JUST AS CONSTRUCTION OF THE BASE OF THE CALHOUN Monument began in 1886, disaster struck. On the evening of Tuesday, August 31, a massive earthquake roiled Charleston. As roofs collapsed and walls crumbled, frantic Charlestonians—many in their bedclothes, some almost nude—raced into the open air. Fires erupted when the trembling earth overturned lamps and ruptured gas lines, and aftershocks rocked the city for twenty-four hours. Eighty-three people ultimately died. Many of those who survived fled to the city’s public spaces that first night—to City Hall Park, on Broad Street; to the Battery, nearby at the tip of the peninsula; to the College of Charleston campus; and to the Citadel Green, which locals began calling Marion Square in the 1880s. Numbering around 40,000, the displaced set up what became semi-permanent encampments of residents, white and black, unable to live in their damaged homes.1
“It is not a scene to be described by any mortal tongue or pen,” wrote a shell-shocked News and Courier reporter. “It is not a scene to be forgotten.” While some Charlestonians were lucky enough to return home within the next few days, thousands remained in the crowded, increasingly dirty camps. September 9, when a huge rainstorm blew in, was especially awful. In Marion Square, torrents of water sent refugees scrambling to find shelter in hastily assembled tents and sheds, to no avail.2
Hundreds of structures were damaged or destroyed, including the Guard House, Military Hall, and the infamous Work House. Three decades after James Redpath predicted that the terrifying house of corrections would one day be leveled “to the earth amid the savage yells of insurgent negroes and the shrieks of widowed ladies,” the city razed the building.
Amazingly, the earthquake spared the unfinished granite base of the memorial to John C. Calhoun, located on the southern end of Marion Square. And despite all the misery in their midst, stonemasons continued to work on the monument, devoting precious time and energy to a structure that would not save a single soul from the elements. It was fitting: the Calhoun Monument was the culmination of Charleston’s lengthy and tenacious crusade to honor South Carolina’s favorite son, who had died in 1850. For decades after Calhoun succumbed to tuberculosis, white Charlestonians showed their affection with parades, statues, busts, and then, in 1887, with the bronze monument that would tower over Marion Square. Even in death, Calhoun lived on.3
Not everyone relished Calhoun’s perpetual presence, however, especially when his imposing likeness was raised just as segregation began to extinguish the dwindling light of Reconstruction. With words and stones, African Americans protested, for their memories of Calhoun challenged whites’ unwavering assumption that he should be memorialized. During Jim Crow, fault lines ran deep among Charlestonians, dividing more than the ground beneath their feet.
* * * *
HAILING FROM THE South Carolina Upcountry, John C. Calhoun himself had little love for his state’s first city. As a young man, he had attributed a wave of illness that struck Charleston “to the misconduct of the inhabitants,” who were cursed “for their intemperance and debaucheries.” Yet Charlestonians—even the Lowcountry planters who had more than earned this reputation for decadence—did not feel the same about the dour and humorless figure once described as “the cast iron man.” According to Scandinavian writer Fredrika Bremer, locals often joked that “when Calhoun took snuff the whole of Carolina sneezed.”4
Why were Charlestonians so devoted to a man who held their city in low esteem? It certainly had something to do with his stature. Among the most prominent American statesmen of the nineteenth century, he served as a U.S. congressman, senator, secretary of war, and vice president of the United States over his forty-year political career. Calhoun was the leading figure in the Nullification Crisis, in which the state of South Carolina challenged federal supremacy in a dramatic showdown with President Andrew Jackson. On the surface, this crisis was about the tariff, but many South Carolina planters believed something greater was at stake: the slaveholding South’s capacity to defend itself from a hostile federal government. The Nullification Crisis reveals a second reason white Charlestonians celebrated Calhoun—he was their culture’s most dogged defender.5
South Carolina politician John C. Calhoun was the South’s leading proslavery voice in the 1830s and 1840s.
