Nikki Haley Is Not Wrong About the Cause of the Civil War
As I have mentioned in other articles, I graduated from Howard University with a degree is in African-American Studies, so the myth surrounding Abraham Lincoln as The Great Emancipator was debunked for me many, many years ago.
One place that I did not expect to see what I learned in the early 1990s as a student at Howard was where the information appeared in the later 1990s when I taught eighth-grade students’ in Tulsa, Oklahoma and re-read the following quote from Abraham Lincoln in my students’ U.S. History textbook:
“If I could save the Union without freeing any slave I would do it, and if I could save it by freeing all the slaves I would do it; and if I could save it by freeing some and leaving others alone, I would also do that.”
Read the entire article on the Library of Congress website.
Even the current President got it wrong…
Abraham Lincoln didn’t give two hoots about “the colored race.”
He believed that “blacks and whites would live best if they lived separately.”
As a matter of fact, Lincoln wanted to save the Union so badly that he proposed paying slaveowners for those in bondage of “the colored race.” Lincoln also personally donated a very substantial amount of money to the American Colonization Society, which was an organization created to ship boat loads of “the colored race” to out of America.
The Civil War was about saving the Union, and the ending of slavery was just something that Lincoln did to break the backs of white Southerners to cause them to lose the war.
So when Nikki Haley says, “It always comes down to the role of government and what the rights of the people are” she is not wrong. Lincoln wanted to industrialize the United States of America, and slaveowners didn’t want to give him their free labor force. Slaveowners also didn’t want to give up their rights to having their own currency in their states and making trade deals with foreign governments.
Lincoln believed that until all the states were truly united, so foreign entity could come in and weaken the fledgling nation and do away with the reason for the Revolutionary War. Lincoln wanted the seat of power for every state to be with the federal government. He wanted one currency for the whole nation. While Lincoln was okay with leaving some rights to be determined by each state, he absolutely did not want any state making trade deals with foreign entities.
And let’s not even get into the fact that there were THREE Emancipation Proclamations!
Well, I might do that in another piece, but suffice it to say that Nikki Haley saying “next question” can be interpreted as being dismissive of the person asking the question, or you can choose to see it as Nikki Haley deciding not to perpetuate the lie that Lincoln freed the enslaved because he loved “the colored race” so much!
