Haley and the Politics of Slavery [Updated with Video]
Why can't some of us handle the truth?
Via Politico: Haley declines to say slavery was cause of Civil War.
The former UN Ambassador and South Carolina governor, who has seen her star rise in the first-in-the-nation primary state, was appearing at a town hall event in Berlin, New Hampshire, when a voter asked her to identify the cause of the war.
“I think the cause of the Civil War was basically how government was going to run,” she responded. “The freedoms and what people could and couldn’t do. What do you think the cause of the Civil War was or argument?”
If I start by being charitable, it is true that conflicts are typically multicausal and not amenable to simple answers, at least if one is engaging in a full analysis (and, moreover, I suppose every single civil conflict is, to one degree or the other, about “how government [is] going to run”).
But let’s be clear: the American Civil War was fought, fundamentally, over the issue of slavery and it shouldn’t be hard for politicians to say that in 2023 nor should they avoid saying it because there is some substantial subsection of American voters who can’t stand to hear that simple truth. (See, also, my post from 2010, History 101: Tariffs, Secession and the General Politico-Economics of Slavery).
Allow me to share a passage from CSA Vice President Alexander Stephens, who was quite clear on this subject way back in 1861 (emphasis mine).
The new constitution has put at rest, forever, all the agitating questions relating to our peculiar institution African slavery as it exists amongst us the proper status of the negro in our form of civilization. This was the immediate cause of the late rupture and present revolution. Jefferson in his forecast, had anticipated this, as the “rock upon which the old Union would split.” He was right. What was conjecture with him, is now a realized fact. But whether he fully comprehended the great truth upon which that rock stood and stands, may be doubted. The prevailing ideas entertained by him and most of the leading statesmen at the time of the formation of the old constitution, were that the enslavement of the African was in violation of the laws of nature; that it was wrong in principle, socially, morally, and politically. It was an evil they knew not well how to deal with, but the general opinion of the men of that day was that, somehow or other in the order of Providence, the institution would be evanescent and pass away. This idea, though not incorporated in the constitution, was the prevailing idea at that time. The constitution, it is true, secured every essential guarantee to the institution while it should last, and hence no argument can be justly urged against the constitutional guarantees thus secured, because of the common sentiment of the day. Those ideas, however, were fundamentally wrong. They rested upon the assumption of the equality of races. This was an error. It was a sandy foundation, and the government built upon it fell when the “storm came and the wind blew.”
It was clear at the time what the cause of the conflict was. And, I would note, Stephens made this declaration in Savanah, Georgia, which is extremely close to the South Carolina border.
The fact that it is considered potentially problematic to simply state the obvious truth that the Civil War was fundamentally about slavery fits into my ongoing point about our inability, as a country, to fully reckon with our past.
All of this reminds me of the following posts from earlier this year:
- America’s “Family Secret” or Just Plain Denial?
- Thinking about the Past
- Still Thinking about the Past
All Haley is doing here is admitting, via her obfuscatory language, that too many of her potential voters harbor latent, if not overt, white supremacist sentiments that preclude a direct acknowledgment of the sins of slavery. And I think that that is because such admissions mean having to deal with the long-term consequences of slavery on the Black population. There is also the complicated acknowledgment that one’s ancestors really did fight to protect the rights of rich landowners to own other human beings.
Further, and I think this is a huge part of it as well, if we admit to ourselves, as a country, the deep truth of all of our history, then we really do have to re-evaluate huge swaths of the social structure, to include why inner city poverty is what it is, or why the Black Belt in Alabama is so underdeveloped. Or, beyond that, issues like mass incarceration of Black males or why public schools in Alabama and elsewhere are so deeply underfunded. Or police shootings of Black people.
It is, sadly, far too palatable for far too many to simply want to pretend like the past is just too complex to understand. Or, perhaps worse, that the past is really a simple thing and we solved all of that years ago and so current problems are because, well, those people just don’t know how to behave.
That last sentiment, by the way, is still that kind of thing I would hear at the ballfields of Montgomery, AL when I would overhear other parents talking about why Montgomery Public Schools were so bad. Or what I read in comment threads about crime in Montgomery to this day on social media (a phenomenon that I noted uptick considerably since the city elected its first Black mayor recently).
