By Allen C. Guelzo

Of all wars, none are quite so catastrophic as civil wars. They arise from the ugliest of disagreements, they spill into the most reprehensible of behaviors, and they seem never to have a distinct ending.

The American Civil War is no exception, since there was no convenient peace treaty to lend it a conventional closing date. And how could there have been, since the Lincoln administration consistently refused to recognize the secession of Southern states in 1861 as constitutionally legal? In Lincoln's mind, there was no such thing as the Confederacy; there was only an insurrection, and nations do not sign peace treaties with insurrectionists they have defeated.

In the popular imagination, the Civil War usually ends with the surrender of Robert E. Lee's Confederate army at Appomattox Court House on April 9, 1865. True, most of the large-scale killing ended at Appomattox, but another major Confederate field army was still at large in North Carolina and wouldn't disband until April 26. An entire rebel department was also still in the field, beyond the Mississippi, and it wouldn't formally surrender until May 26. Even then, a Confederate warship, the Shenandoah, continued to destroy Union merchant vessels in the Pacific until the beginning of August, when captured newspapers finally convinced the crew to run for refuge in England. Meanwhile, unreconciled Confederates crossed into Mexico in the hope that its French puppet-emperor, Ferdinand Maximilian, would help them to continue the fight.

The Union seemed just as uncertain about declaring the conflict over. President Andrew Johnson, having assumed the presidency after Lincoln's assassination on April 14, declared on May 10 that "armed resistance" was "virtually at an end." On May 11, the Union's general-in-chief, Ulysses Grant, announced that "all persons found in arms against the United States" after June 1 would be regarded as "guerillas and punished with death."

But guerillas are warriors of a certain shape, and Johnson had only spoken of hostilities as being "virtually" at an end. Not until Aug. 20, 1866, did Johnson finally proclaim that the "insurrection is at an end," and "peace, order, tranquility, and civil authority now exist." This came only three weeks after a deadly race riot in New Orleans made it clear that tranquility was still a long way off in the onetime Confederacy.

Michael Vorenberg's "Lincoln's Peace" chronicles this uncertainty. The writing of it began in 2003 -- two years after the publication of his landmark "Final Freedom," on the making of the 13th Amendment -- with a kind of archival epiphany. In an 1890 War Department report, Lewis Grant (no relation to Ulysses) struggled with the Civil War pension claim of a former soldier, John Barleyoung. The department was ready to dismiss Barleyoung's claim on grounds that he had only enlisted in April 1866, a year after Appomattox. But Barleyoung countered that the war had not received a final dismissal until Johnson's Aug. 20, 1866, proclamation, and thus he was entitled to the pension Congress provided to all Civil War survivors. That sent Lewis Grant down a legal rabbit hole to determine when, exactly, the Civil War ended. More than a century later, he dragged Mr. Vorenberg down the hole after him.

Barleyoung never got his Civil War pension, but his complaint opened up for Mr. Vorengerg a disturbing new vista on a landscape he had taken for granted. Did Lee and Grant really bring the war to a halt at Appomattox Court House? Grant generously offered paroles to Lee's soldiers rather than demanding the kind of unconditional surrender Lee feared he would demand. But paroles only end combatant activity, not wars. A day after their meeting, Lee warned Grant that Northern armies "might have to march over" the South "three or four times before the war entirely ended."

The anomalies multiplied. A great celebratory review of the victorious Union armies was staged in Washington at the end of May 1865. But that same month as many as 50,000 Union soldiers were dispatched to the Rio Grande to deal with the possibility that a new Confederacy would be fashioned, with the blessing of the French emperor Napoleon III, from parts of Texas and French-occupied Mexico. Would that create a new war, or an extension of the old one? And did outbreaks of fighting against the Sioux and Cheyenne also count as part of the Civil War? If so, the war could be stretched farther westward to include the Battle of Little Big Horn, where the Civil War's most sensational cavalryman, George Armstrong Custer, and more than 200 of his troopers met their doom in 1876.

The largest uncertainty over what counts as war involves the years of Reconstruction, which frequently and swiftly degenerated into the kind of guerilla violence Grant had hoped to head off. And alongside the white-hooded barbarity Grant struggled to suppress, a political war broke out between President Johnson and Congress in which Congress seized the reins of Reconstruction from his hands and passed a series of acts reducing the defeated Confederacy to five military occupation districts. Is occupation an extension of war, or its conclusion? Eventually, by 1871, Congress was persuaded to readmit the districts to the Union in the form of the original states. But it took only a few years before the Confederate oligarchs were once more in control, and Southern politics resumed so much of its old shape that it could have seemed that the war had never happened at all.

Like mercury escaping from a broken thermometer, the more Mr. Vorenberg pressed on the question of when the Civil War ended, the more it squiggled away from him. Finally, he had to confront "the unbearable knowledge" that pinning an end on the Civil War might be impossible. That uncertain note should not suggest any lack of clarity in either Mr. Vorenberg's cheekily ironic style or in his careful delineation of the many ways in which the Civil War stubbornly refused to end. The title may be slightly misleading -- Lincoln doesn't play a major role in the peace he never lived to see. Moreover, Mr. Vorenberg isn't entirely persuaded that Lincoln would have yielded to Congress's demand that all adult black men be allowed to vote, or to its barring former federal officeholders who had served the Confederacy from reacquiring "any office, civil or military, under the United States."

Nevertheless, "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.

--Mr. Guelzo is the Thomas W. Smith Distinguished Research Scholar at Princeton University and a fellow of the American Enterprise Institute.

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March 28, 2025 11:30 ET (15:30 GMT)

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