John C. Calhoun, Philosopher and Statesman
In 1862 Charles Drake resorted to describing the basic frame of American political history in order to speak about the war in which the nation was then engaged. Albeit united by a common government, the Northern and Southern sections of the nation had developed in contrary political directions, as “all candid observers know,” he said. The Northern section was “in its nature and principles essentially democratic,” the Southern section “essentially aristocratic.” He added, “Each obeyed the law of its own condition.” The Southern aristocracy was “born to authority” and “tenacious of power.” They could not “tolerate a majority not controlled by them.”1
In obedience to the law of its own condition, “the aristocratic minority would, with absolute certainty, separate itself, by violence, if necessary, from the democratic majority, the very hour it could no longer subject that majority to its will.” Indeed, when power shifted to the Northern people due to the North’s more rapid growth, the aristocracy “struck its first blow at American Republicanism.” The war had been “certain to come,” and when the first blow was struck, it was aimed “with a relentless purpose to destroy.”2
Although the foregoing account had become obvious to Drake and the Republicans once hostilities commenced, the war had not been entirely foreseeable to them: “For many years we refused to believe that the Southern aristocracy would seek that terrible resort, because it seemed out of the range of any imaginable possibility that the descendants of our Revolutionary sires could ever strike at the life of their glorious Country.” That is, it seemed too incredible to be true that Drake’s generation of Southern statesmen could differ so profoundly from their forebears. But they showed that they were in fact a different kind of men altogether. “We forgot,” Drake continued, “that an aristocracy ruled the South, and that aristocracies stop not at blood to hold and perpetuate their predominance.” Drake expressed a common opinion among the Republicans, that between the Revolution and the Civil War, the character of Southern statesmen had been radically transformed. In 1776 they were willing to shed their own blood to defend the rights of mankind; by 1861 they were willing to spill blood to assail the rights of mankind. The rebellion in 1776 was a republican revolution; the rebellion in 1861 was an “aristocracy revolting against the people.”3
From the Republican point of view, the Missouri controversy was a prominent event in the ongoing and general transformation of Southern statesmen from ambitiously republican to ambitiously oligarchic. Prior to the Missouri controversy, the Northern people could justifiably assume that the system of government and way of life in the Southern states were developing in a republican direction, as they were in the North, because so many of the most famous republican founders were from the Southern states. But the Missouri controversy had begun to awaken the American people in the free states to the truth. Thereafter, they understood that the influence of the republican principles in the Declaration of Independence on Southern government and society was waning and that the influence of slavery was strengthening. Still, the ambitions of the generation of Southern statesmen exhibited during the Missouri controversy were tame in comparison to the ambitions of Southern statesmen in Drake’s generation. The assessment of the Republicans was that the Missouri Compromise thwarted the spread and development of republicanism across the nation, but the Kansas-Nebraska Act three decades later threatened the life of American republicanism.
It was South Carolina statesman John C. Calhoun, the Republicans believed, who decisively reshaped Southern statesmen and decisively changed the course of national events over those decades. His national political career began in the U.S. House of Representatives in 1811, when he was twenty-eight. By the close of his life and career in 1850, the representatives of the republican people in the free states and the oligarchic rulers of the slave states were struggling for control of the national government, contending for republicanism and oligarchy, respectively.
The Republicans held Calhoun responsible, far more than anyone else, for the advance of revolutionary Southern oligarchy after the Missouri controversy. They recognized that by the force of its intrinsic attributes, slavery had been transforming Southern political society as it spread and increased. To that structural cause of revolutionary change, Calhoun added a superior guiding mind. Looking back, the Republicans traced every contentious event in their party’s new but momentous career to Calhoun’s influential statesmanship. Congress felt his influence in national affairs so strongly that his name echoed in its two houses for twenty years after his death in 1850, as the records of the Congressional Globe well testify. In Republican eyes, he was a great, wicked, and ingenious man. They both admired and loathed his qualities as a statesman, and some would even profess their admiration and loathing for him at the same time. Representative John Wentworth of Illinois wrote that it would be unjust to say that Calhoun “ever did or said an uncivil thing.” Calhoun’s life, he said, “shows us how very bad a very good man can be. His life was spotless, but his influence was extremely deleterious.” In an 1860 speech, Charles Sumner said of Calhoun that he “possessed an intellect of much originality and boldness,” but also, “All that the Republican Party now opposes may be found in John C. Calhoun.”4
Calhoun brought new political principles, new constitutional doctrines, an ambitious vision, and carefully developed methods of realizing his ambitions. With regard to his plans, he was as incapable of candor, though seeming candid, as Sumner was incapable of subtlety. His paramount aim, said Representative Ralph Buckland of Ohio, was “the subjection of the Government to the control of the slave aristocracy of the South, or the dismemberment of the Union and the formation of a confederacy founded on human slavery.”5 The Republicans deduced his designs from his theories and the practical statesmanship Calhoun exercised throughout his public life. In the aftermath of the Missouri controversy, Calhoun’s project to build an empire ruled by the slaveholding oligarchy began in earnest.
