Ahem.
There would seem
to be, upon consideration, a great number of truisms which one might fairly
apply to the political culture of the United States of America without any need
to make qualified admission to time, place, or context. They are fact, they
have always been fact, they will always be fact, or so it would seem. Americans
hate taxes, for example. Now and again they have been convinced of their
necessity, but their first impulse, as a people, seems always to a kind of
moral outrage towards the very idea that their hard-earned money should have to
pay for something not of their choosing. Americans love a war hero, it might
also be said, even when they have mixed feelings about the war itself. A
willingness to shed blood for the nation, even in the service of a questionable
cause, almost never fails to elicit respect and devotion among the American
people. Indeed, many a political career has been founded on exactly this
phenomenon. And then, of course, there is the matter of the Founders. Americans
love them, love to quote them, love to draft them into their arguments. The
average American may not know very much about the life and career of Thomas
Jefferson, his political philosophy, or his policy positions, but they know
enough to pay heed to the speaker when his name is invoked. As often the
speaker seems to know as little as their audience, but this hardly seems to
matter. The Founders are not people, with flaws, and biases, spotty judgement,
and moral failings. At best, they are icons to be beatified and worshiped. At
worst, they are implements with which to bludgeon one’s opponents. In either
case, they are not human beings.
Not, at least,
in the way they are most often talked about. I can only hope that this series
has offered a useful counterpoint to this tendency. Treating the Founders like
deities or blunt instruments is destructive to understanding how and why they
did what they did. They were people, they tried their best, they made mistakes.
Possessed of this knowledge, the United States of America as a concept becomes
a fair bit less anxiety-inducing and a fair bit easier to live with from one
day to the next. The nation was not created by gods and then handed down to
mortal successors who must invariably fail to live up to or even understand the
motives and intentions of these otherworldly figures. Rather, it was created by
human beings who didn’t always have all the answers but hoped, all evidence to
the contrary notwithstanding, that they and their descendants might conceivably
make things work. This might not seem like the most inspiring truth by which to
live – embracing, as it does, the imperfection of humankind – but it is most
definitely preferable to the alternative. Better, I think, to understand that your
nation was created by people as imperfect as you are than to drive yourself to
distraction trying to live in strict accordance with a set of painfully flawed
ideas all because you’ve convinced yourself that they represent the objective,
universal truth. Forgive me for seeming to do the opposite of what I say, but
this latter course seems rather far afield of what the Founders wanted for
their countrymen.
The funny thing is, of course, that this idea
– that the Founders are less people and more rhetorical devices – has been in
circulation in the United States of America since the Founders themselves were
still running the show. From almost the moment that the Constitution took full
effect in the late summer of 1789, exceptionally intense debates began to take
shape concerning the “true significance” of this or that article, or clause, or
sentence, or grammatical construction. People who were not in attendance at the
Philadelphia Convention nonetheless claimed to know for certain what was
intended by the use of the words “necessary and proper” in Article I, Section
8, and argued vehemently with anyone who dared to disagree. People who were in
attendance, but who disagreed on how a given power was to be deployed in
practice, likewise claimed a special knowledge, and argued just as vehemently
with each other. Complete agreement on the subject was exceptionally uncommon.
All that everyone seemed to be sure of was that their interpretation was the
right one. Granted, people were more willing, in those days, to see the
Constitution for what it was: a flawed attempt to create a stable government
for the American republic. The number of amendments they collectively agreed to
– fully twelve between 1790 and 1804 – would seem to speak to this
understanding. But a pattern was set all the same. Arguing about the meaning of
the Constitution and the intentions of its authors had become a foundational
aspect of American political culture.
Enter, on that
note, one John C. Calhoun (1782-1850). He has appeared in these pages before,
as both an ardent nationalist and a vehement defenders of the rights of the
states, and most recently figured into the previous series as the principle
opponent of President Andrew Jackson during the so-called Nullification Crisis
(1828-1833). Calhoun, among other things, famously articulated his own particular
vision of how the Constitution was supposed to function in the form of the
South Carolina Exposition and Protest (1828). This, too, was discussed in the
previous series, but really only by way of context. The subject at hand was
Jackson, his understanding of executive authority, and the various incidents
which caused him to convert his convictions into policy. But Calhoun, in truth,
is just as significant to the history of American political culture as was Old
Hickory himself. Jackson digested, processed, and reshaped existing attitudes
towards the nature of presidential power in ways that would continue to
reverberate for the better part of the century that would follow his tenure in
office. Just so, Calhoun re-framed the established tradition of constitutional
interpretation – particularly as concerned the balance of power between the
states and the federal government – in ways that would resonate for generations
to come. Bearing this in mind, certain question would seem to warrant
investigation on the subject of Calhoun’s theory of constitutional sovereignty.
