Nikki Haley and the Uses of History

Aboutness as Rhetoric

If the causes of great events could be fitted into single sentences, we would not need history books.

Nikki Haley had a chance to show this when she was asked what led to the Civil War. Haley, as the world knows, gave one of the dumbest answers imaginable, with a vagary inspired by the fear of saying anything specific, including mentioning slavery (among other inanities, she said the war was about “basically how the government was going to run.”)

After an uproar, Haley retracted and said, “Of course the Civil War was about slavery.”

She was closer to the truth in her retraction, but those history books still have plenty to say that her make-up exam omitted. I don’t have space for a full book here, so let’s try two paragraphs:

“The Civil War followed a decade-long national crisis over slavery. For the South, including in Haley’s native South Carolina, the tipping point was the election of Abraham Lincoln and the Republicans, who deemed slavery to be immoral and, in particular, were vehemently opposed to the extension of slavery into the western territories and new states. While the Republicans were not abolitionist—they pledged to respect the legality of slavery in states where it existed—they were hostile to slavery as an institution, and naturally seen as a threat to its future.

“Once the South seceded, the North went to war not, in the immediate instance, to abolish slavery but to preserve the Union. Over time, anti-slavery was added to the Union’s agenda. This happened gradually, first with a series of small measures such as abolition within the District of Columbia, then with larger acts including the Emancipation Proclamation—which freed slaves only in areas actively in rebellion—and, finally, as the war wound down, by the Thirteenth Amendment, abolishing slavery everywhere and forever.”

This is more complicated than “about slavery,” but more informative. Aboutness is a rhetorical construct, applied in retrospect. Those among Haley’s critics who would condense history into a two-word soundbite do the public no favors.

Historical events do not always answer to neat causes. A good simplification is that slavery was the underlying cause of the war. The division of North and South over slavery led to wholesale political and economic divisions which led to bitter disputes in Congress, violent clashes in Kansas and at Harper’s Ferry, and finally the war itself.

But if by “cause” is meant the immediate cause of the war’s outbreak (as Japan’s bombing of Pearl Harbor caused the U.S. to enter World War II), then the answer is indeed more complicated. The drama of North and South going to war occurred in two acts. After Lincoln’s election in 1860, seven cotton states (led by South Carolina) seceded. That was Act 1.

The seceding states did not envision, and certainly did not want, a war. The war was provoked by the North, five months later, when Lincoln sent ships to reprovision Fort Sumter, in Charleston harbor.

Lincoln repeatedly said his purpose was to preserve the union. Steve Inskeep, one of my favorite radio journalists and historians, has written that the idea that Lincoln’s main war aim was preserving the Union, rather than ending slavery, “cannot sustain any argument longer than a social media meme.”

In this case, I respectfully disagree. Lincoln took the law very seriously. The law was his civic religion, the bedrock of his faith in democracy. When he said he had a duty to preserve the Constitution, it had far more weight to him than a social media meme.

Moreover, the Northern people (outside of abolitionists, who were very small in number) had no desire to fight and die for Black slaves. Republican majorities in both houses of Congress made this explicit, months after Sumter, by approving the Crittenden Resolution, affirming that the war “is not waged .. for any purpose of …interfering with the rights or established institutions” of Confederate states.

The North took to arms to suppress the rebellion—that is evident in virtually every historical document, letter and article from the time. But over the course of the war, Lincoln’s aims evolved and came to include antislavery. And many Union soldiers, particularly after the Proclamation was issued, embraced the idea that they were fighting not just for union but for freedom.

Lincoln announced the Proclamation, in September 1862, to further the aims of the war. By the time he signed it, the following January 1, he had come to perceive its moral significance. Pen in hand, he is said to have exclaimed, “If my name ever goes into history, it will be for this act.”

Lincon took another fateful step by enlisting nearly 200,000 Black troops in Union armies. This gave Blacks a purchase on the outcome, and Lincoln knew it.

As the human cost of the war mounted, for Lincoln unbearably, he increasingly invoked a deity—some sense of higher purpose—to make sense of the suffering. Finally, in his second inaugural address, Lincoln reframed the conflict as divine retribution for the crime of slavery. He put it far more beautifully: “If we shall suppose that American slavery is one of those offenses which in the providence of God must needs come but which having continued through His appointed time He now wills to remove … He gives to both North and South this terrible war as the woe due to those by whom the offense came…”

Even in that masterful flight of oratory, near the war’s conclusion, Lincoln stayed true to the historical record. Speaking of the war’s origins, specifically of the South’s “powerful interest” in slavery, Lincoln said, “All knew that this interest was somehow the cause of the war.” It was his most direct linkage between slavery and the war—and yet in his “somehow,” Lincoln permitted history a continuing window into the suppleness of causality, more specifically, into the difference between the perception of the war’s purposes at its inception and at its end.

Simplification fulfills a human need to know why, but history is a rich vein. We learn from its complexity.

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Roger Lowenstein is the author of Ways and Means: Lincoln and His Cabinet and the Financing of the Civil War (Penguin Press).