April 2, 2025 • 41 mins
Professor Michael Vorenberg joins us to address one of the most perplexing questions in US history. Did the Civil War end on 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”? And we talk about the general question of when wars truly end. Fascinating! Episode 578.
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Episode Transcript
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Speaker 1 (00:12):
Hello, everyone, it's Professor Buzzkill busting myths, taking names, and
you know, so much of what we discuss on this
show is the complications of history and the way in
which easy answers to things, including like simple dates this
happened on this date and this ended on that date,
are really almost too simple and often wrong. And one
of the big instances where that has happened is in
(00:36):
our study of the American Civil War. And fortunately for
all of you, we have perhaps the expert on the
end of the Civil War, or perhaps I should say
the endings of the Civil War, and that's Professor Michael
Wahrenberg from Brown University. Doctor Warrenberg, thank you so much
for coming on the show.
Speaker 2 (00:53):
Thank you for having me, and I look forward to
the conversation.
Speaker 1 (00:58):
Well it's so fast, and your new book, which is
just out, called Lincoln's Piece, The Struggle to End the
American Civil War, completely open my eyes about everything that
I thought had happened in eighteen sixty five, first of all,
but then also shows that things go on through eighteen
sixty six and even into later decades. The Civil War
(01:19):
doesn't end at apomatics, does it.
Speaker 2 (01:21):
Well, it doesn't. Although I don't think this book will
change the way in which we talk about appomatics, including myself.
I think appomatics it is an excellent shorthand for talking
about the end of the war, and so many of
us say after appomatics or posted apomatics. I don't think
that's necessarily going to change. I don't seek to change it.
(01:44):
It is a really remarkable event and an ending one ending,
but yes, the war goes on, so it really ends
up being a question about how one counts the end
of war when one decides to all the line.
Speaker 1 (02:01):
Yeah, and that's so crucial because when we get popular
presentations of the war, like ken Burn's famous Civil War documentary,
which is now a thousand years old, you know appomatics
is really the end. And even in the famous movie Lincoln,
which a lot of your work was used in that movie,
it it almost implies appomatics is the end, complete end.
(02:23):
But things go on, they do.
Speaker 2 (02:25):
And it's funny you mentioned the movie Lincoln because it
is really the only scene I believe in the film
where Lincoln himself is not in it. That is the
scene at Appomattics is so compelling, such a big part
of our history and myth, and the visual of it
is so important. I think if you grow up in
(02:46):
the United States and you read a US history textbook
for school, there's very likely to be some kind of
image of Lee surrendering to Grant. And it was as
if Spielberg simply couldn't leave it alone. He had to
include this, and so we get this scene staged, the
tableau of Lee surrendering to Grant, or it's really the end,
(03:06):
but it's Greed creating the scene. And that's how important
that moment is. But yes, that's a really important moment
for the ending of the war. It's very important to
the film. Now, stepping back, let me just speak to
one way that we can think about the ending not
happening at appomatis if we wanted to press on that. So,
when Lee surrenders, that is not the only Confederate army
(03:30):
in the field. It's hard to know how many people
are in any given Confederate army, but almost certainly Joe
Johnston's army, which at the time was in North Carolina,
was larger than Lee's, and that army had not surrendered
when Lee surrendered, and it would not surrender officially really
till the end or near the end of April. Lee's
(03:52):
surrender happened on April ninth, and then after Johnston's army.
If you're just going to focus on the military side
of things, there are still Federates who have not surrendered,
who have yet to surrender, but they don't quit control
such large armies as Johnston. Yes, so that's just the
military side of things. So even on the most basic
way to count an ending, which might be when do
(04:14):
organized armies leave the field? When do they surrender? When
did they disperse? April ninth, which is April ninth, eighteen
sixty five, which is lee surrender is not it, but
it is the surrender, Lee's surrender of the most important,
the best known, the most famous army of the Confederacy.
Speaker 1 (04:34):
But also after Johnson's surrendered, then there are all these
things out in the West that or what was then
considered the West, that seemed to still be going on.
And you know, I think ninety percent of Americans don't
know about that. They think once applematic is over, boom,
it's over. And perhaps that's all overtaken because of Lincoln's assassination.
What is it six days later, four days, five days later,
(04:55):
five or six days later. I can never remember. As
someone who was born on April fifteenth, I should know
this well. It's almost as if people think that, oh, yeah,
there's Appomattox and then there's Lincoln's death, and then everything
really is over. But as you show, it's much more
complicated than that, especially out west.
Speaker 2 (05:10):
Yes, I'll talk about the West in a moment, but
let me say that it's an honor to meet someone
who was born on April fifteenth. Not really an honor,
but I want to sympathize with you. I was not
born on April fifteenth, but I always feel for people
who were born on April fifteenth because that's a rough day.
That's when Lincoln died. He was shot on the fourteenth,
but died on the fifteenth. This tax day. And you'll
know better than I, is that the day that Titanic
(05:32):
went down? Is that right?
Speaker 1 (05:34):
It is the day that Titanic went down.
Speaker 2 (05:36):
Yes, And so you must have a lot of explaining
to do when you tell people these things. But anyway,
let me go back to your question about the West.
So let me point out that when we talk about
the West, there really are many wests. When we think
about the West. Today, we might think about the Southwest,
and we might think got California, and those are relevant
(05:58):
to the story of the Civil War, though we generally
don't think about them. But one thing that's very relevant
is the West in terms of US government Native American
relations and how that fits into the end of the war.
But I'm not going to talk about that quite yet
until later, unless I hope you'll ask me about that,
because that is very much a part of the book,
and it's a part of this story. But before even
(06:21):
that story, let us go back to the straight story
of the US versus the Confederate forces. When Johnston surrenders
towards the end of April, we still have, by some estimates,
about fifty thousand Confederate soldiers who are west of the
Mississippi River. Most of them are in Texas and the
(06:42):
US for the most part, with only one two small exceptions,
the government excuse me, the US army has really not
penetrated into Texas. So we have then a sizeable Confederate
force dispersed over a pretty large area of life and
west of the Mississippi. And this is the Kirby Smith
(07:03):
Force or General Kirby Smith's force, and that is still
to be resolved, and that is part of the story.
And add on to that story that those troops have
to be subdued. But in addition, it is the motivation
of Grant and many others to put a lot of
(07:23):
US troops near the border of Mexico. Maybe because they're
worried about an invasion from Mexico, maybe because they're looking
for an opportunity to invade Mexico, maybe both. And so
that is also part of the story. That too, is
in the book. Because Napoleon the Third, better known at
the times Louis Napoleon, has installed his puppet emperor in
(07:46):
Mexico and has put his troops there. Many in the US,
including Grant, would like to get rid of him. Anyway.
Getting back to the West, you won't get the official
surrender of Kirby Smith until the very beginning of June
eighteen sixty five. So now we're a fair number of
weeks past Daplomatics. And I'll say one last thing about that.
This will allow me to tie into something you've done
(08:08):
on this show very well. The story that I've just
told about Texas is entirely part of the story of
what is now a federal holiday, and that is June teenth.
What happens is that the US Army to get into Texas,
they land, a sizable contingent lands in Galveston, and when
they land, the commander of that contingent, Gordon Granger, stands
(08:33):
in the city and reads the Emancipation Proclamation and then
he reads an order he's written. That day is the
day that's acknowledged later on is June teenth. That wouldn't
be called Juneteenth for some time. It was actually your
show on June teenth that you did on Juneteenth, which
was really excellent, that brought this story to listeners, and
(08:53):
I was really glad you did that, partly because I
had written about it, but also because I had such
a fascinating story to what ex is June teenth, which
we celebrate as a really important date for end of slavery,
also an important date for the end of the Civil War.
How do we connect those two things, the end of
slavery and the end of the Civil War, which was
part of what I think you were talking about that day,
(09:15):
and it really caught my attention.
Speaker 1 (09:17):
Well, thank you for noticing that. That is one of
my favorite recent shows. I was when I started the
research at as I was stunned at how drawn out
the end of slavery actually was.
Speaker 2 (09:29):
Yes, it was, and well, of course June teenth is
in June of eighteen sixty five. If you want to
focus on the legal and constitutional end of slavery, you
can't place that for the United States until December mid
December of eighteen sixty five. That's the ratification of the
thirteenth Amendment, the law of certain states at abolished slavery.
