
Lincoln's Peace
The Struggle to End the American Civil War
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Narrated by:
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Landon Woodson
About this listen
One historian’s journey to find the end of the Civil War—and, along the way, to expand our understanding of the nature of war itself and how societies struggle to draw the line between war and peace
LOS ANGELES TIMES "TOP TEN BOOKS TO READ IN 2025"
"Eye-opening, disturbing, moving and at times jaw-dropping . . . Once in a great while a book arrives that allows us to rediscover the strange inexhaustibility of the Civil War. Lincoln's Peace is such a book.”—Tony Kushner
“Lincoln’s Peace does something remarkable: It makes us think about familiar questions in an entirely new and engaging way. A marvelous achievement.”—Jon Meacham
"Helps us understand what the war was all about and whether in some ways it is still being fought."—Eric Foner
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. Vorenberg was 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 here, 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.
©2025 Michael Vorenberg (P)2025 Random House AudioListeners also enjoyed...
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Critic reviews
*Los Angeles Times "10 Books We're Looking Forward to in 2025"*
“As he demonstrated with his magnificent Final Freedom: The Civil War, The Abolition of Slavery and The Thirteenth Amendment, Michael Vorenberg has a gift for illuminating vast historical terrain by posing a central yet unasked question and answering it with scholarly exactitude, penetrating insight and a brilliant narrative style. In Lincoln's Peace, he offers an account, eye-opening, disturbing, moving and at times jaw-dropping, of the myriad ways in which the forces that ignited the American Civil War retained implacable vitality and destructive energy long after Appomattox, resisting and ultimately thwarting the dream of a just and lasting peace. Once in a great while a book arrives that allows us to rediscover the strange inexhaustibility of the Civil War—its meanings, its implications, its ongoing relevance to the fate and future of the American democratic project. Lincoln's Peace is such a book.”—Tony Kushner, Pulitzer Prize-winning playwright and screenwriter
“Original, absorbing, and illuminating, Michael Vorenberg’s Lincoln’s Peace does something remarkable: It makes us think about familiar questions in an entirely new and engaging way. A marvelous achievement.”—Jon Meacham, author of And There Was Light: Abraham Lincoln and the American Struggle
"Everyone knows the Civil War ended with Robert E. Lee’s surrender at Appomattox. But as Michael Vorenberg shows in this fascinating and original narrative, the situation was actually much more complicated, and a full account of the war’s end has all sorts of ramifications, legal, military, and racial. Vorenberg’s account helps us understand what the war was all about and whether in some ways it is still being fought."—Eric Foner, author of The Second Founding: How the Civil War and Reconstruction Remade the Constitution
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Story
At the end of the Nuremberg trials in 1946, some of the greatest war criminals in history were sentenced to death, but hundreds of thousands of Nazi murderers and collaborators remained at large. The Allies were ready to overlook their pasts as the Cold War began, and the legacy of the Holocaust was in danger of being forgotten. In The Prosecutor, Jack Fairweather brings to life the heroic story of Fritz Bauer who survived the Nazis as a gay Jewish man to force his countrymen to confront their complicity in the genocide.
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Story
- By janine on 03-25-25
By: Jack Fairweather
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The Mesopotamian Riddle
- An Archaeologist, a Soldier, a Clergyman and the Race to Decipher the World's Oldest Writing
- By: Joshua Hammer
- Narrated by: Matthew Lloyd Davies
- Length: 10 hrs and 32 mins
- Unabridged
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From the ruins of Persepolis to lawless outposts of the crumbling Ottoman Empire, The Mesopotamian Riddle whisks you on a wild adventure through the golden age of archaeology in an epic quest to understand our past.
By: Joshua Hammer
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The Mysterious Mr. Nakamoto
- A Fifteen-Year Quest to Unmask the Secret Genius Behind Crypto
- By: Benjamin Wallace
- Narrated by: Benjamin Wallace
- Length: 8 hrs and 39 mins
- Unabridged
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In October 2008, someone going by the name Satoshi Nakamoto posted a white paper outlining “a peer-to-peer electronic cash system” called Bitcoin to an arcane listserv populated by Cypherpunks. No one in the community had heard of Nakamoto, and just as people were starting to wonder who he was, he vanished. As the years passed, and the scope of Nakamoto’s achievement became clear, the truth of his identity grew into the greatest unsolved mystery of our time. The Mysterious Mr. Nakamoto traces Benjamin Wallace’s attempt to unmask the figure behind the currency and the world it wrought.
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Interesting read, even for a non-geek
- By A reader on 04-23-25
By: Benjamin Wallace
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Shots Heard Round the World
- America, Britain, and Europe in the Revolutionary War
- By: John Ferling
- Narrated by: Jason Keller
- Length: 20 hrs and 13 mins
- Unabridged
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Shots Heard Round the World is a bold, comprehensive rendering of the world war that erupted out of America’s battle for independence. Ferling highlights underestimated pivotal moments to reveal why the British should have put down the rebellion within a couple years of fighting. As European rivals France, Spain, and the Dutch Republic entered the fray, Britain’s problems grew, but after seven long years, the war’s outcome remained very much in doubt.