Namely, as specifically concerns the South Carolina Exposition and Protest, what
is it that he said, why does it matter, and how does it fit into the
well-established American tradition of treating the Founders as though their
words were carved in stone?
This, of course,
is usually where the discussion shifts to a kind of biographical overview. What
better way to begin to understand the perspective of a historical actor then by
examining the experiences that shaped and tested them? Calhoun will receive
this treatment as well, rest assured. First, however, a qualification. There
are many things which the various members of the Founding Generation did over
the course of their lives which went entirely beyond what in any age should be
thought of as morally acceptable. They have not always been mentioned, it is
true, in the discussions which form the substance of this series, mostly
because they have not always been pertinent to the subject at hand. But this
should not be taken as some manner of pardon. George Washington, Thomas
Jefferson, and James Madison, all of whom have been written about here at
length – and in often complementary terms, it must be said – were all also
guilty of having owned human beings. Nothing they accomplished will ever wash
this stain from their records. Their contributions to the cause of “American
liberty” cannot erase the crime, or make it seem to be anything less than the
unforgivable offense that it is. They are important men, most definitely, and
worthy of study and scholarship. And let no one say that they were exceptional
among their contemporaries for having claimed to possess the bodies of wholly
innocent men and women. But the fact remains, notwithstanding their willingness
to admit that the institution of slavery was vile, cruel, and arbitrary, that
they should have been better. They should have done better. This has not been
said often enough in these pages.
As to how this relates to John C. Calhoun, the
answer is a fairly simple one. The likes of Washington, Jefferson, and Madison,
while all lifelong slaveowners, tended not to celebrate the institution or
advocate for its spread beyond the states in which it appeared to be
economically essential. They did little to alleviate the suffering that chattel
slavery caused, of course, but nor were they among its most vehement defenders.
In this way, perhaps, it becomes easier to forget the magnitude of the harm
they caused to countless individuals bought and sold. John C. Calhoun, on the
other hand, was not a sensitive, repentant, hand-wringing slaveowner. He did
not bemoan the dubious necessity of owning human beings while simultaneously
doing little to lessen the suffering that said ownership caused. On the
contrary, and quite famously, he argued that slavery was an unmitigated boon. “Never
before has the black race of Central Africa,” he notoriously asserted in a Senate
speech delivered on February 6th, 1837, “From the dawn of history to the
present day, attained a condition so civilized and so improved, not only
physically, but morally and intellectually [.]” Slavery was sanctioned by
scripture, Calhoun argued. It was practiced in ancient Greece and in the Roman
Republic. Far from being incompatible with the attainment of true greatness, it
accordingly seemed essential to the same. Access to an exceptionally cheap and
plentiful source of labor effectively freed slaveholders to cultivate their
mental, spiritual, and artistic faculties, the end result of which was the
development of a rich and varied culture from which all its members stood to
benefit. And at the same time, proximity to such enlightened civilizations
afforded slaves the ability to transcend their “savage” origins by a course of
mimicry and education. Indeed, Calhoun concluded, wherever, “Two races of
different origin, and distinguished by color, and other physical differences,
as well as intellectual, are brought together, the relation now existing in the
slaveholding States between the two, is, instead of an evil, a good—a positive
good.”
It should not need to be argued that
Calhoun was emphatically incorrect. There is not, nor can there ever be, any
means by which the ownership of human beings might possibly be justified. That
he nevertheless attempted to claim otherwise would accordingly seem to warrant
a particularly strident disclaimer for the discussion that is to follow.
Calhoun was not worse than George Washington, or Thomas Jefferson, or James
Madison on the spectrum of prominent American slaveholders. Indeed, there is no
spectrum. Owning slaves is unforgivable, period. It’s just that Calhoun is more
strongly associated with attempts to defend the institution of slavery than any
of the Founders. They were selfish cowards who were simultaneously willing to admit
the evil of slavery but unwilling to take any action which would have
threatened their material livelihoods. Calhoun, by his own admission,
conversely makes himself out to be a monstrous bigot who actually believed that
buying a human being and proceeding to work them until they died represented
some kind of twisted cultural enlightenment. The crime, in either case, remains
the same, but it is undeniably easier to recoil at Calhoun’s shamelessness than
at the mealy-mouthed repentances of the slave-owning Founders. Bearing all of
this in mind, let the following be made absolutely clear. Regardless of what
might be said about the man in the entries to follow, and regardless of what it
might seem to say that the present discussion is taking place at all, John C.
Calhoun was in many ways a vile human being whose words and actions vis-à-vis
the institution of slavery are unjustifiable and unforgivable. He is being
featured here because he was an exceptionally influential figure in the realm
of 19th century American politics, and because some of the things
that he said over the course of his public career remain pertinent to
discussions that continue to take place. He is not being given a pass.
