"Slavery" Seems to be the Hardest Word

Nikki Haley and Joe Biden tackle the legacy of slavery in America

I’m a historian who’s taught U.S. history and also military history, including the history of the U.S. Civil War. If you asked me what caused that war, slavery would be at the top of the list. Of course, slavery wasn’t the only cause of the war, but as Abraham Lincoln said in his brilliant Second Inaugural Address in 1865,

One-eighth of the whole population [of America in 1861] were colored slaves, not distributed generally over the Union, but localized in the southern part of it. These slaves constituted a peculiar and powerful interest. All knew that this interest was somehow the cause of the war. To strengthen, perpetuate, and extend this interest was the object for which the insurgents would rend the Union even by war, while the Government claimed no right to do more than to restrict the territorial enlargement of it. Neither party expected for the war the magnitude or the duration which it has already attained. Neither anticipated that the cause of the conflict might cease with or even before the conflict itself should cease.

It’s hard to argue with Lincoln, but Nikki Haley was asked in New Hampshire what she thought were the causes of the war, and she failed to mention slavery, even when given a second chance to do so. For Haley, the Civil War was about the role of government; specifically, that the government was and should be about allowing people freedom. You’d think that maybe she’d add that the Civil War led to the elimination of slavery in America, i.e. freedom, but nope. She refused to go there and rejected any talk of slavery and its legacy in America.

Nikki Haley, expert on the U.S. Civil War and its causes

Well, no matter. Back in 2019, Candidate Joe Biden was asked about slavery and its legacy during a debate, and his word-salad response showed a man befuddled. And now he’s the president, so there’s hope for Nikki Haley in 2024.

Anyway, here’s what I wrote about Joe Biden in 2019. Answers like the one below by Biden suggest we won’t be seeing much of him in unscripted debates in 2024.

POSTED 9/14/2019

There was another Democratic debate this week, and I have to admit I missed it.  I’ve been checking the highlights (or lowlights, if you prefer), and Joe Biden, as usual, figures prominently.

First, here’s his stunningly paternalistic, clueless, and incoherent response to a question on the legacies of slavery, segregation, and racial discrimination:

Well, they have to deal with the — look, there’s institutional segregation in this country. And from the time I got involved, I started dealing with that. Redlining, banks, making sure we are in a position where — look, you talk about education. I propose that what we take the very poor schools, the Title I schools, triple the amount of money we spend from $15 to $45 billion a year. Give every single teacher a raise to the $60,000 level.

Number two, make sure that we bring in to help the teachers deal with the problems that come from home. The problems that come from home. We have one school psychologist for every 1,500 kids in America today. It’s crazy. The teachers are — I’m married to a teacher, my deceased wife is a teacher. They have every problem coming to them. Make sure that every single child does, does in fact, have 3-, 4- and 5-year-olds go to school. Not day care, school.

We bring social workers into homes of parents to help them deal with how to raise their children. It’s not that they don’t want to help, they don’t want — they don’t know quite what to do. Play the radio, make sure the television — excuse me, make sure you have the record player on at night, the phone — make sure that kids hear words. A kid coming from a very poor school — a very poor background — will hear 4 million words fewer spoken by the time they get there.

Make sure you have the record player on at night?

How difficult is it, really, to admit to the legacy of slavery in this country?  But Biden would rather jumble a lot of words together, perhaps based on a few ideas that he memorized poorly.  So he mentions segregation and the practice of banks redlining predominately black/minority neighborhoods and denying them loans (which he doesn’t explain), then he pivots to education and social workers while suggesting the solution to helping minority kids to learn is for them to hear more words coming from record players and phones at night.

And Democrats think this man is going to defeat Donald Trump in 2020?

Second, Joe Biden was attacking Bernie Sanders on the cost of Medicare for All.  When Sanders accurately noted that Americans pay twice as much per capita for health care as Canadians do under their national health care system, Biden’s response was three words: “This is America.”

So apparently it’s the American way to pay twice as much as other countries for equivalent health care.  It’s the American way to be denied coverage, to pay large co-pays and deductibles, and to go into bankruptcy because of a serious medical condition.

“This is America.”  I feel better already!

Not so incredibly, the Democratic establishment would rather lose to Trump with a candidate like Biden than win with a candidate like Bernie.  And so Biden’s non-sequiturs, his gaffes, his prejudices, and indeed his stunning incoherence are shrugged off as “That’s Biden being Biden.”

I may not have watched last week’s debate, but I have a strong sense of who won: Donald Trump.

[Coda: Despite his incoherence, Biden did manage to eke out a victory in 2020. Again, there’s hope for Nikki Haley in 2024. A Trump/Haley ticket, perhaps?]

UPDATE (12/28): In the comments section, two readers cited Lincoln’s letter to Horace Greeley in 1862, saying that his principal aim was preserving the Union irrespective of the status of slavery in America. The suggestion here is that slavery wasn’t central to the Civil War because it wasn’t central to Lincoln.

This is a misreading of the evidence, according to James McPherson, perhaps America’s foremost historian of the war. I had the pleasure of attending a lecture by McPherson on April 23, 1991, on “Lincoln and the Second American Revolution.” In that lecture, McPherson explained that Lincoln’s views on slavery evolved over time. In 1861, Lincoln first and foremost sought to preserve the union. In July 1862, Lincoln decided to issue the Emancipation Proclamation, waiting until after the victory at Antietam to make the announcement. By this point, Lincoln had decided “A broken egg [of slavery in America] cannot be mended.” Lincoln, McPherson argued, became a revolutionary by 1863—he had decided the war would end with the elimination of slavery—recognizing that slavery, if it persisted, would prevent efforts to restore the union.

Put succinctly, McPherson called Lincoln a “conservative revolutionary”: he was conservative in that his ultimate goal was to save the union, but his means were revolutionary in that he presided over a fundamental change in America: the elimination of slavery for the pragmatic reason that the persistence of that “peculiar institution” would doom efforts to restore America as a single united country.

Other Sources: See “The Radical and the Republican: Frederick Douglass, Abraham Lincoln, and the Triumph of Antislavery Politics” (Norton) and the review of this book by James McPherson in the New York Review, March 29, 2007, with the title “What Did He Really Think About Race?” on pages 18-19.