Sometimes it isn’t what you do say, but what you don’t that gets you in trouble. Republican presidential candidate Nikki Haley found that out last week when asked by a voter about the cause of the American Civil War . She answered that it “was basically [about] how government was going to run — the freedoms and what people could and couldn’t do.”

Haley received an avalanche of criticism for not even mentioning, much less highlighting, slavery as the conflict’s cause. Perhaps she meant to include it among “the freedoms,” though that was far from clear in the context of the answer.

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She should have said, and she did later affirm, that the Civil War’s ultimate cause was human bondage. The states that tried to leave the Union certainly had other complaints. They had objected to high tariffs for decades. Those tariffs only helped Northern industry while both raising prices on Southern consumers and hiking retaliatory tariffs in other........

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