Calhoun had taken a number of contradictory positions as a politician. He was a vigorous nationalist and later the architect of the theory of nullification, a supporter of Unionism and the Constitution in some moments and the South’s loudest voice for secession in others. Where he never wavered, however, was in his commitment to slavery. Reared by a father who owned thirty-one enslaved laborers, Calhoun became the master of two plantations and more than a hundred slaves. He took it for granted that slavery was the foundation of southern society. When northern reformers flooded the nation with antislavery petitions and pamphlets in the mid-1830s, then Senator Calhoun led protests in Washington, D.C. Abolitionism, he insisted, “strikes directly and fatally, not only at our prosperity, but our existence, as a people. . . . It is a question, that admits of neither concession, nor compromise.” Although early American slaveholders such as George Washington and Thomas Jefferson had viewed slavery as, at best, a necessary evil, Calhoun rejected this notion, arguing that it was “a positive good” that benefited both masters and slaves. He maintained that the South had to guard this benevolent institution at all costs. Just weeks before he died in 1850, Calhoun warned that northern agitation on the slavery question might soon force the South “to choose between abolition and secession.”6
Even before Calhoun’s death, Charlestonians sought to honor his legacy. In 1843, cotton merchant Henry Gourdin and a small group of Calhoun supporters commissioned renowned American sculptor Hiram Powers to produce a large sculpture of the statesman. After countless delays, Powers, who lived and worked in Italy, put the sculpture on a ship bound for the United States in April 1850. Yet the wait was not over, for the statue sailed across the Atlantic aboard the Elizabeth—a ship that hit a sandbar and sank less than 300 yards from Fire Island, New York. This infamous wreck, which took the lives of eight people, including Transcendentalist writer Margaret Fuller, left Powers’s sculpture at the bottom of the ocean. Charlestonians spent three more anxious months as their sunken treasure, stained and damaged by the wreck, was retrieved by divers and then transported to the city, where it was prominently displayed in City Hall.7
The Powers statue arrived in Charleston six months after Calhoun was laid to rest in the city. When the senator died on March 31, 1850, the city council commissioned a full-length portrait of Calhoun, also to be featured in City Hall. The Charleston Courier and Charleston Mercury offered customers copies of Calhoun’s final speech printed in either ink or gold, while a bookseller advertised a fresh supply of the “most beautiful” Calhoun portrait available. Locals also ensured that Calhoun would be buried in Charleston rather than at his Fort Hill plantation in the northwestern part of the state.8
Calhoun continued to loom large in Charleston in the years that followed. The city celebrated his birthday with extravagant parades and redubbed Boundary Street, which bisected the peninsula and formed the southern boundary of the Citadel Green, Calhoun Street. When former New York senator Nathaniel P. Tallmadge started peddling stories about communicating with Calhoun through two spiritualists in 1853, the Courier devoted sizable sections of two issues to the topic. The paper’s editor was incredulous, but the chief message that Calhoun delivered from the afterlife—“I am with you still”—was no doubt reassuring to its readership.9
The city’s elaborate funeral for Calhoun in 1850 was the centerpiece of these early memorial activities. When the iron sarcophagus containing the statesman’s remains arrived on April 26, it was greeted by the most impressive funeral procession Charleston had ever seen. People from across the state, the region, and even the nation attended the ceremony, while few residents missed the opportunity to celebrate their fallen hero. The two-mile procession included the deceased’s family, a delegation from Washington, the governor of South Carolina, and myriad local politicians, militia companies, and fraternal organizations. After the parade, Calhoun’s body lay in state in City Hall, where massive crowds paid their respects. The Courier took special note of the reception that black and enslaved residents accorded the politician. Reflecting their deep faith in the paternalist ideology championed by Calhoun, city officials permitted everyone—black or white, slave or free—to visit his remains. Black Charlestonians reportedly embraced this opportunity in “considerable numbers.”10
Yet, while whites viewed the funeral as a somber moment for mourning and reflection, many African Americans were enthused. Fredrika Bremer, who happened to be in town to witness Calhoun’s funeral, noted that “during the procession a whole crowd of negroes leaped about the streets, looking quite entertained, as they are by any pomp.” Their excitement, she added, had political significance. According to Bremer, blacks at the procession declared, “Calhoun was indeed a wicked man, for he wished that we might remain slaves.” Elijah Green, who said that as a young slave boy he had dug Calhoun’s grave, agreed, later recalling, “I never did like Calhoun ’cause he hated the Negro; no man was ever hated as much as him by a group of people.”11
Public displays of disdain did not stop once Calhoun was dead and buried. Soon after Confederate troops abandoned Charleston in early 1865, New-York Tribune correspondent James Redpath visited the Mercury offices. There, to his surprise, he discovered a black family in what Redpath sarcastically referred to as “the editorial sanctum.” Redpath’s lack of respect for the fire-eating newspaper matched his scorn for Calhoun, whose bust sat in the office’s front room. “Calhoun did more than any one man to make Slavery respectable,” he wrote in the Tribune. “He used all his great powers to crush the negro.” So, Redpath told the woman who showed him the bust, “That man was your great enemy—he did all he could to keep you slaves—you ought to break his bust.” Later, when Redpath returned to the front room to get the Calhoun bust, which he thought would make a nice trophy for the Tribune headquarters in New York City, he discovered that the freedwoman had destroyed it.12
The politician’s tomb, which was located at St. Philip’s Church cemetery, also suffered in the wake of the war. Portions of the marble slab were broken off, while other parts were marked up with pencil. When Henry Ward Beecher visited the tomb during his visit to Charleston, he was frustrated that “vandal hands were beginning to chip off the marble to bring back pebbles as memorials.” Although he blamed Calhoun for the war, the Brooklyn minister saw no point in violating Calhoun’s grave. The New York Times also condemned the defacement of Calhoun’s tomb, urging any future vandals to pay attention to the penciled inscriptions on the grave: “A Massachusetts man and an Abolitionist abhors the violation of this tomb.” “Respect ourselves if we do not him who lies beneath this stone.”13
The original grave of John C. Calhoun, ca. 1865, in St. Philip’s Church cemetery.
