Tag: neoconfederates
Nikki Haley

What Nikki Haley's Neoconfederate Remarks On The Civil War Really Meant

Her name is Nikki Haley, and she has been featured in the news of late for the answer she gave at a political townhall in New Hampshire to this question: “What was the cause of the Civil War?”

Just listen to the way the former governor of South Carolina began her response: “I think the cause of the Civil War was basically how government was going to run, the freedoms and what people could and couldn’t do.”

This alleged candidate for the Republican presidential nomination comes from the state of South Carolina, in which the first shot of the Civil War was fired on a United States Army installation, Fort Sumter, in Charleston Harbor. But that ignominious fact does not capture the depth of shame South Carolina bears for the war that took more than 600,000 American lives.

South Carolina was the first state to declare its secession from the United States on December 20, 1860. As a former governor of the state, Nikki Haley should have these figures on her fingertips. In 1860, South Carolina had the largest percentage of enslaved people in the entire country, 58 percent Black slaves to 42 percent free Whites. Which raises the question, who was doing the work in the state of South Carolina?

South Carolina’s “Declaration of the Immediate Causes Which Induce and Justify the Secession of South Carolina from the Federal Union” spelled out the answer fairly succinctly: slaves. White slave owners were protecting, in the words of Nikki Haley, what they “could and couldn’t do” with their slaves. Here are a few choice lines from that hugely disgraceful 1860 document:

“Those [non-slave holding] States have assume the right of deciding upon the propriety of our domestic institutions; and have denied the rights of property established in fifteen of the States and recognized by the Constitution; they have denounced as sinful the institution of slavery; they have permitted open establishment among them of societies, whose avowed object is to disturb the peace and to eloign the property of the citizens of other States. They have encouraged and assisted thousands of our slaves to leave their homes; and those who remain, have been incited by emissaries, books and pictures to servile insurrection.

For 25 years this agitation has been steadily increasing, until it has now secured to its aid the power of the common Government. Observing the forms of the Constitution, a sectional party has found within that Article establishing the Executive Department, the means of subverting the Constitution itself. A geographical line has been drawn across the Union, and all the States north of that line have united in the election of a man to the high office of President of the United States, whose opinions and purposes are hostile to slavery. He is to be entrusted with the administration of the common Government, because he has declared that that "Government cannot endure permanently half slave, half free," and that the public mind must rest in the belief that slavery is in the course of ultimate extinction.

This sectional combination for the submersion of the Constitution, has been aided in some of the States by elevating to citizenship, persons who, by the supreme law of the land, are incapable of becoming citizens; and their votes have been used to inaugurate a new policy, hostile to the South, and destructive of its beliefs and safety.”

Isn’t that something? Way back in 1860, states in the South were all a-twitter about “books and pictures” that were “inciting” people and giving them terrible, threatening ideas.

What happened before the Civil War was the secession of the southern slave-holding states from the United States of America. Each of those states whined and complained about the man who was president, Abraham Lincoln, whined and complained that states in the north had refused to return people who had escaped slavery and had attained freedom and were thus, in the words of South Carolina and other southern states, “fugitives.”

After choking out an admission on a radio show that “of course the Civil War was about slavery,” Nikki Haley went on with her new explanation: “What it means to us today is about freedom — that’s what that was all about. It was about individual freedom. It was about economic freedom. It was about individual rights.”

Yep, it was, Nikki, you put your finger right on it. All those escaped slaves who belonged to slave owners in South Carolina had been awarded freedom and individual rights and had achieved economic freedom, and your state, and the rest of the Confederacy was angry enough about what the escaped slaves had done to secede from the United States and start a war over it.

The awful truth about this whole thing is that Nikki Haley’s state and the other states of the former Confederacy have been teaching the garbage that came out of her mouth for 158 years, that the Civil War was about states rights and individual freedom and economic freedom and what the government can tell you that you could and couldn’t do.

It’s a good thing that someone stood up at the town hall and asked her that question, because the answer she gave tells us what this election is really about. Listen to Nikki Haley and to Donald Trump and to every other Republican. Listen to what they say and what they leave out. We don’t count. They do. It’s about their freedom, and their individual rights, and their economic freedom. They mean it.

Lucian K. Truscott IV, a graduate of West Point, has had a 50-year career as a journalist, novelist, and screenwriter. He has covered Watergate, the Stonewall riots, and wars in Lebanon, Iraq, and Afghanistan. He is also the author of five bestselling novels. You can subscribe to his daily columns at luciantruscott.substack.com and follow him on Twitter @LucianKTruscott and on Facebook at Lucian K. Truscott IV.

