Haley received an avalanche of criticism for not even mentioning, much less highlighting, slavery as the conflict’s cause. Perhaps she meant to include it among “the freedoms,” though that was far from clear in the context of the answer.
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She should have said, and she did later affirm, that the Civil War’s ultimate cause was human bondage. The states that tried to leave the Union certainly had other complaints. They had objected to high tariffs for decades. Those tariffs only helped Northern industry while both raising prices on Southern consumers and hiking retaliatory tariffs in other countries to which the South exported cotton. On a related front, the Confederate states argued against expansive national infrastructure spending, which they thought picked their pockets through taxation to pay for roads, railroads, and canals to again boost Northern economic interests.
But slavery was the issue that truly tore the country apart from 1861-65. We need only read the words of the men who led the secession efforts and the documents they produced. Haley’s own South Carolina, the first state to secede, makes clear slavery was the most important and pressing matter for its decision.
Consider, too, Alexander Stephens, future vice president of the Confederate States of America,
who said that racial inequality and the consequent positive good of slavery was the cornerstone on which the new country would be built.
Certainly, the Civil War was fought over the limits of national and state power as well, as Haley seemed to imply in her original statement. But that matter of federalism really came down to slavery as well. Some abolitionists sought to end slavery in the states. Some slavery supporters sought to expand it as far and wide as possible. Men such as Abraham Lincoln, prior to the war, hoped stopping slavery’s spread while respecting where it was eventually might lead to the institution’s demise. Lincoln’s approach changed only with the conditions of the war through the Emancipation Proclamation and the 13th Amendment.
So, Haley was wrong. But we must not let her admitted mistake lead the national conversation amiss in another direction. Some of her harshest critics wish to make the existence of slavery in America a reason to condemn our country’s past and present in an attempt to determine its future. Slavery was always wrong, and America would have been a more just country to have ended it as soon as we had the political power to do so. Horrific injustice came through it, including pervasive physical violence, sexual abuse, the destruction of families, and economic oppression.
But the story of America also is how much we have overcome about our inherited, sinful institution. We ended slavery — we did not begin it. Thus, our commitment to human equality, expressed in the Declaration of Independence, was not hypocrisy. It established a standard, a promise about what we as a country would demand of ourselves. By our own promise, we owed a debt to the enslaved that could be paid only in full freedom. We owed a debt to their descendants that only full equality under the law could realize. And we must continue to seek fulfillment for any other of our citizens to whom the principles of equality and liberty are not fully followed.
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This is the story persons such as Haley now have a new chance to tell. It is the story of an imperfect country good enough to know the good and seek it, even at great cost. It is the story of men and women who, even when brutally oppressed, made themselves a vibrant and essential part of “We, the people.”
Haley should have done better last week. Let us all learn to appreciate our country more in considering why.
Adam Carrington is an associate professor of politics at Hillsdale College.
