I have been critical of Nikki Haley as Presidential candidate (see my essays on the GOP debates like this one); like most libertarians, I am not happy in paticular over her interventionist/neo-con policies. Foreign policy is a key enumerated Pesidential responsibility. I currently expect to support the LP nominee for POTUS but the only GOP candidates I would consider voting for are Haley and Christie, neither likely to win nomination under current circumstances/polls. The wild card is what might happen, say if Trump is convicted on any pending charges or the ballot exclusion (14th amendment section 3) takes hold.
Let me first summarize Haley's townhall kerfuffle over the Civil War:
The former UN Ambassador and South Carolina governor, who has seen her star rise in the first-in-the-nation primary state, was appearing at a town hall event in Berlin, New Hampshire, when a voter asked her to identify the cause of the war.
“I think the cause of the Civil War was basically how government was going to run,” she responded. “The freedoms and what people could and couldn’t do. What do you think the cause of the Civil War was or argument?” When she asked him what he believed the cause of the war was, he replied that he wasn’t running for president.
“I think it always comes down to the role of government and what the rights of the people are,” Haley replied. “And I will always stand by the fact that I think government was intended to secure the rights and freedoms of the people. It was never meant to be all things to all people. Government doesn’t need to tell you how to live your life. They don’t need to tell you what you can and can’t do. They don’t need to be a part of your life. They need to make sure that you have freedom. We need to have capitalism. We need to have economic freedom. We need to make sure that we do all things so that individuals have the liberties so that they can have freedom of speech, freedom of religion, freedom to do or be anything they want to be without government getting in the way.”
When the questioner said it was “astonishing” to hear her respond “without mentioning the word slavery,” Haley replied: “What do you want me to say about slavery?”
I'll provide my own analysis later in the essay, but I find her whole discussion obscure, ill-focused and nonresponsive, a meandering discussion of rights and liberties without a discussion of relevant context of the Civil War. Keep in mind Haley is a former governor of South Carolina, the first state to secede. It's possible you could read securing emancipation of slaves into her discussion, but one can point out there were slave states remaining in the union and the thirteenth amendment passed after the end of the war. Is she arguing secession involved violations of other identified fundamental rights, the free market/capitalism, etc.? This discussion seems more relevent to the modern conservative and an expanding Big Federal Government. Note that state government can also be repressive. I do know the South resented protectionist tariffs at their expense (retaliatory foreign duties on Southern exports, etc.), redirected revenue to northern infrastructure. I know Southern slaveholders resented northern noncompliance on returning their "property" or territorial restrictions on travel or migration with their slaves. But it's not clear what restrictions on rights she mentions led to the Civil War or even which side was at fault. Her dismissal of slavery on the follow-up seemed to be aimed at shifting the burden to the questioner; she made no effort to link slavery to her discussion.
I tweeted extensively on the kerfuffle at the time, and I'm not going to review them all here. But a key point I made was Haley, who is usually quick on her feet, should have been well-prepared to field a related question. I mean, we've had recent high-profile cases on removing Confederate monuments, even melting them down, renaming military bases from Confederate figures, etc. In fact, in 2010 Haley bucked ending rhe Confederate flag display on State House grounds. Five years later, she flipped her stand in the aftermath of a white supremacist mass murder at a black church. (The murderer had prominently embraced the Condederate flag.)
Haley quickly reversed herself after her townhall stumble made headlines, athough she disingenuously tries to link back to her original response:
“I want to nip it in the bud. Yes, we know the Civil War was about slavery. But more than that, what’s the lesson in all this? That freedom matters,” Haley said on “The Pulse of NH,” a local radio show. “And individual rights and liberties matter for all people. That’s the blessing of America. That was a stain on America when we had slavery. But what we want is [to] never relive it, never let anyone take those freedoms away again.”
Finally, let me present my own unpopular response to the provocative gotcha question. My thinking on the topic has been loosely based on the work of scholars like Tom DiLorenzo (especially his critique of Lincoln), Tom Woods, and Brion McClanahan. (Note that they may have nuanced dfferences from my own take.) These are more fellow libertarian (Brion is more on the conservative side but he supported Rand Paul in 2016.) [I used to follow Woods' podcast. I'm less familiar with his thoughts on Lincoln and the Civil War (versus numerous DiLorenzo YouTube lectures, and the regular blog readers know I regularly post Brion's podcast, which often references the war), but this 2005 review makes it clear his thoughts are consistent with the other two.]
I was brought up on the Lincoln myth, that Lincoln freed the slaves, etc. The facts led me to believe otherwise.