At its base, I think a lot of people are afraid that if we admit that there are problems that need to be solved then money will be needed, and therefore one’s taxes might go up (or, their behaviors in some way would have to change). Fear of having to help pay to solve problems leads many people to want to ignore that problem. I think, in simple terms at least, that is why a lot of people are climate change deniers. They don’t want to pay the costs (in taxes, prices, or behavioral changes) that might come with attempted solutions.
I mean, really, how hard is it to say that the main cause of the Civil War was slavery? And why would anyone object to that observation?
UPDATE: Here’s the video.
Update 2: An attempt to explain (and poorly so, IMHO).
Beautifully stated!
This is an example of the “if the question is awkward just play dumb” strategy that’s become common among Republicans and it is really annoying.
On a Venn diagram, the intersection of “It was about states’ rights” and “I love Donald Trump” is almost the same as the union of those two sets.
Or, equally bad, that this is her assumption about her potential voters.
What it also notable is where she made these comments. It’s not as if the question came up in the deep south. She was in figgin’ New Hampshire*–read the room and know your audience.
*-That said she might have been trying to court the Mises Caucus of the Libertarian party that has decided to go all in on racism:
One more thought–I expect some conservative commenter will fire back that this is a “gotcha” question.
My question to that commenter is this: Normally, when the topic of Civil Rights comes up, conservatives love to remind us about how it was the Republican party who freed the slaves and the Democrats who were the party of slavery. If that’s the case, why did Haley miss the opportunity to be proud of that historical fact?
If anything, this should be the ultimate softball for any Republican.
I don’t know… Hard to believe that if she had simply said “Slavery. Next question” she would be worse off than she is now. Or maybe I underestimate the size of the white-supremacist wing of the modern-day GOP.
Have you seen the Alt-Right Playbook’s I Hate Mondays vid? It makes the great point that conservatives don’t think the ills of the world can or should be fixed because they are fundamental unchangeable features of the world.
Haley understands her audience. Conservatives like Mondays as a concept because it means no matter what they do or did or will do, there will always be an immutable horribleness not their fault. She can’t point out basic facts that will lead to the conclusion that actionable efforts can make meaningful change and that the past is prologue. Admitting that Mondays suck because they are a fundamental feature of the capitalist notion of a standard work week (as opposed to older notion of regular day you need to work to live vs holiday) means admitting there’s a flaw in a fungible system. There’s Something You Can Do to make Mondays suck less and thus it’s on you that you aren’t doing your part to help. Monday is not a natural or logical outcome of life – it’s part of a system created and maintained for a reason and that reason can be challenged/changed.
Haley just pulled a weak “Well, that was a Monday” because otherwise she’d have to admit that her party is cheerfully doing everything it can to make it Monday forever.
I think you’re being too charitible to Ms. Haley.
She’s from South Carolina. The South Carolina “Declaration of Seccession”, offered in 1860, it EXPLICITLY states that the reason for their seccession is holding onto slavery, against the wishes of the Northern states.
She refused to answer the question honestly because she knows that it would inflame the majority of the GOP base. That’s it. She knows a large part of her base is racist.
Why the media continues to ignore that the majority of Republicans are racist is beyond me.
Because there are many white citizens in every state in the Union who truly believe that black citizens are inferior to the white people and would like to keep it that way.
This is my personal observation as a result of traveling the country over 35 years for work.
She is a politician from a Southern state, hoping to appeal to other Southerners. In the South that the American Civil War (War of Northern Aggression) was about states’ rights is an article of faith. As an article of faith it’s useless to point out the relationships among Lincoln’s election, his multiple pledges to abolish slavery, and the Civil War.
The Civil War was obviously about slavery. The rebels who died defending their homes were sacrifices to the wealth produced by continuing slavery.
@Dave Schuler:
Indeed. But therein lies a huge part of the problem.
She’s trying to clean up the mess she made:
http://www.rawstory.com/nikki-haley-civil-war-slavery/
@Matt Bernius:
Done and dusted. That conservative was Nikki Haley herself.
Notice also the childish use of “Democrat” instead of “Demorcratic” to assuage the juvenile insult contingent of her party.
@EddieInCA: Exactly. As I said in this post in the open thread, “Bottom line, the whole document consists of two things: explaining why South Carolina has the right to secede, and stating and restating that the reason is because they want to protect the enslavement of people. “
This is so lame.