(09:53):
But then getting beyond even December of sixty five comes
the very authority question of how do you and slavery,
How does anyone and slavery? How do the enslaved people
themselves break the bonds of slavery on the ground, as
opposed to simply saying that the thirteenth Amendment is ratified.
And that's the story that also has been told to
(10:16):
some extent, but often is told separately from the story
of the end of the Civil War, And to me,
those two stories should.
Speaker 1 (10:25):
Be licked well. June teeth is important because it's the
whole you know, slavery is the whole reason for the
cause of the war, and there are all sorts of
questions about what to do about emancipated people throughout that period.
How is it going to be put into effect? Et cetera,
et cetera, et cetera. But if you don't mind me
backing up a little bit, this reminds me of what
(10:46):
it actually meant to the people in the Union and
to the people in the Confederacy. What surrender actually meant. Particularly,
this was very clear in the Appomatics chapters and things
like that. Does it mean withdrawing Lane and at least
Grant is making proposals laying down their arms, et cetera,
et cetera. Are they allowed to go home with arms?
And this sort of thing. It's all very complicated about
(11:08):
what actually a surrender means. Do you mind drawing that
out for listeners? Because I found it fascinating.
Speaker 2 (11:14):
I can draw a few pieces of it out. A
lot of it is so complicated. The surrender that takes
place in Appomatics is the surrender of an army, and
let's focus on that. What does it mean for a
military surrender, And in the case of the Civil War,
what it means is that the army agrees not to
(11:39):
take up arms again and signs what are called paroles.
Those paroles are pieces of paper, and it's very much
like the way the word parole is used today. You
have basically got a get out of jail card, but
it's not a guarantee that you're going to stay out
(12:02):
of jail or out of trouble forever. So the parole
is an old form, not just old in terms of
the Civil War goes way back. It's a standard way
by which you avoid having to imprison a lot of
people who surrender or are captured. So this had gone
on all through the war. With surrender, you parole the soldiers.
(12:25):
Those soldiers take an oath not to bear arms against you.
The parole you give them. This is you being the
victorious army that's accepting the surrender. The parole you give
them protects them so that they are not to be
treated as the enemy. They can't be killed in the
field as if they're fighting. They're allowed a free pass home,
(12:47):
but they are expected not to bear arms against the
United States. Again, that's why we have the surrender on
the ninth, but then a couple of days later you
have the stacking of arms and appomatis, which is a
huge and important ceremony to indicate that this is it
you're stacking arms, you're going home. We're not gonna interfere
(13:07):
with you going home. You're gonna go home, and you're
gonna be peaceful, and that's the deal. But there is
this implication, it's not explicit, but there is an implication
that you really are never going to go to jail.
You're never gonna be tried, You're never gonna have to
stand trial for treason if you're just a normal soldier.
But that's actually not promised, it's just implied. And then
(13:29):
for the higher ranking people like including Roberty Lee, that
is not implied. Their fate the high officers like Lee
is up in the air. Lee could be tried for
treason at that he knows he could be. In the end,
he's not for various reasons. But let me stop there.
And that can say more about other dimensions of surrender.
(13:49):
But that's that's what happens at Appomatics. That's really the
crucial story.
Speaker 1 (13:55):
But again, as you show throughout the book, the whole thing,
the whole end of the war is not just about
surrendering soldiers. It's all tied up with a the Thirteenth Amendment,
the ratification implementing that sort of thing, what do we
do with the freedmen? And on and on and on.
It's got to be one of the most complicated things
in American history that just that two year period, if
(14:18):
you will, and I say two years for a reason,
which i'll get to in a minute. So that's again,
I'm a sucker for the for complications, and that's one
of the reasons the book is so great because it
lays them out so clearly. It makes it so much
more understandable that the wall just didn't come down, and
the door didn't slam down, and that was the end
of it.
Speaker 2 (14:35):
That's right, it didn't just slam down. If you want complexity,
it doesn't get more complex than the Civil War for
these kinds of things, because civil wars are different types
of wars, and the American Civil War in particular was
a very strange legalistic war in that it was at
the same time a civil war. That is, Lincoln and
(14:55):
the Lincoln government proclaimed that this was a rebellion, it
was an insurrection, a word that Lincoln uses over and
over again, and yet at the same time it was
a war between two political entities. Let me back up
on that. For the Lincoln government it's crucial that they
claim that the Confederacy is not a nation. They never
(15:19):
want to give it national status for all sorts of reasons.
They want to deny the legitimacy of secession. They want
to make sure that foreign nations cannot come in and
aid the Confederacy, and under international law, foreign nations cannot
do that if this is a domestic rebellion. On the
other hand, the Lincoln government wants the Confederacy to be
(15:39):
a nation for certain other reasons, such as prisoner exchange,
legalizing the blockade because you have to blockades are only
to be done against actual nations. So the Lincoln government
gets it both ways. That's a story that precedes my book,
but I integrate that into the book of how complicated
(15:59):
that is. The reason why that then ties into the
end of the Civil war is there's one way you
end the civil war and a different way you end
a different kind of war. So the way to end
the civil war is to put down the insurrection and
try the traders or do something with the traders. That's
the way you end a civil war. The way you
end a war between nations under international laws through treaties,
(16:21):
and there was never going to be a treaty with
the Confederacy, because the US was never going to recognize
the Confederacy as a nation that you can make treaties with.
But in both of these things, that is both a
war between nations and a civil war. What's really important,
and certainly this is true in international law and dealing
with two nations, the crucial thing is the surrender of
(16:45):
the civilian leader. And that is something we haven't talked
about yet. But the civilian leader of the Confederacy is
Jefferson Davis, the president of the Confederacy, And under international
law it always has to be a civilian leader, the
civilian leader who surrenders for the entity, the political entity,
(17:06):
to be said to be really done. And of course
Jefferson Davis never surrenders. I mean, he's captured on May
tenth of eighteen sixty five, but he never surrendered. He
never publicly renounces the Confederacy. He never makes some kind
of announcement to Southern or Southern whites saying, hey, lay
down your arms were done. So this is just examples
(17:26):
of how complicated this story is. Right, he's imprisoned, So
how do you under war when the civilian leader refuses
to say that the war is over. I'll just leave
that question hanging there.
Speaker 1 (17:38):
It is fascinating. And then, of course, and those only
slightly different topic, certain Confederates are able to come back
eventually into the American government. Alexander Stevens gets re elected
to Congress, which I think other countries would find shocking.
Speaker 2 (17:51):
Yes, that is the story that then plays out, which
is a story that Lincoln was part of, even before
we get to eighteen sixty in his Reconstruction Proclamation of
eighteen sixty three he makes it fairly clear. And even
before then, I should say, the idea of getting a pardon,
a presidential pardon, is out there very early on in
(18:14):
the war. And then that will become crucial under the
Andrew Johnson administration as the way in which the elite
white leaders of the former Confederacy will be able to
become US citizens, eligible for office, etc. Etc. They get
a pardon. As you say, Alexander Stevens asked for a pardon,
(18:37):
got a pardon. Roberty Lee, that's a little bit more complicated,
but yes, he did ask for a pardon. Jefferson Davis
never did, and well, actually he did. I'm getting ahead
of myself. What happens is the full pardon doesn't come
for Lee and Jefferson Davis till they're long dead. But
as you say, Alexander Stevens, the vice president of the Confederacy,
(19:01):
is able to be re elected. But really many, many
hundreds of former Confederate officers end up in office in
the States because of the actions of mostly Andrew Johnson
as president. Some of them had gotten pardons from Congress,
but you had to get a pardon. So yes, that
is remarkable, and it's particularly remarkable because again, now we
(19:25):
go back to this notion of if the war was
about ending slavery, and it was. I believe it was.
I think it should be fairly commonplace knowledge that it was.
May not have started that way, but it becomes that way.
So by the end of the war, the war is
about ending slavery to put people back in office who
(19:46):
have stood for slavery for so long, who claimed to
be owners of slaves were treated as owners of slaves.
Alexander Stevens had said that slavery was the cornerstone of
the Confederacy, to put these peopleeople back in public office
at a time when the formerly enslaved population is in
(20:08):
the process of being enfranchised into the body politic fully
necessarily creates conflict, hypocrisy, confusion.
