Working from the premise that "wars have seldom been justified," Adams argues that not only was the Civil War avoidable, but it was a humanitarian disaster that nearly destroyed American democracy. This paperback edition features a new Afterword by the author.

Using primary documents from both foreign and domestic observers, prominent scholar Charles Adams makes a powerful and convincing case that the Southern states were legitimately exercising their political rights as expressed in the Declaration of Independence when they seceded from the United States. Although conventional histories have taught generations of Americans that this was a war fought for lofty moral principles, Adams' eloquent history transcends simple Southern partisanship to show how the American Civil War was primarily a battle over competing commercial interests, opposing interpretations of constitutional rights, and what English novelist Charles Dickens described as "a fiscal quarrel."