Two interrelated motives, the steady advancement of oligarchic rule and the extension and perpetuity of slavery, drove Calhoun’s public conduct. These motives were the mirror opposite of the American founders’ motives, perpetual republican rule and the ultimate extinction of slavery. To achieve his ends, Calhoun presented his doctrines in such a way that they would seem to defend, and not destroy, the Constitution and seem to fulfill, and not defeat, the founders’ aims. By seeming to venerate the republican principles of the fathers, and by professing to interpret the Constitution strictly, he could appeal to others’ patriotism and reverence for the founders in support of his doctrines, which in reality served the purpose of quietly destroying and replacing the founders’ political regime.
Whether authentic or not, a recollected conversation between Commodore Charles Stewart and Calhoun captured the Republicans’ sense of Calhoun’s motives. In a public letter quoted by Daniel Gooch and by other Republicans, Stewart recalled that he and Calhoun were on intimate terms during the War of 1812 when Calhoun was a young and able member of the House of Representatives. In one part of their conversation, regarding the southern section of the country, Calhoun admitted to Stewart, “That we are essentially aristocratic I cannot deny.” The sectional policy of Calhoun and his friends determined the “necessity” of associating with the Democratic Party, “however it may occasionally clash with our feelings,” because through affiliation with the party in “the middle and western States we hold power.” But if the aristocrats were to lose party dominance or to meet any other obstacle, and “we cease thus to control this nation . . . , we shall then resort to the dissolution of the Union.” In the second part of their conversation, on slavery and the American founding, Calhoun acknowledged, “The compromises in the Constitution, under the then circumstances, were sufficient for our fathers.” Gooch noted that the fathers to whom Calhoun referred were the subset of the “leading men of the South,” who looked upon slavery “as essential to their prosperity” and who desired “its permanence.” That southern type did not include “the fathers of the Republic,” who “desired and intended . . . the temporary existence of the institution.” In other words, when Calhoun referred to “our fathers” who deemed the compromises of the Constitution sufficient, he was referring to the proslavery fathers, and only the South Carolina and Georgia fathers who demanded the concessions to slavery in the Constitution could meet that general description, but not Washington, Jefferson, Henry, Madison, and other leading founders from the South.
Calhoun further alleged that “under the altered condition of the country from that period” (from the founding period forward), the South had “no resource but dissolution” amid new conflicts over slavery, because “no amendments to the Constitution can be reached under the three-fourths rule.” Gooch commented that Calhoun foresaw the improbability of ratifying an amendment to the Constitution that would provide additional security to slavery. The tide of the American Revolution threatened slaveholders like him, who wished to perpetuate and expand slavery, and as early as 1812 Calhoun was considering opportunities to reverse that tide. He looked on the compromises of the Constitution at its adoption not as the founding generation did—as temporary expedients designed to address an inherited slave system until the nation extinguished it as expected. Rather, to Calhoun, the compromises were openings to exploit and resolve in favor of perpetual slaveholding. The first barrier to establishing the permanence of slaveholding was that proslavery slaveholders like Calhoun constituted a small minority in a large national republic. Gooch understood that Calhoun contemplated this barrier early in his national career, and his future statesmanship would attempt to surmount that barrier or, failing that, to break his section of the nation away and become independent.6
Representative Frederick Pike of Maine located the origin of Calhoun’s revolutionary statesmanship in 1820, the year when the Missouri controversy raged. Around that time, he said, Calhoun had decided that the slave states should remain in the Union only so long as they could control the national government. Like Gooch, Pike acknowledged Calhoun’s early recognition of the barrier that he and the proslavery cause faced. Although the minority slaveholders ruled in oligarchic South Carolina, majority rule predominated in the extended Republic. The population of the free states was growing faster than that of the slave states, and this posed an obstacle to Calhoun’s vision. Calhoun “saw what was coming” and sought means to ensure control by the slave states. In Jefferson’s theory of state sovereignty, Calhoun “very early saw its applicability to the quarrel he had originated with majorities.” Jefferson and Calhoun fundamentally differed in that “Jefferson was a believer in majorities,” whereas Calhoun used Jefferson’s theory as “a shield against majorities.”7
Calhoun drew his theory of state sovereignty from the Kentucky and Virginia Resolutions of 1798, authored by Jefferson and Madison, respectively. Those founders, John Baldwin said, had arrayed “‘State sovereignty’ against certain acts of Congress,” the Alien and Sedition Acts. Many Republicans deplored the resolutions, as Baldwin did, calling them “notorious,” but not due to the principled positions they advanced. The Kentucky and Virginia Resolutions vexed them because Jefferson and Madison had inadvertently supplied a plausible but false pretext for Calhoun to claim the support of those eminent founders’ authority in advancing his revolutionary goal, oligarchic rule. The Republicans recognized that Calhoun’s theory crucially differed from the original authors’ similar theory. Baldwin said that in authoring the resolutions, Jefferson and Madison had not “understood very well what they did. Certainly they did not mean all that has since been meant by nullifiers and secessionists.”8
