John Kelly expressed regrets that the US didn't reach some sort of "compromise" about slavery in 1860.

This is the same false-equivalence veil for bigotry that the troll has used.

The US Congress made a series of compromises over slavery in the decades preceding the Civil War. (See the Missouri Compromise in Wikipedia.) The effect of these compromises was to perpetuate slavery, and that would have been true in 1860, 1880, 1900, and 2000 if the North hadn't said "No more compromises."