Calhoun: American Statesman

With the ideology of “wokeness” pervading much of our society, it is nearly impossible to have a meaningful conversation about Southern history, the War to Prevent Southern Independence, or the great statesmen of the South on any public forum without being tagged with one of the Left’s favorite sobriquets. Not long ago I saw an exchange on Twitter about John C. Calhoun. While one side of the debate was using facts, primary sources, and logic, the other side (and we all know what side that is) spewed nothing but nasty insults and spouted “slavery, slavery, slavery” at every turn. I no longer waste my time and energy engaging with such shallow thinkers and their childish, virtue-signaling antics.

Like Lee and Davis, Calhoun is a favored target of these woke ideologues, who know next to nothing about the man, his political thought, or his illustrious career. It takes almost no time to realize these people have read very little of Calhoun’s words, if they’ve read anything at all. They have their usual talking points and their oft-used knee-jerk reactions to any positive opinions about the South.

But I am a proud admirer of John C. Calhoun, though I can’t recall the exact time or place when I first became an enthusiast. I certainly knew of him when I was in high school but with little in-depth knowledge. In the mid-1990s, I took an undergraduate college course on the sectional crisis and the War, and we covered Calhoun quite a bit. The professor, who later became my graduate advisor, the late Dr. William K. Scarborough at the University of Southern Mississippi, was not hostile to Calhoun at all, himself one of the few open Republicans on campus, and even spoke favorably of Calhoun’s greatest advocate and scholar, Dr. Clyde Wilson. This was my first knowledge of Clyde and his scholarship.

In those days, though, information was not as prevalent. There was no internet yet (we were still looking for books via the card catalogue). No Amazon. No concept of smart phones, no podcasts or social media. I read what I could find, such as Margaret Coit’s 1950 Pulitzer Prize-winning biography, as well as a few of the less favorable books. Most of what I read about Calhoun, though, was not good.

Over the years, especially during my time in graduate school and teaching at the higher education level, I’ve heard it all. Aside from Clyde Wilson, Brion McClanahan, and just a handful of others, most learned scholars have nothing good to say about Calhoun. A professor of constitutional law told me, after I said I admired Calhoun and wanted to write a paper on him, “If you like Calhoun, you are past the point of being far rightwing!” He thought I was nuts anyway! Teaching in Texas, a colleague said to me one day, as we discussed Southern history, “Well Calhoun was an idiot,” even though his specialty was French military history during the Napoleonic era.

But, back in those ancient days of little-to-no good information, I attended an annual Southern Heritage Conference in Jones County, Mississippi, where I’m from, and found a couple of Clyde’s lectures on cassette tapes, one on states’ rights, the other on Calhoun. In fact, I still have them. Over the years I have listened to them so much I can still nearly recite them from memory.

In his Calhoun lecture, Clyde referred to a previous speaker, at the conference where he was speaking, who spoke of the “perils of criticizing Lincoln” and what it could do to one’s career. To that Clyde’s response was, “You should try praising John C. Calhoun.” To uproarious laughter.

When I began graduate school, I got a lesson in that very same vein. I considered doing my master’s thesis on Calhoun, on what aspect I did not yet know. I asked my advisor, Dr. Scarborough, who I thought might be favorable to the idea, since he seemed to have some admiration for the man, but he shot me down cold, “Don’t do Calhoun!” Although he didn’t say it, the implication was not a negative view toward Mr. Calhoun but that my career would be over before it began. (Of course, Dr. Scarborough had not yet learned about me and my proclivity for overturning the academic apple cart. To echo Clyde, try praising Warren Gamaliel Harding!)

But that brief setback didn’t stop my study of Calhoun. I eventually found Clyde’s great book, The Essential Calhoun, and devoured it. How could anyone read Calhoun’s words and not come away with the understanding that this great man was far ahead of his time? He has become, not the true American statesman that he was, but rather a creature of today’s leftist historians.

Case in point: A 2002 feature article in Civil War Times entitled “He Started the Civil War: John C. Calhoun and the Anger that Divided a Nation,” complete with a cover photo one of the many unflattering pictures often used to ridicule Calhoun as a fanatic. “If one person could be called the instigator of the civil war,” wrote author Ethan S. Rafuse, “it was John C. Calhoun – genius, pragmatist, and racist.” (Couldn’t we more legitimately use those three words to tag Abraham Lincoln?)

