The Civil War on the campaign trail
Remarks by Nikki Haley and Donald Trump reveal something about our culture.
In recent days, the presidential campaign focused on the Civil War. This was not totally unexpected; pundits have talked up parallels to the Civil War, and politicians such as Marjorie Taylor-Greene have talked up a “national divorce.” Still it was striking when two presidential candidates weighed in on the events of the 1860’s.
Nikki Haley was criticized when someone in New Hampshire asked her to name the cause of the Civil War, and her response didn’t include slavery. I wrote about this for the New York Times:
How is the Civil War’s cause not an easy question? The facts of our history are currently contested — especially that history. Gov. Ron DeSantis of Florida has acted to restrict what he sees as woke views of slavery and race in schools. Other Republican-led states have taken similar measures, and Donald Trump has offered his own hazy views of the past. It’s no wonder Ms. Haley spoke cautiously. The history of race has become as fraught a topic on the political right as it has been on the left.
Haley’s answer also reflected something in the broader electorate, which has become more apparent to me as I have talked about my book Differ We Must.
Despite clear evidence (Confederates explicitly said in their declarations of secession that they were breaking up the Union over slavery), some Americans do not believe slavery was the cause of the Civil War. Generations of propaganda have persuaded many people otherwise.
Donald Trump weighed in a few days after Haley. He said slavery was the obvious cause of the war, and added that Haley’s answer consisted of “about three paragraphs of bullshit.”
It’s on brand for Trump to say such a thing. Haley’s remarks had been widely panned; Trump picked up and repeated the criticism. He pulls various sayings and ideas out of the culture, and uses them. His contribution is the word choices.
Trump went on to make his own doubtful assertion, that the war could have been "negotiated."
This, too, is on brand! It’s common for Trump to claim he could make a deal about anything.
It’s not a checkable statement. It's a counterfactual. The available evidence tends to cast doubt. Lawmakers did try to negotiate away the Civil War. One chapter of Differ We Must tells the story of Duff Green, a proslavery propagandist, who was an old friend of Lincoln’s and tried to persuade the newly elected president in late 1860 to go along with a compromise. All Lincoln would have to do, Green said, was enshrine slavery in the Constitution forever. Also a few other things. Lincoln ultimately didn’t go along, and it’s not clear that even that would have persuaded some Southern leaders.
But Trump’s claim, like Haley’s, reflects something in our culture. Some people believe the Civil War could have been negotiated away. John Kelly, Trump’s chief of staff, once said it. The historian Shelby Foote did too. In the past, it was not even controversial to say there should have been some way to avoid America's deadliest war.
It comes down to a question of values. Surely, people should avoid war whenever possible. But if we could see a parallel universe where America avoided war, but kept slavery as a result, what would we say? We could wish for some additional parallel universe where slavery ended peacefully, but that didn’t seem possible given the people who were alive at the time and the way they calculated their interests.
At the moment of secession—1860-61—eleven states declared they were leaving the Union to protect their interest in slavery. Mississippi secessionists called it “the greatest material interest of the world.”
Lincoln perceived his choices as straightforward. He could run the risk of war by insisting that Southern states had no right to leave, over slavery or anything else.
Or he could allow the South to depart, seizing federal forts and arsenals within their states and establishing a new international border.
Lincoln concluded that his job was to "run the machine as it is," meaning he would maintain federal authority. He was not authorized to split up the country, even if he wanted.
Insistence on the rule of law required tremendous strength on Lincoln’s part, including the enforcement of laws he didn’t like. He said he even would uphold laws supporting slavery, which he had no power to change!
That governed his approach to the secession crisis. He declined to surrender the few federal forts in the South that remained in the government’s possession. And the South finally started the war by opening fire on the most important one, Fort Sumter. Eventually the war, and an act of Congress, gave him the legal authority to issue the Emancipation Proclamation.
Democracy requires compromise and negotiation. Lincoln believed the republic also required the rule of law—that chaos and self-destruction would follow.
Ultimately this meant he would not negotiate with those who defied the law, and refused to return to compliance.
That particular aspect of the Civil War has yet to come up in the presidential campaign, in which a leading candidate has spoken of “the termination of all rules, regulations, and articles, even those found in the Constitution” in order to achieve his goals.
This attitude, too, is drawn out of the culture! A common American narrative—call it the Dirty Harry approach, the True Grit approach, or even the Batman approach—features the antihero who breaks the rules in order to achieve whatever he defines as the greater good. But Lincoln believed he knew what this approach would mean if it prevailed in real life: the end of self-government.
Thanks for reading Differ We Must, a companion to my book of the same name. It tells Lincoln’s life story through his meeting with people who differed with him, and you can find Differ We Must by clicking on this link.
Here is Trump saying slavery was the “obvious” cause of the war.
This link takes you to the New York Times story on Nikki Haley.
Here’s a link to John Kelly’s remarks on the Civil War.
Here is Mississippi’s ordinance of secession naming slavery as its cause.
And here is Lincoln writing that an official’s duty is to “run the machine as it is.”
Despite the ickiness of "white guy writing a book about if slavery was still a thing", I find Ben H. White's "Underground Airlines" an interesting look at an alternate universe where the Civil War didn't happen and the Crittenden Compromise ruled the day. The idea that the Confederacy was just a group of gentlemen who resented federal rule is perhaps the most toxic part of our internalized history.
The possibility of national divorce is getting more real. What would it look like? Map tool: https://divorcethenation.com/