In fact, nothing worthy of respect, disdain, or anything else lay beneath that stone in 1865. Several years earlier a group of Charleston gentlemen, led by Henry Gourdin and his younger brother, Robert, had secretly moved Calhoun’s remains for fear that local blacks—or, worse yet, northern fanatics—might dig them up. Calhoun’s casket was not returned until 1871, when Henry Gourdin and a few others placed it in its original tomb in the western half of the cemetery.14
Eventually, South Carolina decided to replace the chipped and battered marble slab that marked the Calhoun gravesite. In 1883, the state legislature appropriated $3,000 to erect a more appropriate memorial. The following November, a ten-foot stone sarcophagus was installed atop a brick foundation at St. Philip’s. That Calhoun’s remains got this new home just as Grover Cleveland—the first successful Democratic candidate since the Civil War—was elected president seemed “a singular coincidence” to News and Courier editor Frank Dawson. “At the very moment when the American people have signified their determination that the Federal Government must and shall be cleansed from the corruption with which twenty-four years of continuous Republican rule has encrusted,” he wrote, “the bones of the great Calhoun have for the first time found a resting place and memorial stone worthy of his imperishable fame.” Viewed this way, the new tomb was a symbolic representation of Redemption—not just of the South, but of the nation as a whole.15
Three years later, in 1887, Charleston upped the symbolic ante by erecting the massive monument to Calhoun in Marion Square. As workers labored diligently through the aftermath of the 1886 earthquake, they brought to fruition a project that dated back to the 1850s, when two rival groups of Charlestonians had organized to erect a monument to the revered statesman. After the city council pledged to build a monument to Calhoun in 1850, the all-male Calhoun Monument Association (CMA) and the Ladies’ Calhoun Monument Association (LCMA) began competing for the honor of memorializing Calhoun in stone. The superior organizational and fund-raising skills of the LCMA gave it the upper hand. The CMA thought White Point Garden at the Battery was a more appropriate location for the monument, but the LCMA rejected it as “a mere plea sure promenade,” preferring the Citadel Green instead.16
In choosing the Citadel Green, the LCMA opted for a site that William Gilmore Simms once deemed “the only public square in Charleston that merits the title.” But there was also the location’s considerable symbolic power. An assemblage of dignitaries had formally received Calhoun’s body at the Citadel Green after its journey from Washington, D.C., in 1850. The square, moreover, was home to the Citadel, the arsenal built to police slaves in the wake of the Vesey conspiracy. The ladies hoped that with Calhoun’s stern countenance watching over them, Citadel cadets might learn to “emulate the virtues of the great statesman.” Finally, the Citadel Green was adjacent to the Neck. This was the neighborhood in which a majority of free African Americans had long lived and which the city had annexed in the months after Calhoun’s death in an effort to exert greater control over its inhabitants. Putting the Calhoun Monument in the Citadel Green, as historian Thomas J. Brown has argued, “reinforced this extension of racial authority.”17
The LCMA laid the cornerstone on June 28, 1858, the anniversary of the battle of Fort Moultrie, a Revolutionary War victory that secessionists held dear. Fire-eater Laurence Keitt delivered the keynote address. When the Civil War broke out in 1861, the project came to a standstill, but the efforts of the organization’s treasurer ensured that the dream did not die with the Confederacy. According to the LCMA’s official history, Mary A. Snowden, having fled Charleston for Columbia, sewed the group’s stocks and bonds into her dress to save them from Sherman’s torch. The feat was all the more amazing, the LCMA claimed, because a slave had witnessed Snowden’s furtive actions and yet had never revealed the secret. In the LCMA narrative, the ingenuity of Confederate womanhood and the fidelity of the loyal slave combined to ensure the monument’s survival.18
Similar heroics failed to save another Calhoun memorial. Fearful that the Powers statue, which still stood in City Hall, might succumb to Union artillery after being rescued from its ill-fated voyage across the Atlantic, locals had removed it to Columbia for safekeeping at the start of the Civil War. Yet the star-crossed sculpture was destroyed by the fire that engulfed the state capital in the conflict’s final months. Charlestonians could have been forgiven for thinking that Calhoun’s memory was cursed when another memorial to the statesman went missing a few years later. Since the 1840s, a stone bust of Calhoun, made by local sculptor Clark Mills, had been on display at City Hall, not far from Powers’s statue. In the early years of Reconstruction, however, it disappeared.19
The Civil War thus not only opened up a wave of vandalism against Calhoun’s tomb; it also cost Charleston its two most prominent Calhoun memorials—the Powers statue and the Mills bust—as well as the bust in the Charleston Mercury office destroyed by the freedwoman. By the mid-1870s, the LCMA determined to step into this commemorative breach and complete the monument it had started on the Citadel Green.
