I have fond memories of Berlin, New Hampshire. After a midwinter’s day of bouncing off gnarly bumps at nearby Wildcat Mountain or a summer’s day hiking up and skiing down Tuckerman’s Ravine on the eastern face of Mount Washington, the place to go in Berlin was Fagin’s Pub, a storied watering hole for ski bums and sane people alike.
This week, Berlin became famous for more than Fagin’s Pub. It gained notoriety as the small town in which it was revealed how little American history is known by some people who want to be president of the United States. Specifically, former South Carolina Governor and U.S. Ambassador to the United Nations, Nikki Haley, needs a lesson on the Civil War.
During a town hall meeting in Berlin on Wednesday, Haley was asked by an attendee, “What was the cause of the United States Civil War?” Rather than stating the obvious, Haley gave the fabulously fractured response, “I mean, I think the cause of the Civil War was basically how the government was going to run the freedoms and what people could and couldn’t do.”
It is a mystery why Haley spoke this tortured collection of words rather than the simple historical truth. The cause of the Civil War was Democrats who wanted to preserve chattel slavery.
By the mid-19th century, most of the civilized world had done away with slavery. But American Democrats wanted to continue owning black people as property so they started a war to keep their slaves following the election of a Republican president in 1860.
But before Democrats started the war, they started seceding from the Union. Democrat Governor William Gist got things started in South Carolina in December 1860, forcing the legislature to remain in session until the election results were final. After calling for a secession convention and beefing up the state militia, Gist was happy to sign the instrument of secession.
Six more states, all run by Democrat governors, seceded from the Union over the next few months, and by April 1861, Democrats decided it was time to start killing people who disagreed with them. In the pre-dawn hours of April 12, a Democrat from Virginia named Edmund Ruffin is said to have been given the honor of firing the first shot at soldiers inside Fort Sumter. Astonishingly, Democrats failed to kill a single American after a 36-hour bombardment.
Now that Democrats had started a war so they could continue owning human beings, four other states run by Democrats - Virginia, Arkansas, North Carolina and Tennessee - joined their fellow insurrectionists in the effort to maintain slavery.
By June 8, 1861, a total of 11 states run by Democrats had left the Union, but it took about six more weeks for Democrats to start killing people en masse in support of slavery. They waged the first major battle of the Civil War, the first battle of Manassas, on July 21. The Union suffered 2,708 casualties in a battle won by the South. By the end of the war, the Democrats’ fight to preserve slavery left about 620,000 Americans dead.
Some people will complain that this assessment is overly partisan but critics cannot honestly say it’s incorrect. Democrats wanted to keep owning slaves so badly, they were willing to kill people in vast numbers. The chattel slavery defended by Democrats was so evil, New York Magazine writer Eric Levitz noted that we are, “entirely correct to condemn U.S. chattel slavery as a world-historic atrocity.”
The history of violence by Democrats did not end with the Civil War. Democrats formed the Ku Klux Klan as a means of terrorizing freed slaves and whites who defended the freedom of black Americans. Democrat violence continued with Jim Crow laws designed to prevent blacks from participating in society. Democrats are engaged in violence today, with pro-Hamas demonstrations from coast to coast, trans days of vengeance, and other assorted expressions of chaos.
The history of American Democrats is littered with 200 years of violence against those with whom they disagree; it is embedded in their DNA. They are prepared to destroy, injure, and kill to get or preserve whatever they want. That is neither hyperbole nor exaggeration but historical fact. If you doubt this, just watch the news in 2024.
The ‘What was the cause of the Civil War?’ question was asked in Berlin, New Hampshire, and is not likely to be asked again this election cycle. But the important thing to remember is that wars are not caused by policy; wars are caused by people in pursuit of policy. In the case of the Civil War, it was caused by Democrats who wanted to continue slavery. If the subject ever comes up, in any context, the correct response to what caused the bloodiest conflict in American history requires a single word: Democrats.