When did the Civil War end? We commonly say it’s a fact that it concluded on April 9, 1865, at Appomattox, where Confederate General Robert E. Lee surrendered to Union General Ulysses S. Grant in Wilmer McLean’s parlor.
However, an argument could be made that the Civil War didn’t actually end until ten weeks afterward, in Galveston, where a federal commander proclaimed the end of slavery—a day now celebrated as Juneteenth. But for the quibblers, perhaps it should be highlighted that in August of 1866 President Andrew Johnson simply declared “the insurrection is at an end.”
Admitting there is ambiguity in marking exactly when the Civil War came to a close brings us closer to the foggy confusion of the times. The ambiguity helps to underscore that even for those living during that turbulent time, they didn’t know themselves when the war ended. The Galveston News reported Lee’s surrender as a positive development for the Confederacy. The editor encouraged Texans to fight on and win the war.
To have the weighted bookends for the start and the conclusion of the war does serve a purpose. To create a clean common narrative about the most divisive chapter in American history makes the conflict appear settled.
Traditionally we say the Civil War began at 4:30 a.m. on April 12, 1861, when Confederate troops fired on Fort Sumter in South Carolina's Charleston Harbor. And 1,461 days later the Union won the American Civil War when Lee surrendered his troops to Grant at the Appomattox Court House in Virginia. Five days after that, President Lincoln was assassinated.
But an even more difficult question is—When did the post-Civil War peace begin?
That answer is elusive even to historian Michael Vorenberg, whose work served as a key source of Steven Spielberg’s film, 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. It was a peace that required not one but many endings.
Guest:
Michael Vorenberg is a professor of history at Brown University, in Providence, Rhode Island. He is the author of Final Freedom: The Civil War, the Abolition of Slavery, and the Thirteenth Amendment, which was a finalist for the Lincoln Prize. His new book, Lincoln’s Peace, seeks to expand our understanding of the nature of war itself and how societies struggle to draw the line between war and peace.
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This interview will be recorded on Monday, March 17, 2025.
