When in the Course of Human Events

Charles Adams, the world’s leading scholar on the history of taxation, author of several books, and known as the “tax writer,” entered the field of international taxation after ten years in private legal practice and became a certified specialist in taxation law. His articles are widely published with lead stories …

Charles Adams, the world’s leading scholar on the history of taxation, author of several books, and known as the “tax writer,” entered the field of international taxation after ten years in private legal practice and became a certified specialist in taxation law. His articles are widely published with lead stories in the New York Times, Washington Post, and Wall Street Journal. He is a visiting lecturer on U.S. tax history at the national archives, George Mason University, University of Rochester, University of Toronto, and New York University.

“When in the course of human events, it becomes necessary for one people to dissolve the political bands which have connected them with one another, and to assume among the Powers of the earth, the separate and equal station to which the laws of Nature’s God entitled them, a decent respect of the opinions of mankind requires that they should declare the causes which impel them to separation.”

With those words, thirteen British colonies in North America declared independence from British rule. Eighty-five years later, adhering to principles articulated by their revolutionary forebears, the eleven Confederate States of America seceded from the United States, plunging the country into the bloodiest war of its history. Untilthe publication of this highly original book, most attempts to explain the origins of the American Civil war relied heavily on regional sympathies and mythology – that the South abandoned the Union to maintain slavery while President Lincoln’s primary goal was to preserve the nation.

Using primary documents from both foreign and domestic observers, Adams makes a powerful and convincing case that the Southern states were legitimately exercising their political rights as expressed in the Declaration of Independence.