Why Trump Thinks the Civil War Was Negotiable

By Dan McLaughlin

Monday, January 08, 2024

 

The latest controversy over remarks made by Donald Trump arises from this: “The Civil War was so fascinating, so horrible. So many mistakes were made. See, there was something I think could have been negotiated, to be honest with you. I think you could have negotiated that. All the people died, so many people died. You know, that was the disaster.” Trump has been wading back into the topic of the Civil War of late, apparently in response to Nikki Haley’s stumbling over the question of its causes.

 

There’s a temptation to get into an ideological debate over what Trump meant, as illustrated by this piece from Marianne LeVine in the Washington Post. For that matter, a debate erupted in 2017 between John Kelly, then Trump’s chief of staff, and Virginia senator Tim Kaine, Hillary Clinton’s former running mate, when Kelly argued that “the lack of an ability to compromise led to the Civil War” and Kaine responded, “The Civil War wasn’t because of a lack of compromise. The Civil War was because of an immoral compromise.”

 

There is, in fact, an extensive and multifaceted historical debate going back all the way to the 1860s over whether the Civil War was avoidable, when (if it was avoidable) it turned the corner to being inevitable, and whether the good that came out of the war — chiefly the end of slavery and the immediate emancipation of nearly 4 million slaves — could have been accomplished without war. Certainly, a great many people (including Abraham Lincoln, William Seward, Jefferson Davis, John Crittenden, Stephen Douglas, James Buchanan, and the four then-living ex-presidents) made sincere efforts in 1860–61 to negotiate something that would have headed off secession and war — even to the point of contemplating a constitutional amendment guaranteeing the right to own slaves in the states where it was already legal.

 

It is also clear that the whole decade-plus period from the Mexican War to the Civil War was characterized by a breakdown in all of the mechanisms by which Americans are supposed to use peaceable means to resolve conflicts short of war. While the pro-slavery forces were the greater offenders in that regard, there was enough fault to go around in all factions. Had it been possible to avoid war, the time to do so was probably before one or more of the watershed events — John Brown’s 1859 raid, the 1858 Lecompton constitution fight, the 1857 Dred Scott decision, the 1856 assault on Charles Sumner, the 1854 Kansas–Nebraska Act, or perhaps the Mexican War itself.

 

Every war is both a crime and a tragedy, and the question for historians is whether the crime is by one side or both. For generations, the standard American history taught in schools treated the war mainly as a tragedy of “brother against brother” and emphasized the virtue of post-war reconciliation. Ken Burns’s 1990 Civil War miniseries, which by no means underplayed the reality of slavery, was nonetheless saturated in this spirit of regret for a war that killed three-quarters of a million people — most of them raised as Americans and professing to believe in the same American values. Much of the tolerance for honoring the Confederacy and its “heroes” arose from the laudable instinct to reconcile the country and avoid the kind of enduring bitterness that has characterized never-ending conflicts throughout the Eastern Hemisphere. Mercy and forgiveness are, by themselves, good things, after all. That narrative has been largely overturned in the past three decades by a more intensive focus on the fundamental justice of exterminating slavery, and by the concern that the reconciliation of white Southerners with the rest of the country was accomplished in good part at the expense of black Southerners. So, there’s a natural tendency to project onto Trump’s remarks some of the ideological freight of that debate.

 

Maybe that’s part of his thinking; as I’ve often noted, there is hardly anything less productive than debating the state of mind of Donald Trump. But the Occam’s razor answer is that Trump thinks the causes of the Civil War were negotiable because he thinks everything is always negotiable. It’s why he still claims he could get Vladimir Putin in a room and settle the war in Ukraine in an afternoon. He spent his whole adult life negotiating deals and made it his personal ethos. Everything he says is animated by his effort to strengthen his bargaining position (or at least, he thinks it is). Trump’s disinterest in truth and falsity, his demands for loyalty as a one-way street, his disdain for rules, laws, and institutional norms, his instinct for people’s weaknesses and pressure points — these are all symptoms of his tendency to look at everything through the lens of bargaining. Even history itself.