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A high school history
- By mona berrier on 04-02-25
By: John Ferling
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Abraham Lincoln
- A Life
- By: Michael Burlingame
- Narrated by: Douglas R Pratt
- Length: 32 hrs and 55 mins
- Unabridged
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Hailed as the definitive portrait of the sixteenth president, Lincoln scholar Michael Burlingame's impressive two-volume biography has been masterfully abridged and revised. Based on deep research in unpublished sources as well as newly digitized sources, this work reveals how Lincoln's character and personality were the North's secret weapon in the Civil War, the key variables that spelled the difference between victory and defeat. He was a model of psychological maturity and a fully individuated man whose influence remains unrivaled in the history of American public life.
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What an Extraordinary Human Being!
- By joan m. on 09-24-24
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The Ride
- Paul Revere and the Night That Saved America
- By: Kostya Kennedy
- Narrated by: Johnny Heller
- Length: 5 hrs and 15 mins
- Unabridged
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Timed for the 250th anniversary of one of America’s most famous founding events: Paul Revere’s legendary ride, newly told with fresh research into little-known aspects of the myth that every American learns in school.
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Great read on Paul Revere
- By Fred on 04-19-25
By: Kostya Kennedy
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Show Trial
- Hollywood, HUAC, and the Birth of the Blacklist (Film and Culture Series)
- By: Thomas Doherty
- Narrated by: Keith McCarthy
- Length: 13 hrs and 40 mins
- Unabridged
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In 1947, the Cold War came to Hollywood. Over nine tumultuous days in October, the House Un-American Activities Committee held a notorious round of hearings into alleged Communist subversion in the movie industry. The blowback was profound: the major studios pledged to never again employ a known Communist or unrepentant fellow traveler. The declaration marked the onset of the blacklist era, a time when political allegiances, real or suspected, determined employment opportunities in the entertainment industry. Hundreds of artists were shown the dooror had it shut in their faces.
By: Thomas Doherty
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Naples 1944
- The Devil's Paradise at War
- By: Keith Lowe
- Narrated by: Richard Trinder
- Length: 15 hrs and 10 mins
- Unabridged
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Keith Lowe has chronicled the end of WWII in Europe in Savage Continent and the war's aftermath in The Fear and the Freedom. In Naples 1944, he brings listeners another chronicle of the terrible and often unexpected consequences of war. Even before the fall of Mussolini, Naples was a place of great contrasts filled with palaces and slums, beloved cuisine and widespread hunger. After the Allied liberation, these contrasts made the city notorious. Compared to the starving population, Allied soldiers were staggeringly wealthy.
By: Keith Lowe
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Wide Awake
- The Forgotten Force That Elected Lincoln and Spurred the Civil War
- By: Jon Grinspan
- Narrated by: Sean Pratt
- Length: 12 hrs and 27 mins
- Unabridged
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At the start of the 1860 presidential campaign, a handful of fired-up young Northerners appeared as bodyguards to defend anti-slavery stump speakers from frequent attacks. The group called themselves the Wide Awakes. Soon, hundreds of thousands of young White and Black men, and a number of women, were organizing boisterous, uniformed, torch-bearing brigades of their own. These Wide Awakes--mostly working-class Americans in their twenties--became one of the largest, most spectacular, and most influential political movements in our history.
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Interesting account
- By MikeEC on 06-06-24
By: Jon Grinspan
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The Monastic World
- A 1,200-Year History
- By: Andrew Jotischky
- Narrated by: Michael Page
- Length: 15 hrs and 19 mins
- Unabridged
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From the late Roman Empire onwards, monasteries and convents were a common sight throughout Europe. But who were monasteries for? What kind of people founded and maintained them? And how did monasticism change over the thousand years or so of the Middle Ages?
By: Andrew Jotischky
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The Invisible Spy
- Churchill's Rockefeller Center Spy Ring and America’s First Secret Agent of World War II
- By: Thomas Maier
- Narrated by: Stephen Graybill
- Length: 12 hrs and 49 mins
- Unabridged
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As a tough but smart Italian American kid, Ernest Cuneo played Ivy League football at Columbia University and was in the old Brooklyn Dodgers NFL franchise before becoming a city hall lawyer and “Brain Trust'' aide to President Roosevelt. He was on the payroll of national radio columnist Walter Winchell and mingled with the famous and powerful. But his status as a spy remained a secret, hiding in plain sight. During this time, Cuneo began a close friendship with British spy Ian Fleming and helped inspire Fleming's James Bond novels.
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N excellent isten. sorry to see it end
- By "Old" but Good Reader on 04-10-25
By: Thomas Maier
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Seven Social Movements That Changed America
- By: Linda Gordon
- Narrated by: Hillary Huber
- Length: 17 hrs and 35 mins
- Unabridged
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How do social movements arise, wield power, and decline? Renowned scholar Linda Gordon investigates these questions in a groundbreaking work, narrating the stories of many of America's most influential twentieth-century social movements. Beginning with the turn-of-the-century settlement house movement, Gordon then scrutinizes the 1920s Ku Klux Klan and its successors, the violent American fascist groups of the 1930s.
By: Linda Gordon