It was the wrong box. 

The roots for Michael Vorenberg’s newest book, “Lincoln’s Peace, The struggle to end the American Civil War,” can be traced to a mis-step inside the Library of Congress. 

Vorenberg said he was researching material for a different book when one of the staffers at the Library of Congress brought out a box of unfamiliar historical papers. Vorenberg, a longtime Barrington resident and professor of history at Brown University, realized the mistake and politely asked for the staffer to return with the correct box. 

While waiting for the worker to return, Vorenberg decided to take a look at the historical documents inside the “wrong box.”

The contents captured his attention. The papers offered Vorenberg a new story to tell, a new book to write, a new question to answer: Just when, exactly, did the Civil War end?

“I was working on a different book and this box is brought to me. So now I have to wait for the correct box to come. In the meantime, I look in this box and I start going through it. And there's this huge file that's marked ‘End of Civil War,’” Vorenberg said. “Now, I've been studying the Civil War in graduate school and written a book about the Civil War and I said, ‘Well, the end of Civil War doesn't require a big file.’ You know, (Robert E.) Lee surrenders to (Ulysses) Grant in April 1865…So what's the big deal here? And so I start going through this and it was absolutely fascinating.”

The box contained documents from Lewis Grant, who was an officer in the U.S. Army during the Civil War. Grant’s notes later became a full report shared with the Secretary of War, and stemmed from a request filed by a soldier who wanted to collect a pension. The soldier stated that when he signed on, the war had not yet ended. 

“So, what triggered all of this was a fairly mundane matter which then led this guy Lewis Grant — he wasn't going to let it stop. He wanted to get to the answer. He wouldn't let it go,” Vorenberg said.

The task levied onto Grant grew into a mission to discover the date marking the actual end of the Civil War. Vorenberg found Grant’s work compelling and eventually led him to write “Lincoln’s Peace, The struggle to end the American Civil War.”

Vorenberg, during a recent interview, indicated that the confusion swirling around the end date for the American Civil War was not unique — he described a similar situation at the end of World War II and at the end of the US-Iraq war. 

Vorenberg said that on May 1, 2003, then U.S. President George Bush announced that combat operations in the U.S.-Iraq war had ended. 

“When we get to the Obama era, the war is still going on. And Obama gives an end of war declaration in 2011,” Vorenberg said. 

Finding the agreed-upon end date for the Civil War also offered some challenges. In his book, Vorenberg includes two photos of newspapers — the headline from the April 10, 1865 New York Herald states “Surrender of Lee and his whole army to Grant” while the same newspaper shares the headline “Complete. It is finished. Surrender of Kirby Smith and the last army of Rebels” on May 28, 1865. 

There are different moments in history declaring the end of World War II, as well, said Vorenberg.

“So, you need these legal endpoints,” he said. “This is not a unique occurrence what happened in the Civil War. It seems to be repeating itself pretty regularly with every conflict.”

Vorenberg shared the story of a ship in the Confederate Navy — the Shenandoah. His research showed that the ship started a mission in 1864 focused on inflicting as much financial destruction as possible on the North. At that time, whale oil was very valuable, so the Shenandoah gives chase to the whaling fleet and finally tracks it down in the North Pacific Ocean. Within 10 days of locating the fleet, the Shenandoah has sunk or set fire to most of the whaling ships. 

“And the great irony, of course, is that the war is over. It's been over,” Vorenberg said. 

Eventually, the Shenandoah, encountering other ships, learns that the war had ended before they attacked the whaling fleet. 

“They sail all the way around South America and ultimately go to Liverpool (England). They surrender in Liverpool in November of 1866. They are the last surrender of the war, and they're in England when they surrender. And there's a question still alive which is what's going to happen to them because the US authorities want them tried and executed. They want them sent back to the US to stand trial,” Vorenberg said. 

“England refuses to hang them and then in the end there's a negotiation and they're saved.”

Endorsement

“Lincoln’s Peace: The Struggle to end the American Civil War” is Vorenberg’s most recent book, but his book “Thirteenth Amendment” also garnered a lot of attention. 

“Thirteenth Amendment” served as a key source during the creation of the 2012 Steven Spielberg film “Lincoln,” starring Daniel Day Lewis. Vorenberg said Pulitzer Prize-winning playwright and screenwriter Tony Kushner used “Thirteenth Amendment” when writing the screenplay for Spielberg’s “Lincoln.”

“You know I have incredible admiration for Kushner because he did a lot of research,” Vorenberg said. “He likes history. He did a lot of original research. He wanted to get it right.

“A lot of screenwriters in the same position wouldn't necessarily have cared. He wanted to get that stuff right. And so he read my book…”

As Vorenberg grew nearer to finishing “Lincoln’s Peace, The struggle to end the American Civil War,” he reached out to Kushner regarding an endorsement. The screenwriter offered this: “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.”