Nullifying Calhoun

Kimball’s point is well taken, especially in regard to the phrase “white supremacist,” a neologism that does a poor job of situating Calhoun in his own time. Conservatives are right to worry about the progressive assault on the icons of American history, particularly when men of the past are condemned and denounced not according to the standards of their day but ours.

But Calhoun is unusual among progressive targets in that he falls short by the standards of his own day, although Yale failed to explain this coherently. Their failure, however, does not change the facts of the case. When push came to shove, Calhoun chose the parochial interests of South Carolina over the welfare of the Union, and in so doing laid the intellectual groundwork for the violence of the Civil War.

Calhoun began his career an ardent nationalist. Elected to the House from South Carolina in 1810, he joined the “War Hawks” in pushing for conflict with England. After the War of 1812, he became a leader in the Madisonian wing of the Republican party. He was an architect of the Second Bank of the United States, and even voted for the Tariff of 1816. Most congressmen from his region opposed the measure, but he believed a moderate course of protection would improve the nation’s defensive capabilities. He served for eight years as secretary of war under James Monroe, then two terms as vice president, under John Quincy Adams and Andrew Jackson.

Calhoun’s views began to shift during the 1820s. He had once hoped that economic and population growth would be more balanced between the regions, but he became alarmed that the North had outpaced the South—and was looking to press its advantages through legislation. The break came with the Tariff of 1828, remembered as the Tariff of Abominations. This tariff hardly answered the call of sensible economic development. It was instead a naked grab for economic and political advantage, which more or less robbed the South to enrich the North and the West.

Southern members of Congress were near unanimous in their opposition, but Calhoun took matters further than ordinary politics. He saw in that law a fatal defect in American government—the possibility for an avaricious majority to line its pockets at the expense of a minority. Writing in Federalist 10, James Madison had argued that this was less likely to happen in a republic as extensive as the United States, but Calhoun rejected this idea. The tariff showed that it was only a matter of time until factions would form a majority to gang up on a minority—in this case, the North and West teaming up against the South.

Calhoun was a prolific writer blessed with a keen mind, but he was inclined to follow his arguments to their most extreme conclusions. Hence, in the South Carolina Exposition, written in 1828, he developed the idea of the “concurrent majority.” He argued that states retain full sovereignty over internal matters, that the national government was authorized to legislate only in cases where the good of all required it, and that the states possessed an implicit veto over federal laws that violated this limitation. The Exposition helped inspire the Nullification Crisis of 1832-33, when South Carolina declared the Tariff of 1828 to be null and void within its borders.

A compromise was hammered out between Calhoun and Henry Clay to reform the tariff, which should have vindicated Madison’s confidence that a large republic would protect minority rights. But Calhoun was undeterred. He expanded the ideas in the Exposition into the Disquisition on Government, a sectionalist magnum opus from the man who once represented the best of Southern nationalism. In his final act as statesman, during the winter of 1850, Calhoun opposed admitting California as a free state, even with the conditions that Clay had fashioned in what would become the Compromise of 1850. Too old and ill to speak, he delegated the task of delivering his final address to Senator James Mason of Virginia. Calhoun’s conclusion: There could be no compromise. The North had to stand down on the matter of slavery and provide the South with a constitutional guarantee of sectional balance in the government. Otherwise, disunion was inevitable, and proper.

Calhoun’s was no doubt a formid­able life. One cannot understand our nation’s history without knowing at least a little about him. But this is not a life that any American should feel obliged to honor. And that is not because he was a slaveholder who defended the institution of slavery. Madison, Thomas Jefferson, and George Washington all fit in that mold. Rather, it is the lengths to which Calhoun was willing to go in defense of his section’s interests.

Though Calhoun did not recognize it as such, the concurrent majority was a dangerous, violent doctrine. No doubt he was right that the Tariff of Abominations was a terrible piece of legislation, and he was also correct that it raised the specter of majoritarian tyranny. But the concurrent majority implicitly validates a tyranny of the minority. In his thinking, each state was the proper judge of when the federal government is violating its proper limits. So what happens when a state is selfish or immoral in defying the rightful acts of a legitimate majority? Calhoun has no practical answer. But history offers it: The Nullification Crisis nearly turned violent, and the Civil War most certainly did.

Calhoun’s concurrent majority is deeply antithetical to the principles embedded in the Constitution. Madison, Washington, Alexander Hamilton, and most of the Founders had agitated for a new governing instrument in part because the states had once claimed the authority Calhoun now argued had remained implicitly reserved to them all along. The Framers understood that this was unsustainable. If the states were left to judge matters for themselves, the result would be, as Hamilton argues in Federalist 8, “desultory and predatory” war.

Even if Yale’s logic behind removing Calhoun’s name is a total hash, the historical record provides a sound basis for their decision. Calhoun was a prominent statesman, but he misunderstood the Constitution and in so doing undermined the Union. ¨

Jay Cost is a senior writer at The Weekly Standard.