Maybe former U.S. Ambassador to the United Nations Nikki Haley should pass on questions related to the Civil War.
You probably know about her omitting slavery as a cause of the conflict when asked by a voter last December. She later declared it to be a major reason for our country’s most bloody war.
Now, Haley has had to walk back a statement she made regarding another major Civil War matter: secession. When asked last Wednesday about Texas’s conflict with the Biden administration over the border crisis, she stated that if the whole state of Texas wished to leave the country, “I mean, that’s their decision to make.” But on Sunday, she said differently: “According to the Constitution, they can’t” secede. Instead, Texans have a right to protect themselves in relation to the lack of national immigration law enforcement along their border with Mexico, she said.
As with her December comment, Haley eventually got to the right answer. The Civil War was fought over slavery. But it was also fought over what options exist for settling significant disagreements between us, including secession.
These two matters point back to a deeper question, one deeply relevant to our own time: Who are we?
Slavery concerned our principles and, with it, our character. All political communities must answer whether they believe human beings are fundamentally equal or not. How we treat each other, as private persons and by public laws, hinges on which view we take. Slavery demanded a view that humans were essentially unequal, so much so that some rightly could exert complete control over others. Skin color, moreover, was made the determiner of that line, propped up by alleged science and even more subversive biblical exegesis. By so committing to human inequality, slavery called on us to be tyrants in practice and in soul.
Emancipation took us on another path. It was not a new path but one mapped out, even though not realized, by our Declaration of Independence. That document declared the equality of human beings as a fact that demanded our obedience in private action and in public law. President Abraham Lincoln’s Emancipation Proclamation and the 13th Amendment secured freedom purchased by much blood and toil. It called us to a character forged in liberty and dedicated to bettering its protection for all persons.
Secession pertained to the nature of our political bonds. How were we and how are we a political community? The states that claimed to secede in the 1860s based their argument on the idea that America was a compact between states. The states made our union, acting as the equivalent of independent countries in a kind of confederation.
Those who opposed secession saw our country differently. The union preceded the Constitution, thus our Preamble said that the document’s goal was to “form a more perfect Union,” not a new one. Our union came into being when we declared independence in 1776, if not even before. Thus, as Lincoln argued, our states never were their own independent political communities but essential parts of one country, bound by common ideals and with a relationship melded in the hardship of war.
More importantly, the union was a compact between persons: “We the people of the United States.” One person may leave through emigration, breaking his friendship with his countrymen. But that bond is not dissoluble by one state unilaterally declaring it wishes to leave. The states exist as part of America and have no existence, in their present form, outside of America.
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We should seek to address our differences as we have in every part of history save the Civil War — through debates and elections. But even if those differences at some point cannot so be solved, the answer is not secession. We do not call our struggle for independence from Great Britain a secession but a revolution. A revolution does not seek the partitioning of political communities. It seeks to start an entirely new political community. It does not seek to do so according to existing constitutions and laws but against them, appealing to the higher and deeper laws of nature and of nature’s God.
These are the truths we should take from Haley’s Civil War comments and their corrections. They are so important to know and to act upon in our own time, confused as we’ve become about who we were, who we are, and who we should be.
Adam Carrington is an associate professor of politics at Hillsdale College.
