Although Ulysses S. Grant and Robert E. Lee shook hands at Appomattox Court House in 1865, it seems that arguments over the Civil War will never end. And no bigger argument about America’s internal struggle revolves around why it was started in the first place. We saw the conflict inserted into the 2024 election, as South Carolina Governor Nikki Haley struggled to answer the question of what caused the Civil War.

“When asked a softball question this week about the causes of the Civil War, Haley, a former South Carolina governor, flubbed the answer, calling it a “difficult” question and mumbling on about “basically how government was going to run — the freedoms and what people could and couldn’t do,” wrote Joshua Zeitz with Politico. He added that she walked back the issue, somewhat, in the following days with a press release, saying “Of course the Civil War was about slavery. We know that. That’s unquestioned, always the case. We know the Civil War was about slavery. But it was also more than that. It was about the freedoms of every individual. It was about the role of government.”

John A. Tures is a professor of political science at LaGrange College in Georgia. He can be reached at jtures@lagrange.edu. His Twitter account is @JohnTures2.