DeSantis camp slams Nikki Haley’s slavery comments months after Florida’s own controversy

The DeSantis campaign is denouncing GOP presidential rival Nikki Haley for failing to cite slavery as a cause of the Civil War, but critics were quick to recall Gov. Ron DeSantis’ own controversy from the summer on the history of American slavery.

“Maybe you should sit this one out,” wrote Carlos Guillermo Smith, a former Democratic state representative from Orlando and current state Senate candidate, addressing the DeSantis campaign’s comments.

Haley, the former governor of South Carolina, the first state to secede from the union in 1860, said in response to a questioner in New Hampshire on Wednesday that the cause of the war “was basically how government was going to run. The freedoms and what people could and couldn’t do.”

“We need to have capitalism, we need to have economic freedom, we need to make sure that we do all things so that individuals have the liberties, so that they can have freedom of speech, freedom of religion, freedom to do or be anything they want to be without government getting in the way,” she continued.

“In the year 2023, it’s astonishing to me that you’d answer that question without mentioning the word ‘slavery,’” the questioner said, to which Haley responded, “What do you want me to say about slavery?”

Her answer drew widespread criticism, including from President Joe Biden. “It was about slavery,” he wrote on X, the former Twitter.

The DeSantis War Room account also jumped in, posting a video of her “disastrous town hall” and writing, “Haley inexplicably does not mention slavery in her response.”

“It’s been 12 hours and Nikki Haley still hasn’t offered an explanation for her comments,” the War Room account wrote on Thursday morning. “What’s the hold up?”

Haley did backtrack later on Thursday, saying, “Of course the civil war was about slavery. We know that. That is unquestioned, always the case.”

But, she added, “it was also more than that. It was about the freedoms of every individual. It was about the role of government.” She also alleged the questioner was a Democratic plant.

DeSantis campaign mired in controversies over slavery, anti-gay video, alleged Nazi symbol

DeSantis, though, faced his own uproar on the subject in July after the state Board of Education approved Black history standards that included teaching “how slaves developed skills which, in some instances, could be applied for their personal benefit.”

“How is it that anyone could suggest that in the midst of these atrocities that there was any benefit to being subjected to this level of dehumanization?” Vice President Kamala Harris said shortly afterward at an event in Jacksonville.

The DeSantis campaign initially responded with a statement that Democrats were “obsessed with Florida” and were lying about the standards.

Two members of the workgroup that put together the standards then released a statement listing some individual blacksmiths, shoemakers and shipping industry workers they claimed were examples of slaves who benefited from developing skills.

But at least four of the individuals they listed were likely born free, the Tampa Bay Times reported, while others were children when slavery ended.

DeSantis appeared to take a pass on the responsibility for the standards, saying at a campaign event, “I didn’t do it. I wasn’t involved in it. … These were scholars who put that together. It was not anything that was done politically.”

But at the same time, he added, “They’re probably going to show some of the folks that eventually parlayed, you know, being a blacksmith into doing things later in life.”

DeSantis’ then-primary rival, U.S. Sen. Tim Scott, R-South Carolina, was one of several Black Republican Congress members to criticize the standards, including U.S. Reps. Byron Donalds, R-Naples, John James, R-Mich., and Wesley Hunt, R-Texas.

“What slavery was really about was separating families, about mutilating humans and even raping their wives,” Scott said. “It was just devastating. So I would hope that every person in our country — and certainly running for president — would appreciate that.”

Reaction to the DeSantis War Room’s criticism of Haley on Wednesday cited the controversy and slammed the campaign as hypocritical.

Austin Ahlman of the Open Markets Institute wrote that “sliding into a feeble third place has apparently given the DeSantis team a newfound appreciation for the legacy of slavery.”

Recent polls in New Hampshire have placed DeSantis behind Haley and former President Donald Trump. The 538 poll average has Trump in first with 44%, Haley second with about 26% and DeSantis well behind at less than 8%.

The DeSantis campaign’s blast at Haley also received criticism from the right, with many replies to the post defending Haley’s initial answer. “BTW DeSantis War Room, you are in a REPUBLICAN primary,” one person wrote. “Your tweet was not a good one.”