Speaker 1 (20:17):
Yeah, it's just fascinating, and it's one of these things
that you almost can never stop thinking about, right, In
other words, what is an enemy after the actual bullets
have stopped flying? We find this, of course, after the
surrender of the Germans, A number of lower a number
of German soldiers eventually become involved in West German politics,
(20:38):
et cetera, et cetera, et cetera, although the high command doesn't.
And it's just fascinating because one of the big themes
in your book is, you know, in some ways wars
almost never end, and this is one of the reasons.
This is one of the ways in which that's true.
Speaker 2 (20:51):
Let me speak to the really good question you're asking
for the Civil War, and then maybe in a more
general way about wars in general. There is a fundamental
problem with the Civil War, and I would say to
your point, it is a problem we find in other wars,
maybe all wars. If you have an enemy population, that
is an enemy population of not just soldiers but civilians
(21:13):
that has ascribed to certain ideological principles, and that's what
they're fighting for, that's what they believe. And then the
war ostensibly is over. You can claim the war's over,
you can make it legally over, you can put it
in the books, is over. But what do you do
with the population that held these principles. You can't simply
(21:34):
legalize those away. So what do you do? This is
a fundamental problem for the Civil War. And the answer
that the practical answer is well, you make people take
an oath of loyalty to the Union and the Constitution.
But of course, if they take such an oath, does
that really mean that they entirely give up all that
(21:56):
the Confederacy stood for? There are certain Confederates who absolutely
did give it up, who turned against it. There are
some famous examples. Elizabeth Aarron has written a wonderful book
about Longstreet. He's one of the pro maybe the most
famous examples of this. But of course, for the mass
of these Confederates, they don't just give up. Some actually
(22:18):
refuse to take the oath. But for the most of
these folks who do take the oath, they hold on.
So how do you then really fix the end of
war in a way? And so of course, that's a
story that takes American history well into the twentieth century,
because it isn't a simple fix in any means. In
the case of what you gave of the Germans after
(22:39):
World War Two, it's a fascinating story and one I
don't know very well. My colleague at Brown, Omar Bartov,
has worked on this, and I remember asking about this,
which is so, if the idea is in post war
Germany that there were Germans who supported the Nazis, and
maybe some who didn't, but of course the bulk did.
(23:02):
Now you need a post World War two German society
composed of Germans. How do you create such a society
and get people to renounce the Nazism that they supported
and actually make it convincing? Right? And that's a grand problem,
and the Germans had an answer to that. I mean, again,
(23:24):
none of these answers is good. But there is a
process by which this was done. In the United States,
the process, if there was a process, was in no
way coherent, It was in no way enforced. It should
have it absolutely must have been a process that demanded
of people adherence to emancipation and to freedom, and by
(23:48):
freedom I mean broader freedom than simply the legal end
of slavery. And I say that because Lincoln from the
beginning said that you only really get amnesty if you
swear to abide not only by the Union and the Constitution,
but all the acts passed by the Union government during
(24:09):
the Civil War. And that would include the Emancipation Proclamation.
That would include any act of emancipation passed by the states,
and there have been a few. It would include renunciation
of the black laws in places like Illinois, and it
would include the Thirteenth Amendment. And all of these things
extend beyond mere abolition of chattel slavery. So when you say, well,
(24:34):
I'm putting the Confederacy behind me, fine, but that also
means you are supposed to be adhering to the principle
of freedom, which includes black freedom. And of course that's
not what we get in the post war world in
the South and even parts of the North.
Speaker 1 (24:51):
Yes, it is absolutely amazing, but if you don't mind,
Before we end up with a more thematic conclusion to
the show, I'd like to ask two sort of eight
questions that I found fascinating, And the first is happens
in eighteen sixty five there's a debate even until now,
and even in terms of like monuments by the side
(25:11):
of the road where the actual last battle slash, skirmish,
slash whatever happened. One claims to be in Georgia and
one claims to be in Texas. Now, before I start
rolling on and telling a story, because I'm so excited,
I should let the expert tell the story. So please
enlighten our listeners about that.
Speaker 2 (25:29):
Yes, one of my favorite images in the book, and
I'm glad it made it into the book, is actually
a dual image, and it's in the inset of the
book of Color Images. And it's a dual image of
two historic plaques. And both of these plaques mark the
site of the last battle of the Civil War. And
(25:51):
yet these two plaques are about one thousand miles apart
from one another.
Speaker 1 (25:57):
That's right, and.
Speaker 2 (26:00):
In Columbus, Georgia, the other is in Well, I'm gonna
I'm gonna use the names of the places from the time.
Columbus Georgia is still Columbus Georgia. But the name Palmido Ranch,
Texas is the other location. Some called it Palmetto, I
call it Palmido. That was the more common name. It's
not a organized town by any means. Today if you
go there, there's really not much there except for the plaque.
(26:22):
So Columbus Georgia is unquestionably a real battle, and it's
in April of eighteen sixty five, sometime after Appomattox, and
there's a story behind it, because what's happening after Appomattox
And another places you have to remember this is there's
all sorts of battles and fighting going all over the place.
(26:42):
Communication is a wreck. People don't know that Leah surrendered.
And actually the armies that are in Columbus Georgia are
not under Lee's command. Columbus Georgia's right on the border
with Alabama, and it's a river town. There's a battle there.
I won't go into great detail. It's a significant battle.
There's actual engagement of organized troops, and I would say
(27:05):
arguably that's a place that deserves a plaque. Now jump ahead,
and one of the things you get in May not
quite a month later after the Battle of Columbus is
you have in Texas along the Rio Grande, near the
mouth of the Rio Grande, you have a station A
(27:26):
couple contingents of US soldiers. And then you have Brownsville,
Texas upriver from the mouth a bit which is occupied
by Confederate soldiers. That's the state of affairs in early May.
This well after the surrender many of the surrenders that
have happened. And what happens is that one of the Union,
(27:48):
the US officers near the mouth of the river, decides
to take a contingent of men and to try to
get the Confederates out of Brownsville. And along the way
there's a skirmish between you soldiers and the Confederate soldiers,
and there are fatalities and injuries. That then is claimed
to be the last battle of the Civil War. And
(28:12):
that's why if you were to go there now, you
can find a plaque that claims it to be the
last battle. The official records of the War of the Rebellion,
which in themselves are an act of creation. That is,
they're the official records, but there was a lot of
work that went into them and deciding what went in
and what didn't go in. The official story is created
(28:34):
by those official records. This is a wonderful story told
by the historian Yelle Sternell in her book called War
on Record. That recently out. But in those official records,
Palmito Ranch, the skirmish I just described is described. It
is stated, this is the last battle of the Civil War.
And so the people of Columbus, you know, who take
(28:55):
pride in that, No, no, we're the last battle. They
want to be the last battle. There's an excellent historian
who wrote a book about the Battle of Columbus who
spends a lot of time at explaining why the Battle
of Columbus is a real battle and what happened in
Palmito Ranch only counts as a skirmish, not a battle.
To me, I'm not a military historian or expert, but
(29:16):
it just cracked me up. I thought that are we
really going to get into a fight an argument over
what's a skirmish and what's a battle and how can
we possibly draw the line? But it does get at
this one of these sort of fascinating little tidbits, like
what do we really call the last battle, or, for
that matter, the last shot of the Civil War? This
(29:37):
too is fascinating. The last shot of the Civil War
arguably happens off the coast of Alaska. And if you
want me to talk more about that, I will, But
maybe that's a good way just story. Yeah, whether it
really happens there or not is I guess up for debate.
But it's such a great story, right, which is that
the Confederate ship, the Shenandoah, which was in the North
(29:59):
Pacific's mission was to do as much damage to Union
whalers as possible. The idea was this happens more you
do economic damage, you're not simply trying to kill people.
So the Shenandoah was in the Northern Pacific, way north,
we're talking about the Bearing Straits kind of north, and
they end up destroying many, many whaling vessels, that is
(30:23):
the whaling grounds for the New England whaling fleet. Who
are they're going after bowhead whales especially, And there is
during you know, the most destructive week of the Civil
War destruct So the most destructive week of the Civil
War instrictly financial terms in terms of a loss of
(30:44):
value happens in June of eighteen sixty five by the Shenandoah.
And this is now we're talking well over two months
past diplomatics, and that's because they didn't know about what
had happened back on them. There was no way that
the Shenandoah could know, and so there are shots fired
(31:05):
at a certain moment during the pursuit of one of
these ships, and so you could then say, as some
have said, that those are the last shots of the
Civil War. That's the summary of that story of the Shenandoah.
