Lincoln and the Fight for Peace

In this latest book, Avlon (Washington’s Farewell) argues that Abraham Lincoln thought as much about how to achieve peace as to how to win the Civil War. Lincoln knew that binding up the nation’s wounds from a civil war required more than raw power to impose on the defeated; it especially required magnanimity to bring the defeated back willingly to the national fold. But magnanimity would only count if it came from a position of strength and clear purpose. In Avlon’s telling, Lincoln’s approach to peace rested on three “indispensable conditions” that the Confederates were required to accept, from which he never deviated: unconditional surrender, restoration of the Union, and the end of slavery forever. In his very readable, if sometimes meandering, book, Avlon does not break new interpretive ground, but he does provide many personal, policy, and political details of Lincoln’s thought and actions.