Nikki Haley needs a history lesson and a lesson for all politicians from Donald Trump

The former Governor and now Presidential candidate moved swiftly from refusing to clearly state that slavery was the primary cause of the Civil War to inexplicably claiming America was “never” a racist country. She likely knows better, but her advisors probably don’t.

Former Governor and Ambassador to the United Nations Nikki Haley has about the same chance of defeating Donald Trump in the Republican primary as I do, especially after being trounced in Iowa last week and likely to experience the same in New Hampshire tomorrow, but this doesn’t mean her campaign cannot serve as a lesson in what not to do to have any chance of securing the trust of voters in either party.  In conservative circles, it has long been believed that Governor Haley was the sort of candidate who’d say whatever she thought the public wanted to hear, figuratively sticking her finger in the air to determine the way the wind blows, or as the great Mayor Quimby put it in The Simpsons, “When the wind blows, let it not be said that I too do not blow.”  These fears were made all the more real in recent weeks, after she moved swiftly from refusing to clearly state that slavery was the primary cause of the Civil War to inexplicably claiming America was “never” a racist country.  The initial incident occurred at a town hall in New Hampshire late last year, where a voter asked her, admittedly in a somewhat surprising question considering the forum, about the cause of the Civil War.  Rather than answering honestly, as in saying “I’m not a historian and I know historians attribute it to a number of different factors, but it certainly seems to me that slavery was at the heart of it,” Governor Haley rambled and deflected, saying something, I’m not quite sure what, about “freedom,” except not for the slaves of, course.  If you think I’m exaggerating, try to make sense of this, “Well, don’t come with an easy question, right?  Yeah, I mean, I think the cause of the Civil War was basically how government was going to run — the freedoms and what people could and couldn’t do.”  Even the questioner was shocked at the answer, replying, “Thank you. And in the year 2023, it’s astonishing to me that you answer that question without mentioning the word slavery.”  She was already deflecting by the next morning, claiming on Good Morning New Hampshire that “of course, the Civil War was about slavery,” but her comments were not meant to be taken from a historical perspective.  They reflect “what it means to us today.”  “What it means to us today is about freedom — that’s what that was all about. It was about individual freedom,” she said. “It was about economic freedom. It was about individual rights.”  She even went so far as to suggest the question itself was planted by a Democrat.

Of course, back in the real world, every rational human being – including Governor Haley herself – knows that the root cause of the Civil War and almost every major political battle before it was slavery.  Any regular reader of this blog is fully aware I’m an unequivocal, unrepentant proponent of American Exceptionalism, and I believe wholeheartedly that the Founders changed the world by creating a government founded on the equality of all people, human rights in general, and the need to restrain government while empowering citizens.  There is, however, equally no doubt that they made the classic deal with the devil by sidestepping the slavery question, fully knowing the literal ownership of human beings was not compatible with both their rhetoric and their framework of government.  In this view, the Founders had a choice:  Either they could create a new country based on these principles, one they truly believed had a chance at peace and prosperity for the majority of citizens, unfortunately at the expense of the slaves (and women for that matter to a large extent), or they could tear the fledgling republic apart along the Mason-Dixon line and abandon the purpose of the Revolutionary War in the first place.  They chose to forge a new country, wisely in my opinion, and from their own writings, they sincerely hoped the slavery question would be resolved peacefully at some point – by abolishing slavery.  We know this because they moved swiftly to ban the import of new slaves, passing a law in 1800 that went into effect in 1808, only a year after Britain’s similar ban.  The hope was that ending the international trade would lead to ending slavery in general, as it did in Britain by 1830.  The proliferation of Eli Whitney’s cotton gin, however, fundamentally transformed the southern economy and increased the value of slaves by orders of magnitude.  The Founders who were slaveholders, George Washington, Thomas Jefferson, James Madison, and others, primarily grew tobacco, wheat, and corn, while only dabbling in cotton because separating the fibers from the plant was incredibly inefficient and costly.  The cotton gin changed that dynamic, causing slaveholders to rapidly replace almost all of their other crops with cotton, using slaves to run the machinery and everything else.  As the National Archives described it, “Cotton growing became so profitable for enslavers that it greatly increased their demand for both land and enslaved labor. In 1790, there were six ‘slave states’; in 1860 there were 15. From 1790 until Congress banned the slave trade from Africa in 1808, Southerners imported 80,000 Africans. By 1860, approximately one in three Southerners was an enslaved person.  Because of the cotton gin, enslaved people labored on ever-larger plantations where work was more regimented and relentless. As large plantations spread into the Southwest, the price of enslaved labor and land inhibited the growth of cities and industries. In the 1850s, seven-eighths of all immigrants settled in the North, where they found 72% of the nation’s manufacturing capacity.”