The actual story is much longer, and I'll say more interesting,
and one of my favorite stories that I get to
tell in the book.
Speaker 1 (31:24):
Well, we want to leave that for the readers because
it is It is fascinating, and the illustrations for that
are fascinating. My second date question, though, is this interesting
thing that I had never heard of, and I don't
think anyone I know really knows, or if they do,
they don't talk about it very much. It's that President Johnson,
of course, Lincoln's successor, very publicly proclaims the end of
(31:46):
the Civil War in eighteen sixty six, and tell that story.
That's also fascinating.
Speaker 2 (31:52):
Yes, this is what is in my prologue and what
was effectively the colonel that was stuck in my brain
that would eventually lead me to write this book. It
took many years before I decided to stop working on
the book I was working on and to work on
this one. When I learned that that proclamation on August twentieth,
(32:15):
eighteen sixty six, by President Andrew Johnson was the official
legal end of the Civil War. I was shocked when
I learned that that it was the actual legal end
of the war. How I learned that has to do
with time spent in the archives. A lot of Civil
War historians know about this, that that is the official end.
(32:35):
I had known about that proclamation. I didn't think anyone
took it seriously, but it is actually taken seriously. It
was taken seriously at the time as the end of
the war, and it was debated. That is. Congress pushed
back and said, no, that is not the end of
the war. So what's going on there. To jump ahead
is that by August eighteen sixty six, the US is
(32:56):
in let us call it a state of war. It
may not be in a full on war. In fact,
you can hardly say it's in the kind of condition
of war that it had been prior to appomatics. However,
it is officially in a state of war. When I
say officially, I mean Congress has basically saying we are
in a state of war. What's important there is that
(33:16):
Congress gets to use, with the president's help, the war power.
So the idea is that the president, as commander in chief,
exerts the war power. Congress has said, you have the
war power, and Congress expects the President and the president's
executive officers, which include the Secretary of War, General in
Chief Grant, a Secretary of War Stanton, they expect them
to use the power to subdue the South and to
(33:38):
be the basis of reconstruction. This then gets wrapped up
in the politics of reconstruction. And so when we get
to the point that Andrew Johnson has fully broken with
the Republicans Congress, the Republicans in Congress, Andrew Johnson wants
to say that the war's over. He wants to pull
the troops out, and he wants essentially to put the
Civil War in the past, and so he wants to
(34:00):
draw the line. He does it with first, he tries
it in April sixty six with a proclamation that says
the war's over except in Texas. No one could argue
that the war was over in Texas because there was
so much fighting going on there. And then in August
of sixty six he says the war's over everywhere, and
that is this proclamation that in the end turns out
to be the official end because Congress mistakenly somewhat later
(34:24):
mentions that proclamation and treats it as the end in
a trivial bill that they pass, and then the Supreme
Court says that they're willing to recognize that as the
end President's proclamation. And let me just say that, as
crazy as that sounds, that a president can simply proclaim
the war over, that's what got me into this book
(34:47):
because when I learned that fact was just literally weeks
after President George W. Bush in two thousand and three
in May proclaim aimed the combat operations in Iraq were over,
and he did so in front of a banner that
said Mission accomplished. This became known as the Mission Accomplished speech.
(35:11):
And it struck me that moment in two thousand and
three that that was a moment where the president was
declaring the war was over. He said, combat operations are over.
The war of occupation now is going on, but that's
a very different war. He proclaimed the war over. And
a lot of people made fun of that mission accomplished
speech and said it did nothing. But in fact, when
(35:32):
I looked in the political science literature, the international relations
scholars were treating that speech of May two thousand and
three as the official end of the US Iraqi war.
And I said, Wow, that's power that a president can
simply declare a war over. And then I saw this
proclamation by Johnson, which had been affirmed by the Supreme Court,
(35:56):
was in a number of legal records as the end
of the war, and I thought, people talk about war
powers of the president, what are the war powers of
the president? What aren't the war powers one of the
unwritten war powers of the president. Maybe it's only true
in the modern era. Maybe it's always been true. I'm
not sure, but I do believe that there is this
(36:17):
informal war power where the president can declare that a
war is over. I'm not saying it's official, I'm not
saying it's legal, but it happens, and when it happens,
it can take the force of law, or at least
history along with it.
Speaker 1 (36:32):
Right. But perhaps the big overriding theme in the whole book,
especially bracketed in the prologue and the epilogue, is you know,
there are all these problems about a number of wars
and when they end or if they ever end this.
We remember from the early seventies it seemed as if
there were four or five endings of the Vietnam War.
There were innumerable endings and non endings of the wars
(36:55):
in Iraq, Afghanistan. It seems to be a continual thing.
And that, to me, was the big theme in the book,
and this big, big, sort of intellectual question, why does
this keep happening? Why do wars keep going on in
all sorts of forms even after they're technically declared over.
Speaker 2 (37:15):
You're asking about wars generally, and that is a question
that has been on my mind from the beginning. I
was pretty young when we had, as you say, the
multiple endings of the US Vietnam War. For people of
my generation may be a little older as well. If
you say, when did the Vietnam War end, it's a
(37:37):
visual thing that comes to mind.
Speaker 1 (37:39):
Right. That's a helicopter.
Speaker 2 (37:42):
The helicopter taking off in Saigon. And by the way,
in April of twenty twenty five, this year is going
to be the fiftieth anniversary of that visual, if you will.
For me, that's the end of the Vietnam War. Well,
it isn't the end, the actual technical end has to
do with the treaty that was signed a couple of
years before that, right, so how do you mark the end?
That's one example, but of course the more immediate or
(38:03):
more recent, I should say, the more recent example has
to do with the US interventions in Iraq and Afghanistan.
And that then leads to these the term forever war
and these notions that, yeah, those are wars that don't
have endings, or they have multiple endings or do over endings,
and that is exactly correct with those interventions, and then
(38:23):
the Civil War is supposed to stand in contrast to that. Right,
that this notion of a forever war, whether it's the
Vietnam War that kept ongoing or needed do overs, or
the twenty first century US interventions, that these are somehow
really modern types of wars, where in the good old
(38:44):
days the wars were clear in time definition, they had beginnings,
they had middles, and they had endings. That's certainly what
I believed growing up, that the Civil War was had
an ending. It was one of those wars, and that
in many ways not just n ending, but a beautiful
(39:04):
ending as pictured in the textbooks. As I said, right
right where the one side simply surrenders to the other
and everyone goes home happy. And it's not a forever war,
not the civil wars, not a forever war. And I
don't want to stretch this analogy. I don't want to
make it too analogous, because they are not analogous. We
(39:25):
are dealing with a very different time in the twenty
first century. But I would say that the Civil War
is a little bit more like these forever wars at
the present than the textbooks tell us. That's maybe the
way to put it. And in these ways that we've
been talking about, certainly militarily, even more so politically in
terms of struggling to figure out how you end the war.
(39:48):
Is it by a presidential proclamation or Congress? For example?
One last point about that Congress rejects Andrew Johnson's proclamation
of August sixty six. In the end, they say, we
get to decide when the war is over. So this
is one of the issues like who who gets to
(40:10):
say when the war is over? And Congress, of course
says we get to decide, And so they define the
end of the war as the moment at which the
last of the seceded states has representation in Congress and
that doesn't happen till eighteen seventy one. Wow, So again,
how do you define the end of the war. Do
(40:33):
we go with the congressional definition, do we go with
Andrew Johnson? Do we go with the military sort? Any
of these you know, could be argued as legitimate. I'm still,
like I said at the beginning, appomatics will forever be
thought of as the end of the war, and I'm
not trying necessarily to displace that. But as you have
said many times and in many ways, your show is
(40:53):
committed to this principle. Complexity is the story here, not simplicity.
Speaker 1 (40:58):
That's right, and I can't imagine a better way to
end this episode than on that idea and that theme.
And in the complexity we find as historians, we find
so much fascination and also so much deeper meaning. So
it just remains for me to say, thank you so much,
professor for coming on the show.
Speaker 2 (41:14):
Well, thank you so much for having me. It's been
great to be a part of the conversation. I've really
enjoyed talking to you, and again, thank you for putting
on such a great podcast for historians and for people
who are just interested in history. Thank you.