It’s not easy being the guy who started a war that claimed a million lives, especially when you died 11 years BEFORE the conflict began. But that’s Calhoun’s legacy according to these leftwing revisionist historians who are more concerned with rewriting history than they are with promoting it. Calhoun, writes Rafuse, “devoted much of his remarkable intellectual energy to defending slavery.” And since slavery caused the war, they say, it must be Calhoun’s fault since he pushed the South to such anger over slavery that they left the Union in order to protect it. Look at social media on any given day and you will find Calhoun and “Positive Good” before much time has passed. But as Brion McClanahan and Clyde Wilson have written, “It is somewhat ridiculous to single out Calhoun as a defender of slavery when no one in his time proposed any serious solution to the slavery question.” That would also include Lincoln.

In the more than twenty years since that article came out things have changed very little. I recently picked up a book published in 2018 on the great triumvirate of Clay, Webster, and Calhoun, entitled Heirs of the Founders by author H. W. Brands. And I made it all the way … to page four, where Brands had this to say about the South Carolinian: “His defense of states’ rights, and especially of the right most important to Southern planters, the right to own slaves, became a monomania. Where other defenders of slavery were content to call it a necessary evil, essential to the operation of the Southern economy but nothing to boast of, Calhoun pronounced it a positive good, an ornament to the South’s superior culture. As his national reputation diminished, and with it his hopes for national office, he retreated into state and section, which honored him the more. He became a Miltonian figure: rather than serve in heaven, he determined to reign in hell.” I saw little need in reading further.

But serious scholars, without the baggage of wokeness and the overwhelming need to virtue-signal their superior qualities, do not see Calhoun in such a tarnished light. As Russell Kirk wrote, “Calhoun’s political thought is more original and more closely reasoned than that of any other American statesman.” Bray Hammond, in Banks and Politics in America from the Revolution to the Civil War, wrote that Calhoun understood the complex issues of banking and the currency better than the experts at the time.

Merrill D. Peterson, in his book, The Great Triumvirate, noted Calhoun’s great moral character. “In the eyes of nearly everyone who knew him, Calhoun was a man of saintly or, as chivalry would have it, Roman character. His private life was unblemished; he was plain, kind, and unassuming; he was wholly without guile; and he indulged in none of the ordinary vices.” Such could not be said of Clay or Webster.

Even scholars who have little love for Calhoun have acknowledged these traits. Gerald M. Capers, who wrote a thinly-disguised attack entitled, John C. Calhoun: Opportunist, which centered on the South Carolinian’s supposed “burning desire” to become President, admitted that not he did not engage in such vices as gambling, drinking, or womanizing.

Perhaps few have spoken out as forcefully about Calhoun as John F. Kennedy. “I have also admired John C. Calhoun,” he noted in a speech before the South Carolina Legislature on October 10, 1960, during the heated final weeks of his campaign for the presidency. “When I was selected as chairman of a committee to pick five outstanding Senators in the history of this country, John C. Calhoun’s name led all the rest, and his painting is now in the Senate reception room. And when I wrote a book about courageous Senators, I mentioned John C. Calhoun. I am not here in South Carolina to make glittering promises or glowing predictions, but to express the hope that in 1960, South Carolina and the Nation will be guided by the spirit of Calhoun and his courage.” He also expressed his satisfaction at being “in the party of Calhoun.”[i]

The book he spoke of was his Pulitzer-prize winning Profiles in Courage. What Kennedy had said of Calhoun: “His speeches, stripped of all excess verbiage, marched across the Senate floor in even columns, measured, disciplined, carrying all before them. Strangely enough, although he had the appearance, especially in his later days, of a fanatic, he was a man of infinite charm and personality. He was reputed to be the best conversationalist in South Carolina, and he won to him through their emotions men who failed to comprehend his closely reasoned arguments.  His hold upon the imagination and affection of the entire South steadily grew, and at his death in the midst of the great debate of 1850 he was universally mourned.”

