Sarah Huckabee Sanders, the White House press secretary, dismissed suggestions that John F. Kelly’s position implied he would have accepted a resolution to the conflict short of abolition.
John F. Kelly’s suggestion that « compromise” could have stopped the Civil War touched off an angry debate on Tuesday about the meaning of the conflict that served as the latest reminder that the 1860s was not the only time of political polarization in the country’s history.
Mr. Kelly, the White House chief of staff and a retired general who seems to moving from the role of quiet backstage manager to open partisan, told Laura Ingraham of the Fox News Channel on Monday night that “ Robert E. Lee was an honorable man ” who had prioritized his loyalty to Virginia over fealty to the country.
“It was always loyalty to state first back in those days,” Mr. Kelly said, when asked about the decision by a church congregation in Virginia to remove memorials honoring George Washington and Lee, commanding general of the rebel Army of Northern Virginia.
“Now it’s different today,” he said. “But the lack of an ability to compromise led to the Civil War.”
The comments echoed President Trump’s own claim this year that he could have struck a “deal” to prevent the conflict. It elicited an immediate rebuke from many Democrats and some Republicans, who said it played down the moral culpability of the slaveholding South.
“We need to stop relitigating and referencing the Civil War as if there was some moral conundrum,” said Senator Tim Scott of South Carolina, the only black Republican in the Senate. “There was no compromise to make — only a choice between continuing slavery and ending it.”
Asked if the administration stood behind Mr. Kelly’s remarks, Sarah Huckabee Sanders, the White House press secretary, defended the comments. She dismissed suggestions that Mr. Kelly’s position implied that he would have accepted a resolution to the conflict short of abolition as “frankly outrageous and absurd.”
But black leaders say that Mr. Trump has long fostered an atmosphere of racial and political polarization, and exacerbated racial tensions by refusing to forcefully condemn a riot provoked by white supremacists protesting the removal of a monument to Lee in Charlottesville, Va., over the summer.
“At first, Kelly seemed like a reasonable, straight shooter,” said Representative Elijah E. Cummings, a Democrat from Maryland, who is a member of the Congressional Black Caucus. “But now it’s clear that Trump has metastasized, and it’s spread to Kelly. It’s really, really unfortunate.”
In his interview, Mr. Kelly also said he would “never” offer an apology to Representative Frederica S. Wilson, after mischaracterizing as self-aggrandizing the remarks she made at the opening of an F. B. I. field office in Miami a few years ago. Mr. Kelly, whose son was killed in Afghanistan in 2010, took issue with the fact that Ms. Wilson listened in on Mr. Trump’s condolence call with a widow of a soldier killed during a raid in Niger in October.
Ms. Wilson said in an email on Tuesday that Mr. Kelly owed “an apology to me and the American public” — and disputed his claim that a compromise would have prevented the bloodiest conflict in American history.
“It is inconceivable to me that anyone of his age and stature could believe, let alone say aloud, that an inability to compromise is what led to the Civil War,” she wrote. “I’m also curious to hear what kind of compromise he thinks would have been acceptable given the choice between enslaving people and treating them like chattel or returning to them their God-given freedom.”
Jay Winik, author of “April 1865,” a history of the war’s end that highlights Lee’s determination to quickly reunify the country, said that Mr. Kelly’s suggestion that more compromise was needed was nominally true, but that he glossed over the fact that Southern secessionists were unwilling to make the accommodations necessary to avoid war.
“Kelly is right that the image of Robert E. Lee has been perverted in this debate,” Mr. Winik said. “But I think he would have been the first person to say take down these Confederate memorials, so they aren’t a stain and an eyesore, and cause more people pain. He would tread lightly and speak softly.”
Ms. Sanders cited the historian Shelby Foote, who told the documentary filmmaker Ken Burns in 1990 that the war began “because we failed to do the thing we really have a genius for, which is compromise.”
“Because you don’t like history doesn’t mean that you can erase it and pretend that it didn’t happen,” said Ms. Sanders, as reporters pressed her on whether she was suggesting that slavery should have been preserved in the interest of peace.
But Mr. Burns had his own response. “Many factors contributed to the Civil War,” he wrote on Twitter . “One caused it: slavery.”
Ms. Ingraham, a prominent conservative hosting her inaugural show on Fox, also defended Mr. Kelly, saying that his comments reflected the opinions of previous presidents of all political stripes.
“F. D. R. referred to Robert E. Lee as ‘one of our greatest American Christians and one of our greatest American gentlemen,’” she wrote in an email. “John F. Kennedy referred to Lee’s ‘gallant failure, [who] urged those who had followed him in bravery to reunite America in purpose and courage.’”
“I stand with F. D. R. and J. F. K. and so does General Kelly,” she continued.
Ms. Sanders left the White House briefing on Tuesday to a shouted question about whether she supported slavery, an extraordinary moment even in a room that has been an arena to frequent battles between Trump administration officials and the news media.
She turned her back and walked back to her office in silence. She did not want to dignify the question with a response, according to a senior White House aide.
