Haley Had An Opportunity To Speak Truth…And Blew It
The study of history is all about facts. In that respect, it is no different than physics or chemistry.
This all came to my mind when considering the answer Nikki Haley gave when asked the causes of the Civil War. Her answer was all gibberish and about as fact-free as it comes. If she had said the South seceded because of states’ rights issues, then she could have been allowed to skate.
Her own state of South Carolina precipitated a crisis in 1832 over a tariff the legislature did not want which would have impacted the slaveholding South. John C. Calhoun, the then vice president of the US, resigned over the issue of whether a state could elect to nullify a federal law. President Jackson (the last American president who fought in the Revolutionary War) declared that the federal government had supremacy over the states. Jackson was prepared to treat nullification as treason and back it up with the use of armed force.
According to both Jefferson and Madison, states did have the right to nullify federal laws. In their view, the federal government existed because of a compact between sovereign states. Those sovereigns had specified and delegated authority to the central government. When that authority was exceeded, the states could declare laws to be null and not in force within their sovereign state.
Haley mentioned none of this as a cause of the Civil War. Then there was the 1860 Declaration of Secession by South Carolina. As a former governor and a lifelong resident of the state, she studied that in school. It was the state’s reason for declaring its independence from the federal government. The first shots of the war occurred at Fort Sumter in Charleston Harbor.
That1860 document states that South Carolina was seceding because of the hostility of the non-slave holding states who had refused to return property to the rightful owner…meaning slaves to their masters. Can slavery be any plainer than that as a root cause? South Carolina was the first state to secede followed by Mississippi and Florida who espoused similar reasons.
Haley could have stated the economic reasons for the Civil War. The South’s economy was tied to agriculture. Their main cash crop, cotton, was intimately tied to enslaved men, women, and children working unpaid to produce profits for the landowners. There was no pretense of workers receiving wages for their labor as developed later under the sharecropping system. Economically, the South could only survive in its antebellum form by continuing slavery.
Haley mentioned something about individual rights and freedom but neglected to say anything about whose individual rights were being ignored. In 1860, 57% of South Carolina’s population was enslaved. That was the highest of any state. That is a whole lot of individual rights being ignored and trampled upon.
Today, many Americans are prepared to no longer acknowledge that slavery existed in the Unites States. This is out of sheer fear. It is my belief that most of the fear is because of prejudice. Prejudice toward a population easily identified and stigmatized by those who want to keep hold of a make-belief past merged into blinded present to meld into a colorless future. The very thing that has been an acceptable tenet of the “Lost Cause” or “Stolen Election.”
Former South Carolina Governor Haley knows the cause of the Civil War. She is afraid to utter it because she might offend those who think facts and truth are not absolutes. Haley must couch her answers on ideas and issues like slavery or deficits or health care or an election because the myths and untruths have become more believed than the facts by her voters and supporters.