Politically, the impact was a irreparable fissure between the North and the South, the non-slave holding states and the slave-holding states.  As the North increasingly became abolitionist, Southerners increasingly feared they would have the power in Congress and the Presidency to ban slavery, and grew more and more desperate to prevent what they considered an existential threat to their existence.  The battles over states rights, nullification, how and what new states to admit to the union, how to organize territories, and more were all fought in the shadow of the slavery question.  Even when the North lacked the political power and could not yet find the will, the South was terrified they would discover both at some point and acted accordingly to block any move at the Federal level that could conceivably ban slavery, however far in the future.  These battles began in earnest when the country wasn’t even forty years old.  The Missouri Compromise of 1820 only allowed the admission of new states to the union two at a time, one with slavery, one without.  A decade later, the idea of nullification, that is the ability of a state to override a Federal law, claiming it was “void and of no force,” caused a political crisis when South Carolina threatened to refuse to enforce tariffs passed in 1828.  A slaveholding President Andrew Jackson, who was reported to have said the choice was between the union or death, avoided catastrophe, but the reality that the situation was untenable was apparent almost a full thirty years before war broke out.  As John Quincy Adams put it in 1835, when has serving in the House of Representatives after a single term as President, “Slavery is, in all probability, the wedge which will ultimately split up this Union.  It is the source of all disaffection to it in both parts of the country.”  The divide infected everything, from the major issues facing the young Union to whether or not an individual’s petition could be read aloud in Congress.  Southern politicians went so far as to suggest that even members of the House of Representatives couldn’t mention slavery as part of their duties on the House floor.  “These are the tenets of the modern nullification school.  Can you wonder that they shrink from the light of free discussion?  That they skulk from the grasp of freedom and truth?” John Quincy noted in a public address.

It was another 25 years before these divisions would explode into open warfare, but there is no doubt slavery was the evil hand behind them the entire time.  Even after war broke out, many politicians continued to insist in public that the conflict was driven by whether states had a right to secede from the Union, while they wrote in private that the war would not end until slavery was either abolished or the country was permanently split.  As late as August 1862, President Abraham Lincoln was claiming that whether slavery wasn’t his chief concern, writing a public letter to Horace Greely.  “If there be those who would not save the Union, unless they could at the same time save slavery, I do not agree with them. If there are those who would not save the Union unless they could at the same time destroy slavery, I do not agree with them. My paramount object in this struggle is to save the Union, and is not either to save or to destroy slavery. If I could save the Union without freeing any slave I would do it, and if I could save it by freeing all the slaves I would do it; and if I could save it by freeing some and leaving others alone I would also do that.”   In truth, he had already drafted the Emancipation Proclamation that would end slavery in the Confederacy, but he obfuscated in public because he was waiting on the right moment, which he conceived as a massive Union victory in the war.  I understand Governor Haley isn’t a historian and might not be able to quote the details, but to deny the central role of slavery in the near dissolution of the United States is to deny reality itself.  Incredibly, she wasn’t finished yet.  A couple of weeks later, she was treading similar ground using different language, claiming and I quote, “We’re not a racist country, Brian. We’ve never been a racist country” to the host of Fox and Friends, Brian Kilmeade.  Once again, as much as I love America and believe our Founding was a singular moment in the history of the known university, it’s near impossible to take this statement seriously.  Racism has been a specter haunting American life since before the country was founded, and (admittedly flawed) interpretations of the Constitution permitted legalized racism until the passage of the Civil Rights Act and the Voting Rights Act in 1964 and 1965 respectively, which ended “Jim Crow” laws that authorized segregation of schools and everything else by race and outlawed discrimination.

You might believe like I do, in the exalted company of Frederick Douglass, Booker T. Washington, and Martin Luther King, Jr., that the Declaration of Independence and the Constitution offered the framework and foundation to end overt, legally sanctioned racism, but there simply is no doubt that such racism was allowed by law from the ratification of the Constitution, first as slavery and then as segregation, all the way up until 1965, well over a century and half of legal racism.  Needless to say, it didn’t take long for Governor Haley to start spinning her remarks, claiming she was referring to the “premise” of the country, this time at a CNN town hall last week.  Suddenly, she had personally experienced “plenty of racism” growing up in rural South Carolina, but the intent of the country as a whole was “to do the right thing” because the Declaration of Independence claims “all men are created equal” and have a right to “life, liberty and pursuit of happiness.”  “When you look, it said, ‘All men are created equal.’  I think the intent was to do the right thing,” she said. “Now, did they have to go fix it along the way? Yes, but I don’t think the intent was ever that we were going to be a racist country.”   “The intent was everybody was going to be created equally,” she added. “As we went through time, they fixed the things that are not, ‘All men are created equal.’”  This is an answer in search of a question that was never asked, a classic trick of politicians who say something incredibly stupid and refuse to accept the truth.

