LAST SHOT IN ANGER: 5/8: Lincoln's Peace: The Struggle to End the American Civil War Hardcover – Illustrated, March 18, 2025 by Michael Vorenberg
The John Batchelor Show
John Batchelor
4.5 • 2.8K Ratings
🗓️ 28 June 2025
⏱️ 10 minutes
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Summary
by Michael Vorenberg
1865 APPOMATOX VA
https://www.amazon.com/Lincolns-Peace-Struggle-American-Civil/dp/1524733172
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. Vorenbergwas 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.
Transcript
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| 0:00.0 | This is CBS I on the World. Here's John Batchelor. This is CBSI on the world. I'm John Batchelor. Continuing my |
| 0:15.8 | conversation with the author Michael Vorenberg, also professor of history at Brown University. |
| 0:21.9 | The book is Lincoln's Peace, The Struggle to End the American Civil War. |
| 0:26.0 | We've looked at Appomattox Courthouse, not the end. |
| 0:29.2 | We've looked at Benham Place near Durham, North Carolina, the surrender of Joe Johnson's army to William Sherman, not the end. |
| 0:36.0 | We've looked possibly at the trial of the conspirators. |
| 0:41.7 | Not only those who murdered Lincoln and attacked the Secretary of State, |
| 0:47.3 | but the man responsible for horrible death at Andersonville, not the end. |
| 0:51.9 | We've looked at the surrender of various guerrilla-like forces or holdouts |
| 0:57.3 | in Columbus, Georgia, in Texas near Brownsville. One man Shelby crossed into Mexico, not the end. |
| 1:06.9 | So we're still looking, and so was Congress. The end of the core question had not been resolved, the professor writes, by early 1866. |
| 1:15.6 | This is the 39th Congress. |
| 1:17.7 | It has a lot of work to do for reconstruction and to secure the freedom of the freedmen, |
| 1:24.0 | where there are various anecdotes coming in that the brutality is continuing, that the union |
| 1:30.1 | has not done its job in the Confederacy, and turning its back now is reckless. Professor, we |
| 1:36.9 | begin with philosophy, not violence. Richard Henry Dana, born 1815, very well-to-do family. |
| 1:47.5 | He decides, as a young man, that he needs his eyesight back because he's had |
| 1:52.9 | difficulties with his eyesight, and time at sea would be good for him. |
| 1:58.8 | And as you write, rather than going to the grand tour, |
| 2:02.0 | which he can easily afford through his family, he decides to spend two years before the |
| 2:06.6 | Mass. It's still a wonderful book to read, and I recommend it to everyone. However, now he's a |
| 2:12.3 | grown man, and he's observing in Boston, where he is a very strong advocate for abolition before the war and in support of civil rights for everyone, suffrage for everyone during the war. |
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