Never the Honest Answer from Republicans

As part of her ongoing campaign to survive long enough for trump to get jailed / barred from the ballot to be the Republican presidential candidate for 2024, Nikki Haley has been making the tour stops taking questions from people so she can sell herself as presidential timber.

Of course, this means she's exposing her political, cultural, and historical ignorance when she does so, such as making a massive gaffe when quizzed about a simple fact of American history (via Ashley Lopez at NPR):

Former South Carolina Gov. Nikki Haley is facing significant backlash after failing to mention slavery as a driving force behind the Civil War during a campaign stop in New Hampshire.

At an event on Wednesday, a voter asked Haley: "what was the cause of the United States Civil War?"

She replied that the cause "was basically how government was going to run, the freedoms, and what people could and couldn't do."

"I think it always comes down to the role of government and what the rights of the people are," Haley continued. "And I will always stand by the fact that, I think, government was intended to secure the rights and freedoms of the people."

Haley essentially regurgitated the "States Rights" defense that the former Confederacy flew as their excuse to the historians once the bloodshed stopped. At no point did she even explain what "rights of the people" were getting fought over. Even the person who asked the question replied "you didn't mention slavery."

So let's go over this, one more time about how the Civil War was unavoidable because slavery was the dividing issue between Free and Slave states.

The Confederacy happened because most of the pro-slavery southern states would not accept the election results - both the popular vote AND Electoral College - going decisively towards the anti-slavery Republican Party in 1860. Even with Abraham Lincoln promising only to "limit slavery's spread" and not abolish it outright, the slaveowner class knew it still meant the death of their "peculiar institution" because the industry needing slavery - Cotton - consumed all agricultural land and it needed to expand.

And when slave state after slave state seceded from the Union in that period between November 1860 through March 1861 (before Lincoln would be sworn in as the next President), nearly every declaration of secession included Slavery as the motivation.

Nikki Haley's own state of South Carolina - infamously the birthplace of secession (its incubator since the days of John C. Calhoun and talk of Nullification) - put slavery - and the growing resistance to the Fugitive Slave Acts - as center to their "Declaration of the Immediate Causes" and the core argument for their attempt to break the Constitution: 

...The General Government, as the common agent, passed laws to carry into effect these stipulations of the States. For many years these laws were executed. But an increasing hostility on the part of the non-slaveholding States to the institution of slavery, has led to a disregard of their obligations, and the laws of the General Government have ceased to effect the objects of the Constitution. The States of Maine, New Hampshire, Vermont, Massachusetts, Connecticut, Rhode Island, New York, Pennsylvania, Illinois, Indiana, Michigan, Wisconsin and Iowa, have enacted laws which either nullify the Acts of Congress or render useless any attempt to execute them. In many of these States the fugitive is discharged from service or labor claimed, and in none of them has the State Government complied with the stipulation made in the Constitution. The State of New Jersey, at an early day, passed a law in conformity with her constitutional obligation; but the current of anti-slavery feeling has led her more recently to enact laws which render inoperative the remedies provided by her own law and by the laws of Congress. In the State of New York even the right of transit for a slave has been denied by her tribunals; and the States of Ohio and Iowa have refused to surrender to justice fugitives charged with murder, and with inciting servile insurrection in the State of Virginia. Thus the constituted compact has been deliberately broken and disregarded by the non-slaveholding States, and the consequence follows that South Carolina is released from her obligation...

If the conflict ever was over the idea of States Rights, it was over WHICH states who have more rights over the others. South Carolina - and the other slave-owning states - found themselves in opposition to the freedman states that didn't want slavery imposed on them. Rather than accept the democratic - or  republican if you're going by the Roman model - concept of the majority having a say when the Republicans won outright control of the federal government in 1860, the slave states got upset they weren't in charge like they were in the 1820s or even 1852 anymore, and decided they wanted to take their ball and go home.

