Republican presidential candidate Nikki Haley declined to specify that slavery was a cause of the civil war on Wednesday, wading into an area of history that continues to reverberate and in some ways define US politics nearly 160 years after it concluded.
Haley, the former governor of South Carolina, where the first shots of the north-south conflict were fired by Confederate soldiers in April 1861, was asked by a New Hampshire voter about the reason for the war but didn’t mention slavery in her response.
Instead, Haley talked about the role of government, replying that it involved “basically how the government was going to run” and “the freedoms of what people could and couldn’t do”.
The questioner said they were astonished she did not mention slavery.
“I think it always comes down to the role of government and what the rights of the people are. And we will always stand by the fact that I think the government was intended to secure the rights and freedoms of the people,” said Hayley at a town hall event in Berlin, New Hampshire.
“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.”
The Republican presidential candidate, who served as US ambassador to the UN under the Trump administration, then turned the question back to the man who had asked it.
The unnamed questioner replied that he was not the one running for president and wished instead to know her answer. Haley went into an expanded explanation about the role of government, individual freedom and capitalism.
“In the year 2023, it’s astonishing to me that you answer that question without mentioning the word ‘slavery’,” the questioner responded, prompting a retort from Haley.
“What do you want me to say about slavery?” she asked.
On Thursday, amid wide reporting of her response and in apparent damage limitation mode, Haley said in a radio interview: “Of course the civil war was about slavery.”
According to the Washington Post, Haley told The Pulse of NH radio show: “I want to nip it in the bud. Yes, we know the Civil War was about slavery. But more than that, what’s the lesson in all this?
“That freedom matters. And individual rights and liberties matter for all people. That’s the blessing of America. That was a stain on America when we had slavery. But what we want is never relive it. Never let anyone take those freedoms away again.”
Wednesday’s exchange comes less than a month before the New Hampshire primaries on 23 January. Recent polling has placed Haley in second place to Donald Trump among Republican voters in the state.
The Biden campaign later posted a clip of the question on the X social media platform and text saying: “It was about slavery.”
It was about slavery. https://t.co/q9bTDvtPne
— Joe Biden (@JoeBiden) December 28, 2023
After Wednesday’s town hall meeting, Christale Spain – elected this year as the first Black woman to chair South Carolina’s Democratic party – said Haley’s response was “vile, but unsurprising”.
“The same person who refused to take down the Confederate Flag until the tragedy in Charleston, and tried to justify a Confederate History Month,” Spain said in a post on X. “She’s just as MAGA as Trump,” Spain added, referring to Trump’s “Make America great again” slogan.
Jaime Harrison, current chair of the Democratic National Committee and South Carolina’s party chair during part of Haley’s tenure as governor, said her response was “not stunning if you were a Black resident in SC when she was Governor”.
“Same person who said the confederate flag was about tradition & heritage and as a minority woman she was the right person to defend keeping it on state house grounds,” Harrison posted Wednesday night on X. “Some may have forgotten but I haven’t. Time to take off the rose colored Nikki Haley glasses folks.”
A poll last week placed Haley within four points of the former president, though the poll was conducted across a small number of people and its results have not been replicated in other surveys that give Trump a commanding lead.
Haley has frequently said during her campaign that she would compete in the first three states before returning “to the sweet state of South Carolina, and we’ll finish it”.
Haley’s campaign did not immediately return a message seeking comment on her response. The campaign of the Florida governor, Ron DeSantis, another of Haley‘s GOP foes, recirculated video of the exchange on social media, adding the comment: “Yikes.”
Issues surrounding the origins of the civil war and its heritage are still much of the fabric of Haley’s home state, and she has been pressed on the war’s origins before.
As she ran for governor in 2010, Haley, in an interview with a now-defunct activist group then known as the Palmetto Patriots, described the war as between two disparate sides fighting for “tradition” and “change” and said the Confederate flag was “not something that is racist”.
During that same campaign, she dismissed the need for the flag to come down from the statehouse grounds, portraying her Democratic rival’s push for its removal as a desperate political stunt.
Five years later, Haley urged lawmakers to remove the flag from its perch near a Confederate soldier monument after a mass shooting in which a white gunman killed eight Black church members who were attending Bible study. At the time, Haley said the flag had been “hijacked” by the shooter from those who saw it as symbolizing “sacrifice and heritage.”.
South Carolina’s ordinance of secession – the 1860 proclamation by the state government outlining its reasons for seceding from the Union – mentions slavery in its opening sentence and points to the “increasing hostility on the part of the non-slaveholding States to the institution of slavery” as a reason for the state removing itself from the Union.
The Associated Press contributed reporting