Speaker 1 (41:28):
Well, we'll tell all you buzzkillers out there that, of
course the book is on the buzzkill bookshelf and they
should go get at asap because it is out now,
and we will talk to all of you next time.
Hello, everyone, it's Professor Buzzkill busting myths, taking names, and
you know, so much of what we discuss on this
show is the complications of history and the way in
which easy answers to things, including like simple dates this
happened on this date and this ended on that date,
are really almost too simple and often wrong. And one
of the big instances where that has happened is in
(00:36):
our study of the American Civil War. And fortunately for
all of you, we have perhaps the expert on the
end of the Civil War, or perhaps I should say
the endings of the Civil War, and that's Professor Michael
Wahrenberg from Brown University. Doctor Warrenberg, thank you so much
for coming on the show.
Speaker 2 (00:53):
Thank you for having me, and I look forward to
the conversation.
Speaker 1 (00:58):
Well it's so fast, and your new book, which is
just out, called Lincoln's Piece, The Struggle to End the
American Civil War, completely open my eyes about everything that
I thought had happened in eighteen sixty five, first of all,
but then also shows that things go on through eighteen
sixty six and even into later decades. The Civil War
(01:19):
doesn't end at apomatics, does it.
Speaker 2 (01:21):
Well, it doesn't. Although I don't think this book will
change the way in which we talk about appomatics, including myself.
I think appomatics it is an excellent shorthand for talking
about the end of the war, and so many of
us say after appomatics or posted apomatics. I don't think
that's necessarily going to change. I don't seek to change it.
(01:44):
It is a really remarkable event and an ending one ending,
but yes, the war goes on, so it really ends
up being a question about how one counts the end
of war when one decides to all the line.
Speaker 1 (02:01):
Yeah, and that's so crucial because when we get popular
presentations of the war, like ken Burn's famous Civil War documentary,
which is now a thousand years old, you know appomatics
is really the end. And even in the famous movie Lincoln,
which a lot of your work was used in that movie,
it it almost implies appomatics is the end, complete end.
(02:23):
But things go on, they do.
Speaker 2 (02:25):
And it's funny you mentioned the movie Lincoln because it
is really the only scene I believe in the film
where Lincoln himself is not in it. That is the
scene at Appomattics is so compelling, such a big part
of our history and myth, and the visual of it
is so important. I think if you grow up in
(02:46):
the United States and you read a US history textbook
for school, there's very likely to be some kind of
image of Lee surrendering to Grant. And it was as
if Spielberg simply couldn't leave it alone. He had to
include this, and so we get this scene staged, the
tableau of Lee surrendering to Grant, or it's really the end,
(03:06):
but it's Greed creating the scene. And that's how important
that moment is. But yes, that's a really important moment
for the ending of the war. It's very important to
the film. Now, stepping back, let me just speak to
one way that we can think about the ending not
happening at appomatis if we wanted to press on that. So,
when Lee surrenders, that is not the only Confederate army
(03:30):
in the field. It's hard to know how many people
are in any given Confederate army, but almost certainly Joe
Johnston's army, which at the time was in North Carolina,
was larger than Lee's, and that army had not surrendered
when Lee surrendered, and it would not surrender officially really
till the end or near the end of April. Lee's
(03:52):
surrender happened on April ninth, and then after Johnston's army.
If you're just going to focus on the military side
of things, there are still Federates who have not surrendered,
who have yet to surrender, but they don't quit control
such large armies as Johnston. Yes, so that's just the
military side of things. So even on the most basic
way to count an ending, which might be when do
(04:14):
organized armies leave the field? When do they surrender? When
did they disperse? April ninth, which is April ninth, eighteen
sixty five, which is lee surrender is not it, but
it is the surrender, Lee's surrender of the most important,
the best known, the most famous army of the Confederacy.
Speaker 1 (04:34):
But also after Johnson's surrendered, then there are all these
things out in the West that or what was then
considered the West, that seemed to still be going on.
And you know, I think ninety percent of Americans don't
know about that. They think once applematic is over, boom,
it's over. And perhaps that's all overtaken because of Lincoln's assassination.
What is it six days later, four days, five days later,
(04:55):
five or six days later. I can never remember. As
someone who was born on April fifteenth, I should know
this well. It's almost as if people think that, oh, yeah,
there's Appomattox and then there's Lincoln's death, and then everything
really is over. But as you show, it's much more
complicated than that, especially out west.
Speaker 2 (05:10):
Yes, I'll talk about the West in a moment, but
let me say that it's an honor to meet someone
who was born on April fifteenth. Not really an honor,
but I want to sympathize with you. I was not
born on April fifteenth, but I always feel for people
who were born on April fifteenth because that's a rough day.
That's when Lincoln died. He was shot on the fourteenth,
but died on the fifteenth. This tax day. And you'll
know better than I, is that the day that Titanic
(05:32):
went down? Is that right?
Speaker 1 (05:34):
It is the day that Titanic went down.
Speaker 2 (05:36):
Yes, And so you must have a lot of explaining
to do when you tell people these things. But anyway,
let me go back to your question about the West.
So let me point out that when we talk about
the West, there really are many wests. When we think
about the West. Today, we might think about the Southwest,
and we might think got California, and those are relevant
(05:58):
to the story of the Civil War, though we generally
don't think about them. But one thing that's very relevant
is the West in terms of US government Native American
relations and how that fits into the end of the war.
But I'm not going to talk about that quite yet
until later, unless I hope you'll ask me about that,
because that is very much a part of the book,
and it's a part of this story. But before even
(06:21):
that story, let us go back to the straight story
of the US versus the Confederate forces. When Johnston surrenders
towards the end of April, we still have, by some estimates,
about fifty thousand Confederate soldiers who are west of the
Mississippi River. Most of them are in Texas and the
(06:42):
US for the most part, with only one two small exceptions,
the government excuse me, the US army has really not
penetrated into Texas. So we have then a sizeable Confederate
force dispersed over a pretty large area of life and
west of the Mississippi. And this is the Kirby Smith
(07:03):
Force or General Kirby Smith's force, and that is still
to be resolved, and that is part of the story.
And add on to that story that those troops have
to be subdued. But in addition, it is the motivation
of Grant and many others to put a lot of
(07:23):
US troops near the border of Mexico. Maybe because they're
worried about an invasion from Mexico, maybe because they're looking
for an opportunity to invade Mexico, maybe both. And so
that is also part of the story. That too, is
in the book. Because Napoleon the Third, better known at
the times Louis Napoleon, has installed his puppet emperor in
(07:46):
Mexico and has put his troops there. Many in the US,
including Grant, would like to get rid of him. Anyway.
Getting back to the West, you won't get the official
surrender of Kirby Smith until the very beginning of June
eighteen sixty five. So now we're a fair number of
weeks past Daplomatics. And I'll say one last thing about that.
This will allow me to tie into something you've done
(08:08):
on this show very well. The story that I've just
told about Texas is entirely part of the story of
what is now a federal holiday, and that is June teenth.
What happens is that the US Army to get into Texas,
they land, a sizable contingent lands in Galveston, and when
they land, the commander of that contingent, Gordon Granger, stands
(08:33):
in the city and reads the Emancipation Proclamation and then
he reads an order he's written. That day is the
day that's acknowledged later on is June teenth. That wouldn't
be called Juneteenth for some time. It was actually your
show on June teenth that you did on Juneteenth, which
was really excellent, that brought this story to listeners, and
(08:53):
I was really glad you did that, partly because I
had written about it, but also because I had such
a fascinating story to what ex is June teenth, which
we celebrate as a really important date for end of slavery,
also an important date for the end of the Civil War.
How do we connect those two things, the end of
slavery and the end of the Civil War, which was
part of what I think you were talking about that day,
(09:15):
and it really caught my attention.
Speaker 1 (09:17):
Well, thank you for noticing that. That is one of
my favorite recent shows. I was when I started the
research at as I was stunned at how drawn out
the end of slavery actually was.
Speaker 2 (09:29):
Yes, it was, and well, of course June teenth is
in June of eighteen sixty five. If you want to
focus on the legal and constitutional end of slavery, you
can't place that for the United States until December mid
December of eighteen sixty five. That's the ratification of the
thirteenth Amendment, the law of certain states at abolished slavery.
(09:53):
But then getting beyond even December of sixty five comes
the very authority question of how do you and slavery,
How does anyone and slavery? How do the enslaved people
themselves break the bonds of slavery on the ground, as
opposed to simply saying that the thirteenth Amendment is ratified.