Just to show how the other slave states were taking it, here's the declaration of secession from my birth state of Georgia. They mentioned slavery right off the bat, and more often than South Carolina's:

The people of Georgia having dissolved their political connection with the Government of the United States of America, present to their confederates and the world the causes which have led to the separation. For the last ten years we have had numerous and serious causes of complaint against our non-slave-holding confederate States with reference to the subject of African slavery. They have endeavored to weaken our security, to disturb our domestic peace and tranquility, and persistently refused to comply with their express constitutional obligations to us in reference to that property, and by the use of their power in the Federal Government have striven to deprive us of an equal enjoyment of the common Territories of the Republic. This hostile policy of our confederates has been pursued with every circumstance of aggravation which could arouse the passions and excite the hatred of our people, and has placed the two sections of the Union for many years past in the condition of virtual civil war. Our people, still attached to the Union from habit and national traditions, and averse to change, hoped that time, reason, and argument would bring, if not redress, at least exemption from further insults, injuries, and dangers. Recent events have fully dissipated all such hopes and demonstrated the necessity of separation. Our Northern confederates, after a full and calm hearing of all the facts, after a fair warning of our purpose not to submit to the rule of the authors of all these wrongs and injuries, have by a large majority committed the Government of the United States into their hands. The people of Georgia, after an equally full and fair and deliberate hearing of the case, have declared with equal firmness that they shall not rule over them. A brief history of the rise, progress, and policy of anti-slavery and the political organization into whose hands the administration of the Federal Government has been committed will fully justify the pronounced verdict of the people of Georgia...

I'd quote more but good lord do my Peach State peeps go on and on about this.

You can tell from the Georgia declaration more than the South Carolina one how the slave states were framing the argument: That they were the ones under attack, that the poor slave states were getting pressured to change a perfectly legal and constitutional institution as human slavery, and that it's the fault of the abolition northern states who refuse to accept the natural order of things.

That view got spelled out by the Confederate Vice President Alexander Stephens, who bluntly makes slavery the Cornerstone of what the rebelling states wanted:

...Our new government is founded upon exactly the opposite idea; its foundations are laid, its corner-stone rests, upon the great truth that the negro is not equal to the white man; that slavery subordination to the superior race is his natural and normal condition. This, our new government, is the first, in the history of the world, based upon this great physical, philosophical, and moral truth...

...The errors of the past generation still clung to many as late as twenty years ago. Those at the North, who still cling to these errors, with a zeal above knowledge, we justly denominate fanatics. All fanaticism springs from an aberration of the mind from a defect in reasoning. It is a species of insanity. One of the most striking characteristics of insanity, in many instances, is forming correct conclusions from fancied or erroneous premises; so with the anti-slavery fanatics. Their conclusions are right if their premises were. They assume that the negro is equal, and hence conclude that he is entitled to equal privileges and rights with the white man. If their premises were correct, their conclusions would be logical and just but their premise being wrong, their whole argument fails...

Spoken like true Far Right conservatives convinced of the righteousness of their side, which back in 1860 were the slave-owning Whites of the Southern Democratic faction. Today, the Far Right conservatives are the immigrant-bashing civil-rights-denying anti-woke anti-women Whites of the modern Republican Trumpian Party

These declarations were not only their excuses for giving up on the American Union, they were the foundations for the Lost Cause mythos that built up in the post-War Reconstruction and Jim Crow eras where the Southern states - even after slavery was abolished for good with the 13th Amendment - refused to accept the sins of slavery and tried to rewrite history to make themselves the victims of an aggressor North. In order for that Lost Cause to work - in order for the southerners and Klansmen and Confederate sympathizers to paint themselves as tragic heroes "betrayed" by abolitionists - the revisionists had to argue the fight was never about slavery.

So you get modern-day Confederate sympathizers - who are now all camped with a Conservative Republican Party that flipped from being the Party of Lincoln to the Party of Jeff Davis during the Southern Strategy of the 1960s-80s - who keep parroting that Lost Cause narrative as "vice signaling" to their fellow racists.

People should ask Nikki Haley about her assertation that the Civil War was about "the freedoms" for the people. Where was the "freedom" from an intrusive government when it came to the African-American slaves still in bondage when the Civil War started? Because according to the slave states like South Carolina and Georgia and Florida and Alabama and Mississippi and Louisiana and Texas and Arkansas and Tennessee and North Carolina and Virginia, their idea of government was making sure the Blacks had no freedoms at all.

The American Civil War - the first one, which by some measures never really finished because it's fueling the coal-burn of the second one we're in - was about slavery, Republicans. Stop feeding yourselves the Lost Cause myth that your party founders abhorred back in the day, because those slaveholders they fought weren't the heroes of that war, and neither are you when you keep plotting to reset our nation back to 1850. You're lying to yourselves, and you keep getting caught in spite of your denials.

Gods help us. This is how 2024 is going to be.