Jefferson and Madison invoked the sovereignty of the state to protect the people against unjust action on the part of the central government. Their doctrine, Pike said, held that a state could “annul the laws of the central power, or withdraw from the partnership,” but the only justifiable cause for these actions was when the central power “had become oppressive.” This use of the theory of state sovereignty was “a remnant of the revolutionary struggle . . . , standing in the place of, the right of revolution.” By the right of revolution, Jefferson and Madison understood that the people might disobey the government, even popular government under the Constitution, when the government became destructive of the ends for which it was established, the security of the equal natural rights to life, liberty, and the pursuit of happiness. Only then might a people “appeal to heaven,” to resistance, violence, or war. The right of a state to nullify an oppressive or unconstitutional action by the central government stood in place of the right of revolution, which was grounded in natural right. Therefore, the character of the central government’s action determined whether the state’s conduct was justifiable. Nullification of an oppressive law by a state was justified on behalf of its oppressed people. It was an extreme measure for extreme circumstances, a peaceful intermediate step before justifiable rebellion and, possibly, civil war. That was the doctrine of state sovereignty contended for by the Kentucky and Virginia Resolutions. Baldwin pointed out that Jefferson and Madison dropped state-sovereignty doctrine after the crisis of the Alien and Sedition Acts had passed, when events no longer required its assertion. After the defeat of the Federalist Party, “Mr. Jefferson himself made no further use of them.”9
Whereas the authors of the Kentucky and Virginia Resolutions dropped state-sovereignty doctrine after an unwanted crisis had passed, Calhoun twisted its principled basis and attempted to reinterpret the entire constitutional order of American government according to it. In brief, John Bingham recapitulated, Calhoun’s theory of state sovereignty held that “the Government of the United States is nothing but a mere agent, the principals of which are separate, sovereign, and independent States of the Union.” In other words, the states were supreme and the national government the creature or agent of the sovereign states. This meant that Calhoun attributed national sovereignty to the states of the Union, because, Baldwin remarked, “Sovereignty is the highest, the most absolute, and the most essential prerogative of a nation” and “cannot rightfully be predicated of any political society or community that is not a nation.” The logical consequence of the doctrine was that leaders of state government had the right to direct a state in relation to other states, just as the rulers of a nation could direct a nation in relation to other nations. State-sovereignty doctrine just as easily implied the right to secede from the Union as national-sovereignty doctrine implied the right to terminate a treaty. Interest, not duty, bound a state to the Union. Anticipating and refuting the false charge that he favored the centralization of power in the nation’s capital and imperial rule over states, Baldwin acknowledged, “The scope of the national Government is limited and defined by the Federal Constitution,” but the national government was not the administration of a league composed of sovereign states. “To this Government, and to this alone,” he continued, “belong the rights of sovereignty.”10
It might have been true that Calhoun did not openly counsel the policy of secession, careful man that he was, but, as Frederick Pike pointed out, secession logically derived from his state-sovereignty doctrine just as much as nullification did. Reader Clarke, too, claimed that “supreme State sovereignty” constituted “all that is claimed in practical nullification and secession, . . . a sword to strike and a shield to protect.” The disciples of Calhoun’s “supreme State sovereignty” had claimed “the right to secede; the right to disregard the law of Congress; the right to stay in or go out of the Union at pleasure.”11
On the surface, Calhoun’s theory appeared to be the same as the theory in the Virginia and Kentucky Resolutions, and by association with the venerable authors of those Resolutions, it might appear to be warranted by the Constitution. But these appearances were deceiving, said the Republicans. Representative Martin Thayer of Pennsylvania flatly stated, “The idea of State sovereignty as understood by the school of politicians referred to is fundamentally opposed to the Constitution of the United States.” The Republicans characteristically trotted out quotations from the generation of founding statesmen to show that they did not recognize the states as independent sovereignties under the Constitution. Charles Sumner quoted Elbridge Gerry in the Federal Convention, who affirmed that the states were never independent. Patrick Henry and George Mason opposed the ratification of the Constitution because they understood it “superseded State rights.” Sumner quoted the cover letter of George Washington as president of the convention, transmitting the draft Constitution to Congress. Washington justified the “consolidation of the union” under the proposed Constitution, because without that consolidation, it was “impracticable” to “secure all rights of independent sovereignties” to the states and, at the same time, to secure the basis of “prosperity, safety, perhaps our national existence.” And Sumner quoted Madison, the alleged source of Calhoun’s state-sovereignty doctrine. In the Federal Convention, Madison averred, “Some contend that States are sovereign, when in fact they are only political societies. The states never possessed the essential right of sovereignty.” Thayer found evidence that Madison feared the exact result that Calhoun’s misappropriation of his ideas attempted to secure: “I apprehend the greatest danger is from encroachment of the States on the national Government. This apprehension is justly founded on the experience of ancient confederacies, and our own is proof of it.”12 Thus, while Calhoun claimed fidelity to the Constitution, his interpretation denied, and the effect of his interpretation undermined, nationhood, a central aim of the founders.
Madison had lived long enough to witness Calhoun’s signal misappropriation of his and Jefferson’s theory in the Virginia and Kentucky Resolutions, and this distressed him. John Baldwin quoted several letters in which Madison strenuously disassociates his ideas from Calhoun’s, which Madison calls “preposterous”: “If it be understood that our political system contains no provision for deciding questions between the Union and its member but that of negotiation, and thus, failing, but that of war, as between separate and independent Powers . . . [w]hat has been called Government is, on that supposition, a mere league only.” Senator Edward Baker of Oregon quoted from a letter Madison sent to Daniel Webster in 1833, in which he addresses state sovereignty and the right to nullify a national enactment or to secede. In it Madison affirms the right of a state to secede for “intolerable oppression,” which is “another name for revolution, about which there is no theoretic controversy.” But “to secede at will” is “a violation without cause, of a faith solemnly pledged.” This might have been permissible if states were independent sovereignties joined together by a treaty. It was “an undisputed fact,” however, that “the Constitution was made by the people” and therefore bound the states to the Union according to republican theory.13 States were not independent sovereignties, and the Constitution was much more than a treaty.