The LCMA chose sculptor Albert E. Harnisch, a Philadelphia artist working in Rome, to execute its plan. Harnisch seemed a fine choice to the organization, especially after it received reports from various art critics and friends who had seen his progress in person. Frank Dawson, who spent some time in Rome in 1883 and visited Harnisch’s studio while there, vouched for the young man’s talent when he returned to Charleston. Although the original antebellum cornerstone appears to have survived the war, the LCMA ordered the construction of a new base in 1884. The work began sometime that year or the next. Then came the August 1886 earthquake. “Strange,” the LCMA later observed, that “while the city was almost demolished by that great convulsion of nature, the unfinished base and pedestal of the monument were not in the smallest degree hurt.” By February 1887, the completed statue, having arrived in the city several months earlier, was placed atop its pedestal in Marion Square (formerly the Citadel Green). Nearly three decades after the LCMA had begun construction of the monument, Calhoun—perched more than forty feet in the air—finally stood watch over Charleston.20
Harnisch’s statue depicted Calhoun, cast in bronze, rising from his seat in the Senate, his cloak falling back on his chair and his right index finger upturned and pointed forward, a gesture that signaled the beginning of an address in classical oratory. The large granite base of the statue was to have been surrounded by four allegorical figures, representing Truth, Justice, History, and the Constitution, though only Justice was installed.21
The Calhoun Monument made no mention of the politician’s strident support of slavery. On this score, it had much in common with the Confederate statues that were raised across the South from the 1870s to the 1930s. From odes to the common soldier to statues of war heroes like “Stonewall” Jackson and Robert E. Lee, Confederate memorials avoided the issue of slavery, highlighting instead the glorious if doomed military struggle that the Confederacy had waged. Charlestonians participated with enthusiasm in this commemorative wave. The Charleston Ladies’ Memorial Association erected a monument to the Confederate dead in Magnolia Cemetery in 1882, and, in the years that followed, locals unveiled an obelisk dedicated to the Washington Light Infantry in City Hall Park (which came to be called Washington Square), a monument to General Roswell Sabine Ripley at Magnolia, and a memorial to those who had died aboard early submarines at White Point Garden.22
The first Calhoun Monument, including Justice, the only allegorical figure installed, Marion Square, ca. 1892. African Americans mocked and vandalized the monument, which they dubbed “Mr. Calhoun an’ he Wife.”
In one sense, the statue of Calhoun, like these memorials, eschewed slavery and did not explicitly address his racial beliefs at all. But, in another sense, the Calhoun Monument dealt directly with slavery, as it differed from Lost Cause memorials in an important way. Calhoun was represented as the South’s iconic figure of defiance: standing up, both literally and figuratively, for his region’s interests on the Senate floor. The Calhoun Monument thus signaled an attachment to the racial ideology of the Old South in a more direct fashion than most Confederate monuments did, including those erected in Charleston. While none mentioned slavery, the Calhoun Monument alone harkened back to a time before the war, when its precipitating cause occupied the energies of the state’s politicians.23
Indeed, having died more than a decade before fire rained down on Fort Sumter, Calhoun could not easily be cast in the forgiving light of battlefield heroism. In 1884, just three years before the Calhoun Monument was installed, former slave Archibald Grimké offered a frank evaluation of his fellow South Carolinian’s commitment to slavery. Grimké had thrived after leaving Charleston in late 1865. With financial support from his abolitionist aunts, Angelina and Sarah, he had earned a master’s degree from Lincoln University and a law degree from Harvard. In the 1880s, he had become active in Republican politics in Boston. Grimké’s 1884 speech on Calhoun, which he delivered in Washington, D.C., was, in fact, among the earliest in a public speaking career that lasted well into the twentieth century. “The hand of Calhoun was the master hand that directed the horrible chorus of slavery,” he told the audience. Calhoun did anything in his power to advance “this primeval sin.”24
Fellow Republican and former commander in chief of the Grand Army of the Republic Samuel S. Burdett made a similar point in 1887, just after the Calhoun Monument was unveiled. At a birthday party for Ulysses S. Grant, Burdett departed from his remarks about the Union war hero to criticize leading American statesmen for taking part in the recent dedication ceremony in Charleston. Burdett described Calhoun “as a man who regarded the human race as composed of a few masters with whips in the hands, and a multitude of slaves to do the work of their masters.”25
The city’s evolving residential patterns drove home the statue’s association with race and slavery. At the beginning of the nineteenth century, Marion Square sat on the northern periphery of the city. As the population moved up the peninsula over the next several decades, the square became a part of the city’s core. By installing a monument to South Carolina’s most outspoken proslavery voice in this particular space, in other words, the LCMA proclaimed the centrality of Calhoun—and his defense of slavery and white supremacy—to Charleston, both past and present.
