TO MY MOTHER AND FATHER

Acknowledgments

First, I want to express my gratitude to my editors at Houghton IVIifflin Company, Paul Brooks, Dorothy de Santillana, Craig WyHe, and Esther Forbes, who with infinite patience and understanding have worked with me on this book through the years. Special thanks are also due Arthur M. Schlesinger, Junior, of Harvard, who read American Portrait while it was still in manuscript, and to whom I am indebted for enlightenment on obscure aspects of the slavery question, and on the modern significance of Calhoun's philosophy. I have accepted without material alteration his interpretation of Calhoun's state of mind in the ^Years of Decision' (1837-38), as depicted in The Age of Jackson. Bernard DeVoto of Cambridge also read this book in its original eleven hundred pages of manuscript, and is responsible for pruning of much surplus material, and for directing my attention to the significance of the soil depletion in the Southern states and the interrelationship of the consequent Western expansionist and abolitionist movements.

I wish to thank Little, Brown and Company for permission to quote from Claude M. Fuess' Daniel Webster, two volumes, Boston, 1930; Charles Scribners' Sons for quotations from Margaret Bayard Smith's The First Forty Years of Washington Society, Gaillard Hunt, editor, New York, 1906; E. C. McClurg and Company, publishers of Eva E. Dye's Mc-Loughlin and Old Oregon, Chicago, 1900; John Perry Pritchett, for material quoted from his Calhoun and His Defense of the South, Poughkeepsie, 1935; the Chapel Hill Press for quotations from the Reminiscences of William C. Preston, Minnie Clare Yarborough, editor, copyright, 1933, by the University of North Carolina Press, and especially G. P. Putnam's Sons, for quotations from The American Heresy by Christopher Hollis, copyright, 1930, by Christopher Hollis.

The search for the essence of Calhoun must, of course, begin in his own South Carolina. At Clemson Agricultural College his great mass of personal papers and other contemporary material were made available to me; and I wish to express my thanks to the librarian, Miss Cornelia Graham, io Professor and Mrs. A. G. Holmes and Professor Mark Bradley for their

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Viii ACKNOWLEDGMENTS

assistance. I am deeply grateful to Mrs. Francis Calhoun, who nearly fifty years ago wrote down her personal interviews with the last of the Calhoun slaves at Fort Hill, which are here used for the first time.

Help has also come from other members of the Calhoun family, including anecdotes and reminiscences from the last grandson, the late Patrick Calhoun of Pasadena, California; from Miss Lilian Gold, Flint, Michigan; Mr. John C. Calhoun, Columbia, South Carolina; and ]Mr. Louis Symonds, Mr. and ^Irs. John C. Calhoun Symonds, and ^liss Eugenia Frost, all of Charleston.

Mr. Alexander S. Salley, Junior, head of the South Carolina Historical Commission, gave me invaluable help in unraveling the early legislative proceedings of South Carolina, still in manuscript. Others assisting me in Columbia were Professor Robert L. Meriwether of the University of South Carolina Faculty, Miss Elizabeth Porcher of the University Library, Colonel Fitz Hugh McMaster, Mr. J. Gordon McCabe, and Mr. James T. Gittman. I also wish to thank Miss Virginia Rugheimer of the Library of the College of the City of Charleston, jNIiss Ellen FitzSimons, librarian of the Charleston Library Society, and ]Miss Kitty Ravenel and Dr. W. W. Ball, also of Charleston.

In Washington, D.C., I am under obligation to IMr. St. George L. Sioussat of the ^Manuscript Division of the Library of Congress; also to Mr. Thomas P. Martin and Miss Elizabeth McPherson; and to Miss Bess Glenn of the National Archives.

I am deeply grateful to Professor Hollen Farr, curator of the Yale Memorabilia Room, who reconstructed for me the 'Yale College' of 1804. Also assisting me at Yale University were ]Miss Anne Pratt, Professor Gerard Jensen, Mrs. Sara Jane Powers, Mr. James T. Babb, ^Ir. C. B. Tinker, Professor R. D. French, and Doctor John Charles Schroeder, headmaster of Calhoun College.

The staffs of the Public Libraries of Boston, Newburyport, Haverhill, and West Newbury, Massachusetts; the Boston Athenaeum, the Library of the University of North Carolina at Chapel Hill and of the Woman's College at Greensboro, North Carolina, have all been generous with their assistance.

The following individuals, by advice or information, have also aided in the preparation of this book: Dr. Clarence Saunders Brigham and Mr. Clifford Shipton of the American Antiquarian Society, Worcester; Mr. Louis H. Dielman, former librarian of the Peabody Institute, Baltimore; Mr. Gerald Johnson, Baltimore; Mr. Robert Richards, Memphis; the Honorable Thomas Salley, Orangeburg, South Carolina; Professor Fletcher Green and Professor Paul Green, Chapel Hill, North Carolina; Mr. Theodore Morrison, Cambridge, Massachusetts; Mr. John N. Burk, Boston; Mrs. Ralph Boas, Norton, Massachusetts; Miss Evelyn Crosby, Centerville, INIassachusetts; IMr. John B. Osgood, Lawrence, IMassachusetts; Mr.

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ACKNOWLEDGMENTS IX

Robert W. Lull, Newburyport, Massachusetts; Miss Mildred Gould and the late J. E. Latham, Greensboro, North Carolina; Mr. Cornelius D. Thomas, Junior, New Orleans; Mrs. Howard F. Dunn and Mrs. Mildred L Hal-lihan, Litchfield, Connecticut; Mr. Eugene F. Dow and Mr. Fletcher Pratt, New York City; Mr. and i\Irs. Carl Kuhlmann, Riegelsville, Pennsylvania, and Mr. E. Austin Benner, Haverhill.

Finally, I wish to mention two of my professors at the Woman's College of the University of North Carolina, the late Benjamin B. Kendrick and the late Alex Mathews Arnett, whose advice, encouragement, and understanding enabled me to write this book.

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