves, and with all nations."
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