And that's the story that also has been told to
(10:16):
some extent, but often is told separately from the story
of the end of the Civil War, And to me,
those two stories should.
Speaker 1 (10:25):
Be licked well. June teeth is important because it's the
whole you know, slavery is the whole reason for the
cause of the war, and there are all sorts of
questions about what to do about emancipated people throughout that period.
How is it going to be put into effect? Et cetera,
et cetera, et cetera. But if you don't mind me
backing up a little bit, this reminds me of what
(10:46):
it actually meant to the people in the Union and
to the people in the Confederacy. What surrender actually meant. Particularly,
this was very clear in the Appomatics chapters and things
like that. Does it mean withdrawing Lane and at least
Grant is making proposals laying down their arms, et cetera,
et cetera. Are they allowed to go home with arms?
And this sort of thing. It's all very complicated about
(11:08):
what actually a surrender means. Do you mind drawing that
out for listeners? Because I found it fascinating.
Speaker 2 (11:14):
I can draw a few pieces of it out. A
lot of it is so complicated. The surrender that takes
place in Appomatics is the surrender of an army, and
let's focus on that. What does it mean for a
military surrender, And in the case of the Civil War,
what it means is that the army agrees not to
(11:39):
take up arms again and signs what are called paroles.
Those paroles are pieces of paper, and it's very much
like the way the word parole is used today. You
have basically got a get out of jail card, but
it's not a guarantee that you're going to stay out
(12:02):
of jail or out of trouble forever. So the parole
is an old form, not just old in terms of
the Civil War goes way back. It's a standard way
by which you avoid having to imprison a lot of
people who surrender or are captured. So this had gone
on all through the war. With surrender, you parole the soldiers.
(12:25):
Those soldiers take an oath not to bear arms against you.
The parole you give them. This is you being the
victorious army that's accepting the surrender. The parole you give
them protects them so that they are not to be
treated as the enemy. They can't be killed in the
field as if they're fighting. They're allowed a free pass home,
(12:47):
but they are expected not to bear arms against the
United States. Again, that's why we have the surrender on
the ninth, but then a couple of days later you
have the stacking of arms and appomatis, which is a
huge and important ceremony to indicate that this is it
you're stacking arms, you're going home. We're not gonna interfere
(13:07):
with you going home. You're gonna go home, and you're
gonna be peaceful, and that's the deal. But there is
this implication, it's not explicit, but there is an implication
that you really are never going to go to jail.
You're never gonna be tried, You're never gonna have to
stand trial for treason if you're just a normal soldier.
But that's actually not promised, it's just implied. And then
(13:29):
for the higher ranking people like including Roberty Lee, that
is not implied. Their fate the high officers like Lee
is up in the air. Lee could be tried for
treason at that he knows he could be. In the end,
he's not for various reasons. But let me stop there.
And that can say more about other dimensions of surrender.
(13:49):
But that's that's what happens at Appomatics. That's really the
crucial story.
Speaker 1 (13:55):
But again, as you show throughout the book, the whole thing,
the whole end of the war is not just about
surrendering soldiers. It's all tied up with a the Thirteenth Amendment,
the ratification implementing that sort of thing, what do we
do with the freedmen? And on and on and on.
It's got to be one of the most complicated things
in American history that just that two year period, if
(14:18):
you will, and I say two years for a reason,
which i'll get to in a minute. So that's again,
I'm a sucker for the for complications, and that's one
of the reasons the book is so great because it
lays them out so clearly. It makes it so much
more understandable that the wall just didn't come down, and
the door didn't slam down, and that was the end
of it.
Speaker 2 (14:35):
That's right, it didn't just slam down. If you want complexity,
it doesn't get more complex than the Civil War for
these kinds of things, because civil wars are different types
of wars, and the American Civil War in particular was
a very strange legalistic war in that it was at
the same time a civil war. That is, Lincoln and
(14:55):
the Lincoln government proclaimed that this was a rebellion, it
was an insurrection, a word that Lincoln uses over and
over again, and yet at the same time it was
a war between two political entities. Let me back up
on that. For the Lincoln government it's crucial that they
claim that the Confederacy is not a nation. They never
(15:19):
want to give it national status for all sorts of reasons.
They want to deny the legitimacy of secession. They want
to make sure that foreign nations cannot come in and
aid the Confederacy, and under international law, foreign nations cannot
do that if this is a domestic rebellion. On the
other hand, the Lincoln government wants the Confederacy to be
(15:39):
a nation for certain other reasons, such as prisoner exchange,
legalizing the blockade because you have to blockades are only
to be done against actual nations. So the Lincoln government
gets it both ways. That's a story that precedes my book,
but I integrate that into the book of how complicated
(15:59):
that is. The reason why that then ties into the
end of the Civil war is there's one way you
end the civil war and a different way you end
a different kind of war. So the way to end
the civil war is to put down the insurrection and
try the traders or do something with the traders. That's
the way you end a civil war. The way you
end a war between nations under international laws through treaties,
(16:21):
and there was never going to be a treaty with
the Confederacy, because the US was never going to recognize
the Confederacy as a nation that you can make treaties with.
But in both of these things, that is both a
war between nations and a civil war. What's really important,
and certainly this is true in international law and dealing
with two nations, the crucial thing is the surrender of
(16:45):
the civilian leader. And that is something we haven't talked
about yet. But the civilian leader of the Confederacy is
Jefferson Davis, the president of the Confederacy, And under international
law it always has to be a civilian leader, the
civilian leader who surrenders for the entity, the political entity,
(17:06):
to be said to be really done. And of course
Jefferson Davis never surrenders. I mean, he's captured on May
tenth of eighteen sixty five, but he never surrendered. He
never publicly renounces the Confederacy. He never makes some kind
of announcement to Southern or Southern whites saying, hey, lay
down your arms were done. So this is just examples
(17:26):
of how complicated this story is. Right, he's imprisoned, So
how do you under war when the civilian leader refuses
to say that the war is over. I'll just leave
that question hanging there.
Speaker 1 (17:38):
It is fascinating. And then, of course, and those only
slightly different topic, certain Confederates are able to come back
eventually into the American government. Alexander Stevens gets re elected
to Congress, which I think other countries would find shocking.
Speaker 2 (17:51):
Yes, that is the story that then plays out, which
is a story that Lincoln was part of, even before
we get to eighteen sixty in his Reconstruction Proclamation of
eighteen sixty three he makes it fairly clear. And even
before then, I should say, the idea of getting a pardon,
a presidential pardon, is out there very early on in
(18:14):
the war. And then that will become crucial under the
Andrew Johnson administration as the way in which the elite
white leaders of the former Confederacy will be able to
become US citizens, eligible for office, etc. Etc. They get
a pardon. As you say, Alexander Stevens asked for a pardon,
(18:37):
got a pardon. Roberty Lee, that's a little bit more complicated,
but yes, he did ask for a pardon. Jefferson Davis
never did, and well, actually he did. I'm getting ahead
of myself. What happens is the full pardon doesn't come
for Lee and Jefferson Davis till they're long dead. But
as you say, Alexander Stevens, the vice president of the Confederacy,
(19:01):
is able to be re elected. But really many, many
hundreds of former Confederate officers end up in office in
the States because of the actions of mostly Andrew Johnson
as president. Some of them had gotten pardons from Congress,
but you had to get a pardon. So yes, that
is remarkable, and it's particularly remarkable because again, now we
(19:25):
go back to this notion of if the war was
about ending slavery, and it was. I believe it was.
I think it should be fairly commonplace knowledge that it was.
May not have started that way, but it becomes that way.
So by the end of the war, the war is
about ending slavery to put people back in office who
(19:46):
have stood for slavery for so long, who claimed to
be owners of slaves were treated as owners of slaves.
Alexander Stevens had said that slavery was the cornerstone of
the Confederacy, to put these peopleeople back in public office
at a time when the formerly enslaved population is in
(20:08):
the process of being enfranchised into the body politic fully
necessarily creates conflict, hypocrisy, confusion.
Speaker 1 (20:17):
Yeah, it's just fascinating, and it's one of these things
that you almost can never stop thinking about, right, In
other words, what is an enemy after the actual bullets
have stopped flying? We find this, of course, after the
surrender of the Germans, A number of lower a number
of German soldiers eventually become involved in West German politics,
(20:38):
et cetera, et cetera, et cetera, although the high command doesn't.