John C. Calhoun was a lifelong South Carolinian, born in the Edgefield District in 1782. One branch of my family came from the same area of South Carolina around the time Calhoun was beginning his great political career. I’ve often wondered if my family knew the Calhouns.

Calhoun attended Yale College, then Judge Tapping Reeve’s law school at Litchfield, Connecticut.  He had a long and wide-ranging political career, serving in the South Carolina legislature, the US House, Secretary of State, Secretary of War, two terms as Vice President under John Quincy Adams and Andrew Jackson, and finally, the place where he is most notable, two stints in the US Senate, where he served with such distinction that, as Kennedy noted in his speech in South Carolina, he was named one of the five greatest Senators of all time.

There is much we can learn from Calhoun, who might be considered America’s greatest political thinker. He was not some old “slaveocrat” obsessed with oppressing blacks into perpetual bondage but a statesman who wrote, thought, and spoke more about political issues such as banking, the currency, tariffs, and foreign affairs than he ever did on matters concerning slavery or the conflict between North and South.

As the 1844 presidential campaign approached, many of Calhoun’s admirers, both in the South and in the North, wanted to promote him for the White House. His platform was thus: “Free Trade. Low Duties. No Debt. Separation from Banks. Economy. Retrenchment. Strict Adherence to the Constitution.” Many of the issues that Calhoun most often spoke about are of great importance today, most particularly fiscal responsibility and foreign affairs.

Calhoun was a fierce advocate of economy in government, that is spending the taxpayer’s money wisely and sparingly. Even in his day, government ran amok when not checked by a very attentive populace. “We all knew when a public building was once commenced that it was never finished under five times the original estimate,” he said in a Senate speech in 1838. And Calhoun understood that the best way to keep the government in check was to starve it of funds. “Every dollar we can prevent from coming into the treasury, or every dollar thrown back into the hands of the people, will tend to strengthen the cause of liberty, and unnerve the arm of power,” he told the Senate in 1836.

“The surplus money in the Treasury is not ours,” he said in the Senate on another occasion. “It properly belongs to those who made it, and from whom it has been unjustly taken. I hold it an unquestionable principle, that the Government has no right to take a cent from the people beyond what is necessary to meet its legitimate and constitutional wants.”

In 1837, Calhoun told a story about his early days in the House, before the War of 1812. A friend told him that it would be “much more difficult to repeal than to lay on taxes.” Calhoun admitted to being “astonished at the time,” hearing such a tale from a friend, but during his long career in government found “the remark to be strictly correct.”

For Calhoun, those representing the people in any governmental capacity had a special duty to protect them, not to enrich themselves. And certainly not to buy votes with public monies. “Why should the Government pay the expenses of one class of men rather than another?” he asked rhetorically in 1837.

During John Quincy Adams single term in the White House, when Calhoun served as Vice President, from 1825 to 1829, the Jacksonians, still smarting over the “corrupt bargain,” ridiculed the President for extravagant spending while in office, accusing him, among many allegations, of using taxpayer funds for a billiard table. After his falling out with Andrew Jackson, Calhoun joined the Senate and denounced the Jackson Administration for hypocrisy, when “they went on to spend beyond” what they had accused Adams of spending. “The moral effect of this state of things had been most pernicious. It had led the nation to conclude that the professions of no party could be believed.”

In the crucial area of foreign affairs, Calhoun believed in the Jeffersonian principle of non-intervention, what he called a “wise and masterly inactivity.” In a review of The Essential Calhoun, Charles K. Piehl, of Mankato State University in Minnesota, called Calhoun a “foreign policy expert in Washington.” And one of the biggest foreign policy debates during Calhoun’s time in Washington was the War with Mexico. Surprising to many, Calhoun did not support it. I often ask his detractors: If Calhoun was so single-minded on slavery, why did he oppose the war? Many have no idea that he was opposed.

