John Caldwell Calhoun (1782-1850), the South Carolina senator who was slavery’s most vociferous defender (he called it a “positive good”) and whose espousal of state “nullification” of federal laws is said to have led directly to Southern secession and the Civil War, is probably today’s most canceled U.S. historical figure. A statue of Calhoun in downtown Charleston, erected by Confederacy sentimentalists during the late 19th century and standing 115 feet tall in its longest-lasting version, was one of the first of the many Confederate monuments in the South to be toppled during the race-related urban turmoil of the summer of 2020. Meanwhile, in 2017, Yale University, from which Calhoun graduated with high honors in 1804, renamed a residential college that had been named after him in 1933.
Only a few decades earlier, Calhoun had been regarded in academic circles mostly as an anachronism: a brilliant if wrong-headed constitutional theorist whose defense of slavery and secession was of “little more than antiquarian interest,” as Richard Hofstadter wrote in 1948. Alternatively, Calhoun was viewed as an agrarian romantic, admired for his gracious Southern manners and devotion to his family and for his courage in taking a stand for the South’s plantation way of life against the economic brutality and alienation of 19th-century industrial capitalism. As Robert Elder relates in his gracefully written new biography, Calhoun: American Heretic, in 1984, the historian J. William Harris compared Calhoun to a dinosaur who had survived into the age of mammals, “a pre-eighteenth-century republican … awesome and perfect in its way … but bound for extinction.”
In fact, Elder, an assistant professor of history at Baylor University, argues that it is a mistake to dismiss Calhoun as either an agrarian fantasist or a figure marginal to the U.S. experience. Drawing on the vast trove of speeches, reports, essays, and correspondence that the phenomenally energetic Calhoun left behind him, Elder maintains that his subject was a thoroughly modern man, one whose thought was marked by an “embrace of progress … in all areas of human understanding.” That included the technological: In a daunting array of federal political offices that included two different vice presidencies, Calhoun promoted road-building, canal networks, steamships, and railroads. He spent the summer of 1836 trekking through the mountains of North Carolina, searching for a possible rail route that would connect Charleston and Cincinnati. In an 1846 speech to a packed Senate chamber (Calhoun was famous for his oratory), he praised the newly invented telegraph and its “magic wires” of electricity that promised to unite the world with instant communication. As a youthful secretary of war under James Monroe, he had reorganized and modernized the War Department, prodded Army surgeons and meteorologists into statistical record-keeping, and devised a practical and mathematics-based curriculum for the newly founded West Point.
Ingeniously, Calhoun even managed to predicate his arguments for slavery in part upon the free trade principles of Adam Smith and the classical economists of the early 19th century. He consistently opposed protective tariffs, not (merely) out of sectional interest — the tariffs benefited Northern manufacturers while forcing Southerners to pay more for imported goods — but on a theory of comparative advantage that would have done David Ricardo proud. The biggest export market for the South was Great Britain, the textile mills of which were hungry for slave-grown cotton. “We have a cheap and efficient body of laborers, the best fed, clothed, trained, and provided for, of any in the whole cotton growing region, for whose labor we have paid in advance,” he argued in a tariff battle in 1842. “Paid in advance” meant that Southerners had already bought the slaves. Calhoun was certain that under a free trade regime, enterprising people could find similar ways to exploit international markets and thereby create prosperity at home. He was America’s first globalist.
Calhoun hailed from the “Scotch-Irish,” the lowland Scots to whom King James I had offered free land in northern Ireland during the early 17th century and who emigrated by the thousands to Appalachia during the 18th century, dissatisfied with being forced, as Presbyterians, to support the Church of Ireland with their taxes. The most famous portrait of Calhoun, painted around 1845 by George Healy and reproduced on the jacket of the book, shows a startling phenotypical resemblance to Calhoun’s fellow Scotch-Irishman Andrew Jackson: the same angular features, high forehead, and imposing head of hair. Calhoun’s grandparents, Patrick and Catherine Calhoon (their spelling of the name), settled in Pennsylvania in 1733; their son, Patrick, John Calhoun’s father, moved farther south, first to Virginia and then to the frontier backcountry of South Carolina, where he bought slaves, set up a plantation near Abbeville, and, after independence, served in the South Carolina Legislature. He raised his children in the Calvinist Presbyterianism of the Scotch-Irish, although John later gravitated toward Unitarianism, whose rejection of the supernatural comported with “his temperament, his devotion to reason, and his embrace of progress,” Elder writes.
