The Long Grasp of War

Abraham Lincoln wanted peace, for the war to end. He expressed his desire to “bind up the nation’s wounds” in his second inaugural address on March 4, 1865. In a meeting at City Point, Virginia, three weeks later, he urged his generals to “let ‘em up easy” when accepting the anticipated surrender of Confederate military forces.

Lincoln lived to see the surrender of General Robert E. Lee’s Army of Northern Virginia but knew there was tough peacemaking ahead when he went to Ford’s Theater the evening of April 14. He died without seeing the cessation of hostilities. And as Michael Vorenberg explains in Lincoln’s Peace: The Struggle to End the American Civil War, Americans since 1865 have been unable to agree on when, or even if, our deadliest conflict ended. “Had he lived,” writes Vorenberg, “[Lincoln] would have seen firsthand how difficult it was to make a peace that was both speedy and righteous.”

Lincoln’s Peace, an important addition to the multitude of books about the Civil War, begins with what most people believe to be the end of the war. Ask average Americans when the war ended, and they will say “1865” or “when Lee surrendered at Appomattox.” But as Vorenberg makes clear, Lee’s surrender to Ulysses S. Grant on April 9, 1865, was only the beginning of the end. As the Army of Northern Virginia was stacking its guns before the Army of the Potomac, most Confederate military forces were still in the fight. The armies commanded by generals Joe Johnston and Edmund Kirby Smith did not capitulate until late May and early June, and the Confederacy’s Cherokee allies, led by Principal Chief Stand Watie, didn’t give up until late June. Confederate naval action, in the form of raids by the CSS Shenandoah, continued until November. Beyond that date, diehard Confederates plotted guerilla actions.

Even after the end of military resistance, violence continued. Union forces occupied the rebellious states until 1877, during which time thousands, mostly civilians, died. In September 1876, in Ellenton, South Carolina, the U.S. Army fought a battle against white paramilitary groups that some argue was the last combat of the war. And the Plains Indian Wars, which began during the rebellion and that many historians consider part and parcel of the Civil War, continued until the 1890s.

Vorenberg recognizes that to determine the end of a war, war itself must be defined. Is it fighting between organized armies? Is it any organized violence? Does it include the occupation of a hostile area after the fighting ends? Does war end only when the political goals or causes of the war are resolved? Application of any of these definitions results in different end dates or, in this case, collections of possible end dates for each condition.

In a speech given on June 21, 1865, only two days after the famous “Juneteenth” declaration in Texas, Republican attorney Richard Henry Dana, Jr. declared that the winning side in a war doesn’t just go home; “it holds the conquered enemy in the grasp of war until it has secured whatever it has a right to require.” Dana was arguing that military occupation of the South was needed to destroy slavery, the principal cause of the war. Indeed, although slavery was legally abolished in December 1865 with ratification of the 13th Amendment, it continued in one form or another past that date, including in states that never seceded from the Union. And if a goal of the war was equal opportunity for all, it can be argued — and is by some — that the war is unfinished.

In Lincoln’s Peace, Vorenberg, whose previous books about the Civil War include Final Freedom: The Civil War, the Abolition of Slavery, and the Thirteenth Amendment, explores the justifications presented for each of the many end dates proposed for the Civil War, searching for the best. His conclusion — “It’s complicated” — may be, as he readily admits, unsatisfactory to some. But the causes and resolutions of war are rarely simple and, as Vorenberg points out, understanding how end dates are established is needed in our own times, when the phrase “forever wars” has become common.