Thinks Lack of Compromise Produced the
Civil War
There is one sure way to ruin one's
reputation. Talk about the Civil War in terms other than it was a
conflict to eliminate the blight of racial slavery in the United
States. Mention states rights, or fighting for one's state or any
other apology-like excuse for defending the idea that Africans should
be enslaved and one immediately loses one's moral standing. And that
is what General
Kelly (Ret.), the Chief of Staff of Donnie Trump did.
If, by appearing on Laura Ingraham’s
show on Monday night, John F. Kelly was trying to do damage control
after the indictments of Trump associates earlier in the
day, it did not work.
Instead, Mr. Kelly, the White House
chief of staff, resurrected the debate over Confederate monuments —
previously fueled by his boss, President Trump, over the summer
— and the Confederacy itself. He called Robert E. Lee “an
honorable man who gave up his country to fight for his state,” said
that “men and women of good faith on both sides made their stand
where their conscience had them make their stand,” and argued that
“the lack of an ability to compromise led to the Civil War.”
First of all, appearing on Laura
Ingraham's shows is tantamount to admitting to bigotry and
intolerance. Second, how exactly does one 'compromise' on slavery.
Should people be slaves part of the day? Should people be chosen
from the African American labor pool by random, some to be slaves,
some to be free? And of course a stain on American history is that
until the Civil War there were compromises that allowed slavery to
continue and flourish.
The
Missouri Compromise, in 1820, admitted Missouri to the union as a
slave state; in exchange, it admitted Maine as a free state and
barred slavery in most parts of the Louisiana Purchase territory
north of a specified latitude. The Compromise of 1850 eliminated the
slave trade from Washington, D.C., but also required citizens of free
states to aid in the capture of fugitive slaves. The Kansas-Nebraska
Act, which replaced the Missouri Compromise in 1854, let citizens of
Kansas and Nebraska decide whether to allow slavery.
And, of course, there was the
compromise that aided the very passage of the Constitution: the
Three-Fifths Compromise, which counted slaves as three-fifths of a
person for the purposes of congressional districting.
“If John Kelly isn’t a complete
idiot,” John Hudak, a senior fellow at the Brookings Institution, a
public policy research organization, tweeted late Monday,
“he’s at least 3/5ths of the way there.”
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