Lincoln’s Peace 

by Michael Vorenberg (Knopf)

Nonfiction

Vorenberg, a historian, picks up the story of the Civil War at the end of the conflict, as it was drawing to a close after unfathomable death and suffering. Vorenberg’s account, despite the intervening carnage, returns us to a situation eerily similar to the one that preceded the war; the white South, though militarily defeated, had no intention of accepting anything resembling racial equality. And, while Robert E. Lee might have declined to resort to guerrilla warfare, many of his lieutenants carried on a program of suppression by terror. In that sense, Vorenberg argues, the Civil War never truly ended.