by Nikki Haley came under fire this week for what she didn’t say. While she was campaigning in New Hampshire for the Republican presidential nomination, a person asked her to name the cause of the Civil War.
Haley, the former governor of South Carolina, joked that it was not an “easy question.” She then mentioned “how the government was going to work,” “liberties,” the need for “capitalism,” and individual liberties. When the interlocutor observed that she had not mentioned slavery, he asked, “What do you want me to say about slavery?”
The next morning, he told a radio interviewer that “of course” the war had to do with slavery, that he was not evading the issue but trying to reframe it in modern terms. While we shouldn’t read too much into a video clip, it’s fair to ask: How is the cause of the Civil War not an easy question?
The facts of our history are currently contested, especially that history. Gov. Ron DeSantis of Florida has taken steps to restrict what he considers woke views on slavery and race in schools. Other Republican-led states have taken similar steps, and Donald Trump has offered his own confusing views on the past. No wonder Mrs. Haley spoke cautiously. The history of race has become such a fraught topic on both the political right and the left.
All of this points to a reality we would do well to face: Some Americans do not believe slavery caused the Civil War. I came across some of them while discussing a recent book about Abraham Lincoln.
A few days ago, a C-SPAN caller identified as “William in Lansford, Pennsylvania,” told me: “The Civil War was not about slavery. “It was about states fighting each other over money.”
It was by no means the first time he had heard such statements. It’s not hard to see why a candidate might avoid engaging too much with voters on this issue.
But the rest of us can arm ourselves with some basic facts. Much more than most historical events, the Civil War is the subject of debate among ordinary people and historians alike. (Lincoln called it “a people’s war,” and now it is a people’s story. I recently attended the annual Lincoln Forum in Gettysburg, Pennsylvania, where academics shared the room with hundreds of superfans.) If we are going to hold on to our history, we can prepare ourselves to respond calmly and factually when someone makes a dubious claim. The evidence shows what the war was about. It also shows why some people think it wasn’t slavery and why it matters a century and a half later.
The evidence is simple. Southern states rejected Lincoln’s election in 1860 as president of the antislavery Republican Party. South Carolina was the first of 11 states to attempt to leave the Union, and the Confederates fired the first shot of the Civil War there, at Fort Sumter in Charleston Harbor.
The leaders of the would-be new republic named slavery as their cause. Alexander H. Stephens, vice president of the Confederacy, gave a speech in 1861 in which he said that “the assumption of the equality of races” was “a mistake” and “a sandy foundation” for the country he intended to abandon.
More than 30 years of agitation over slavery preceded the war. Northern antislavery leaders increasingly denounced the Southern institution and eventually organized through the new Republican Party to gain political power. Southern leaders, who once viewed slavery as a tragic legacy of colonial times, increasingly defended it as moral and good.
After the South’s defeat in 1865, these clear facts were obscured. Former Confederates portrayed their war heroes, such as Robert E. Lee, as defenders of their home states rather than defenders of slavery.
The United Daughters of the Confederacy campaigned for generations to downplay slavery’s role in the war. In a 1924 speech at the group’s annual convention, Hollins N. Randolph asserted that “Southern men” had “fought to the death” for “the freedom of the individual, for the home, and for the great principle of local self-government.” ”. Never mind that it was “the freedom of the individual” to possess other human beings. The speech advocated raising funds for a large Confederate monument that still exists in Stone Mountain, Georgia.
Beyond the grandiloquence, historians questioned many facets of the long road to war. To give just one example from the immense academic record: T. Harry Williams, a 20th century writer, blamed the war in part on Northern capitalists. He said they anticipated “great rewards” by removing pro-slavery aristocrats from power and reshaping the economy to the benefit of their own factories and railroads. But in reality, such arguments amount to different interpretations of how the United States came to wage a war over slavery.
Today, some people quote Lincoln, accurately, as saying that his primary war goal was to preserve the Union, not end slavery. But these quotes can’t sustain any argument longer than a social media meme. Lincoln also said that slavery was “the cause of the war.” Preserving the Union ultimately required the destruction of slavery.
It seems that people question the historical record less because of doubts about the past than because of conflicts in the present. Some conservatives feel that progressives use slavery as a cudgel against their side in modern debates about race and equality.
The first Republican president saw slavery neither as a cudgel nor as something to be hidden. In an 1864 letter, he described slavery as a “great error” and added that both Northern and Southern people shared “complicity in that error.”
Complicity. Lincoln asserted his country’s responsibility for failing to fulfill his promise of equality. He still believed in the country and the promise of it.
Lincoln never claimed to be morally superior to his countrymen. He focused on an immoral system, which he worked to restrict and then destroy. The end of slavery is now part of this country’s legacy. It’s also part of the legacy of Lincoln’s party, although Haley’s example shows that it can be difficult for Republican candidates to talk about.
Steve Inskeep, co-host of NPR’s “Morning Edition” and “Up First,” is the author of “Differ We Must: How Lincoln Succeeded in a Divided America.”
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