Surely, a man as intelligent and as politically prominent as Calhoun must have known how different his theory was from the theory of the author whom he claimed to follow, the still breathing but increasingly exasperated James Madison. Yet Calhoun persisted in promoting his theory and in claiming the founder’s mantle. Why? Baldwin laid out the purpose of Calhoun’s doctrines and revealed their attractions to new young leaders of the slave states. Those state governments were “strongholds of the slave power and main defenses of its system of oligarchy.” This explained why Calhoun and his followers set forth not the national government but the states as “very sacred State ‘sovereignties,’” as “fixed, changeless, absolute something, above the people, greater than the nation, and endowed with a sort of divine right to bind and control both the people and the national Government.”14
In practice, arguments derived from state-sovereignty doctrine checked the national government and the growing popular majority in the free states. If the ruling oligarchy in the slave states disliked duly enacted federal laws, decisions by the federal courts, the results of a presidential election, or actions by the federal executive, Calhoun’s state-sovereignty doctrine permitted them to interpose and threaten nullification or secession. Thus, though only a minority, they could induce the American people or their officers in the national government to accede to their demands. They could strategically deploy states’ rights to control the behavior of the national majority. Calhoun’s doctrine allowed them to do all of this with a clear constitutional conscience.
The national government could not safely act without first deferring to the states for approval, that is, to the slave-state governments, controlled by the ruling oligarchy. Hence, the national majority that should otherwise have ruled by right through the federal government could rule only with permission from the oligarchic minority in the slave states, which ruled their domain by might. Calhoun’s doctrine gave the oligarchic class a self-serving constitutionalism that resisted “King Numbers.” This increased the oligarchy’s incentive to secure or maintain their control of government in the old and new slave states. By doing so, they could rule much more than their local domain. Calhoun illuminated a path for the oligarchy to acquire rule over the nation, through means that appeared to be constitutionally justified. This would be their reward for maintaining control of the slave states and following Calhoun’s banner.
Once a majority of the states were slave states, Calhoun’s state-sovereignty theory would no longer be valuable and could be discarded, because the ruling minorities in most states would constitute the national government and fill the national offices. The admission of more slave states relative to free states would give the oligarchy the direct means to convert the national government into an oligarchy proper. To reach that goal, it was necessary to exert their disproportionate influence in the national government to spread slavery. This explained the slaveholders’ increasingly aggressive policy to expand slavery into new territories and states.
The Republicans shone a bright light through the outward surface of Calhoun’s doctrine and revealed a chasm of difference between the authors of the Kentucky and Virginia Resolutions and Calhoun. The resolutions were written for a republican people living under a republican form of government, for the purpose of protecting their constitutional liberties. Calhoun taught his constitutionalism to an oligarchy that ruled. Its master motive and the primary end it directly served were the advancement of oligarchic rule, which was completely at odds with the Constitution.
John Baldwin pointed out the “very noteworthy significance” that “the disloyal crusade against the supremacy of the national Government” was undertaken for the “States, and not in behalf of the southern people.” That was because the Southern people were not the sovereign rulers of the states; the small class of oligarchs controlled the state governments and expected to rule by right. Hence, Baldwin said, it was no accident that the term State Rights was coined rather than Rights of the people, for the latter term “would not have served as well” and “would, in fact, have served to defeat rather than aid the purpose of the conspiring slavery extremists.” It was their aim “to deny the rights of the people and establish a slave oligarchy; and it was a clever artifice to use a loud clamor for State rights as a shield to cover the establishment of plantation despotisms.”15
An alert historian, Baldwin suggested, would understand the whole political history of the Southern section for the “last half century,” by tracing Southern politicians’ uses and meanings of the terms state sovereignty and states’ rights in connection with oligarchy, the motive interest behind the promotion of those ideas. He illustrated the effect of Calhoun’s doctrines by reaching into that history and highlighting an example of constitutional interpretation, given by Calhoun’s disciple “Mr. Rhett, of South Carolina.”
In the U.S. Senate in 1851, Rhett redefined the meaning of the clause on treason in Article III, Section 3, of the Constitution, which says, “Treason against the United States, shall consist only in levying war against them, or in adhering to their enemies, giving them aid and comfort.” Passing that clause through Calhoun’s theory of interpretation, Rhett magically transformed the plain meaning of the language, so that its new meaning was the exact opposite of the traditional meaning. Rhett argued that treason consisted in rebelling against individual states. In practice, this meant that treason consisted in rebelling against the ruling oligarchies in the slave states. Baldwin quoted Rhett, who said that treason was “a violation of allegiance to the sovereignties who established the system of government; and those sovereignties are described in the Constitution as the States. A person levying war against them, or giving aid and comfort to their enemies, is guilty of treason; showing distinctly that treason can be committed against them, and against them only.”16
Therefore, according to Rhett, if an individual or even a state betrays, attacks, or conspires against the national government in any fashion, the Constitution does not deem this conduct to be treason. But if a mob of disgruntled poor whites and rebellious slaves attacked the statehouse in Columbia, South Carolina, where the South Carolina oligarchy gathered, the U.S. Constitution defines that as treason against the United States. By Rhett’s application of Calhoun’s doctrine, the Constitution of the United States bound and enforced the people’s obedience to the states. In the free states, this would pose no burden, since the state governments were accountable to the sovereign people. But in the slave states, this redefined clause in the Constitution bound the Southern people’s obedience to the oligarchy, which was not accountable to the ruled people. In this way, the slave-state oligarchies could invoke the national power to protect their antirepublican regime and to punish its assailants, on allegedly constitutional grounds, and reverse the constitutionally mandated obligation of the national government to guarantee to each state a republican form of government, in Article IV, Section 4.
