Will people in the South now agree the Civil War had to do with slavery?

Asked by JLeslie (65452) December 29th, 2023 from iPhone

In a town meeting an audience member asked Nikki Haley what was the reason for the Civil War. She wouldn’t say slavery. She said it was about individual rights and keeping the government out of your life.

Afterwards, the news picked up in it, even DeSantis came out and said slavery was one of the reasons for the war. Nikki Haley fairly quickly has backpedaled saying slavery was a cause for the war.

No surprise Christie names slavery regarding the Civil War also. He even told crowds how South Carolina at the time of the Civil War named slavery as a primary reason to secede from the Union. It’s right there in writing in case Southerners didn’t learn about it in school.

The “problem” for Haley is these first primaries are in northern states, so she can’t easily rattle off the typical Southern lines, even though a certain amount of Republicans in the North do buy into the Southern version of Civil War history.

Aside from whether the questions affected the Republican primary, which please feel free to comment on also, did this recent discussion change how Southerners see the war?

When the primaries are going on in the South will this all change and go back to saying things like the war was about agriculture, which is what I usually here, and what Haley said about individual rights. I also usually hear state’s rights thrown in.