John Kelly and Sarah Sanders’s emphasis on “compromise” is part of a larger understanding of the American story, which historians call the “reconciliationist” narrative.” As developed by turn-of-the-century scholars like Ulrich B. Phillips and William Archibald Dunning (father of the influential “Dunning School.”), the reconciliationist narrative told a false, sweeping story about American race relations: that slavery was a mostly benign institution, and antebellum America was bedeviled by fanatical abolitionists committed to the false idea of human equality. The extremism of both the abolitionists and secessionists, the argument goes, prevented any compromise between North and South, which led to the Civil War. After the war, the abolitionists pushed for Reconstruction, which created a corrupt central government and the empowerment of African-Americans who were not ready for democracy. This led to a necessary resistance from the South in the form of the Ku Klux Klan. Peace was achieved only by ending Reconstruction with the Compromise of 1877, leading the white South to be reconciled with the North.
Stated in such bald terms, the reconciliationist narrative seems like pure apologia for the white supremacy. But the major themes of this version of history (the tragedy of failed compromise) often shapes the perception of people who would reject an overt declaration of the neo-Confederate point of view. In early 2016, Hillary Clinton was asked which president she most admired. She chose Lincoln, and offered a view of him that can be described as Reconciliationist Lite. Clinton said:
You know, [Lincoln] was willing to reconcile and forgive. And I don’t know what our country might have been like had he not been murdered, but I bet that it might have been a little less rancorous, a little more forgiving and tolerant, that might possibly have brought people back together more quickly.
But instead, you know, we had Reconstruction, we had the re-instigation of segregation and Jim Crow. We had people in the South feeling totally discouraged and defiant. So, I really do believe he could have very well put us on a different path.
In reality, Lincoln knew that compromise with the slave South was impossible. In his address at Cooper Union on February 27, 1860, Lincoln correctly emphasized that the demands of the slave owning class in the South were beyond reason and could not be satisfied:
The question recurs, what will satisfy them? Simply this: We must not only let them alone, but we must somehow, convince them that we do let them alone. This, we know by experience, is no easy task. We have been so trying to convince them from the very beginning of our organization, but with no success. In all our platforms and speeches we have constantly protested our purpose to let them alone; but this has had no tendency to convince them. Alike unavailing to convince them, is the fact that they have never detected a man of us in any attempt to disturb them.
These natural, and apparently adequate means all failing, what will convince them? This, and this only: cease to call slavery wrong, and join them in calling it right. And this must be done thoroughly - done in acts as well as in words. Silence will not be tolerated - we must place ourselves avowedly with them. Senator Douglas’ new sedition law must be enacted and enforced, suppressing all declarations that slavery is wrong, whether made in politics, in presses, in pulpits, or in private. We must arrest and return their fugitive slaves with greedy pleasure. We must pull down our Free State constitutions. The whole atmosphere must be disinfected from all taint of opposition to slavery, before they will cease to believe that all their troubles proceed from us.
For many decades after the Civil War, the Lincoln view of the conflict was less popular than the reconciliationist narrative. The reason is not hard to find: compromising with racism has always been easier for most white Americans than fighting it. As the historian Peter Novick showed in his definitive book That Noble Dream (1988), the rise of the Dunning School went hand in hand with the popularity of scientific racism and a desire in the North to live in harmony with the Jim Crow South. “But as the [19th] century drew to a close—as a result of a racist downgrading of the Negro, the need for reconciliation of the sections and the desire to strike a posture of impartiality fairness, detachment, and objectivity—the professional historians worked to revise previous northern views of several related questions,” Novick wrote. “They became as harshly critical of the abolitionists as they were of ‘irresponsible agitators’ in the contemporary world, they accepted a considerably softened picture of slavery, and they abandoned theories of the ‘slave power conspiracy.’”