In fact, the long delay in the monument’s construction provided a new use for Calhoun’s ideology in the present. Three decades after the LCMA’s first attempt to honor Calhoun in stone, the completed Calhoun Monument now invoked slavery to justify segregation. Black Charlestonian Mamie Garvin Fields, who was born in 1888, one year after the monument was erected, interpreted the statue as a message to African Americans about their place in the New South: “I believe white people were talking to us about Jim Crow through that statue.” What’s more, the statue spoke in a language that the city’s black residents could easily understand. In light of the high illiteracy rates that plagued black communities at the time, African American leaders often employed visual and aural, rather than written, methods to reach their followers. White southerners who erected monuments followed a similar strategy. While some African Americans may not have been able to read the segregationist editorials pouring forth from newspapers across South Carolina, they could not miss the visual message the Calhoun Monument announced to them every time they passed by.26
Mamie Garvin Fields’s suspicion that the Calhoun Monument spoke as much to the New South’s emerging racial dynamics as to the Old South’s racial order was correct. The statue went up as racial lines began to harden in Charleston, as the expansive possibilities of Reconstruction gave way to the constricting realities of segregation. By the early 1880s, Redeemers had succeeded in removing most black Charlestonians from political office, while the 1882 Eight Box Law disenfranchised tens of thousands of African Americans throughout South Carolina by requiring voters to place ballots in separate boxes labeled for each state-level office, among other restrictive measures. The architect of that law was Edward McCrady, a state representative, Confederate memory stalwart, and former head of the Sumter Guards, one of the rifle clubs that had helped redeem South Carolina in 1876. Seen in this context, the statue marked the new order, both symptom and cause of the changing state of race relations.27
* * * *
THE CALHOUN MONUMENT was dedicated at an extravagant ceremony on April 26, 1887. A spring storm brought a cooling breeze that morning, producing bright, sunny, and unseasonably temperate conditions. The crowd matched the occasion and the weather. Some twenty thousand people lined Meeting Street to watch the large parade of dignitaries, civic organizations, military companies, and veterans groups, such as the Survivors’ Association of Charleston. “Never, perhaps, since the funeral of the immortal Calhoun,” noted Frank Dawson’s News and Courier, “have the civil societies of Charleston turned out in such large numbers or with such full ranks.”
The grand procession marched a mile and a half from the Battery at the base of the peninsula through the center of the city to Marion Square, where the unveiling ceremony took place. There, a crowd of more than fifteen thousand spilled out of the park into the surrounding streets, sidewalks, buildings, and churches. As at Calhoun’s funeral nearly forty years before, Charlestonians of all walks of life turned out. “Every window from basement to attic was full of bright, fair faces, and very many others not so fair, looked out from behind the chimney tops or peered over the edges of the roofs,” reported the News and Courier. Unlike the 1850 funeral, however, there is no evidence that black residents—or anyone else—struck a discordant note during the festivities. The black newspaper the New York Freeman noted that the shared suffering of the 1886 earthquake had helped heal the wounds of Charleston’s black community. “There is no feeling in the hearts of the colored people towards those who despitefully used them. The war is over with them; they are ready and willing to work for the building up of this common country.” A number of leading black Charlestonians even chose to attend the unveiling ceremony.
