Title: The Last Secession
Review: I started "1865" expecting a bullet-by-bullet account of key battles along with the life stories of all the usual generals. It is anything but a military account. Winik reminds us that prior to the Southern Secession, some New England states had threatened to leave the Union over the War of 1812. And armed rebellion was nothing new either, when you consider that, as Winik points out, frontier farmers had fielded a small army to fight against Hamilton's whiskey tax. More startling was reading about Jefferson Davis's General Order Number 14, emancipating slaves who enlisted for the Confederacy. (Of course, civil rights in a future independent Confederate nation was another matter.) Winik makes the case that the South was really fighting for its independence, not slavery, and that whether the Union existed in perpetuity was, until this last secession, a question that had not been completely resolved...."April 1865" is a brilliant distillation, but still ...
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