All that being said, let us continue in our
accustomed way. Calhoun – who, it really shouldn’t need to be said at this
point, was a native of South Carolina – was born on March 18th, 1782
in what was then the Abbeville District on the Palmetto State’s
sparsely-populated western frontier. Like most of the families in the region,
the Calhouns were Scots-Irish Presbyterians who came originally from Northern
Ireland and settled in the colonial American interior in search of cheap land
and a favorable economy. The family found exactly that on the South Carolina
borderlands – after brief, preliminary stopovers in Pennsylvania and Virginia –
and Calhoun’s father Patrick (1727-1796) enjoyed particular success as a
surveyor, farmer, planter, and politician. The elder Calhoun never truly became
one of the colony’s political or social elite, it is true. Being a Presbyterian
frontiersman in a culture dominated by a coastal Anglican junta, he was more or
less forbidden from rising to the absolute heights of power and influence. But
he provided exceptionally well for his family all the same, thereby ensuring
that his sons wanted for little and had every reason to feel pride in their
origins. Indeed, by succeeding as he did in spite of his status as a social and
political outsider, Patrick doubtless did much to shape young John’s personal
and political convictions. Patrick was a man of ambition and a supporter of the
Revolution who opposed the ratification of the United States Constitution on
the grounds that the resulting national government would inevitably threaten
the rights of the states. Though John would begin his political career as an
avowed and enthusiastic nationalist, in time his principles would come to
closely mirror those of his father.
Though possessed of prodigious intelligence
and scholastic ambition, Calhoun’s early formal education was severely limited
by the circumstances of his upbringing. Quite simply, there were no schools in
the Abbeville District, or even in any of the surrounding counties, of which
young John might have availed himself. An academy in Appling, Georgia – some
fifty miles distant – was the nearest source of formal instruction, and while
Calhoun was made to attend this selfsame institution, it struggled to secure
funding and operated only intermittently. His early studies, in consequence,
were largely self-directed, and had to be squeezed into whatever free time
young John could set aside between his increasingly demanding responsibilities
to the Calhoun family’s various properties. His father’s death in 1796, at a
time when his older brothers were settling into careers and lives of their own,
made this balance even harder to maintain. By age fourteen, Calhoun was
managing all five of the farms his family owned, and studying at his own
behest, and hunting, and fishing as often as he could manage. It was, no doubt,
an exceptionally crowded life for one so young, and which surely demanded a
high degree of discipline. Fortunately, Calhoun’s brothers were not ignorant of
their younger sibling’s travails. Six years after their father’s death, they
conspired to pool their resources and sent young John to one of the handful of
universities yet extant in the United States.
Surprisingly, given that he was a
southerner, Calhoun chose not to attend the College of William & Mary,
where many scions of prominent Virginia families had received their education.
Instead, in a move that was, if not entirely unheard of then at the very least
unusual, Calhoun enrolled at Yale College in Connecticut. The moral and
intellectual strains of New England Federalism, it seemed, would form a primary
influence on Calhoun’s understanding of the political issues of the day. And
so, indeed, they did, though not to the exclusion of Jeffersonian democracy. College
President Timothy Dwight (1752-1817), a Congregationalist theologian originally
from Massachusetts, became Calhoun’s mentor upon his matriculation in 1802, and
profoundly impressed the young South Carolinian with the breadth of his
knowledge and the clarity of his insight. Even so, Dwight reportedly found it
impossible to shake Calhoun of his attachment to the radical populism favored
and professed by the ascendant Democratic-Republicans. It was a shame, he once
explained to his young disciple, that Calhoun seemed to possess, “A most
unfortunate bias for error,” for otherwise, “Your talents are of a high order
and might justify you for any station [.]” Dwight did not live to see it, but
his frustrations may well have been soothed by Calhoun’s later attempt to
interpose the sovereignty of the individual states between the passage of federal
law and the enforcement of the same. Dwight, after all, was among a relatively
small group of New Englanders active in the 1800s and 1810s whose disdain for
the administration of Thomas Jefferson and his Virginia successors ran so deep
that they openly considered the possibility of secession. If successive
southern presidents, they asserted, were going to pursue such policies as
visited severe and particular harm upon mercantile New England, then the states
therein had every reason to contemplate severing their connection to the agrarian
South out of purest self-defense. Nothing every came of these discussions –
beyond an ultimately discredited convention held in Hartford over the winter of
1814/15 – and Calhoun never became the Federalist that Timothy Dwight might
well have preferred. But clearly, and to some extent, his beliefs did sink in.
Calhoun might not have ended up a secessionist, but he most certainly came to
believe that the essential sovereignty of the various states entitled them to
act with perfect autonomy whenever that their interests were fatally
threatened.
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