On Saturday, former US President Donald Trump made the argument that “negotiation” may have prevented the Civil War, contending that Abraham Lincoln ought to have done more to avert carnage and that the struggle to abolish slavery in the US was ultimately pointless.
“There were a lot of errors made. To be honest with you, there was something that I believe could have been negotiated,” Trump remarked during a Newton, Iowa, campaign stop. That could have been resolved, in my opinion. Everyone perished. So many individuals lost their lives.
The former president made these remarks a little over a week before Iowa’s first-ever presidential caucuses, where he leads Florida Governor Ron DeSantis and former South Carolina Governor Nikki Haley handily in the polls.
Unexpectedly, the Civil War has come up during the GOP primary campaign. More than a week before Trump’s remarks, Haley responded to a query on the origins of the Civil War without bringing up slavery, which was the main cause of the conflict. Since then, she has apologized many times, claiming that she assumed the information was obvious.
Trump didn’t mention or respond to Haley’s comments in his speech.
There were several attempts to settle to preserve the Union before the start of the Civil War. However, a compromise was not possible to resolve the issue of slavery in the South, and the country ended up at war with itself. Trump described the war as “so horrible but so fascinating,” but he did not elaborate on how he would have stopped it.
Trump remarked of the conflict, “I don’t know, it was just different.” “I just discovered it; I find it so visually appealing.”
“There’s nothing nice about it,” Trump remarked after detailing the injuries soldiers received in combat, calling the war a “tough one for our country.”
Furthermore, he implied that “if he negotiated it,” Lincoln would not have the same historical cachet.
Former Republican Representative Liz Cheney criticized Trump’s social media views, questioning how Republicans who had backed the outgoing president could “possibly defend this?”
In the Civil War, which front “could have been negotiated”? the portion about slavery? The part about secession? Was it right for Lincoln to keep the Union intact? Cheney penned. “I have a question for members of the Lincolnesque party, the GOP: How can you possibly defend this endorsement of Donald Trump?”
Lincoln is often cited by contemporary Republicans as a hero—a Republican hero—for his part in keeping the Union together when the South wanted to secede rather than abolish slavery.