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On July 4, A Message For Patriots Of All Persuasions

On July 4, A Message For Patriots Of All Persuasions

When the flags fly proudly on the Fourth of July, I always remember what my late father taught me about love of country. He was a deeply patriotic man, much as he despised the scoundrels and pretenders he liked to mock as “jelly-bellied flag flappers.”  It is a phrase from a Rudyard Kipling story that aptly describes the belligerent chicken-hawk who never stops squawking – someone like Dick Cheney or Rush Limbaugh.

Like many who volunteered for the U.S. Army in World War II, my dad never spoke much about his four tough years of military service, which brought him under Japanese bombardment in the Pacific theatre. But eventually there came a time when he attached to his lapel a small, eagle-shaped pin, known as a “ruptured duck” – a memento given to every veteran. With this proof of service, he demonstrated that as a lifelong liberal, he loved his country as much as any conservative.

Would such a gesture resonate today? Right-wingers have long sought to establish a monopoly on patriotic expression. On this holiday, when we celebrate the nation’s revolutionary founding, we need to remind ourselves just how hollow that right-wing tactic is and always has been. Only our historical amnesia permits the right — infested with neo-Confederates and other dubious types — to assert an exclusive franchise on the flag, the Declaration of Independence, the Constitution, and the whole panoply of national symbols. In the light of history, it should be plain that progressives are fully entitled to a share of America’s heritage; indeed, perhaps even more than their right-wing rivals.

Let’s begin at the official beginning. Although “right” and “left” didn’t define political combat at that time on these shores, there isn’t much doubt that behind the American Revolution, and in particular the Declaration of Independence, was not only a colonial elite but a cabal of left-wing radicals as well.

How else to describe Samuel Adams and Thomas Paine, the revolutionary idealists who declared their contempt for monarchy and aristocracy? It is true that many of their wealthier and more cautious comrades in the Continental Congress disdained Adams as a reckless adventurer “of bankrupt fortune,” and Paine as a rabble-rousing scribbler. Of course popular democracy was a wildly radical doctrine in colonial times, only tamed in the writing of the Constitution by the new nation’s land-owning elites and slaveholders.

The right-wingers of that era were the Tories — colonists who remained loyal to the British crown, opposed to change, and, in their assistance to George III’s occupying army, exactly the opposite of patriots. Only after two centuries of ideological shifting can Tea Party “constitutionalists” claim that the republican faith of the Founding Fathers is “conservative.”

The Civil War was just as plainly a struggle between left and right, between patriots and … well, in those days the Confederate leaders were deemed traitors (a term avoided since then out of a decent concern for Southern sensibilities). Academics dispute the war’s economic and social basis, but there is no doubt that the 19th-century left sought to abolish slavery and preserve the Union, while its right-wing contemporaries fought to extend slavery and destroy the Union.

Reverence for the Confederacy remains an emotional touchstone for right-wing Southern politicians and intellectuals (not to mention the Ku Klux Klan, assorted neo-Nazis, and many activists in the Tea Party). All of these disreputable elements denigrate Lincoln, our greatest president, and promote nostalgia for the plantation, sometimes known as “the Southern way of life.” The latest example is Chris McDaniel, the defeated Tea Party candidate for the Senate in Mississippi, a flag-waver if ever there was one – except when he was delivering fiery speeches to the secessionist Sons of Confederate Veterans. At the risk of offending every “conservative” who runs around with a Stars and Bars bumper sticker, it is hard to see how his conduct qualifies as American patriotism.

Still another inglorious episode in the annals of the right preceded World War II. The “America First” movement that opposed U.S. intervention against Hitler camouflaged itself with red, white and blue but proved to be a haven for foreign agents who were plotting against the United States. (Philip Roth brilliantly depicted this sinister campaign in The Plot Against America.)

Although Communists and pacifists had opposed American entry into the war for their own reasons, the broad-based left of the New Deal coalition understood the threat from the Axis very early. After Pearl Harbor most conservatives honorably joined the war effort, but some continued to promote defeatism and appeasement. And the historical roots of postwar conservatism — the “Old Right” of Joseph McCarthy and Pat Buchanan, the Buckley family and yes, the Koch brothers — can be traced to those prewar Nazi sympathizers.

What does true patriotism mean today? Do you truly love your country if you are a corporate leader hiding billions of dollars in profits offshore or insisting on the declining wages that have ruined the American dream? Do you love your country if you demand the right to pollute its air and water and despoil its countryside, no matter the cost to future generations? Do you love your country when you scheme to deprive your fellow citizens of the right to vote, which so many died to preserve?

Somehow the wingers righteously wrap themselves in Old Glory, as if our heritage belongs to them alone. On this holiday, and every other day, it surely does not.

Photo: Mike Mozart via Flickr

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