In an interview with conservative media host Laura Ingraham on Fox News on Monday, White House Chief of Staff John F. Kelly remarked that “the lack of an ability to compromise led to the Civil War.”
He’d been asked to comment on the the decision of an Episcopal church in Alexandria, Va. to remove a plaque honoring Confederate General Robert E. Lee. It was a simple question, one that any public official should have known how to politely bat away. But instead, Kelly chose to offer up a critique. “I would tell you that Robert E. Lee was an honorable man,” Kelly said. “He was a man that gave up his country to fight for his state, which 150 years ago was more important than country. It was always loyalty to state first back in those days. Now it’s different today. But the lack of an ability to compromise led to the Civil War, and men and women of good faith on both sides made their stand where their conscience had them make their stand.”
You can almost hear Carole Emberton, an associate professor of history at the University at Buffalo and Civil War expert, shaking her head in this opinion piece. “By blaming a failure of compromise for the Civil War, Kelly repeated a well-worn tenet of the Lost Cause narrative that valorizes the Confederacy and its leaders like Lee,” she says. “[I]t was slavery, and the refusal of Southern slaveholders to compromise on slavery, that launched the Civil War.”
Journalist Philip Bump interviewed two historians about the remarks, who called them alternatively, “strange,” “highly provocative,” “dangerous” and “kind of depressing.” Said Stephanie McCurry, a history professor at Columbia University and author, “It’s the Jim Crow version of the causes of the Civil War. I mean, it tracks all of the major talking points of this pro-Confederate view of the Civil War.”
Bump is still getting hate mail for his piece.
Television writer, former lawyer, and humorist Kashana Cauley, dropped more knowledge than spit-takes in this terrific read. “To argue that the Civil War came about because Americans couldn’t compromise on whether black slaves were truly people or not would require us to ignore at least six other major compromises on slavery,” she begins, before bringing us up to today.
The Civil War ended slavery, but the legacy of all the prewar compromising on black people’s rights sparked new fights: the fleeting freedoms of Reconstruction; the punishing hand of Jim Crow; the limited triumphs of the civil rights movement; the quiet indignities of practices like racially restrictive covenants, which allowed homeowners to place terminology in property deeds to restrict ownership by race; and redlining, which reduced the value of homes in black neighborhoods compared with their white counterparts.
The Civil War ended slavery, but the legacy of all the prewar compromising on black people’s rights sparked new fights: the fleeting freedoms of Reconstruction; the punishing hand of Jim Crow; the limited triumphs of the civil rights movement; the quiet indignities of practices like racially restrictive covenants, which allowed homeowners to place terminology in property deeds to restrict ownership by race; and redlining, which reduced the value of homes in black neighborhoods compared with their white counterparts.
And that’s precisely why misinformation about our own history is so dangerous. In our quest to soothe unexamined, largely white feelings about our difficult past, we have continued to perpetuate harmful practices that were designed to favor one race and to undermine, control and destroy another.
Success is no remedy. Even today, when an African American enters an inner circle of personal or professional power however they define it, it’s very hard to shake the feeling that it is anything but a temporary reprieve.
Without a serious commitment to truth and reconciliation, it is hard to imagine diversity efforts becoming anything other than beautiful frosting on a toxic cupcake.
Any of the good work that happens in the boardroom must be supported by real work in the classroom and the newsroom, in church basements, at family suppers and at the polls. If political figures won’t speak truth to their powerful bases, the job must fall to us.