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When in the Course of Human Events: Arguing the Case for Southern Secession. By Charles Adams. (Lanham, Md., and other cities: Rowman & Littlefield Publishers, Inc., c. 2000. Pp. xiv, 225. $24.95, ISBN 0-8476-9722-3.)
For those enamored of the Old South and states' rights, Charles Adams's book will be a joyful read, filled with memorable phrases about the perfidy and avariciousness of Yankees. For scholars with a serious interest in the Civil War era, however, the book deserves no attention-except perhaps as an example of the mental state of late-twentieth-century Confederacy worshippers.
The following are Adams's central arguments: The South had every constitutional right to secede; secession was not over slavery but over the tariff; Lincoln was a tyrant who blocked peaceful settlement around Fort Sumter and engineered war; Roger B. Taney was the great constitutional mind of American history; northerners generally and abolitionists in particular wanted to commit genocide against white southerners; Lincoln, Grant, and Sherman were war criminals; British writers clearly saw the economic roots of the war; the "Negrophobia" (a chapter title) of white southerners was justified because blacks were brutal in slave insurrections; the North was hypocritical on race issues; the Ku Klux Klan was a necessary guerrilla movement to preserve local self-government; and the Gettysburg Address was complete bunk.
It is not just the positions Adams takes on questions of the period that are so disturbing (although his inability to address slavery and racism with any tinge of concern for African Americans is profoundly unsettling), but also the wretched historical procedures he employs. Adams bombards his readers with the most superficial nonsequiturs about Roman, Greek, medieval, and European history, sprinkled in with laments about the failures of modern...