States’ Rights for Slavery and Abortion?

Presidential candidate Nikki Haley was asked by a voter in Berlin, New Hampshire, “What was the cause of the United States Civil War?”

She treated it as some kind of trick question. After three rounds back and forth, she never mentioned the word “slavery.” Obviously, she did not want to alienate racists in her base. Whether she has many or few racist fans, she managed to alienate anyone else who has a passing knowledge of U.S. history.

She said it was all about government and freedom. She said, “Government doesn’t need to tell you how to live your life. They don’t need to tell you what you can and can’t do. They don’t need to be a part of your life.”

A very peculiar view of government. Government does many things and one of them indeed is to regulate behavior. Everything from parking and speed limits to stealing and murder. She is one who wants to extend government interference into the most personal matters.

Notably, as a member of the South Carolina legislature in 2010, NBC News reported, “Haley co-sponsored a bill proposing that life begins at fertilization, with due process and equal protection both applying to embryos, essentially imposing a complete ban on abortion.” Little has changed in Haley’s outlook since then. 

Paul Krugman wrote a fascinating New York Times piece that connects these issues. Krugman claimed that at the time of the Civil War there really was not much of an Abolitionist movement. The Northern states one by one abolished slavery in their territory. The Southern states continued to allow human beings to be treated as property with no rights whatsoever.

Many Southerners today claim the war was about “States’ Rights.” True, but not for the reason they claim. There was no federal government movement to outlaw slavery in the South. The Northern states were OK with allowing slavery in the South. But they protested when the Southern states wanted to force the Northern states to be their slave patrol and return escaped slaves to the South.

The South also wanted to force some new western states to be slave states. THAT is what started the Civil War. The South did not respect the States’ Rights of the North or West.

President Lincoln only issued the Emancipation Proclamation on January 1, 1863 – almost two years after the start of the Civil War. I grew up in D.C. and was astonished that the Lincoln Memorial just says that he “Saved the Union.” It quotes him keeping the country together after the war saying, “with malice towards none; charity for all” asking Northerners not to seek vengeance for a war that killed some 620,000 Americans; about as many as died in the Revolutionary War, the War of 1812, the Mexican War, the Spanish American War, World War I, World War II, and the Korean War combined. 

We now see the same thing happening with reproductive rights for women. For almost fifty years since Roe v. Wade gave women their rights in 1973, the anti-reproductive rights people claimed it was all about States’ Rights. The Supreme Court overturned Roe in 2022, giving states the right to take away reproductive rights from women. About half the U.S. states either banned abortions or tried to do so.

But now there is a new twist. Some states are realizing that women are going to free states and getting abortions there. They want the U.S. government to ban this freedom of travel and/or all abortion. Does this sound familiar?

The majority of Americans support reproductive freedom. One after another, states are passing propositions to guarantee these rights. But those who used to go on about States’ Rights suddenly want the federal government to outlaw abortion everywhere. Is this the start of a new Civil War?

Few Americans vote purely on a single issue. Millions who voted for abortion rights at a state level also voted for Trump, who is responsible for taking away reproductive rights.

One more note about slavery. Do you know when slavery officially ended? Do you think it was on Juneteenth (June 19, 1865), when Major General Gordon Granger ordered the final enforcement of the Emancipation Proclamation in Texas? Not quite. It was right after Pearl Harbor in 1941. More about that another time.