The Secessionists then laid down their arms and went home to their farms to rebuild their lives. Just as the assassination of Abraham Lincoln radically changed the president's compassionate plan for dealing with the defeated South, so did other events affect the direction America took in April 1865. The actions of a handful of courageous leaders, Winik says, forged a nation. As a former adviser to Defense Secretary Les Aspin and staff member with the Senate Foreign Relations Committee, he was a witness to civil wars in Cambodia, Yugoslavia, Nicaragua and El Salvador. So there are international lessons to be drawn from this extensively researched and colorful book.
Most civil wars end badly.
America's was different. Our Civil War was unique because, despite the bitterness and hatred that remained in the South, the country nonetheless emerged more united than it had ever been. America entered the war still an embryonic country. The idea that that states' rights outranked the rights of the union was so prevalent that secession was not such a radical idea. In the years before the South seceded, New York once wanted to secede.