The Marion Square crowd came together as one, especially once a black band struck up the tune of “Dixie.” The enormous group recognized the song instantly and began to cheer. As the band electrified the celebrants, six “baby unveilers” and more than thirty young women—most of whom were descendants of Calhoun—pulled away the flags concealing the statue. Cannon fire and enthusiastic shouts mixed in the air before a deep silence descended over the square. “It seemed for a few moments,” the News and Courier told its readers, “as if the people felt themselves to be in his presence and expected him to speak to them again in the long-hushed accents of wisdom and warning.”28
The silence was broken by a brief ode to Calhoun, recited by a local pastor, after which the main speaker of the day, Secretary of the Interior Lucius Quintus Cincinnatus Lamar, took center stage. The Mississippi politician and ex-Confederate general had one foot in Calhoun’s world and another in the New South. Before the war, he had been an ardent secessionist and strong supporter of slavery. After Appomattox, Lamar had been a bitter opponent of Reconstruction. As a member of the House of Representatives, he helped undermine federal legislation that aimed to curb white vigilante violence in the South. But Lamar did not carry the stigma other leading Confederates did. In fact, he was known to be a strong supporter of sectional reconciliation, especially after he lauded Republican Charles Sumner in a well-received 1875 eulogy. Cut from the same cloth as Wade Hampton, Lamar had provided a dignified patina that helped mask the violent redemption of his home state of Mississippi. Charleston could not have asked for a better man to honor Calhoun.29
Unsurprisingly, Lamar’s remarks largely steered clear of divisive issues like secession and slavery, focusing instead on Calhoun’s intellectual and political accomplishments and his devotion to the Union. Near the end of the speech, however, Lamar explicitly took up the institution Calhoun had fought so hard to defend. “Slavery is dead—buried in a grave that never gives up its dead,” he maintained. “Why reopen it to-day? Let it rest.” But Lamar could not let it rest. “If I remain silent upon the subject,” he told the crowd, “it will be taken as an admission that there is one part of Mr. Calhoun’s life of which it is prudent for his friends to say nothing to the present generation.” On the contrary, Lamar contended, Americans today needed to know that in defending the legal status of slavery in the United States, Calhoun was hardly alone. Everyone from Henry Clay to John Quincy Adams to Daniel Webster agreed that the Constitution protected the institution. Calhoun’s great gift was in understanding that hostile forces would not stop until they destroyed slavery, even if that meant undermining the Constitution. “His predictions,” Lamar observed, “were verified to the letter.” Lamar conceded that prevailing sentiments demanded the abolition of slavery and that any attempts to reestablish it were imprudent. Still, Lamar believed that in its day slavery had been a positive institution, especially for the enslaved. Having established Calhoun’s virtues as a statesman, thinker, and apologist for the outdated but civilizing institution of slavery, Lamar then surrendered the platform to two ministers who concluded the festivities.30
For all the pageantry of the dedication, the Calhoun Monument itself was not universally well received. “The monument meets with as many admirers as detractors,” the New-York Tribune reported. Noting its considerable $44,000 price tag, the New York Times concluded that the Calhoun Monument “might easily have been a more artistic work, and some severe criticisms have been made upon it.” Charleston cotton broker Henry S. Holmes was also troubled by the aesthetic failings of the monument. “I remember the unveiling of the monstrosity,” he wrote in his diary in 1895. “Great was the disappointment when the hideous bronze figure was disrobed, and ever since it has been a frightful sight to citizens passing over Marion Square.” Elsewhere in his journal, Holmes described the statue as a “swindle” and an “abortion.”31
Some members of the African American community also felt deep contempt for the Calhoun Monument. Not long after the unveiling ceremony, the annual review of black militia companies took place in Marion Square, right behind the Calhoun Monument. Struck by the juxtaposition of black troops marching between the Citadel and the backside of Calhoun, an African American woman shouted out, “Calhoun turn him back on ’em.’”32
Most often, black Charlestonians targeted the Calhoun Monument with humor and derision. By early June 1887, African Americans were poking fun at the statue of Justice, which had recently been installed at the base of the memorial. “‘De ole man had ee wife wid um now,’” remarked one James Island resident. Or, as the News and Courier explained, “The impression prevails generally among the non-reading colored population that the statue of Justice is that of Mrs. Calhoun.” Judging from the stories that circulated in numerous newspapers and magazines, as well as among the local citizenry, this idea—and “he wife,” the Gullah nickname it spawned—stuck. In 1890, the Augusta Chronicle claimed that black Charlestonians believed that Calhoun, with his “finger pointing downwards,” was “pintin’ at his ma.” Henry Holmes wrote that Justice was “a fearful hag whom the street urchins have always called ‘he wife.’”33
In February 1888, Charlestonians awoke to find the figure of Justice looking “as if it had been on a spree.” Someone “had placed a tin kettle in her hand and a cigar in her mouth.” Five years later, just after a great hurricane hit the city, the News and Courier reported that “old Calhoun” survived “all the terrors of the cyclone,” but “not so” with the “bronze female known to the darkies as ‘he wife,’” whose face had been turned a “lily complexion” with white paint.34
