Sometime last week at a political town hall in Iowa, someone in the audience asked Republican presidential hopeful Nikki Haley how the Civil War got started. Haley was caught off balance, kind of giggled nervously, and remarked “Sure, ask me an easy question,” as if to say the question was, for some reason, difficult. Well, for her it is, because she’s a former governor of South Carolina, one of the Confederate states that quit the federal union, an act that was the final spark to ignite the war. Why that’s a problem is that most die-hard Republicans, especially Trump MAGA Republicans, hail from states in the American south, and a lot of these folks have some pretty bitter memories, even after all this time, of how the Civil War came about and the ensuing Confederate defeat.
What Haley couldn’t do is tell the truth, because that wouldn’t sell with the MAGA Republicans, people she’s going to need when she really runs for president in 2028. She needs the Trump folks on her side, a major reason why she and Ron DeSantis refuse to criticize Donald Trump in the Republican presidential primaries. So, she paused, then said what any self-respecting Southerner would want to hear. “State’s rights,” she said. Because that’s what southern revisionist history scholars all say, that it wasn’t about slavery, it was about a state’s right to choose to be in the Union or not. In short, an absolutely dishonest response.
We get that a lot out of Republicans these days, and apparently she’s no different.
Here’s the scoop on the origins of the U.S. Civil War, or at least the second one, since the American Revolution was also a civil war in it’s own right, with patriots and loyalists fighting against one another, often-times breaking apart families in the process. But we’re talking about the one in the early 1860’s here, the second one. The one Haley either knows nothing about or is willing to fudge on.
At the conclusion of the American Revolution, the new nation had to wrestle with the problem of what was to be done about slavery in the United States. Political discussion took place back and forth, but with many of the founding fathers, and George Washington himself being slave owners, it was a pretty awkward discussion. At the end of it all, it was more or less decided to just leave things be. There’s some political courage for you.
As time went by and over the next eighty years or so, this was the way the nation grew. The northern states, emerging as industrial states, didn’t really have the need for slave labour and so abolitionists began to come to the fore, people who promoted the abolition of slavery. In the agricultural south, the cotton crop in particular was built on the foundation of slavery, and this continued without obstruction for those eighty something years. Over that time, the relative political weight of the north versus the south was more or less the same, with roughly the number of slave states equal to the number of non-slave states.
But America began to grow and move westward. New territories presented themselves as a result of American expansion and American victory over Mexico in the Mexico-American War added several new territories to the national mix. Importantly, however, territories are not states.
The thing is, though, is that territories almost always become states and join the Union. Which brought up a pretty serious question. If these territories were admitted to the Union as fully-fledged states, would slavery be allowed in them? The North said no and the South said yes, and this was important because new states mean new members of Congress and new electoral college votes that are used to select presidents. The south feared that admitting states without allowing slavery would create a political power imbalance vis a vis the north, an imbalance that the north would someday use to make a move to abolish slavery in the Union as a whole.
The 1861 election of Republican Abraham Lincoln (this was back when Republicans had moral integrity) was the last straw for the south as Lincoln was viewed as an out and out abolitionist. The South rebelled at the prospect and, one by one, Southern states began to secede from the Union to form their own “nation,” the CSA or Confederate States of America. The north generally, and Lincoln in particular, could not countenance the breakup of the Union, and after many threats and failed negotiations, the north assembled what was left of the American army and marched on the southern “capital” of Richmond. Their pretext was that the south had bombarded Fort Sumter, an American fort near Charleston, South Carolina. It was a total disaster, leading to the first Battle of Bull Run, where the south, featuring many former Union officers now fighting for the south, sent the federal troops (blue coats, Yankees, Union) scampering back to Washington in full retreat.
From that point it was on.
Haley couldn’t mention this because, to southern ears, any mention of the issue of slavery is an attack on them and not something they want to hear. So they prefer to say that it was a struggle over state’s rights, meaning whether or not a state has the right to quit the union. They prefer to leave any discussion of slavery out of it.
I want to make an important point about Abraham Lincoln, who has been called the Great Emancipator, and is viewed as a national hero for his role in freeing the slaves. It’s important to know that he did this not exclusively as a moral decision, but rather as a political and strategic decision. The north was having a terrible time on the battlefield against the south, and in late 1862 there was some fear that the north could actually lose the war. Freeing the slaves that were held in rebel states is an easy thing to do when you don’t have any in your own jurisdiction, so there’s that. Secondly, freeing the slaves in the south creates a major problem for the south, especially if slaves make the determination that it might be better if they escaped their southern masters and fled north. Not that the north necessarily wanted them mind you, it was more a chance to cause the south, and their agricultural economy, serious harm in a time of war.
Lincoln himself was no real champion of the slaves one way or another. He wasn’t racist and was guided by his religious beliefs and the opinion of northern scholars who he listened to from time to time. But he was no real lover of the African-American population of the time, he just felt in his heart and soul that slavery was wrong. He, himself, was working on a plan that would return the slaves en masse back to Africa, or the Caribbean, so that kind of says something about the thinking and attitude of this American “hero.” This was a policy idea formed when fears of a massive black movement to northern cities became a possibility after emancipation.
The north fought to keep the union together, and emancipation of the slaves was a strategic move to weaken the south in a time of war.
But the original origins of the war, going back to the prospect of new territories becoming states, had slavery at its core.
NEWSMAGRENFREW 