This Friday (4/4) at 3:30pm in Ruane 105, the Humanities Forum will host Michael Vorenberg, Professor of History at Brown University. Vorenberg will tell the eye-opening story of the multiple endings and non-endings of the Civil War, which contains revelations about America’s greatest struggle and about war itself.
Michael Vorenberg transports us back to the precarious time between war and peace at the conclusion of the Civil War, the conflict at the core of American identity. When did the war truly end? Was it on April 9, 1865, as conventional wisdom holds, when Lee surrendered to Grant at Appomattox? Or was it ten weeks later on June 19—Juneteenth—when Black Americans in Galveston celebrated the end of slavery? Or was it a few days after that, when the Cherokee leader Stand Watie became the last Confederate general to surrender? Not until August 20, 1866, was there something like an official end, a mere declaration by President Andrew Johnson that the war was over, even as racial violence and political chaos continued to tear the country apart. The eye-opening story of the multiple endings and non-endings of the Civil War told by Vorenberg contains revelations about America’s greatest struggle and about war itself. To search for the Civil War’s endpoint is to grapple with the war’s true nature and legacy. It is to ask whether any war has an obvious ending, and who, if anyone, gets to say when it’s over.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 and a key source for Steven Spielberg’s 2012 film, Lincoln. He is also the author of The Emancipation Proclamation: A Brief History with Documents, as well as a number of essays on slavery, emancipation, and the U.S. Constitution. His writings have appeared in the Chicago Tribune, The New York Times, Politico, and The Washington Post.
