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Republican presidential candidate Vivek Ramaswamy took a jibe at fellow conservative Nikki Haley for skipping the mention of ‘slavery’ as the cause of the American Civil War.

Speaking at a town hall in Berlin, New Hampshire, a voter asked Nikki Haley, “What was the cause of the United States Civil War?”

“Well, don’t come up with an easy question or anything,” Haley replied. “I mean, I think the cause of the Civil War was basically how the government was going to run. The freedoms and what people could and couldn’t do.”

Nikki Haley then counter-questioned the man on the subject, who replied that he was not the one running for president and wished instead to know her answer.

“In the year 2023, it’s astonishing to me that you answer that question without mentioning the word slavery,” the man said.

“What do you want me to say about slavery?” Haley retorted, before abruptly moving on to the next question.

Her remarks drew flak from the public as well as fellow Republicans. In a post on X (formerlt Twitter), Vivek Ramaswamy said, “I think she mistook him for a Super PAC donor.”

Super PACs (Political Action Committees) are independent expenditure-only committees that can raise and spend unlimited amounts of money in support of a candidate or political cause, as long as they do not directly coordinate with the candidate or campaign they are supporting. Super PACs can receive donations from individuals, corporations, unions, and other entities, and they are known for playing a significant role in the financing of political campaigns in the United States.

Florida Governor Ron DeSantis’ campaign recirculated on X the video of the exchange with the caption “Yikes”.

“Sorry, [Haley]. The Civil War was about slavery. Period,” Rep Dean Phillips (D-Minn.), who is running for the Democratic nomination for president, tweeted.

Later, Nikki Haley told a local radio channel, The Pulse of NH, “Of course the Civil War was about slavery, that’s the easy part. Yes, I know it was about slavery. I am from the South.”

This is not the first time Nikki Haley has been pressed on the origin of the Civil War. During her run for governor in 2010, in an interview with a now-defunct activist group then known as The Palmetto Patriots, Haley described the war as a conflict between two disparate sides fighting for “tradition” and “change.” She said that the Confederate flag was “not something that is racist.”

In that same campaign, Haley dismissed the need for the flag to come down from the Statehouse grounds, portraying her Democratic rival’s push for its removal as a desperate political stunt.

South Carolina’s Ordinance of Secession—the 1860 proclamation by the state government outlining its reasons for seceding from the Union—mentions slavery in its opening sentence and points to the “increasing hostility on the part of the non-slaveholding States to the institution of slavery” as a reason for the state removing itself from the Union.

With inputs from agencies