The White House has been in overdrive over the last few days. In between the growing number of investigations over the Trump campaign's ties to Russia — that's starting to remind people of the Watergate controversy — the administration has been trying to get out of their own way when it comes to Civil War history.

On Tuesday, press secretary Sarah Huckabee Sanders said that "many historians" thought that a "failure to compromise was a cause of the Civil War."

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But filmmaker Ken Burns, who directed a critically acclaimed documentary film about the war, disagreed. The Civil War was caused by slavery, he said.

Sanders was defending Chief of Staff John Kelly, who told Fox News host Laura Ingraham that Robert E. Lee was an "honorable man" and the war — started by the South, who wanted to keep slavery — was caused by a "lack of an ability to compromise."

As Salon noted Tuesday, slavery was pretty much the reason why the South seceded from the United States.

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