While discussing the removal of confederate monuments John Kelly, the White House’s chief of staff, said “the lack of an ability to compromise led to the Civil War.”
In an interview Monday night with Laura Ingraham, host of “The Ingraham Angle” on Fox News, Kelly said Robert E. Lee, Commander of the Confederate States, was a loyal and “honorable man,” and the people at the time were loyal to their state before their country.
“Men and women of good faith on both sides made their stand where their conscience had them make their stand,” Kelly said in the interview.
Monday night, Kelly said the removal of plaques in a Virginia church of former President George Washington and Confederate General Robert E. Lee would be a lack of appreciation for history.
“Well, history’s history,” Kelly said in the interview. “There are certain things in history that were not so good and other things that were very, very good.”
Kelly said taking the morals and values of today and applying them to hundreds of years ago is wrong.
“I think we make a mistake, though, and as a society, and certainly as individuals, when we take what is today accepted as right and wrong and go back 100, 200, 300 years or more and say ‘what Christopher Columbus did was wrong,’” Kelly said in the interview. “Five hundred years later, it’s inconceivable to me that you would take what we think now and apply it back then.”
Daniel Sutherland, president of The Society of Civil War Historians and history professor at the University of Arkansas, said he agreed with Kelly’s statement, but also said it was referring to expansion, not slavery.
“Politicians were able to find middle ground on the issue for at least a generation,” Sutherland said. “But a series of unbridgeable divides between North and South arose in the 1850s.”
Sutherland said he believed the rise of the Republican Party led to the end of a practical approach in politics and was a reason for the Civil War.
Susan O’Donovan, a history professor at the University of Memphis, said protecting slavery was a top priority for secessionists.
“Historians are generally in agreement these days that slavery is the issue that led to the Civil War,” O’Donovan said. “One only need read the Mississippi Declaration of Secession to know that the preservation of slavery was foremost on secessionists’ minds.”
She said Kelly’s remark dismissed the entirety of the slave population who would not be satisfied until slavery was gone.
“Any compromise that left any part of slavery intact was the last thing they wanted,” O’Donovan said. “They wanted immediate and unconditional freedom.”
O’Donovan said the idea of compromising would be simplifying the situation, and she believed Kelly should be cautious with making remarks such as that.
“To claim that the Civil War happened because of a failure to compromise is an example of reductive reasoning that, furthermore, assumes that compromise was a viable solution,” O’Donovan said.
O’Donovan said the war and secession marked the end of an effort to reach compromise.
“Sometimes, compromise simply will not work,” O’Donovan said.
