So Nikki Haley Thinks the Civil War Was Not Fought Over Slavery

Dec 30, 2023

Despite any political inclinations Nikki Haley might have, or what political instincts she may think will be most appealing for her political success, Nikki Haley probably has a better grasp of the realities of the American “experiment” that any other candidate in today’s political arena. The problem with Nikki Haley’s answer was not that she did not mention slavery as the cause of the civil war, but because she knows enough to understand that the issue of slavery didn’t cause the civil war in 1865. If it caused the civil war in 1865 it caused the civil war with Tariff of Abominations in 1828; if it caused the civil war in 1828; the constitution itself caused the civil war in its final draft in 1789; but if the constitution caused the civil war in 1789, the colonization of the American continent with its myriad purposes caused the civil war with its very colonization.

So of course Haley’s was correct, the cause was the differing political establishments that (with the exception of certain factions in differing colonies having a common desire to suspend the relationship with England) had in actuality never had a common collateral purpose. And it is that lack of a common desire to unify the deunified sectarianism that had existed from the very purposes of the colonists’ original settlements.

Of course by the time of the revolution all of these colonial descendents did have uncommon reasons to jointly seek an independent status from Britain and they fought a successful civil war (amazingly enough it succeeded despite dissimilar reasons for revolting). But afterwards they saw no reason to unify their purposes into an independence and they created a loose affiliation that they granted no military powers to and no way to obligate any taxable support other than the new states willingness to do so. Chaos was of course prevalent, as much within the states as between the states. The masters, the creditors who indebted the laborers and farmers to themselves in the northern and central states feared the debtor-majority who was restless and contentious and wanted to release themselves from control by the credit-minority. In other sections of the nation, primarily the south, the masters were indebted themselves and dependent on being supported by their workforce and their indebtedness to their worked created a differing fear of not only their workforce but of the excluded creditless whom they could not control by debt because the masters lacked capital to indebt the creditless that were conclaved upon the outskirts but could potentially threaten their fiefdoms that denied those creditless any access to any life-improving credit. So the constitution was formed to maintain the purposes of the differing masters and maintain their existing classes of authority. But it was a purpose whose commonality to maintain the existing leadership without an abolition of the variant methods, manners and purposes of those differing leaderships. To do so, the biggest error in the formation of the consensus necessary to create the constitution, and the only acceptable manner to reach any consensus, was to attempt to create a decentralized centralized federation that left the existing differing purposes with differing goals and the same fears of those populations that were under their differing methods of control, alive in each of the states.

Within three years of the constitution going into effect the first attempt at negating federal authority was proposed with the Kentucky Resolution. The next year the Supreme court proclaimed these state masters an “artificial entity’ and the 11th amendment was quickly ratified to reestablish the impregnable rights of state authorities to have the same autonomous abilities against suits as the federal (or any centralized government) from suits against it.

This was the cause of the civil war. A cause perpetrated by artificial entities to remain indignantly independent of centralized authority that surpassed their own authority. The concept of state’s rights, that was a mere obfuscation.

But for states to claim the masters did not wish to cede power to those they wanted to be masters over was not very nice sounding, and so they framed it as a “state’s right” to be free from federal interference. What was at issue of course was not so much a state’s right to make its own decisions that benefited its people, but the right of the state authorities to not have any of their authority reduced or lessened. State’s rights is simply the right to maintain the authorities of the state that are the authorities to subjugate its own citizens in the manner it chose to subjugate them and what the desired from the central government was a supportive authority that granted these authorities in all of the states to permit the continuance of the intra-state powers that be a reduced fear from those they wanted to subjugate.

The condition of southern slaves became an issue of political contention not over slavery per se but because the northern masters, excuse me,, powerbrokers, saw it as an issue to obfuscate their own mistreatment of their own labor force. It never really resonated to well with that workforce and the few written accounts (because they were generally forced into labor before they could learn to read) suggest those laborers considered themselves no better than slaves.

We have a greater clarity from slaves that had escaped the slave system and entered into the wage system, and there we find numerous proclamations that there were greater benefits of personal welfare to working under slavery than working for wages, but the benefit to not being considered chattel was that they were even more inhumanely treated by the psychological stigmatization of being someone’s personal property even if, as property, they might have been offered fewer denials of the survival needs. But of course psychological dehumanization is a much greater barrier to overcome submissively and created an antagonism against dehumanization that in some ways gave the enslaved a psychological comprehension that having their welfare supported did not replace the impoverishment of the diminishment of their perceived capacities by categorizing them into being psychological no more valuable than what they produced. The simple psychological recognition of the laboring force of wage-earners led to an antagonistic conflict over their needs of welfare but created a disadvantage in their comprehension that they their “freedom” was nearly as limited by the suppression of their access to their personal welfare needs, they sought greater access to those welfare needs without actually challenging the dehumanization of their psychological needs were equally suppressed by the diminished access to their own welfare needs. And to this day the idea of being free makes them easy prey for psychological miscomprehensions that freedom lies with greater access to their welfare needs while many descendants of slavery may desire the same access to greater welfare benefits (I am not speaking of welfare programs, but the welfare necessary to physically survive) but remain stronger psychologically in recognizing the mannerisms of dehumanization. At least that is a generalized impression I have perceived from my personal encounters with both.

