What Nikki Haley Should Have Said

Nikki Haley apparently experienced a gaffe in a town hall meeting in New Hampshire on Wednesday evening by failing to mention "slavery" in response to an audience member's question about the cause of the Civil War. (Haley has navigated these waters before when as then-Governor of South Carolina the Confederate Battle Flag was removed from the State Capitol building.) Apparently she underlined the omission:

“What do you want me to say about slavery?” She then asked for the next question.

When you examine what she actually said about the cause of the Civil War it wasn't the worst answer in the world, but it would have played better to a South Carolina audience outside of Charleston than to a New Hampshire town hall. It was an abstraction of states' rights which, to be fair, was an open question in the early 19th Century:

“I think it always comes down to the role of government and what the rights of the people are,” Haley replied. “And I will always stand by the fact that I think government was intended to secure the rights and freedoms of the people. It was never meant to be all things to all people. Government doesn’t need to tell you how to live your life. They don’t need to tell you what you can and can’t do. They don’t need to be a part of your life. They need to make sure that you have freedom. We need to have capitalism. We need to have economic freedom. We need to make sure that we do all things so that individuals have the liberties so that they can have freedom of speech, freedom of religion, freedom to do or be anything they want to be without government getting in the way.”

But embedded in the answer was the initial flaw embedded in the Constitution itself, accepting that some humans could be chattel property of another human. Or, more accurately, the answer Haley gave did not address that flaw.

What Haley should have said would have addressed the presumed expectations of the asker and then expanded on it in the direction Haley wanted it to go. For example, Haley could have said:

"Most scholars focus on slavery as the cause of the Civil War — the expectation that the Northern States through federal legislation would extend abolition to the Southern States in the mid-19th Century. But I think that answer is too simple. A lot of Confederate soldiers did not own slaves, and yet they fought for states that had legal slavery. I think they did so because they thought the decision about slavery, and every other aspect of their society, was to be made by them democratically. This is what is often referred to as 'states rights' but which I think is a bit more broadly understood to be the operation of the 10th Amendment that reserves all powers not specifically given to the federal government, to the states and, most importantly, 'to the people'. The problem was that our Constitution at that time was not universally understood to include all men and women under the term "the people". A war was fought and a correction made to our Constitution through amendment.

"Today it seems obvious that all men and women are people with unalienable rights. And, sadly, even with this understanding in our society, slavery continues in human trafficking both in this country and around the world. At least it no longer has the support of law in any jurisdiction in this country, even though there remain places in the world where humans are regarded as property of another. But in the mid-19th Century the notion than one human could own another, that women could not vote or own property, and other notions we would find horrifying today, were present and legally enforced. And people in many states, not just the South, thought that all of those decisions were local matters subject to democratic decision-making, and not universal human rights.

"I am glad, as I assume are you, that we now better understand and uphold the universality of human rights. Our challenge today is to ensure that our rights are not lost by ceding too much power to our governments — power over speech, belief and association; personal decision-making; the ability to create products and perform services that others need and desire. So, yes, the Civil War was fought over slavery, but not just that, and at its conclusion not all of the needed corrections had been made to reflect our national creed in the Declaration of Independence — 'We hold these truths to be self-evident, that all men [and women] are created equal, that they are endowed by their Creator with certain unalienable Rights, that among these are Life, Liberty and the pursuit of Happiness.'"

I recognize that articulating a strong position on human rights has its own issues, e.g., positive versus negative rights. But that is an argument for another day.