And it's just fascinating because one of the big themes
in your book is, you know, in some ways wars
almost never end, and this is one of the reasons.
This is one of the ways in which that's true.
Speaker 2 (20:51):
Let me speak to the really good question you're asking
for the Civil War, and then maybe in a more
general way about wars in general. There is a fundamental
problem with the Civil War, and I would say to
your point, it is a problem we find in other wars,
maybe all wars. If you have an enemy population, that
is an enemy population of not just soldiers but civilians
(21:13):
that has ascribed to certain ideological principles, and that's what
they're fighting for, that's what they believe. And then the
war ostensibly is over. You can claim the war's over,
you can make it legally over, you can put it
in the books, is over. But what do you do
with the population that held these principles. You can't simply
(21:34):
legalize those away. So what do you do? This is
a fundamental problem for the Civil War. And the answer
that the practical answer is well, you make people take
an oath of loyalty to the Union and the Constitution.
But of course, if they take such an oath, does
that really mean that they entirely give up all that
(21:56):
the Confederacy stood for? There are certain Confederates who absolutely
did give it up, who turned against it. There are
some famous examples. Elizabeth Aarron has written a wonderful book
about Longstreet. He's one of the pro maybe the most
famous examples of this. But of course, for the mass
of these Confederates, they don't just give up. Some actually
(22:18):
refuse to take the oath. But for the most of
these folks who do take the oath, they hold on.
So how do you then really fix the end of
war in a way? And so of course, that's a
story that takes American history well into the twentieth century,
because it isn't a simple fix in any means. In
the case of what you gave of the Germans after
(22:39):
World War Two, it's a fascinating story and one I
don't know very well. My colleague at Brown, Omar Bartov,
has worked on this, and I remember asking about this,
which is so, if the idea is in post war
Germany that there were Germans who supported the Nazis, and
maybe some who didn't, but of course the bulk did.
(23:02):
Now you need a post World War two German society
composed of Germans. How do you create such a society
and get people to renounce the Nazism that they supported
and actually make it convincing? Right? And that's a grand problem,
and the Germans had an answer to that. I mean, again,
(23:24):
none of these answers is good. But there is a
process by which this was done. In the United States,
the process, if there was a process, was in no
way coherent, It was in no way enforced. It should
have it absolutely must have been a process that demanded
of people adherence to emancipation and to freedom, and by
(23:48):
freedom I mean broader freedom than simply the legal end
of slavery. And I say that because Lincoln from the
beginning said that you only really get amnesty if you
swear to abide not only by the Union and the Constitution,
but all the acts passed by the Union government during
(24:09):
the Civil War. And that would include the Emancipation Proclamation.
That would include any act of emancipation passed by the states,
and there have been a few. It would include renunciation
of the black laws in places like Illinois, and it
would include the Thirteenth Amendment. And all of these things
extend beyond mere abolition of chattel slavery. So when you say, well,
(24:34):
I'm putting the Confederacy behind me, fine, but that also
means you are supposed to be adhering to the principle
of freedom, which includes black freedom. And of course that's
not what we get in the post war world in
the South and even parts of the North.
Speaker 1 (24:51):
Yes, it is absolutely amazing, but if you don't mind,
Before we end up with a more thematic conclusion to
the show, I'd like to ask two sort of eight
questions that I found fascinating, And the first is happens
in eighteen sixty five there's a debate even until now,
and even in terms of like monuments by the side
(25:11):
of the road where the actual last battle slash, skirmish,
slash whatever happened. One claims to be in Georgia and
one claims to be in Texas. Now, before I start
rolling on and telling a story, because I'm so excited,
I should let the expert tell the story. So please
enlighten our listeners about that.
Speaker 2 (25:29):
Yes, one of my favorite images in the book, and
I'm glad it made it into the book, is actually
a dual image, and it's in the inset of the
book of Color Images. And it's a dual image of
two historic plaques. And both of these plaques mark the
site of the last battle of the Civil War. And
(25:51):
yet these two plaques are about one thousand miles apart
from one another.
Speaker 1 (25:57):
That's right, and.
Speaker 2 (26:00):
In Columbus, Georgia, the other is in Well, I'm gonna
I'm gonna use the names of the places from the time.
Columbus Georgia is still Columbus Georgia. But the name Palmido Ranch,
Texas is the other location. Some called it Palmetto, I
call it Palmido. That was the more common name. It's
not a organized town by any means. Today if you
go there, there's really not much there except for the plaque.
(26:22):
So Columbus Georgia is unquestionably a real battle, and it's
in April of eighteen sixty five, sometime after Appomattox, and
there's a story behind it, because what's happening after Appomattox
And another places you have to remember this is there's
all sorts of battles and fighting going all over the place.
(26:42):
Communication is a wreck. People don't know that Leah surrendered.
And actually the armies that are in Columbus Georgia are
not under Lee's command. Columbus Georgia's right on the border
with Alabama, and it's a river town. There's a battle there.
I won't go into great detail. It's a significant battle.
There's actual engagement of organized troops, and I would say
(27:05):
arguably that's a place that deserves a plaque. Now jump ahead,
and one of the things you get in May not
quite a month later after the Battle of Columbus is
you have in Texas along the Rio Grande, near the
mouth of the Rio Grande, you have a station A
(27:26):
couple contingents of US soldiers. And then you have Brownsville,
Texas upriver from the mouth a bit which is occupied
by Confederate soldiers. That's the state of affairs in early May.
This well after the surrender many of the surrenders that
have happened. And what happens is that one of the Union,
(27:48):
the US officers near the mouth of the river, decides
to take a contingent of men and to try to
get the Confederates out of Brownsville. And along the way
there's a skirmish between you soldiers and the Confederate soldiers,
and there are fatalities and injuries. That then is claimed
to be the last battle of the Civil War. And
(28:12):
that's why if you were to go there now, you
can find a plaque that claims it to be the
last battle. The official records of the War of the Rebellion,
which in themselves are an act of creation. That is,
they're the official records, but there was a lot of
work that went into them and deciding what went in
and what didn't go in. The official story is created
(28:34):
by those official records. This is a wonderful story told
by the historian Yelle Sternell in her book called War
on Record. That recently out. But in those official records,
Palmito Ranch, the skirmish I just described is described. It
is stated, this is the last battle of the Civil War.
And so the people of Columbus, you know, who take
(28:55):
pride in that, No, no, we're the last battle. They
want to be the last battle. There's an excellent historian
who wrote a book about the Battle of Columbus who
spends a lot of time at explaining why the Battle
of Columbus is a real battle and what happened in
Palmito Ranch only counts as a skirmish, not a battle.
To me, I'm not a military historian or expert, but
(29:16):
it just cracked me up. I thought that are we
really going to get into a fight an argument over
what's a skirmish and what's a battle and how can
we possibly draw the line? But it does get at
this one of these sort of fascinating little tidbits, like
what do we really call the last battle, or, for
that matter, the last shot of the Civil War? This
(29:37):
too is fascinating. The last shot of the Civil War
arguably happens off the coast of Alaska. And if you
want me to talk more about that, I will, But
maybe that's a good way just story. Yeah, whether it
really happens there or not is I guess up for debate.
But it's such a great story, right, which is that
the Confederate ship, the Shenandoah, which was in the North
(29:59):
Pacific's mission was to do as much damage to Union
whalers as possible. The idea was this happens more you
do economic damage, you're not simply trying to kill people.
So the Shenandoah was in the Northern Pacific, way north,
we're talking about the Bearing Straits kind of north, and
they end up destroying many, many whaling vessels, that is
(30:23):
the whaling grounds for the New England whaling fleet. Who
are they're going after bowhead whales especially, And there is
during you know, the most destructive week of the Civil
War destruct So the most destructive week of the Civil
War instrictly financial terms in terms of a loss of
(30:44):
value happens in June of eighteen sixty five by the Shenandoah.
And this is now we're talking well over two months
past diplomatics, and that's because they didn't know about what
had happened back on them. There was no way that
the Shenandoah could know, and so there are shots fired
(31:05):
at a certain moment during the pursuit of one of
these ships, and so you could then say, as some
have said, that those are the last shots of the
Civil War. That's the summary of that story of the Shenandoah.
The actual story is much longer, and I'll say more interesting,
and one of my favorite stories that I get to
tell in the book.