The identity and motives of the vandals in both of these cases is impossible to determine, but black Charlestonians did on occasion use the Calhoun Monument for target practice. In December 1894, an African American boy named Andrew Haig was arrested for shooting a white toddler in the head in Marion Square. Haig told the police that he had not been aiming his tiny pistol at the child, but rather at the female figure that stood at the base of the Calhoun Monument. “I nebber shoot the chile, I shoot at Mr. Calhoun wife, and when I hit ’um he sound like gong,” the boy reportedly said.35
This informal campaign of ridicule and vandalism climaxed just as the Calhoun Monument met its demise. By the early 1890s, the LCMA had determined to remove the Calhoun Monument, commissioning New York sculptor John Massey Rhind to produce a replacement. The original monument, which the News and Courier irreverently dubbed “Mr. Calhoun Number 1,” was taken down Thanksgiving Day 1895. In its column marking the holiday, the paper insisted that “all of Charleston had . . . great cause for thanksgiving,” for “the men who are engaged in demolishing the dreadful eyesore, the old Calhoun monument, did not take a day off as most other folk did.” Some people have “suggested that it be saved up until the death of the sculptor [Harnisch] and then placed over his grave,” reported the paper, but “this plan . . . has been abandoned, the punishment being thought too severe.” A few days later, Justice was also removed. Unsuccessful in its efforts to find an alternate home for the two bronze statues, as well as another of the allegorical figures that had never been installed, the LCMA sold them as scrap metal.36
“Mr. Calhoun Number 2” arrived by steamship on June 7, 1896, followed shortly thereafter by Rhind, who oversaw the first stages of the installation. Three weeks later, the caped likeness of Calhoun—“the largest bronze statue ever cast” in New York, according to the New York Times—was placed high atop a fluted column. Reaching more than one hundred feet in the air, the second Calhoun Monument was significantly taller than the first. The base of the monument was adorned with palmetto trees as well as inscriptions to the LCMA’s crusade to erect the tribute to Calhoun. It also included reliefs that made gestures to his early stance as a war hawk and later career as a states’ rights advocate. Like the original, the new monument did not mention slavery. Mr. Calhoun Number 2 immediately drew large crowds and many admirers, though the LCMA, chastened after the failure of Mr. Calhoun Number 1, chose not to have an official dedication ceremony.37
Men pose in front of the second, much taller Calhoun Monument, ca. 1901–1902.
The association’s official explanation for replacing the first monument focused on aesthetic objections to the statue: its imbalance of proportion, Calhoun’s anachronistic Prince Albert coat, and his exaggerated right index finger that “amounted to a deformity.” The LCMA was equally disappointed by the allegorical figures that were to have been placed around the base of the statue. When the second allegorical figure, History, arrived from Italy, for instance, it was deemed unacceptable and temporarily placed in the courtyard at the Home for the Mothers, Widows, and Daughters of Confederate Soldiers. According to a story that Henry Holmes had heard, the LCMA refused to receive the other two, which remained in Rome. The cotton merchant chalked up the artistic failings of the Calhoun statue and its allegorical companions to their sculptor’s mental deficits. “Harnisch is, I hear, in an asylum in Philadelphia,” concluded Holmes as the first statue was removed in late 1895. “His mind must have been bad originally and the grotesque creations came from its fevered and distracting workings.” Others heard that Harnisch had recently “regained his sanity,” only to relapse “into imbecility” upon recalling “Mr. Calhoun and he wife.”38
But the ridicule and defacement of Mr. Calhoun Number 1 must have been hard for LCMA members to stomach, and even the removal of the statue suggested something more than artistic objections was at stake. After workers placed a rope around the original Calhoun statue and lowered it below “he wife,” one black boy climbed up the legs of the statue while asking, “Wha’ dey tek Mistah Calhoon down foh?” A companion replied, “He must be tek he down foh straighten out he fingah” while he “skillfully pasted Mr. Calhoun in the eye with a lump of mud,” according to the News and Courier. When the laborers looked away, a number of black children crawled up the statue’s legs “and heaped all sorts of indignities upon him” as well as on his female companion. “She must have pain in she back,” said one. Another commented, “She grow fat sence she been dey.” The removal of “Missis Calhoon” was to start the following day, an event, the newspaper predicted, that “will undoubtedly be watched by hundreds of the small African citizens for whom ‘he wife’ has a great power of fascination.” The paper’s coverage of these events transformed black mockery of the Calhoun Monument into racist parody. Yet this fact should not obscure another facet of these stories. Made the butt of jokes by local blacks, “Mr. Calhoun an’ he Wife” represented as much a social and political affront as an aesthetic disaster.39
White accounts acknowledge the myriad aesthetic reservations, sprinkling in the occasional reference to “Mr. Calhoun an’ he Wife.” But black memory places the responsibility for the decision to build a second, significantly taller memorial squarely on the shoulders of African Americans who sought to damage the monument. Mamie Garvin Fields recalled that when she was a girl, Charleston leaders decided “to put up a life-size figure of John C. Calhoun preaching,” referring to the first Calhoun Monument. This angered African American residents, who felt that Calhoun constantly reminded them that even if they were no longer enslaved, they still had to stay in their place. So, Fields explained, “we used to carry something with us, if we knew we would be passing that way, in order to deface that statue—scratch up the coat, break the watch chain, try to knock off the nose. . . . Children and adults beat up John C. Calhoun so badly that the whites had to come back and put him way up high, so we couldn’t get to him.”40