Wars are not fought over issues. Issues are rallying calls to fight wars. Abraham Lincoln did not fight the civil war over the issue of slavery, he resisted as long as possible to make the war about slavery, until a seemingly losing issue of fighting the war over the necessity of maintaining a unified centrality of authority, in contrast to the decentralized and scattered purposes on individual state authorities who continually conflicted over supremacy of who had what authority. The war was well into its third year before Lincoln grasped the necessity of making the war about slavery, to create a rallying battle cry that could accomplish his real purpose of maintaining the supremacy of unification that denied state authority to have equal (or at times, more) authority than the unified authority of centralized commonality. I believe most of the members of the convention who endured through that Philadelphia did so because they did want to accomplish that purpose. Their suffering through the heat of that Philadelphia summer and the endless discussions and recompromises were meant to accomplish that very thing and that is what those that remained did remain.. That such a compromise survived through eighty precarious years shows the remarkableness of that creation they comprised into establishing. But it was supposed to be a blueprint, not a static document. They were all pretty close to understanding that as a blueprint it would need continuous revision through the processes they hoped they had established a constitutional framework for continuous revisionism.

Suppose there had been a different outcome to the secession of most of the southern states. Suppose Lincoln had decided to just let the south go there own way. Suppose he had left the southern capital and relocated his seat back in Philadelphia. Well there are four possible outcomes. One is that the union totally fractured into 34 governments that would continually fight and create a true continental divide of internecine war like the fractious European states. It could have been the end of any pretense of unity and the mass secession could have been like that that occurred after the insolvency of the Soviet Union.

A second possibility, and one that I think highly likely, a great exodus could have occurred by the enslaved in the south to the north. There would have been a demand amongst the northerners to colonize the blacks into a reservation of their own, possibly even grant them nationhood somewhere. That might have been a good outcome for the people who been taken captive and forced into servitude, who knows? Except. The south would have fought a war against the north to regain their slaves and the consequence would have probably been the same unless European nations intervened on one side or another, or some allying with one side and others allying with the other side, but that war would certainly not have been about slavery but about invasion and stolen property.

Another possibility would have been the south’s economy collapsed and they freed their captives of their own accord. But having just declared themselves independent to maintain their authoritarian right to have slaves, I doubt a rapid occurrence of that would have happened and so the more likely outcome would have been the forth option, a massive slave revolt that could have unified the slaves similar to the processes that led to the slaughter of the masses in the Belgian controlled portion of the Congo, and later Kenya, that forced the “masters” into exiling the south. Or more close to home, what had occurred in Haiti or prior to that in Santo Domingo. And if those slaves could have reached out their hand as the Santo Domingans did; to the societally disenfranchised whites, they might have been able to form a similar governing unit that occurred during reconstruction when the freedmen and the scalawags for a very few years began governing together and putting forth construction projects, establishing schools,building roads. etc.

But the ultimate proof that the civil war was not about slavery can be seen in the rapid return to a constitutional status quo. After establishing the Freedman’s Bureau they were granted little financial support; people (former slaves) could be forced back into servitude (sometimes, but not necessarily) by indigentcy regulations simply because the economic base for sugar and cotton that northerners themselves depended upon needed to be reestablished; and of course few slaves did not receive the promised forty acres and the former owners were granted their landed properties to be returned very shortly. Of course they were the “radicals”, termed radical because they actually did believe the war had been fought to free the slaves; unfortunately, the general consensus of the victors was to re-enfold the southern states, perhaps without the rebellions leaders, into the union as rapidly as possible to recreate that very status quo the southerners had rebelled against. Lincoln was attempting a reconciliation with the rebellious states even before the war had concluded. His goal was always a goal of reunification. To Lincoln had created the disunion before the civil war and with slavery ended reunification was possible as soon as any state was ready to concede their cause of rebellion had failed and they willingly wished to rejoin with minimal conditions attached. Lincoln’s plan was too much even for the non-radicals in Congress and even they thought there must be a period of humiliation attached to the reunification. After all, don’t we all know how effective humiliating Germany after their submission to the allies after WWI was, don’t we?

