President-elect Bush’s nominee for interior secretary once praised Confederate soldiers who died defending “the sovereignty of their state” against federal efforts to abolish slavery.
Gale Norton, a former Colorado attorney general, didn’t come out in favor of slavery in her 1996 speech at the Independence Institute, a conservative Colorado think tank.
But she said a monument in a Virginia cemetery gave her the idea that Southern soldiers fought the Civil War not for slavery, but to defend states’ rights.
“It said, ‘In memory of all the Virginia soldiers who died in defense of the sovereignty of their state.’ It really took me aback,” Norton said in the speech, posted on the Independence Institute’s Web site (www.i2i.org).
That the South wanted to keep slavery amounts to “bad facts” in the argument that the federal government has too much control over state governments, Norton said.
“We lost too much,” Norton said, apparently referring to the Civil War’s outcome. “We lost the idea that the states were to stand against the federal government gaining too much control over our lives.”
Environmental groups are seizing upon Norton’s speech as evidence that she’s too extreme to hold the job of overseeing federal lands.
Norton’s views “are out of the mainstream even of conservative legal thinking,” said Doug Kendall, executive director of the Community Rights Council, which defends local governments in property-rights cases.
Kendall and Kenneth Cook, president of another Washington interest group, the Environmental Working Group, want Norton to explain her speech.
“Who is ‘we’ in the phrase ‘we lost too much’ and what specifically was ‘lost’ when the Confederacy lost and slavery ended in 1865?” they asked.
Norton has not spoken out about her speech. But a longtime aide told The Washington Post that Norton was not nostalgic about slavery or advocating secession.
“She was saying that people have laid down their lives in support of states’ rights. That’s the difference between the southern and northern perspectives in the Civil War,” said Marti Allbright, who was Norton’s chief deputy in the Colorado attorney general’s office.