Bests & Worsts Reviews from Amazon

I had great hopes for this book. The reviews here were strong and Amazon's own prediction system said I would enjoy it. I expected a substantive and fresh examination of secession from a libertarian perspective. Boy was I wrong. I wish I could sell the book or give it back. Regrettably, I have covered every page of my copy with marginal notes listing the author's errors, misinterpretations, distortions, and selective quotations. To be brief, Adams has not done his homework. Take secession. There is no evidence in Adams's book that he has studied the records of the secession conventions in any Southern state. There is no evidence he has read their debates, looked at their votes, or studied the biographies of secessionist leaders. He seems to know nothing of the politics of the 1850s, and especially the rich factionalism of Northern politics before and during the war. He mentions Steven A. Douglas only once, only to mischaracterize Douglas's doctrine of popular sovereignty while ignoring Southern hostility to territorial self-determination. Nor does he say anything about the South's hostility to Northern state rights in the form of personal liberty laws. Adams acknowledges that every secession document focused on slavery, but dismisses this by saying that this was just a political trick by Southern leaders (p. 4), this because the tariff issue never played well. Despite their carefully-articulated statements about why Lincoln's mere election was a danger to slavery through the President's appointment and judicial powers he denies throughout the book that this was a real threat. He offers no discussion of Louisiana, Virginia, Kentucky, Tennessee, and Maryland, Southern states where pro-tariff political leaders dominated or were at least a strong minority. His failure to mention the Washington Peace Convention is an especially troubling analytical gap. Adams's charges against Lincoln are shopworn and poorly argued. The author frequently claims to know what Lincoln was thinking (through psychic powers perhaps?). On page 44 he has Lincoln as absolute dictator, jailing every opponent and silencing every critic, but then asserts on page 52 that almost every legal mind in the North published criticisms of his suspension of habeus corpus. Worse, Adams deliberately ignores the Pulitzer-prize winning work of Mark Neely on the Lincoln Administration and Civil Rights which shows how most anti-Lincoln charges were exaggerated for political purposes. Adams also turns a blind eye to the press-smashings, mail riots, jailings and lynchings of abolitionists that made the antebellum South so hostile to free speech. It is worth noting that every charge he makes against Lincoln was made by Republicans against the South in the 1850s. Chapter Four, which contains the crux of his argument that the war was fought to defend Northern business interests, is derived almost entirely from the 1940s work of Marxist historian Philip Foner. Given Adams's libertarian politics this seems like no small irony. Adams's notion of a "war of the tariffs" is the book's most interesting claim. Unfortunately, the evidence he presents is thin and one-sided. Where is his discussion of the North's anti-tariff War Democrats, for example? The book's weakest section is the chapter on the Ku Klux Klan. Adams refuses to acknowledge that Blacks were Southerners. He completely ignores every event between 1865 and 1867, when ex-Confederates ran the South without opposition and with no regard for even minimal civil rights. His Blacks are ignorant, mindless, stereotypes, duped by crafty carpetbaggers. He seems unaware of the educated black leaders who called for a program of economic development almost identical to the one Adams himself seems to espouse. Not surprisingly, his source for the chapter is Claude Bowers' dreadful book The Tragic Era, published in the 1920s. I am surprised that his publisher let this awful chapter get to press. Its racial bigotry, chronological sloppiness, and ignorance of history are breathtaking. This is a poorly-researched volume whose thin veneer of scholarship hides how little Adams really knows about tariff politics, the Republican party, secession, the war, and reconstruction...