Modern spacecraft missions place stringent performance requirements on the reliability and stability of spacecraft attitude control system. However, during long-term in-orbit mission, actuators may suffer faults. In this paper, we proposed an adaptive fault tolerant control law for attitude control under actuator failures and external disturbances. Firstly, the attitude dynamic model under actuator faults and attitude kinematics are described. Then, in order to solve the attitude control problem under actuator faults and external disturbances, an adaptive backstepping sliding mode fault tolerant control scheme is designed. According to Lyapunov theory, the closed-loop system is proved to be globally asymptotically stable. Finally, the numerical simulation results demonstrate that the proposed adaptive controller can achieve anticipative attitude control performance, fault information estimation and well fault-tolerant capability.