There is no conclusive evidence that black vandalism is what prompted the LCMA to install the taller monument. Still, it is clear that the organization—and Charleston leaders more generally—had deep fears about the first monument’s safety. As we have seen, several of the city’s tributes to Calhoun suffered at the hands of vandals, so much so that when his new sarcophagus was installed in 1884 the local paper called for measures that would prevent defacement by “thoughtless or evil disposed persons.” Moreover, just after the first Calhoun Monument was unveiled in 1887, the News and Courier reported that a “Philadelphia crank has written a grossly abusive and ridiculous letter to the Ladies’ Calhoun Monument Association.” The writer expressed his hope that the Calhoun Monument would be treated like the memorial to British spy Major John André. Erected in New York in 1880 by a railroad magnate, the widely unpopular monument to André (who was executed during the American Revolution) had twice been bombed with dynamite. Hurling “the fiercest anathemas against all Southerners,” the “cantankerous crank” from Philadelphia predicted that the Calhoun Monument would also “very soon be blown up or mutilated.”41
Charleston’s newspapers and city officials also regularly expressed worries about the defacement of public statuary and parks, especially Marion Square. On December 2, 1894, the News and Courier denounced widespread graffiti in the city as well as “rough usage” of the city’s parks. Early the following year—just weeks after black youth Andrew Haig told police that he had been shooting his pistol at the first Calhoun Monument—the commissioners of Marion Square hired a new park keeper to limit “the nuisances and depredations now committed by goats, boys and night prowlers.”42
In the end, it seems fair to conclude that some combination of black ridicule and vandalism contributed to the decision to replace the first Calhoun Monument with its much larger successor. After all, what could be more embarrassing to LCMA members than to see their Lost Cause shrine defaced by bullets and buckets of paint, or to have it transformed into a joke that invoked howls of laughter from blacks and whites alike? This was no small victory for black Charlestonians. Scholars of Civil War memory have argued that the monuments and statues erected in the decades after the conflict tended to assume “a sort of physical and psychological impermeability,” engendering little protest as a result. The Calhoun Monument tells a different story. Though marginalized by Redemption and Jim Crow, local blacks found unconventional means to resist a statue they viewed as a symbol of racial oppression.43
And, it is worth noting, they kept up their informal assault well into the twentieth century. As late as 1946, the city’s Historical Commission reported the “wanton mutilation by unknown persons” necessitated repairs to the second Calhoun Monument. Municipal sources make no mention of racial motivations, but oral history indicates that some of the vandals attacked the statue because of Calhoun’s outspoken stance on slavery. In a 1984 interview, for example, former Avery Normal Institute student Lucille Williams recalled that one of her black classmates had thrown rocks at the monument in the mid-1930s because the antebellum politician “didn’t like us.”44
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HOWEVER MUCH BLACK distaste for Calhoun contributed to the installation of a new monument in 1896, it is appropriate that the Calhoun statue climbed to its monumental height as race relations plummeted to their nadir. In addition to responding to black defacement and artistic misgivings, white Charlestonians spoke to an increasingly rigid system of Jim Crow with their taller Calhoun memorial. Throughout the 1890s, South Carolina whites labored to ensure that segregation—a haphazard system in the 1870s, inchoate even when the first Calhoun Monument went up in 1887—became more formalized. Led by “Pitchfork Ben” Tillman, governor from 1890 to 1894, this white supremacy campaign scored its greatest victory in 1895 when delegates to a state constitutional convention disenfranchised most of those remaining African Americans who still enjoyed the right to vote. In Charleston, “white only” and “colored” signs blanketed public accommodations by 1900.45
Though just a child at the time, Mamie Garvin Fields felt the chill of formal segregation immediately. Having lived in an integrated neighborhood since birth, she noticed that Jim Crow made “friends into enemies overnight,” creating a barrier between white and black families who had been on amicable terms. In recalling the institutionalization of segregation in Charleston, Fields focused much of her ire on the Calhoun statues. Both monuments—with their obvious if unstated connection to slavery—were intended to fortify the new barrier and push blacks down to where they supposedly belonged. “Blacks took that statue personally,” Fields wrote of the first monument in her memoir. “As you passed by, here was Calhoun looking you in the face and telling you, ‘Nigger, you may not be a slave, but I am back to see you stay in your place.’” Whites had then put him up even higher. Out of harm’s way, Calhoun could better fulfill his appointed mission—to use the memory of slavery to justify Jim Crow. “Telling you,” Fields recalled, “there was a place for ‘niggers’ and ‘niggers’ must stay there.” As a black newspaper in nearby Savannah argued, the recent success of white supremacists was simply the “logical result” of the philosophy formulated by John C. Calhoun a half century earlier.46