- Was the war about slavery? No. At best, you can make an argument that slavery was a reason that motivated secession. Secession was effectively the same right claimed by the British colonies less than a century earlier, at a time by the way when slavery was legal in almost all colonies {and the British used that fact, even before it was later abolished in the empire). The Confederates had no designs on military conquest of the north; in fact, most battles were in the South, initiated by unprovoked union invasion forces. Secession is not contingent on the general government's approval of the people's reasons or no reason. The people were free to join the union and they never lost the right to associate or disassociate. In fact, the right of secession was specifically reserved by a number of territory states in joining, and northeastern states considered it earlier in the nineteenth century for reasons other than slavery. Moreover, constitutionally Lincoln needed the permission of states to cross the borders of Southern states, which he did not have. The general government is based on the consent of states, not vice-versa. There was no enumerated power for Lincoln to use military forces gainst former states.
- Why did Lincoln invade the South? Well, if you read his inaugural address he was quite insistent that he would not accept the loss of tariff collections in the South. And I'm sure he didn't relish a prospective lower-tariff neighbor to the South. I've already tweeted how South Carolina had already objected to high tariffs during the Jackson Administration. How does one explain secession other than slavery listed in multiple secession documents? The South felt increasingly marginalized, an imbalance of power, by the industrialized northeast. (In fact, Lincoln won the Presidency without a single electoral vote from the South.) I think they viewed Lincoln as hostile to Southern concerns, and certainly many saw slavery as important to sustaining their economy, but the fact is only a minority of households held slaves and most fought not to save slavery but because their homeland was being attacked by northern aggressors
- As I've tweeted before, we libertarians don't need to be lectured over the evil of chattel slavery. There is no regret over the demise of the abomination. Why then oppose the war? First of all, it really wasn't over slavery. What really changed my mind on this was reading Lincoln's first inaugural address. Lincoln admitted that he had no constitutional authority to end slavery in the South. The Fugitive Slave Law continued to exist. Not only that but GOP Congressional allies of Lincoln introduced and passed the Corwin Amendment (not ratified after secession) which would have guaranteed slavery in the South. Not only that but the GOP did not win control of the Senate. Constitutionally, Lincoln couldn't end slavery without a supermajority vote in the Senate. (Ironically secession would make that possible without Southern senators.) The GOP finally won enough votes in the 1864 election to push through the thirteenth amendment , which would be ratified at the end of 1865, months after the war had ended and Lincoln was assassinated; the Emancipation Proclamation itself was unconstitutional. (It was an executive order not enabled by constitutionally passed legislation, which didn't apply to states rejoining the union.) There were 2 union slave states (KY and DE) at the end of the war, Not to mention the Confederacy put slavery on the table trying to win European recognition,
- Why would we libertarians oppose the Civil War? Because Lincoln's invasion violated the non-aggression principle. Lincoln's war was responsible for the deaths of over 1 million Americans. No other nation sacrificed a generation in ending the evil institution. The movement against slavery already had momentum withe abolition in all remaining union states but 4 at the beginning of the war and 2 of those dropped it during the war. Most of us agree with Lysander Spooner, a proto-libertarian abolitionist who opposed the war as immoral and thought the secession of Southern states was a welcome divorce, enabling abolition among the remaining states.
- What about slavery in the South without the war? This is purely speculative, and I don't doubt some wealthy large slaveholders would have resisted vigorously even compensated emancipation. But I think the end would have been inevitable. First, there were many anti-slave societies in the South in the decades before the war. Second, free labor in the South resented competition from slave labor and didn't want to pay taxes to fund recovery of escaped slaves; they could move for better-paying work in the north. Third, sharing a long porous border with a slave-free US hostile to efforts to recapture slaves meant the costs of holding slaves would grow significantly, Fourth, importers had growing alternatives to perhaps boycotted slave-produced goods. I believe the third reason is why slavery collapsed in Brazil a generation later
It is regrettable that Haley, on at least 2 occasions, quickly surrendered under politically correct pressure. I don't underestimate the difficulty of swimming against the current; if and when I tweet on the topic, I don't get many impressions, and I know the 3 scholars I mentioned have attracted negative attention over their uncommon perspective. But she mishandled the townhall question and she had to know when she paid short shift to the follow-up question on slavery it was a strategic blunde that would come back to haunt her. I know my response in this essay is too extensive in the expected brevuty of a townhall. (My dissertation chairman joked to the effect it takes me 20 minutes to answer a question on my name.) I'm sure readers of my Twitter/X feed are used to my long tweet threads.
But watching Trump and DeSantis jump on Haley over the kerfuffle is a bit much. Trump, of course, mishandled the Charlottesville Unite the Right incident and actually vetoed a defense spending bill over plans to rename military bases over Confederate figure names. DeSantis had a Florida curriculum controversy implying training given to slaves helped them make a living after emancipation.
Of course, Biden incompetently responded the war was about slavery. That was a predictable politically correct response. It would be another thing if he tried to argue it was about saving the Union. But given the fact that Lincoln was willing to accept slave states back into the union in his Emancipation Proclamation and of course his inaugural address make it clear such a simplistic response is untenable,