Politically, Calhoun’s constitutionalism served its creator well. State-sovereignty doctrine loosened states’ attachment to the national government, relieved the interstate ruling oligarchy of the constitutional burden of obeying, and in fact gave them a constitutional pretext to demand that the national government obey them. As rulers of sovereign states, the oligarchy could regard the constitutional compact as a league of convenience, broken or observed, according to their interest. By that doctrine, oligarchic rulers in the slave-state capitals were at liberty to choose whether to steer their sovereign states in obedience to the national government, which they might do if their oligarchic class controlled the national government, or to defy the national government’s authority on the allegedly constitutional grounds Calhoun gave them.
Calhoun had developed theories befitting a revolutionary project. The more state sovereignty was taught, embraced, and asserted, the more weakly a state felt bound by obligation to obey the national government. The successful promotion of Calhoun’s constitutionalism was more consequential to the dissolution of the national government than whether he actually urged secession in public or private during his lifetime. At the same time, by his reticence on the question of secession, Calhoun could more easily defend himself against the justifiable imputation that he was undermining the integrity of the national government. Also, because state sovereignty seemed faithful to the American founding, its advocates could use appeals to patriotism to convince impressionable but unsuspecting minds to submit to the dictates of the doctrine, which meant submitting to oligarchic rule. Unless republican citizens were disabused of these ideas, they might hand over their freedom to the oligarchy and bend their necks to the yoke, without a fight and without realizing what they were doing.
To complete the formidable foundation for his project, Calhoun needed assistance. In public and in private, he endeavored to shape a new generation of Southern statesmen to put those theories into practice. Though a political opponent, George Julian wrote that Calhoun “was most genial and kindly” and “always welcomed the society of young men who sought the aid of his friendly counsel.” Other Republicans explained why Calhoun had notably kept company with promising young Southern men. He was training a legion of young disciples in the arts of oligarchic statesmanship and rule. Calhoun shaped “a generation of young men,” said Representative Henry Raymond of New York, “nursed in the doctrine of State rights and State sovereignty, taught to believe in the right of secession, and educated in the faith that the South was the victim of northern tyranny.” This Southern leadership consisted of “men of great intellects, of iron will, of towering ambition, men fit to struggle for empire, and able to infuse their own bold and audacious tempers into the great mass of the southern people over whom their influence was absolute and unbounded.” Representative Horace Maynard of Tennessee recalled that “the right of secession and kindred heresies of the Calhoun philosophy” were taught to “a new generation of young men,” who had “migrated to every part of the southern country as editors, politicians and professional men.” Calhoun’s idea, Senator Jacob Howard of Michigan said, that the national government was poised to overwhelm the constitutional rights of the states, was a “cunningly-devised delusion, addressing itself as it did to sectional prejudice. . . . It was that terrible instrument of falsehood and deception that the Wises, the Masons, the Toombses, the Jefferson Davises, the Yanceys, the Slidells, have for long years wrought upon the popular mind of the South.”17
Calhoun did not restrict himself to proselytizing talented young men from the South to his cause, but included young Democrats from the free states as well. John Wentworth recalled that when he was first elected to Congress from Illinois as a Democrat in 1844, Calhoun practiced his arts on him. Upon his arrival in Washington, Wentworth received an invitation from Calhoun to meet him privately at his home, where Calhoun struck him as “the most charming man in conversation whom I ever heard.” Young and inexperienced as Wentworth was, the older Wentworth admitted, he was seduced, but on his way home from Calhoun’s residence, he fortuitously encountered Senator Thomas Benton, who saw Calhoun’s parting gift to Wentworth, an autographed book of Calhoun’s biography and speeches. Immediately, Benton administered the antidote to Calhoun’s black magic: Wentworth wrote that Benton “became extremely violent, averring that he could tell me every word that Calhoun had uttered. He said it was Mr. Calhoun’s custom to early procure interviews with young men, and instill into their minds the seeds of secession, nullification, and treason.”18
During the Nullification Crisis of 1831–33, Calhoun famously deployed state-sovereignty theory on behalf of South Carolina against the tariff law passed by the U.S. Congress. This face-off between South Carolina and the national government tested whether the state could dictate national policy or, failing that, separate. For the allegedly unconstitutional tariff, Calhoun “and his associates threatened nullification,” Daniel Gooch recalled. However, the nature of the case shed a dubious light on Calhoun’s justification for the extreme remedy of state nullification. Calhoun’s position on the unconstitutionality of the tariff was specious. James Garfield pointed out that as recently as 1814, Calhoun had spiritedly argued in favor of the tariff in Congress, which enacted it “under his lead” in 1816. Concerning the grounds for claiming the unconstitutionality of the tariff, Frederick Pike said, “The pretense was not material,” that is, the stated arguments on the unconstitutionality of the law were not really the grounds for advancing nullification. South Carolinian leaders elaborated “the ‘forty bale’ theory” to demonstrate the unjust exactions of the law, but their argument was unconvincing and pointed to another purpose, which Pike said was “separation.” For proof of that purpose, “we had at the time the testimony of Jackson and Benton. Since then evidence in convincing masses has been furnished.”19 The point gained by the nullification movement was that the rest of the nation was put on notice that South Carolina’s obedience to the national government was qualified. They might or might not obey when it suited them.