Speaker 1 (31:24):
Well, we want to leave that for the readers because
it is It is fascinating, and the illustrations for that
are fascinating. My second date question, though, is this interesting
thing that I had never heard of, and I don't
think anyone I know really knows, or if they do,
they don't talk about it very much. It's that President Johnson,
of course, Lincoln's successor, very publicly proclaims the end of
(31:46):
the Civil War in eighteen sixty six, and tell that story.
That's also fascinating.
Speaker 2 (31:52):
Yes, this is what is in my prologue and what
was effectively the colonel that was stuck in my brain
that would eventually lead me to write this book. It
took many years before I decided to stop working on
the book I was working on and to work on
this one. When I learned that that proclamation on August twentieth,
(32:15):
eighteen sixty six, by President Andrew Johnson was the official
legal end of the Civil War. I was shocked when
I learned that that it was the actual legal end
of the war. How I learned that has to do
with time spent in the archives. A lot of Civil
War historians know about this, that that is the official end.
(32:35):
I had known about that proclamation. I didn't think anyone
took it seriously, but it is actually taken seriously. It
was taken seriously at the time as the end of
the war, and it was debated. That is. Congress pushed
back and said, no, that is not the end of
the war. So what's going on there. To jump ahead
is that by August eighteen sixty six, the US is
(32:56):
in let us call it a state of war. It
may not be in a full on war. In fact,
you can hardly say it's in the kind of condition
of war that it had been prior to appomatics. However,
it is officially in a state of war. When I
say officially, I mean Congress has basically saying we are
in a state of war. What's important there is that
(33:16):
Congress gets to use, with the president's help, the war power.
So the idea is that the president, as commander in chief,
exerts the war power. Congress has said, you have the
war power, and Congress expects the President and the president's
executive officers, which include the Secretary of War, General in
Chief Grant, a Secretary of War Stanton, they expect them
to use the power to subdue the South and to
(33:38):
be the basis of reconstruction. This then gets wrapped up
in the politics of reconstruction. And so when we get
to the point that Andrew Johnson has fully broken with
the Republicans Congress, the Republicans in Congress, Andrew Johnson wants
to say that the war's over. He wants to pull
the troops out, and he wants essentially to put the
Civil War in the past, and so he wants to
(34:00):
draw the line. He does it with first, he tries
it in April sixty six with a proclamation that says
the war's over except in Texas. No one could argue
that the war was over in Texas because there was
so much fighting going on there. And then in August
of sixty six he says the war's over everywhere, and
that is this proclamation that in the end turns out
to be the official end because Congress mistakenly somewhat later
(34:24):
mentions that proclamation and treats it as the end in
a trivial bill that they pass, and then the Supreme
Court says that they're willing to recognize that as the
end President's proclamation. And let me just say that, as
crazy as that sounds, that a president can simply proclaim
the war over, that's what got me into this book
(34:47):
because when I learned that fact was just literally weeks
after President George W. Bush in two thousand and three
in May proclaim aimed the combat operations in Iraq were over,
and he did so in front of a banner that
said Mission accomplished. This became known as the Mission Accomplished speech.
(35:11):
And it struck me that moment in two thousand and
three that that was a moment where the president was
declaring the war was over. He said, combat operations are over.
The war of occupation now is going on, but that's
a very different war. He proclaimed the war over. And
a lot of people made fun of that mission accomplished
speech and said it did nothing. But in fact, when
(35:32):
I looked in the political science literature, the international relations
scholars were treating that speech of May two thousand and
three as the official end of the US Iraqi war.
And I said, Wow, that's power that a president can
simply declare a war over. And then I saw this
proclamation by Johnson, which had been affirmed by the Supreme Court,
(35:56):
was in a number of legal records as the end
of the war, and I thought, people talk about war
powers of the president, what are the war powers of
the president? What aren't the war powers one of the
unwritten war powers of the president. Maybe it's only true
in the modern era. Maybe it's always been true. I'm
not sure, but I do believe that there is this
(36:17):
informal war power where the president can declare that a
war is over. I'm not saying it's official, I'm not
saying it's legal, but it happens, and when it happens,
it can take the force of law, or at least
history along with it.
Speaker 1 (36:32):
Right. But perhaps the big overriding theme in the whole book,
especially bracketed in the prologue and the epilogue, is you know,
there are all these problems about a number of wars
and when they end or if they ever end this.
We remember from the early seventies it seemed as if
there were four or five endings of the Vietnam War.
There were innumerable endings and non endings of the wars
(36:55):
in Iraq, Afghanistan. It seems to be a continual thing.
And that, to me, was the big theme in the book,
and this big, big, sort of intellectual question, why does
this keep happening? Why do wars keep going on in
all sorts of forms even after they're technically declared over.
Speaker 2 (37:15):
You're asking about wars generally, and that is a question
that has been on my mind from the beginning. I
was pretty young when we had, as you say, the
multiple endings of the US Vietnam War. For people of
my generation may be a little older as well. If
you say, when did the Vietnam War end, it's a
(37:37):
visual thing that comes to mind.
Speaker 1 (37:39):
Right. That's a helicopter.
Speaker 2 (37:42):
The helicopter taking off in Saigon. And by the way,
in April of twenty twenty five, this year is going
to be the fiftieth anniversary of that visual, if you will.
For me, that's the end of the Vietnam War. Well,
it isn't the end, the actual technical end has to
do with the treaty that was signed a couple of
years before that, right, so how do you mark the end?
That's one example, but of course the more immediate or
(38:03):
more recent, I should say, the more recent example has
to do with the US interventions in Iraq and Afghanistan.
And that then leads to these the term forever war
and these notions that, yeah, those are wars that don't
have endings, or they have multiple endings or do over endings,
and that is exactly correct with those interventions, and then
(38:23):
the Civil War is supposed to stand in contrast to that. Right,
that this notion of a forever war, whether it's the
Vietnam War that kept ongoing or needed do overs, or
the twenty first century US interventions, that these are somehow
really modern types of wars, where in the good old
(38:44):
days the wars were clear in time definition, they had beginnings,
they had middles, and they had endings. That's certainly what
I believed growing up, that the Civil War was had
an ending. It was one of those wars, and that
in many ways not just n ending, but a beautiful
(39:04):
ending as pictured in the textbooks. As I said, right
right where the one side simply surrenders to the other
and everyone goes home happy. And it's not a forever war,
not the civil wars, not a forever war. And I
don't want to stretch this analogy. I don't want to
make it too analogous, because they are not analogous. We
(39:25):
are dealing with a very different time in the twenty
first century. But I would say that the Civil War
is a little bit more like these forever wars at
the present than the textbooks tell us. That's maybe the
way to put it. And in these ways that we've
been talking about, certainly militarily, even more so politically in
terms of struggling to figure out how you end the war.
(39:48):
Is it by a presidential proclamation or Congress? For example?
One last point about that Congress rejects Andrew Johnson's proclamation
of August sixty six. In the end, they say, we
get to decide when the war is over. So this
is one of the issues like who who gets to
(40:10):
say when the war is over? And Congress, of course
says we get to decide, And so they define the
end of the war as the moment at which the
last of the seceded states has representation in Congress and
that doesn't happen till eighteen seventy one. Wow, So again,
how do you define the end of the war. Do
(40:33):
we go with the congressional definition, do we go with
Andrew Johnson? Do we go with the military sort? Any
of these you know, could be argued as legitimate. I'm still,
like I said at the beginning, appomatics will forever be
thought of as the end of the war, and I'm
not trying necessarily to displace that. But as you have
said many times and in many ways, your show is
(40:53):
committed to this principle. Complexity is the story here, not simplicity.
Speaker 1 (40:58):
That's right, and I can't imagine a better way to
end this episode than on that idea and that theme.
And in the complexity we find as historians, we find
so much fascination and also so much deeper meaning. So
it just remains for me to say, thank you so much,
professor for coming on the show.
Speaker 2 (41:14):
Well, thank you so much for having me. It's been
great to be a part of the conversation. I've really
enjoyed talking to you, and again, thank you for putting
on such a great podcast for historians and for people
who are just interested in history. Thank you.
Speaker 1 (41:28):
Well, we'll tell all you buzzkillers out there that, of
course the book is on the buzzkill bookshelf and they
should go get at asap because it is out now,
and we will talk to all of you next time.
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