Backcountry South Carolina was rough and rustic, wholly unlike the coastal low country, where wealthy planters, overseeing an enslaved black population that already outnumbered white people 2-1, grew rice and long-staple cotton on vast estates. The backcountry was suitable only for growing short-staple cotton, which was not a viable cash crop until Eli Whitney invented the cotton gin in 1793 and transformed the inland South into a cotton kingdom. Calhoun did not become comfortably off until 1811, when he married Floride Colhoun, the daughter of his first cousin John Colhoun (another change of spelling), who had married into the Charleston aristocracy. The Calhouns had 10 children over 18 years, although only seven survived to adulthood, including Calhoun’s favorite daughter and political confidante, Anna Maria, whose husband, Thomas Clemson, founded Clemson University on the grounds of her father’s plantation.
Patrick died when John was 13, and the youth spent several years helping his mother manage the plantation and acquiring an education good enough for him to enroll in Yale as a junior. After graduation, he read law and was admitted to the South Carolina bar in 1807. He was elected to the House of Representatives for South Carolina in 1810, served as Monroe’s secretary of war from 1817 to 1825, and conducted a brief, unsuccessful run for president in 1824 before switching his campaign to vice president, then an independent office. He served for two terms, first under the onetime Federalist John Quincy Adams and then under his Democratic successor, Jackson. Calhoun alienated both of them for different reasons. In Adams’s case, it was states’ rights; in Jackson’s, the “Nullification Crisis” of 1832, in which a South Carolina state convention, egged on by Calhoun, declared that the tariffs imposed by Congress in 1828 and 1832 were unconstitutional. The convention reversed itself only after Congress enacted another law authorizing the federal government to use the military to enforce the tariffs.
Calhoun resigned from the vice presidency in 1832 to take a Senate seat. Another unsuccessful run for the presidency ensued in 1844, and from 1844 to 1845, Calhoun served as secretary of state under John Tyler. His chief and highly controversial accomplishment in that office was to annex Texas and admit it into the Union as a slave state, setting off the Mexican-American War. He ran for the Senate again that year and won. Five years later, he was dead at age 68 from tuberculosis, but not before he had written a blistering attack on the Compromise of 1850, Congress’s effort to split the difference between the almost unstoppable anti-slavery sentiment of the Northeast and Midwest and the Southern drive to expand slavery as far west as American writ would run. His dying screed accused the North of tyrannically upsetting the delicate balance between free and slave states that had existed at the country’s founding and of deliberately trying to destroy the South economically via tariffs. If the North would not restore that earlier equilibrium, “let the states we both represent part in peace,” he wrote.
Calhoun was not dense; he could see very well, especially toward the end of his life, that the forces of the future were arrayed against the slaveholding South. Yet he was unusually alert to perceived infringements on liberty, and an essential part of liberty for him was the right to property, human and otherwise: “I would rather meet any extremity upon earth than give up one inch of our equality — one inch of what belongs to us as members of this great republic!” For Calhoun, to be forced to submit to any government hindering of his rights as a slaveowner was “to be forced to submit to shame … the defining characteristic of a slave,” Elder writes. Calhoun bolstered his views with then-fashionable scientific theories about the “natural inferiority” of the black race. Even as slavery neared its final years in America, it was impossible for him to view the enslaved as anything more than human livestock.
Yet, as Elder points out, it would be a mistake to erase Calhoun from our national consciousness. Calhoun’s nullification doctrine rested on a theory of “concurrent majorities”: that in order to protect against the tyranny of the majority, minorities should have a veto power over government actions that directly affect them. “We have hardly outlived the debate … over how to restrain the excesses of democracy while maintaining its vitality,” Elder writes. “Nor have we definitively solved the riddle of the relationship between states and the federal government. We need not bite the apple Calhoun offered … in order to learn from his critiques.”
There are other ways, unmentioned by Elder, in which the ghost of Calhoun still stalks the land. Nullification, for example, has enjoyed quite a rebound, as liberal-run cities across America (and the entire state of California) have declared themselves “sanctuary” jurisdictions and refused to enforce federal immigration laws. Calhoun’s theories of free trade and globalization have also taken hold to the point that we seem willing to put up with near-slave labor, and sometimes actual slave labor, among our trading partners if they can supply us with cheap goods. Nor do we consider it strange to have a servant class of people of markedly different ethnicity performing, for cut-rate wages, nearly all the manual labor in America. “There has never existed a wealthy and civilized society in which one portion of the community did not, in fact, live on the labor of the other,” Calhoun wrote in 1836. This is a statement uncomfortable to contemplate, but it suggests that we are closer to Calhoun’s mental world than we think.
Charlotte Allen is a Washington writer. Her articles have appeared in Quillette, the Wall Street Journal, USA Today, and the Los Angeles Times.