Pike and other Republicans recognized President Jackson’s awareness of the purposes of nullification and Calhoun’s leadership in the crisis. James Doolittle recalled that Jackson, alert to the steps toward disunion, warned, “If another step were taken, by the Eternal, he would try Calhoun for treason, and if convicted, hang him on a gallows high as Haman’s.” Within a week, Calhoun voted for every section of Clay’s compromise bill that ended the Nullification Crisis. But Jackson understood that the disunion movement had not ended. As many Republicans did, Doolittle and Gooch quoted Jackson’s prophecy that “the tariff was only the pretext, and disunion and southern confederacy the real object. The next pretext will be the negro or slavery question.” Doolittle continued that on the eve of his death, Jackson predicted, “Posterity will condemn me more because I was persuaded not to try and hang John C. Calhoun as a traitor than for any other act of my life.” Had Jackson executed Calhoun, Doolittle added while the Civil War blazed, “we should have had no rebellion now.”20
Although South Carolina’s nullifiers backed down, Calhoun successfully used the event to advance his conversion enterprise. During the crisis, Calhoun delivered a public address from Fort Hill in 1831, aimed at the hearts and minds of Southern statesmen. Waitman Willey traced “the mighty influence which this great man exerted on southern opinion” to that moment. A Virginian, Willey well knew what Calhoun’s doctrines meant in his state and in his section of the nation. Jefferson, he said, had “enunciated the axiom that ‘absolute acquiescence in the decisions of the majority was the vital principle of republics.’” But with “pertinacity Mr. Calhoun resisted the application of the majority principle to our system of national government, as subversive of the rights of states.” He had “warred upon this great principle from the time of his Fort Hill address.” And, Willey later added, Calhoun’s philosophical war against the majority “found a wide-spread lodgment in the minds of southern statesmen. An aristocratic sentiment, carefully and sedulously inculcated, had become everywhere prevalent.” Representative Joseph Segar, a fellow Virginian, also bore witness to Calhoun’s influence in his state and similarly traced it to “the time of Mr. Calhoun’s celebrated Fort Hill manifesto in 1831.” Outside the predominantly loyal western counties he represented in Virginia, Segar claimed, “Mr. Calhoun sowed broadcast those seeds of nullification and sectionalism.”21
By converting the sister states of the South to his constitutional doctrines, Calhoun built an interstate movement, and together the slave states would be more likely to dictate terms to the national government in future cases. They could use his constitutional doctrines to justify selective obedience to the national government and thrust the responsibility back upon the North to support laws and constitutional interpretation that suited the consolidating Southern oligarchy or risk disunion. It was Calhoun’s “cherished purpose,” James Ashley claimed, to force the North to agree that “slavery is recognized by the Constitution, and that Congress had no power to abolish or exclude it from the Territories, or the District of Columbia” or else to achieve a “dissolution of the Union and the organization of a southern slaveholding confederacy.”22
Like the divine rebel Prometheus, Calhoun bestowed upon slave-state leaders an impious gift in republican America: he delivered a serviceable antirepublican philosophy that would transform them from a class of men who had accidentally found ruling power in their hands, due to the incidental structural effect of slavery, into a class determined to rule, philosophically devoted to the principle of their rule, and bent on developing their world around them in accord with their ruling idea. The result was, said Orris Ferry, that “the disciples of the Calhoun school” had “learned to distrust the people, to hate universal suffrage, and to believe in aristocracy.” Their goal was “the complete overthrow of democratic institutions, and the establishment of an aristocratic, or even monarchical government.”23
“This Revolution in Sentiment”
While Calhoun was innovating constitutional doctrines to give legal protection to the political power of the developing slave-state oligarchies, he also took new ground in national councils to advance the basis of their power, slavery. The Missouri debate had demonstrated to the nation that Southern statesmen were in the process of jettisoning the sentiments and policy of the Southerners’ forebears, the slaveholding abolitionists in the founding generation. The unapologetic defenders of slavery and state sovereignty were rising and were Calhoun’s anointed. Those who assimilated to the earlier slaveholding abolitionist archetype were dwindling and gradually becoming extinct. The Republicans linked Southern statesmen’s changing sentiments on slavery to their changing sentiments on government. The rise of the “proslavery argument” corresponded to a change in the character of Southern statesmen, from republican to oligarchical.
