All opinions expressed in this article are solely the opinions of the contributors.
GOP presidential candidate Nikki Haley recently made some contentious public comments on the causes of the U.S. Civil War — without mentioning slavery. While Haley’s critics are quick to accuse her of whitewashing the war, her supporters say her comments speak to something even deeper than the issue of slavery.
Straight Arrow News contributor Star Parker thinks that Nikki Haley had it right. And as far as the slavery issue goes, Parker adds, the fight against slavery was always more fundamentally a fight for the ideal of freedom upon which our nation was founded.
Presidential candidate Nikki Haley has been fending off some flak pertaining to a response she gave to a question at a campaign event in New Hampshire. The question was about the cause of the Civil War.
Haley’s alleged great error was to say that the Civil War was about freedom. She didn’t say it was about slavery. Uh-oh.
“I think the cause of the Civil War was basically about how government was going to run — the freedoms and what people could and couldn’t do.” That’s what she said.
After the barrage of attacks that came because of her omission of the word “slavery,” Haley subsequently qualified her remarks to say the Civil War was “of course about slavery,” but then she added the “bigger issue” was determining the role of government in people’s lives.
As someone who authored a book entitled “Uncle Sam’s Plantation: How Big Government Enslaves America’s Poor and What We Can Do About It” — yeah, that’s me — and whose ancestors were slaves — yeah, that’s me — I must say I believe Haley was exactly right in her first response.
