Why the South was right, the North wrong

The victors write history books, and the dominant accounts of the Civil War [sic] reflect the victorious perspective: misguided Southerners sought to destroy democratic governance and preserve slavery. Led by the heroic Abraham Lincoln, Northerners responded by saving the Union and emancipating the slaves. And for leading his moral crusade, Lincoln is America’s greatest president, martyred in his hour of triumph. Charles Adams, best known for his books on taxation, takes aim at this history. His analysis of what more accurately would be called the War of Northern Aggression is a bit different: With the passing of time, all wars seem pointless. The American Civil War [sic] certainly looks that way at this time in history. Heroes begin to look like fools. The glorious dead, the young soldiers who suffered and died, need to be pitied, and the leaders who led them to early graves need to be lynched. In that war, as in so many wars, the wrong people died. When in the Course of Human Eventsoffers a sustained challenge to much of the conventional wisdom about the conflict. Indeed, the book’s title is a bit misleading. Adams doesn’t so much develop a comprehensive argument for secession as puncture the worst hypocrisies surrounding the North’s decision to initiate war. Observes Adams: “Lincoln’s concern that government ‘of the people’ would perish from the earth if the North lost may have been the biggest absurdity of all.” Particularly valuable is Adams’s critique of Lincoln. The victors’ history books tend to glide by Lincoln’s constitutional usurpations and violations. Adams does not. Even those familiar with the 16th president’s unconstitutional militia call, suspension of habeas corpus, and other lawless acts may not know that Lincoln ordered the arrest of U.S. Chief Justice Roger B. Taney for ruling that Lincoln’s suspension of habeas corpus without congressional approval violated the law. Only the failure of a U.S. marshal to carry out the order “saved the president from what would have been his worst crime against the constitutional scheme of government,” the author writes.