The slavery debates in the Virginia Legislature in 1831–32 illustrated the changing character of Southern leadership. In his history of the slave power, Henry Wilson devoted a full chapter to the duel between the slaveholders of the declining type and the ascending type. The debate commenced when Thomas Jefferson Randolph, grandson of his namesake, introduced a motion intended to permit the legislature to consider a plan for gradual emancipation in the state. This, wrote Wilson, was “denounced as a monstrous proposition that struck at the foundation of republican government,” thus showing that the Virginian idea of republican government had undergone a serious transformation. Wilson commented that these debates revealed, on one side, “the evils and appalling dangers of slavery,” using “language as strong and unequivocal as any ever used by Abolitionists,” and, on the other, “the desperation of a growing class determined to cling to the evil.”24
In the debates, some praised slavery and minority rule in tones unknown to the founding generation of Virginia republicans. A Mr. Wood supported the perpetuation of slavery because it secured an aristocratic way of life for the minority slaveholders. The elegance, refinement, and oratorical achievements of Virginia’s master class, Wood claimed, were unsurpassed in the world. This became a common boast in the South, Wilson commented. But “the facts never justified such pretensions.” Southern authors were “at best of inferior rank,” and their contributions to science, letters, and the arts were meager. Later, the Civil War “tore off the mask” and revealed that their aristocratic pretensions “were shams, or at best, glaringly superficial.” But in 1831–32, a growing class of Virginians brazenly defended slavery concomitantly with the defense of aristocracy, even though some on both sides of the debate acknowledged slavery’s “dangers and difficulties not at a distance, but at home.” The Virginia Legislature would never again give further consideration to emancipation.25
The Virginia debate heralded the end of an era. Virginia, once the home of slaveholding abolitionists, was turning proslavery. Five years later, Calhoun brought their proslavery sentiments uttered in the state legislature to the floor of the U.S. Senate. Alluding to Calhoun’s speech in 1837, James Doolittle reminded his Southern colleagues in the Senate how much they had changed since the moment when Calhoun announced that slavery was “a positive good.” Once, Doolittle said, “the leading men of the South” had maintained “that slavery was an evil to be apologized for; to be borne as a necessity.” But they had “changed their ground” about slavery, now saying that the institution was “a positive good, a divine institution,” and they had changed “under the lead of Mr. Calhoun.”26
On the Senate floor in 1838, one year after his “positive good” speech, Calhoun announced that although many in the South had once believed slavery “was a moral and political evil; that folly and delusion are gone; we see it now in its true light, and regard it as the most safe and stable basis for free institutions in the world.” In 1862 Doolittle quoted that speech also and claimed that Calhoun had introduced a “new idea that slavery was a blessing instead of a curse.” Indeed, as a curse, slavery “was acknowledged to be by all the great men of the revolutionary era.” And “from that hour down to the present moment,” Calhoun and his followers had demanded recognition of slavery “as a good thing.” Calhoun had
forced this idea, as the fulcrum upon which, like Archimedes, he would move the world, first into all the political assemblies and conventions of the South; then into all the pulpits and conventions of the clergy of the South; into every legislative hall in the South; and at last into the decisions of their courts. He forced it here into both Houses of Congress until, during the last twenty years, we have heard little else from the Representatives from that section except that “slavery is a divine institution, a blessing,” and demanding that it should be recognized and regarded as such by every department of this Government, by Congress, the President, and the Supreme Court.27
Henry Wilson also quoted and marked Calhoun’s 1838 speech as a turning point. Thereafter, Calhoun’s disciples
pronounced “slavery to be the corner-stone of the republican edifice.” Inspired by such counsels, the rising young statesmen of the South contemptuously rejected the humane sentiments and republican theories of the founders of the Republic—of Washington, Jefferson, Madison, Henry, Mason, Martin, and their illustrious associates, and assumed slavery to be a positive good; an institution to be nurtured, extended, nationalized. New theories of constitutional construction were promulgated, the policy of slavery extension and slavery domination inaugurated, and the wicked policy of slavery aggression, for nearly a generation, has been pursued with tireless energy, in defiant mockery of the sentiments of mankind and the laws of the living God.28
Doolittle described the changed views shared by Southern statesmen, “this revolution of sentiment.” Orris Ferry decried “this . . . revolution of opinion,” that corresponded to a revolutionary change in the character of both statesmen and the governments in the slave states. By “philosophical necessity,” the “revolution of opinion” overthrew the liberties of the common people in the South, “and, in accordance with that necessity, freedom of speech, freedom of the press, and freedom of elections, the very elements of civil liberty, were, one after the other, given up.”29
“The truth is,” Doolittle said when the Southerners still retained their seats in the Senate, “the South have changed their ground on the whole subject of slavery. . . . We [Republicans] stand where your fathers stood.” In the earlier days of the Republic, “your fathers . . . admitted slavery to be an evil, to be tolerated as a necessity, because you could not see your way to get rid of it; but you did not take the ground that slavery was a blessing—that slavery was in accordance with natural right.” Reuben Fenton reminded his Southern colleagues that during the founding period, “all your early statesmen” believed “that slavery was a political, moral and social evil.” The free states had ever regarded slavery in that light and had not changed. “You, gentleman,” Reuben Fenton rebuked, “have changed from the declared opinions and purposes of the founders.” Waitman Willey informed his colleagues that “for the profession of and adherence to these principles of Washington and Madison, Marshall and Mason,” his fellow Southerners assailed him as “a political reprobate.” He turned the accusation back on his accusers, saying, “They are the real apostates. It is they who are the innovators and renegades from the early principles and policy of the South, as enunciated and maintained by the leading men of the South.” In 1864 John Sherman read copious antislavery extracts from the revolutionary era “to show how far the men who now justify and sustain slavery have departed from the teachings of their fathers.”30