To be sure, this might have been the intent of some, given at least a few of the Founders such as Alexander Hamliton were ardently anti-slavery, but there’s the old expression about the rode to hell being paved with good intentions and nothing can alter the fact that our laws, especially in the South, were irredeemably racist for close to two hundred years.  In my opinion – and in the opinion of many others – this doesn’t make the country itself irredeemable, especially considering the blood and treasure that was expended to right these wrongs, but to suggest racism was not the law of the land is once again to deny reality.  Ironically, doing so not only minimizes the sacrifices that were made to redeem these sins, but also the progress she refers to merely as fixing “things along the way” as though the country were an old junker in need of few repairs on a long road trip, progress that was incredibly hard fought in matters large and small.  It’s almost hard to believe to modern ears, but segments of the country were so overtly racist in even the 20th century, that newly minted President Teddy Roosevelt merely inviting black leader Booker T. Washington to dinner at the White House in 1901 caused a huge scandal, complete with the n-word tossed about in public and calls for violence by supposed statesmen.  James K. Vardaman, a Democrat from Mississippi, complained the executive mansion was “so saturated with the odor of n****r that the rats had taken refuge in the stable.  The Memphis Scimitar called having dinner with a black man “the most damnable outrage which has ever been perpetrated by any citizen of the United States.”  The Missouri Sedalia Sentinel went so far as to turn the episode into a poem, “N****rs in the White House.”  This uniquely appalling contribution to American literature began, “Things at the White House; Looking mighty curious; N****rs running everything; White people furious.  N****rs on the front porch; N****rs on the gable; N****ers in the dining room; N****rs at the table.”  It ended by suggesting the President’s daughter should marry Washington, his son, or other relatives, and a veiled call to assassinate the President himself for the affront, “But everything is settled, Roosevelt is dead; N****s in the White House, Cut off Teddy’s head.”  Others claimed it was black people themselves who needed to die in droves instead.  As Senator Benjamin Tillman put it, “Now that Roosevelt has eaten with that n****r Washington, we shall have to kill a thousand n****rs to get them back at their places.” 

Governor Haley:  This is how far we’ve come.  It’s not merely a matter of fixing a few things, and even worse, by minimizing this progress and the racial issue in general, she is creating an opening for progressives, eager to advance the idea that America is irredeemably racist to this day, down to our very roads, and therefore we must embrace their ideas for a socialist paradise to have any chance of redeeming ourselves.  Contrary to the Governor’s flippant, reality-denying phrasing, there is a battle raging over racism right now, between conservatives who continue to believe – like Martin Luther King, Jr. himself – that embracing the principles of the Founding is the key to building a more equal society, now based on the concept that we should be blind to a person’s skin color or ethnic background, treating everyone as an individual with dignity, respect, and offering opportunity to all.  Progressives, on the other hand, have embraced the opposite approach, claiming racism is systemic, oppression is shared by all minorities in the concept of intersectionality, and the only solution is treat people unequally – providing more resources, protections, and rights to those they consider underprivileged and pardoning any and all behavior from the same groups because of their previous oppressions.  In this view, only white people have agency and accountability for their actions, and all others are helpless unless they are protected and funded by the government.  It is the most important cultural and political battle of our time, one that is likely to dictate what type of government we have for the foreseeable future and whether or not it bears any resemblance to the one that was bequeathed us, and yet Governor Haley seems intent on simply avoiding the real issue, spouting evasive falsehoods and saying nothing of substance.

At the same time, she is not a stupid woman.  I cannot read her mind, but I suspect she knows better, prompting the question as to why she would say such a thing.  To me at least, there can be only one answer:  Some high priced consultant told her conservatives are twitchy when it comes to any mention of slavery and racism, ergo she must avoid the topic even when she sounds completely ignorant.  In other words, she’s pandering, insulting the voters she is trying to court by believing they cannot handle the truth.  This might be typical behavior from a politician, but it’s not likely to be effective, especially compared to her opponent, former President Donald Trump.  When asked about abortion last year, he stated the obvious truth that after the defeat of Roe vs. Wade a compromise needs to be made that allows abortion in more limited circumstances.  This is a compromise he well knows is not likely to please everyone, and many – including fellow presidential candidate Ron DeSantis – saw it as an opportunity to attack him for changing his pro-life position and abandoning Evangelical voters in their time of need.  Evangelicals, however, responded by embracing him more closely than ever, propelling him to a record victory in Iowa last week.  Why?  Because the former President treated them like intelligent adults, capable of handling complex issues that are not going to end entirely in their favor.  There might be a handful of people in the country who believe the overturning of Roe vs. Wade meant abortion was going away completely, not a single one ever to be performed again, but most realized that the genie can never be put back in the bottle as they say and never has in the entire history of the world.  Abortion is a fact of life, which can be limited and reduced, but which will require compromise.  The former President telling it straight, rather than claiming he had some magical means to end the practice, earned him respect and trust, as did similarly nuanced comments on the transgender question.  The contrast couldn’t be more clear, and someone, likely a much lower priced consultant with some common sense, should tell Governor Haley voters do not generally respond well to being treated like morons – that and she needs a history lesson, badly.