'Ignorant': Historians mock Trump claim he would have handled Civil War better than Lincoln

Historians and scholars are criticizing former President Donald Trump over recent comments he made suggesting he could have negotiated a deal with the Confederacy to avoid the Civil War.

In a recent essay for Politico, author Joshua Zeitz commented on how historians were stunned at the former president's speech in Iowa last weekend, in which Trump claimed he would have handled the secession of Southern states and the belligerence of the Confederacy better than Abraham Lincoln.

"The Civil War was so fascinating, so horrible," Trump said in Newton, Iowa. "So many mistakes were made. See, there was something I think could have been negotiated, to be honest with you. I think you could have negotiated that. All the people died, so many people died. You know, that was the disaster."

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"Abraham Lincoln, of course, if he negotiated it, you probably wouldn’t even know who Abraham Lincoln was," Trump added.

Yale professor and historian David Blight referred to Trump's comments as "historically ignorant," and American Historical Association executive director James Grossman said the South's insistence on maintaining the institution of chattel slavery simply "could not be 'negotiated.'"

"[D]eclarations of secession explicitly state that the seceding states were leaving the Union to maintain [slavery] and because many northern states were refusing to return escapees from that regime," Grossman said.

As Zeitz noted, the economy of the antebellum South was based entirely on the forced labor of enslaved human beings, the vast swaths of land they farmed and the crops produced from slave labor. He imagined a scenario in which Lincoln negotiated a compromise with the Confederacy instead of going to war: A proposed deal proffered by then-Sen. John Crittenden of Kentucky would have extended the Missouri Compromise westward to California, which drew a line between slave states and free states, and allowed for one slave state in exchange for every free state admitted to the union.

READ MORE: Black Republican says Haley's Civil War comment doomed her campaign: 'That's over now. She's toast'

"In all likelihood, chattel slavery in North America would have persisted, even grown, well into the 20th century," Zeitz wrote. "It’s easy to imagine the Southern economy humming along, fueled in large part by plantation slavery and aided as it ever was by Northern textile, manufacturing and commercial interests."

"Would [slavery] die out gradually? Unlikely," he continued. "The only plausible program for gradual abolition was compensated emancipation, a scheme by which the government would pay slaveowners to emancipate their enslaved workers. White Southerners bitterly resisted that option... They wanted to keep their slaves. In the end, they lost them to the tide of war, without a dime in compensation."

Trump isn't the only Republican candidate to make widely panned comments about the Civil War. In New Hampshire, former UN ambassador Nikki Haley answered a question about the origins of the Civil War without once mentioning slavery. Of course, then-Confederate States of America Vice President Alexander Stephenson said slavery was the "cornerstone" of the Confederate cause in a speech delivered three days before the attack on Fort Sumter that started the Civil War — in Haley's home state of South Carolina.

READ MORE: George Conway says Nikki Haley's 'slavery' gaffe 'worse' due to Confederate flag removal