Haley apparently hadn’t given thought to the fact that as a political candidate she needed to give the expected gameshow answer of the edumedicated. Teachers and professors have drilled and rewarded the “correct” answer and nuance will not be tolerated. Little can be said against the continuation of slavery being the cause of the secession of the Confederate states. But slavery came late to why the United States went to war with the CSA. States rights, etc. all played into the conflicts as evidenced by slavery continuing in the USA for 6 months (December 1865) after the Union army had freed slaves in the far reaches of the Confederacy (Juneteenth). And was nearly a year before the USA negotiated the end of slavery in the Native American Nations within the confines of the territorial USA.
Slavery didn’t become THE issue of the Civil War until January 1, 1863 with the issuance of the Emancipation Proclamation. That was done for domestic and foreign political reasons as well as to dispose of liability of maintaining captured CSA slaves as enemy contraband. It shutdown any idea of a negotiated peace. It made France and Great Britain overtly face that their aid to the CSA was aiding the continuation of slavery. It allowed the captured slave enemy contraband to be emancipated, thus no longer a logistic problem for the Union Army and opened up the males for recruitment into the Union Army.
But for a politician on a stage, before a college edumedicated audience, the gameshow answer is “What is slavery, Alex”
@JKB:
And… the secession of those States led to what? Please remind us…
I think it’s a bold move to take the “AIDs and COVID rarely killed people on their own, it was pneumonia or other conditions, so why are people chalking those deaths up to those initial diseases?!” reasoning and then apply it to the Civil War.
But it’s all historians and those commie teachers who are twisting themselves into knots.
Then again, I can’t ever forget your constant reminders that Communism and Socialism are still worse than chattel slavery and really chattel slaves didn’t have it so bad. Oh, and have we talked about the tens and tens of white slaves? Or the tens and tens of Black slave owners. I mean, why do people bring race into this to begin with!?!
@JKB: You know, what you are saying now is pretty much what I would have said about the Civil War and its origins, right up to the point, about 15 years ago, that I read the SC Declaration of Secession.
The right that was threatened that prompted them to secede was the right to hold and trade slaves.
It wasn’t anything else. Not even the tariff, which they also didn’t like, was mentioned. And they said it themselves. You can’t run a country based on voting when some of the parties are allowed to decide that they didn’t like the outcome of a vote, and so they are leaving and forming another country. In this case, one that will continue to hold slaves.
So, it is also true that politically, abolition was not a super popular position in the US in 1860. Lincoln did not propose it. The pushback was mostly over free states not wanting to be forced to hand over escaped slaves.
Confederate soldiers often referred to the war they were in as “rich man’s war, poor man’s fight”. They knew what they were fighting to preserve, as well.
@Paine: She was concerned about the exact scenario that came back to bite her in the bottom from the other direction: a viral video.
@JKB: LOL. Someone hasn’t read the SC Declaration of Secession.
Categorically incorrect.
@Mister Bluster: Be honest Nikk, does running against Donald Trump not make sense, even at this early stage? Aren’t you running against Donald Trump, too?
The village idiot shows up and defecates in the middle of the sidewalk again.
I think that this is called boilerplate: i.e. under this Constitution the right of property in negro slaves can not be made illegal.
This was well before the Emancipation Proclamation.
Slavery was THE issue of the United States Civil War from March of 1861.
@JKB: Since nobody else has done the documentation so far, allow me to add, from the #6 comment (by MarkedMan) in today’s Open Forum:
You need to rethink your position that: “Slavery didn’t become THE issue of the Civil War until January 1, 1863…” You are clearly wrong, by 11 years, in fact. Even before Lincoln ran for President, slavery was already “THE issue.” Only the other slaveholding states not wanting to leave the union stopped SC from exiting a decade before.*
*It may have been a mistake for SC not to leave then. It’s possible that Fillmore wouldn’t have called up an army to stop one state from leaving the union and others could have broken away piece by piece.
@MarkedMan:
Because only a Democrat would have the temerity to ask a history 101 question to a Republican politician running for president.
