In my household growing up my father was a Republican and my mother was a Democrat. My mom and dad would sometimes argue about their parties, with my mother bring up Unemployment Insurance, Social Security, and Medicare as accomplishments of her party, but with my father smiling and rejoindering “We ended slavery.” His mother, also a Republican, born in 1892, said that the Civil War was fought over slavery and two of her uncles served in the Union army and their families told her that the war was over slavery. So just fifty years ago, most Republicans not only knew the war was caused by slavery, but they announced it at Thanksgiving dinners, at Fourth of July barbeques, and at parades, civic functions, and commencement addresses.
Jelanie Cobb has a new article in The New Yorker in which he examines the modern GOP’s confusion over the causes of the Civil War and whether Trump style negotiations would have headed off a bloody civil conflict. Here are some excerpts from Cobb’s article:
Trump recently assured a crowd in Mason City, Iowa, that Haley “doesn’t have what it takes.” He cited her meandering answer to a question about the cause of the Civil War, from an audience member at a New Hampshire town hall, in which she failed to even mention slavery. With typical self-satisfaction, Trump noted, “I’d say ‘slavery’ is sort of the obvious answer, as opposed to about three paragraphs of bullshit.”
This particular problem with the past is not a new one for today’s Republicans. Governor DeSantis called Haley’s reply an “incomprehensible word salad,” and said it wasn’t that difficult to identify “the role slavery played”—yet he has faced criticism for Florida’s new public-school standards, which suggest that some Black people benefitted from the institution. (DeSantis majored in history at Yale and briefly taught the subject at a private high school in Georgia; according to the Times, he “got into debates about the Civil War with students who questioned the focus, and sometimes the accuracy, of his lessons.”) Chris Christie accused Haley of being “unwilling to offend anyone by telling the truth,” and mocked her error again last week, in a speech announcing the suspension of his campaign. Ramaswamy offered the most complete response, pointing to the sectional and political tensions that had existed for decades prior to 1861 before noting that, without slavery, none of them was sufficient to ignite the maelstrom of civil war. Previously, however, he had espoused the discredited theory that the Second Amendment secured the freedom of former slaves (by allowing them to defend it with guns) and deemed Juneteenth a “useless” holiday.
Haley, meanwhile, quickly acknowledged that slavery was, of course, the war’s central cause. In fact, in South Carolina’s 1860 Declaration of Secession, legislators said that their decision was the result of “an increasing hostility on the part of non-slaveholding States to the institution of slavery.” And Haley herself, as South Carolina’s governor, had the Confederate flag removed from the grounds of the state capitol in 2015, after a white supremacist murdered nine African Americans as they prayed in Charleston’s Mother Emanuel A.M.E. Church….
The Fourteenth Amendment, ratified in 1868, is, like the Thirteenth and Fifteenth Amendments, a product of the period when the Republican Party was fixated on preventing another disastrous insurrection like the one that had just cost some seven hundred thousand lives. The Thirteenth Amendment abolished slavery in most circumstances. The Fifteenth Amendment enfranchised Black men, implicitly creating a bloc of voters to counterbalance the power of former Confederates in the South. Section 3 of the Fourteenth makes explicit the Republicans’ concerns about the potential threat posed by former insurrectionists.
The third anniversary of January 6th fell in the same week that Trump’s lawyers made their bid to have the Supreme Court keep him on the Colorado ballot. Their argument holds that the state Supreme Court’s ruling will “unconstitutionally disenfranchise millions of voters.” It’s a rich objection, given that Trump is contesting a racketeering indictment in Georgia for, in essence, attempting to do exactly that. Had his efforts to get Secretary of State Brad Raffensperger to “find” him nearly twelve thousand votes been successful, Trump would have disenfranchised nearly two and a half million Georgians who had cast their ballots for Biden.
Nonetheless, Haley, DeSantis, and Ramaswamy all said in recent weeks that, if elected, they would pardon Trump if he is convicted of any of the federal felony charges he is fighting—including those related to January 6th. This suggests that, for all the controversy surrounding the answer, the audience member in New Hampshire may have asked the wrong question. The pertinent issue now is not what caused the Civil War but what we should have learned from it. January 6, 2021, is not an equivalent date in our history to April 12, 1861, but the radical Republican leaders who lived through the Civil War understood a principle that has been lost on their successors: that, if entrusted with power, leaders who commit assaults on the national government once may well attempt to do so again.
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