Republican presidential candidate Nikki Haley was asked Wednesday by a New Hampshire voter about the reason for the Civil War, and she didn’t mention slavery in her response — leading the voter to say he was “astonished” by her omission.
Asked during a town hall in Berlin, New Hampshire, what she believed had caused the war — the first shots of which were fired in her home state of South Carolina — Haley talked about the role of government, replying that it involved “the freedoms of what people could and couldn't do.”
She then turned the question back to the man who had asked it, who replied that he was not the one running for president and wished instead to know her answer.
After Haley went into a lengthier explanation about the role of government, individual freedom and capitalism, the questioner seemed to admonish Haley, saying, “In the year 2023, it’s astonishing to me that you answer that question without mentioning the word slavery.”
“What do you want me to say about slavery?" Haley retorted, before abruptly moving on to the next question.
Haley, who served six years as South Carolina's governor, has been competing for a distant second place to Donald Trump for the 2024 Republican presidential nomination. She 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” in the Feb. 24 primary.
The campaign of Florida Gov. Ron DeSantis, another of Haley's GOP foes, recirculated video of the exchange on social media, adding the comment, “Yikes.”
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The exchange also drew response from President Joe Biden, who shared the video on X with the statement: "It was about slavery."
Haley's campaign did not immediately return a message seeking comment on her response, but the presidential hopeful appeared on local New Hampshire radio station The Pulse of NH on Thursday morning and addressed her response.
"Of course the Civil War was about slavery," Haley said. "We know that. That’s the easy part of it. What I was saying was what does it mean to us today. What it means to us today is about freedom."
"That’s what that was all about. It was about individual freedom. It was about economic freedom. It was about individual rights. Our goal is to make sure, no, we never go back to slavery but what’s the lesson in all of that? That we need to make sure that every person has freedom of speech, freedom of religion, freedom to do and be anything they want to be without anyone in government getting in the way."
"Yes I know it was about slavery. I’m from the South. Of course you know it’s about slavery."
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 following 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 the flag 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.
On Wednesday night, 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, of Haley. “She’s just as MAGA as Trump,” Spain added, referring to Trump's ”Make America Great Again" slogan.
Jaime Harrison, current chairman of the Democratic National Committee and South Carolina's party chairman 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.”
Editor's note: This story has been updated to add Nikki Haley's comments during her appearance on The Pulse of NH.