@Jay L Gischer:
Here’s the thing: if you read what @JKB wrote, he knows that is the case… see:
He then twists himself into knots to say that this wasn’t what caused the war. I read him saying that the cause of the war was Lincoln’s decision to preserve the union and not honor the secessions.
Again, it’s not unlike saying that AIDs never killed anyone. It is pedantically correct but completely misses the point so much that it’s ultimately wrong from a practical perspective (and counter to the vast majority of thought on the topic).
@JKB: so is this a “prove you didn’t read the post and especially ignored the Stephen’s quote” comment?
@Matt Bernius: And it raises the question of why he and his fellow travelers insist on such pretzel logic.
Btw, it is super weird that so many alleged libertarian types seem not to be more virulently anti-slavery nor acknowledge how, rather obviously, the whole-sale denial of liberty to a class of persons can have generational effects.
Better to downplay it and worry about possibly being taxed to address those effects. That’s the real enslavement!
@Matt Bernius: Well, I did address that. You can’t have a country where you vote on things if some people can just leave in response to losing a vote. It won’t work. It’s like saying that the election was fair, as long as you’re the one who won. But if the other guy won, there must have been cheating.
And that’s the principle that most of the Union soldiers thought they were fighting for. To preserve the Union, as they put it.
@Steven L. Taylor:
When a lot of libertarians say that the government is too big, what they mean is that the government is big enough to deter them from using violence to make other people do what they want.
Really pathetic. Just shows Nikki Haley is not a serious leader. She knows better, and she’s just being cynical and weak.
The Republican Party is lacking serious, strong leadership. No one who is too weak to lead conservatives in the right direction on an question as simple as “What were the major causes of the Civil War?” can save the Republican Party from Trumpism. Or successfully lead the country.
@JKB:
Man, we live in a country where you can get your hands on literally any drug or research chemical you want, and you insist on huffing homemade Pledge.
While there were plenty of issues at the time, slavery was the salient issue that drove most of the sectional conflict in the years leading up to the war. It was the sine qua non as regards motives.
Arguing slavery had nothing to do with secession, or that it was a minor issue, is as ridiculous as saying 9/11 bore little or no weight in America’s decision to go to war in Afghanistan.
@Joe:
Caring about the facts of what actually happened is a Libtard tell.
@DK:
The last part there had occurred to me, but the first had not. Thanks for pointing it out; it’s important.
@Matt Bernius:
Surely that can’t be the Ludwig von Mises that our very own JKB is enamored with?
@Joe:
Because only a Democrat would care about Republican politicians inviting White Nationalists into the GOP tent.
@Steven L. Taylor: Libertarians value property rights above all, rather than individual freedom. They’re opposed to zoning laws, minimum wage, or anything that prevents the individual from maximizing the use of their wealth because of the effects on others.
Being pro-slavery just makes sense.
ETA: They are also in favor of lowering the age Americans are free to work at, legalizing prostitution, and lowering the age of consent. Whatever else you want to say, you have to admit that it’s a consistent philosophy.
Remember when Republicans mocked Bill Clinton for …
Well, this is where Nikki and many other Republicans are when it comes to ‘slavery,’ and many other issues in the current culture war. They know that well-over half the people don’t like this transparent obfuscation but they also figure that, like Trump, we’ll move on and forget that they’re so obvious in their disingenuous lying.
Pretty obvious that Nikki is betting that if Trump is somehow getting fitted for an orange jumpsuit, that Republican voters will draft her.
@Steven L. Taylor: Wait a minute…
Libertarianism is about your liberty? I thought Libertarianism was only about my liberty.
@Gustopher:
This is a good point. People need to keep reminding themselves of it.
@Matt Bernius: She was in figgin’ New Hampshire*–read the room and know your audience.
The New Hampshire GOP is quite MAGA as well. While the educational system in the northern states haven’t banned teaching that the Civil War had origins in slavery, I don’t think MAGA were in school that day. So it’s say she was reading the people in room perfectly well, but not the region.
The NH GOP are pushing for a post 15-day abortion ban in the state government. One world guess they’re not too good at reading the room either…
@Argon:
The GOP everywhere is fully MAGA at this point. The various states and districts differ in what percent of the overall population that is, but not in who inhabits the GOP basket.
@Gustopher: there’s also a bunch of “pro-life” libertarians, which really causes me to scratch my head….
