During his appearance on Joe Rogan Experience #2438, musician John Mellencamp made controversial claims about the American Civil War. The 74-year-old rock icon stated that the war was fought over ports rather than slavery, and claimed that Abraham Lincoln personally owned enslaved people.
When discussing politics and American history, Mellencamp told Joe Rogan: “What do you think the Civil War was fought about?”
After Rogan responded that slavery was a big factor, Mellencamp disagreed, saying “Ports.” He explained his theory: “They fought over ports. The port in Savannah, Georgia was the biggest port in America. And the ports in Boston, New York were struggling. And the North said, ‘Hey, why don’t you guys send some of that our way?'”
According to Mellencamp’s account, when the South refused, the North decided to take the ports by force but needed public support. “How are we going to get the American people to get behind that? Slaves. We’ll say it’s to free the slaves,” he claimed, adding that “nobody cared about black people” during that era.
Most significantly, when Rogan questioned whether Lincoln had enslaved people during the 1860s while serving as president, Mellencamp responded affirmatively. Rogan then consulted Perplexity AI, which provided clear historical information: “Abraham Lincoln never personally owned slaves. This is according to mainstream historical scholarship.”
The AI explained that Lincoln was born in Kentucky and raised in Indiana and Illinois as a non-slave owner, working as a laborer, lawyer, and politician. Claims about Lincoln inheriting or ordering the sale of enslaved people “hinge on a small number of contested documents and are rejected by most specialists in Lincoln studies.”
The historical consensus is clear: while economic factors including trade and tariffs played roles in sectional tensions, slavery was the central cause of the Civil War. This is documented extensively in secession declarations from Confederate states, which explicitly cited the preservation of slavery as their primary motivation.
Mellencamp’s comments on Rogan are not an isolated incident. The musician has previously drawn backlash for provocative and poorly supported claims in other public conversations, including a tense exchange with Bill Maher on Club Random.
During that appearance on Maher’s podcast, Mellencamp argued that only “1 or 2 percent” of Black Americans today live better lives than enslaved people did, a statement Maher immediately challenged as absurd. Pressed on the number, Mellencamp admitted he had “pulled it out of [his] a**,” yet continued to defend the broader sentiment.
Mellencamp, who mentioned he lives in the South and bases his understanding partly on regional perspectives, appears to have absorbed a revisionist interpretation of Civil War history that minimizes slavery’s central role in the conflict.
