Adams also quotes many recent publications and studies.
Two observations of the person who posted this - (1)he has not read the book; why comment of the book you have not read? The guy has already decided he disagrees with the work. (2) He does not understand the importance of studying editorials of that period (ie. public opinion).
C'mon Walt, you're posting opinions about a book this person has not even read.
Anyone can see you are pushing disinformation.
Here's the heart of the criticism of the ACW newsgroup:
". . .The New York Merchants and the Irrepressible Conflict. If money makes the world go around and is the heart of war and the blood of governments, then the Foner book explains more about the Civil War than any other study."
I don't have that book by Foner, but I do have his History of the Labor Movement in the United States, vol. 1:
"Late in February, 1861, shortly before Lincoln's inauguration as President of the United States, a convention of slave owners set up a provisional government. . .Knowing that their movement to destroy the Union was unpopular among the majority of the southern white population, the secessionists refused to put the question even before a restricted southern electorate. "We live under an oligarchy," said the Mississippi Natchez Courier of February, 1861, "that has not yet dared to trust the people as to a say to its consent.' While the slave oligarchy was engineering secession and preparing for war, President Buchanan did nothing but pray that all would be well in the end, and northern businessmen, worried over tumbling markets and repudiated debts, were urging Congress to grant the slave holders any concession that would bring them back into the Union." p. 297
Two point contradict Adams:
1. It was a slave oligarchy that took that South to war, not some tax revolt.
2. The Northern businessmen were for appeasement not war."
[end]
Now, unless Foner found two diametrically opposed interpretations for two different books, then Adams is misrepresenting him.
But the record is very clear that what Foner said in the one book is the truth -- it -was- the slave oligarchy that caused the war, and northern merchants -were- for appeasement.
Adams cannot be correct on this one point, and the fact that he was so far off base, in the eyes of this reviewer, discredit anything else he might be selling.
Adams' book (which I have a copy somewhere) is just another neo-reb attempt to skew the perception of these events by an appeal to half-truths, partial quotes and flat lies -- the exact thing we see on FR every day.
Walt