Slavery may have been a rallying cry for some humanitarian societies and certain segments of editorialists prior to the civil war. But Lincoln didn’t take up the abolitionist banner and he long resisted making it the rallying cry of the war. Lincoln’s campaign was not about abolishing slavery but finding a compromise to end the national division that slavery caused. And if such a compromise could have been accomplished, Lincoln’s idea was to round up all of the black citizens in both north and south and transport (deport) them far enough (Panama, he suggested on some occasions) away that the U.S. would have no further contact with them. They would be able to do as they will and succeed or not but they would no longer interfere as a conflictual disunification in white American society. Lincoln didn’t really care about slavery as a moral issue but saw it for the divisiveness it brought to the nation. Ending slavery, Lincoln thought would end the national dialogue of conflict.

Certainly slavery was the driving force of the acrimony between the states. Certainly that acrimony created the atmosphere of disunionism and it was the disunionism that Lincoln wished to put an end to. And if you don’t believe me, perhaps you should read what Frederick Douglass wrote both before Lincoln granted him an audience, and his even more scathing report against Lincoln after being granted an audience. The black leaders that joined Douglass in that conference came away believing that Lincoln had no concern for their freedom, that he saw them as gnats who were an annoyance to the United States that needed to be removed.

I would have been interested in the followup, what did Nikki Haley think of slavery. But the questioner replied no need, she had answered by not saying the war was about slavery. And then I read commentator after commentator suggest what her inability to answer such simple question implied. A question that everyone knew only had one answer and that it was that the war was fought over slavery. Even Howard Zinn suggests that answer is “fake” history, taught in school, but not true history. It was fought over who would be in control. If everyone knows Lincoln set out to free slaves from their bondage then they are indeed learning what Zinn claimed was the false narrative of American history. I am not terribly a great a fan of Zinn, other than what everyone knows about America is not based much on reality but on propaganda; but otherwise I find Zinn abandoning is own premise and going to the other extreme to convince us that the proper interpretation is through the lens of dialectical materialism. There is an element of truth in Zinn’s position that I might often seem to echo, but the materialistic dimension is not evil in itself by denying economic sociality, what materialism does is deny access to power by diverting attention through creating and maintaining a tensive distrust of difference and destroying the psychological welfare of the nation’s people in the process of its materialistic divide.The dialogue, absent its psychological decapitation of comprehension is unrectifiable limited only to its focus on the possessiveness of how much anyone can acquire.

No one cares really cares if a gay couple wants to live together, but tension is created by making gayness into a perversity. We don’t want such perversities to exist, we don’t care if the gay couple exists.This creates a tension against the gay couple and the idea of the perverseness of being gay. We are introduced into the idea of perversity that exists only because the idea of its perverseness is introduced to divert our attention from not being affected one way or another, into being affected by the announcement of its abnormality. And if the woman can be subdued and made unequal to man because she was created from the rib of man ( a rather perverse idea in itself since man comes from the womb of the woman, not the loins of the man); and if everyone knows the civil war was fought over the rights of the slave to be free, then the civil war continues to divide us between those who want to return them to their bondage because they somehow have been introduced to the idea that there is not enough freedom for both blacks and whites to share, so if a white man feels he lacks freedom–ah lookee there–that freedom of the black man that the black person acquires means it is they-the black person who is replacing the limited amount of freedom available to the white man. Rationed freedom creates anxieties that one must demand his share of freedom and creates psychological terrorism within the reception of those who fear that somehow their just enough freedom to be shared by all.

So please do no know what everyone knows. Because what everyone doesn’t seem to know is part of the propaganda is the math formula that allows one person and one person to not add to two persons, but to become divided by its sum into its original equation and so one person and one person are continually divided and never added together. That is what I do not know at least; and it appears to me,to be what potentiates not only the cause of the civil war, but the cause of the continual unsolved tensiveness in civil life that might conclude in any of the alternative resolutions that did not occur because of Lincoln’s insistence on unionism. But unionism cannot occur without union, and what we all need to know is how to solve what no one seems to know, or at least our political structures still seem to deny. Union does not occur by having two “healthy”political parties that wish to subtract from unity rather than offer a solution away from the polyarchy that asks its proponents to remain in conflict. Adding by dividing just seems incapable of finding a unified consensus so that what everyone knows is that the solution is what everyone doesn’t know. And what appears to me to be the solution is to defocus on what everyone knows and understand that what everyone knows never can, in actuality, become, what everyone knows.

The UnUtopian Optimist

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