Diminishing the complexities of Civil War history dumbs down our citizenry | Opinion

Republican presidential candidate Nikki Haley was asked at a recent campaign event in New Hampshire about what caused the Civil War. Haley replied that the cause "was basically how government was going to run, the freedoms, and what people could and couldn't do." The former South Carolina governor received condemnation from the mainstream media and President Joe Biden, who provided his own response to the question on his social media X account, declaring, "It was about slavery." But this rudimentary answer on the cause of the Civil War by Biden isn't worthy of a high mark either.

After the Civil War began, Abraham Lincoln wrote in a letter, "My paramount object in this struggle is to save the Union, and is not either to save or to destroy slavery." Further, in his 18th century essay, "No Treason: The Constitution of No Authority," abolitionist Lysander Spooner remarked, "The pretense that the abolition of slavery was either a motive or justification for the war, is a fraud..."

These quotes from two monumental figures in the Civil War era prove that the Civil War was waged because the Southern states tried to separate from the Union. In fact, by the time the Emancipation Proclamation was issued, freeing some of the slaves, the Civil War had already been going on for over 650 days.

In the 1860s, slavery existed almost all over the world, including in Africa and the Arab provinces of the Middle East. And though classified as "free states," some Northern states had "Black Laws" on the books at the time of the Civil War. For example, according to the Illinois Secretary of State website, "in 1848, Illinois voters approved a new state Constitution that required the state legislature to prohibit African-Americans from moving to Illinois."

Leading up to the Civil War, one of the South's main grievances against the federal government concerned its economic and tax policies. In a talk given at the Mises Institute, historian Murray Rothbard quoted John C. Calhoun, who stated, "the North has adopted a system of revenue and disbursements, in which an undue proportion of the burden of taxation has been imposed on the South, and an undue proportion appropriated to the North, and for the monopolization of Northern industry." Similarly, when separating from The Kingdom of Great Britain, the Founding Fathers, in the Declaration of Independence, listed the British government's economic and tax policies as part of their grievances.

The Civil War was waged less than a century after America seceded from Britain, so at that time, the right to self-determination − the moral principle that people have the right to form their own government − was still deeply entrenched in American culture.

In the U.S., most of the Southern population did not actually own slaves, with slave ownership mainly being concentrated among the affluent planter class. While condensing history into easy-to-grasp narratives is politically convenient for Biden and his mainstream media cohorts, erasing significant complexities from history dumbs down our citizenry, undermining informed public discourse, and is not the display of deep intellectualism expected of a U.S. president or of historically accurate reporting expected of the news media.

Clarence B. Leatherbury of Salem, Indiana is an attorney in Indiana and Kentucky.

This article originally appeared on Cincinnati Enquirer: Biden's remarks on cause of Civil War no better than Haley's