Nikki Haley's Confederate View of the Civil War

Johnny Reb didn't think the war was about slavery either. But he was wrong then, and Haley's wrong now.

Nikki Haley’s view of what caused the Civil War is wrong. It’s also the view that Confederates held at the time. She may have removed the Confederate flag from South Carolina’s state house, but she hasn’t expelled Confederate ideology from her presidential platform. Here is Haley on December 27, 2023:

I think the cause of the Civil War was basically how government was gonna run. The freedoms and what people could and couldn’t do…. Government doesn’t need to tell you how to live your life. They don’t need to tell you what you can and can’t do…. We need to have capitalism, we need to have economic freedom….

And here is an editorial in the New Orleans Daily Crescent, November 13, 1860:

The history of the … Black Republican Party of the North is a history of repeated injuries and usurpations, all having in direct object the establishment of absolute tyranny over the slave-holding States…. They have capped the mighty pyramid of unfraternal enormities by electing Abraham Lincoln … on a platform and by a system which indicates nothing but the subjugation of the South and the complete ruin of her social, political and industrial institutions.

Government telling you “what you can and can’t do” and “the establishment of absolute tyranny over the slave-holding States” is more or less the same complaint, and in 1860 the basis of that complaint was that the Union would not tolerate the spread of slavery beyond the states where it existed already.

Did President-elect Abraham Lincoln wish to inhibit what Haley calls “economic freedom”? Did he seek what the Daily Crescent called “the complete ruin of [the South’s] social, political, and industrial institutions”? Lincoln wouldn’t have put it that way in November 1860, but by March 1865, in his second inaugural address, he more or less did. To whatever extent economic freedom and the South’s social, political, and industrial institutions depended, initially, on expanded commerce in, and, eventually, on the mere existence of, the buying and selling of human beings, the Union was bent on their destruction. Apparently Republican voters in the South continue to resent this. Nobody talks about a Black Republican Party anymore.

The 1860 Republican Party platform called for the abridgment of economic freedom for enslavers. It did so by declaring “the recent reopening of the African slave trade, under the cover of our national flag, aided by perversions of judicial power, as a crime against humanity and a burning shame to our country and age.” Most people no longer conclude from this example, as Haley apparently still does, that abridging economic freedom is always wrong. The 1860 platform also criticized President James Buchanan, a Democrat who sought unsuccessfully to admit the Kansas territory as a slave state, for “construing the personal relations between master and servant to involve an unqualified property in persons.” In that limited sense, I suppose the GOP’s 1860 platform is anti-capitalism.

What a difference 163 years make. Today it’s the Democrats who, when they remember the Civil War, know it was about slavery, and the Republicans who want to pretend it was about some unjust infringement of economic rights. I’ve got the poll numbers to show it. That’s the subject of my latest New Republic piece. You can read it here.

Also, New Republic writers were asked to name the biggest [blank} of 2023. Most of my colleagues chose scoundrels, charlatans, etc., but I’m tired of jerks, and most especially of the short-fingered vulgarian most of them follow. I chose instead the biggest hero of 2023: Shawn Fain. Nobody had a better year. You can read my appreciation here.