(Of course one of their eminence grises thought that married women in the 19th century would be perfectly protected against spousal abuse because they could always negotiate a contract…and couldn’t understand that this was no help at all because there was no law court in the U.S. which would take such a case)
“States’ rights” always sounded oxymoronic to me. States don’t have rights. Only natural human beings have rights. States are instrumentalities devised to secure our natural rights in the inspirational words of the Declaration of Independence. States are arbitrary conventions. The division between Iowa and Minnesota is something created by people. Ownership of human beings is clearly not a right. States’ rights is a slogan intended to justify the unjustifiable.
@JKB:
My idea is that, from the point of view of the Southern states (at least during the war), slavery was indeed the issue; but, from the point the view of the North (who include slave states like Kentucky and Maryland), the issue was the preservation of the union, not the slavery
@Slugger: Yes, many times I have said that states don’t have rights, they have powers. But it seems most can’t read the simple English of the 10th Amendment.
@Grumpy realist:
The child is the property of the man. How dare a woman try to destroy his property?
There’s also a “how dare a woman try to chain a man down with child support?” element that needs to be balanced, but on the whole it’s a very consistent philosophy.
Spend some time perusing the Manosphere of Men’s Rights Activists, and you will find many ideas for balancing the “a woman can’t abort a man’s child” and “a man shouldn’t have to pay for a woman’s kid” dilemma. And a lot of Libertarians.
If you have trouble understanding Libertarianism, that just speaks to your good nature, as it’s an appalling philosophy and a lot of people can’t bring themselves to believe that anyone would think that way.
I think it was John Cole over at Balloon Juice who opined that a liberal sees a starving child and wants to create a large government beauracracy to ensure every child has a sandwich, a social conservative wants to give the kid a Bible and a sandwich, and a libertarian wants to put up a privacy fence so he doesn’t have to see starving children.
I have a lot more in common with the social conservative than the libertarian: a belief that we are part of a society and that we have a responsibility to that society. We differ on priorities and solutions, and in some cases even identifying specific problems, but there’s some common ground.
——
There are a lot of people who think they are small-l libertarians, and I think they need another name. Freedom Enthusiasts, perhaps, who actually want to maximize individual freedom against both government and corporate/wealthy-folk interference.
@Gustopher:
Sure is. The Ludwig von Mises Institute for Austrian Economics.
You have to love the fact that von Mises’ academic career in the US was entirely funded by patronage — NYU didn’t pay him, but a libertarian board member did. I was personally much more familiar with the writings of von Mises’ brother, Richard, who was the leading voice of the then-dominant but now fading frequentist school of probability theorists.
@Miguel Madeira:
This is fair, but it still demonstrates how ultimately slavery was still the key cause.
To put it a different way:
Basic understanding: Slavery
More developed understanding: there were a number of causes and dynamics at play.
Advanced understanding: (almost all of the significant causes and dynamics at play tie back to) Slavery
The Cornerstone Speech, delivered by the VP of the Confederacy multiple weeks before the Civil War fired off, used the word “cornerstone” to describe the “great truth” of white supremacy and black subordination upon which secession and the Confederacy were based.
Southern Republicans remain the single most coddled losers in the history of the world. Each and every statue of a “Southern Civil War Leader” is nothing but a participation trophy. As JKB has demonstrated, for 160 years they have not been able to handle the basic facts about the war they started, and constantly need safe spaces to protect their sensitive feelings.
@Gustopher: Where I live, the conservatives at large don’t care whether the kid gets a sandwich or not, but the evangelicals (still have enough knowledge of the Bible to) know that giving the kid a Bible, but no sandwich is a bad look. So…
@Gavin:
I think it’s probably more accurate to say the majority of White Southern voters here. The party has shifted over the years, but the results are largely the same
@mattbernius: And even after the war, blacks were promised emancipation, citizenship, and the franchise but got sharecropping, Jim Crow, and poll taxes and literacy tests. The legacy lives on.
@Paine:
Or maybe I underestimate the size of the white-supremacist wing of the modern-day GOP.
Indeed, you do. There’s no White supremacist “wing;” the entire GOP is a White supremacist party.
I always find it amusing how Haley’s finally removing the Stars & Bars from the State House is used to point out her ‘moderation’.