The Patriot Post® · Overblown Outrage Over Haley's Flub

The American Civil War — or, more accurately, the War Between the States — ended nearly 160 years ago. And yet, at a recent New Hampshire town hall, Republican presidential candidate Nikki Haley was asked about it as if it had been fought just last year. The questioner, a presumed private individual with no media affiliation, asked, “What was the cause of the United States Civil War?”

Haley should have immediately parried the question away by questioning the questioner: “Why do you ask?” She was not taking a history quiz, so what was the questioner after?

But Haley, the former governor of South Carolina, the first state to secede from the Union back in 1860, probably overthought her response while also aiming to push her political agenda. She answered that the war was fought over the role of government, “the freedoms of what people could and couldn’t do.” Though vague, Haley’s answer was technically correct. But she failed to mention the primary issue that was dividing the states: slavery.

It was a bad look for Haley, and the questioner ensured that it was bad by following up her meandering answer by stating, “In the year 2023, it’s astonishing to me that you answer that question without mentioning the word ‘slavery.’” That made it seem clear it was intended as a gotcha question.

Haley should have known better, but she fell into the trap.

That trap is the false narrative incessantly pushed by Democrats and their Leftmedia cohorts that Republicans are the party of racism and discrimination. The irony is that the truth is the exact opposite: It was the Democrats who were the biggest defenders of slavery leading up to the war, and the Democrats who created the racist antebellum Jim Crow laws. Indeed, the Republican Party was founded 170 years ago as an anti-slavery party. Furthermore, it was Democrats that most opposed the push for civil rights. And to this day, it is Democrats, not Republicans, who are obsessed with pushing racism, most recently via the doctrine of critical race theory and the divisive policies of “diversity, equity, and inclusion.”

Back to Haley, whose flub is now being pushed by the Leftmedia as proof positive that she’s some sort of closet racist who “wants to put y'all back in chains” (to borrow Joe Biden’s phrase).

Never mind the fact that Haley herself is a woman of color — her Sikh parents came to the U.S. from India in the 1960s — or that “color” and “womanhood” were all it took to qualify for consideration as Biden’s vice president. There is also Haley’s record as governor. It was under her watch that South Carolina ended its practice of flying the Confederate flag at the state capitol. In other words, Haley is hardly a slavery apologist.

However, as the governor of a Southern state, Haley is no doubt aware that oversimplifying the myriad causes of the Civil War down to just “slavery” would have been needlessly offensive. Southern heritage and war history are not simply what the mainstream media often disingenuously classify them as — a defense of slavery. Rather, for many Southerners, the deeper reason for our nation’s bloodiest conflict was the issue of states’ rights.

That was true for Northerners, too. When Abraham Lincoln went to war, it was not first and foremost to end slavery. Instead, Lincoln’s primary rationale was to preserve the union, as he stated in his 1862 letter to New York newspaper publisher Horace Greeley: “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.”

As a Republican, Lincoln was opposed to slavery — but history shows that this wasn’t his foremost objective.

Unfortunately for Haley, too many Americans don’t know their history. Now she finds herself on the defensive, struggling to close the massive polling gap between herself and Donald Trump. And for the Leftmedia, Haley’s flub serves as yet another opportunity to pound their false narrative of Republicans being the party of white supremacy — or, we suppose, in Haley’s case, brown supremacy.