Much of the North protested against Mr. Polk’s War, even threatening secession once again, refusing to fight for a cause they identified with slavery. John Quincy Adams, then in the House, denounced the conflict as a “most unrighteous war.” It was simply a contrived fight so that the South could have “bigger pens to cram with slaves,” he said, as he cast one of only 14 votes against the war declaration in the House. The Massachusetts legislature passed a resolution condemning the war, which had as its purpose the “triple object of extending slavery, of strengthening the slave power and of obtaining the control of the free states.” Henry David Thoreau’s famous essay, “Civil Disobedience,” was aimed at building opposition to the Mexican War by trying to convince Northerners to refuse to pay the taxes that funded it. In fact, Thoreau was jailed for refusing to pay a poll tax. This would seem a war that John “Positive Good” Calhoun would support wholeheartedly.[ii]

But for Calhoun, the Manifest Destiny fever taking hold among the people was puzzling. “Our people have undergone a great change,” he wrote to his daughter Anna Maria. “Their inclination is for conquest & empire, regardless of their institutions & liberty; or rather, they think they hold their liberty by a divine tenure, which no imprudence, or folly on their part, can defeat.” He spoke out against those who believed that “it is the mission of this country to spread civil and religious liberty over all the globe, and especially over this continent – even by force, if necessary.”  Calhoun called such thinking a “sad delusion.” In the tradition of Jefferson, he believed the United States possessed enough territory and should not pursue a political policy to gain more.  “Peace is, indeed, our policy,” he told the Senate in 1842. “A kind Providence has cast our lot on a portion of the globe sufficiently vast to satisfy the most grasping ambition, and abounding in resources beyond all others, which only require to be fully developed to make us the greatest and most prosperous people on earth.” America, he believed, had enough territory. To acquire more would be to invite catastrophe. And he was right.

And the idea of nation-building was also a source of contention for Mr. Calhoun. “We make a great mistake in supposing all people are capable of self-government. Acting under that impression, many are anxious to force free governments on all the peoples of this continent, and over the world, if they had the power. It has been lately urged in a very respectable quarter, that it is the mission of our country to spread civil and religious liberty over all the globe, and especially over this continent—even by force, if necessary. It is a sad delusion.  None but a people advanced to a high state of moral and intellectual excellence are capable, in a civilised condition, of forming and maintaining free governments; and among those who are so advanced, very few indeed have had the good fortune to form constitutions capable of endurance.”

And finally, no one with more than a thimble full of brains can blame Calhoun for Mr. Lincoln’s War. Though emotionally-driven, leftist “scholars” continue to do so, it was the man from South Carolina who was doing all in his power to prevent it. His doctrine of state interposition (he didn’t call it nullification) and his thoughts on the concurrent majority, including his idea of a dual presidency in 1850, were all designed to save the Union, giving both sides an equal say in the affairs of the country. No right-thinking person who has spent any time at all reading his words could ever truly say Calhoun was trying to destroy the American Union. Secession was always a last resort, to be used only when all other options had failed.

As Clyde Wilson has told us, John C. Calhoun is a statesman for the 21^st century. Answers to many of our current problems can be found in Calhoun’s wisdom, now more than 150 years old, yet no less sound. We would do well to listen.

Sources

Clyde N. Wilson, The Essential Calhoun: Selections from Writings, Speeches, and Letters (1992)

W. Brands, Heirs of the Founders: The Epic Rivalry of Henry Clay, John Calhoun and Daniel Webster, the Second Generation of American Giants (2018)

Merrill D. Peterson, The Great Triumvirate: Webster, Clay, and Calhoun (1987)

Gerald M. Capers, John C. Calhoun: Opportunist: A Reappraisal (1960)

John F. Kennedy, Profiles in Courage (1955)

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[i] John F. Kennedy, Speech to the South Carolina Legislature, October 10, 1960, https://www.presidency.ucsb.edu/documents/speech-senator-john-f-kennedy-state-house-columbia-sc.

[ii] John Quincy Adams, Diary Entry, May 11, 1846, Volume 45, 566; https://www.senate.gov/artandhistory/history/minute/Senate_Votes_for_War_against_Mexico.htm.

The views expressed at AbbevilleInstitute.org are not necessarily the views of the Abbeville Institute.

Ryan Walters

Ryan S. Walters is an independent historian who lives and writes in North Texas. He is the author of five books, including The Jazz Age President: Defending Warren G. Harding. He can be reached at ryanswalters.net.

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