They had departed so far that they would not tolerate the same antislavery utterances that their own abolitionist fathers had uttered. In 1860 Francis Kellogg expressed his incredulity that because some Republican members of the House of Representatives had endorsed Hinton Helper’s new book, The Impending Crisis, “full of damaging facts against slavery,” the Republicans in Congress “were denounced as traitors to our country, as false to our constitutional obligations.” Speaker of the House candidate John Sherman had also endorsed the book, and “never shall I forget the amazement with which I heard the distinguished and honorable member from Virginia [Mr. MILLSON, page 21 Congressional Globe] say, that ‘one who consciously, deliberately, and of purpose, lent his name and influence to the propagation of such writings, is not only not fit to be speaker, but is not fit to live!’”31
Henry Wilson asked rhetorically, “Can we utter, in the South, the words which the fathers of the South taught us? Could the Senator from New York, [Mr. FISH] whose father fought at Yorktown, go to that field and utter the sentiments which were upon the lips of all the great men of Virginia when Cornwallis surrendered?” He could not, nor could “the Senators from New Hampshire stand on that spot once baptized by the blood of [New Hampshire patriot] Alexander Scammell, and there utter the sentiments of Henry, or of Jefferson, or of Mason.” None of them could safely “go down to Mount Vernon . . . and there repeat the words of Washington, that ‘No man desires more earnestly than I do to see slavery abolished.’” None of them could safely “go to Monticello” and “stand by the graves of Jefferson, of Madison, of Henry, of the great men of Virginia, and utter the great thoughts which they uttered for the liberty of the bondmen.” Benjamin Wade held up “General Washington,” who was himself, “according to your understanding of it, just as much an Abolitionist as you charge me with being.” He asked, “How long do you suppose that he could remain on the soil of Virginia to-day, with this declaration upon his tongue?” Cadwallader Washburn defended William Seward, who had been designated “the evil genius of Democracy,” arguing that Seward had “never uttered any sentiment on this slave question” any different from the sentiments of southerners “George Washington, Thomas Jefferson, or James Madison.” If those “great men were now living their persons would be unsafe to-day on the soil of Virginia.” Washburn announced that a few days earlier, Virginia historian Robert Reid Howison had withdrawn from giving a lecture to a Richmond literary association because Washington’s opinions on slavery were now declared contrary to “Scripture and reason.” He added that “Jefferson, if now living would not be a welcome visitor in a Virginia community.”32
Confronted by these Republican charges, the Southern statesmen did not deny them. James Doolittle recalled that on a recent day, Senator Robert Hunter of Virginia
stood up here and stated the fact frankly, . . . that we in Virginia have changed our ground; we do not stand where we stood anciently; we do not stand where our fathers stood upon this slavery question . . . we do not believe in what Washington believed and Jefferson believed and Madison believed and Monroe believed, and all the leading men of Virginia, for the first fifty years of our existence under the Constitution, believed; we have changed our opinions in Virginia, and instead of now admitting that slavery is an evil, to be restricted and discouraged, and which we may hope and pray may be someday entirely removed from the Republic, we now take the ground that it is a blessing, to be fostered, encouraged, and extended, as a benefit to the black man and a benefit to the white.33
Remarkably, Hunter’s colleague from Virginia Senator James Mason broke into the speech and confirmed that Doolittle quoted Hunter “substantially, correctly,” and added his approval to Hunter’s remarks.
In 1860 Charles Van Wyck quoted several leading Southern statesmen who admitted that their sentiments on the slavery question departed from their fathers’ beliefs. Senator and future Confederate president Jefferson Davis had denominated prior antislavery sentiments an “error,” but thanks to their allegedly free discussions in the South, Davis continued, “reason” had triumphed over these “delusions.” Georgia representative and future vice president of the Confederacy Alexander Stephens looked expectantly toward the expansion of slavery, saying that “Negro slavery is but in its infancy.” He averred, “Our fathers did not understand it. I grant that the public men of the South were once against it, but they did not understand it.” In Congress Representative Lawrence Keitt of South Carolina rejected the “sentiments which the great men of the Revolution entertained upon the question of slavery,” excusing them because, he alleged, “the institution had not been discussed; its character and capacities had not been tested; besides, they were imbibed with the influence of the French encyclopedists, and were affected by the abstractions of the Declaration of Independence.”34
The Republicans linked the Southern statesmen’s embrace of the “pro-slavery argument” and rejection of their own republican fathers’ proscription of slavery to their embrace of minority rule and rejection of republicanism. Francis Blair referred to Calhoun’s “positive good” speech in 1837 as a turning point and added that “the Calhounites” were not the only
peculiar class of politicians in thinking that an institution which gives them political power is a divine institution. All the aristocrats of England, with rare exceptions, think that primogeniture is equally divine; and it was argued in Parliament, with more earnestness, eloquence, and learning, to show that the rotten borough system was the source of English power and prosperity, than was ever exhibited in Congress to show that slavery was the secret of the marvelous greatness and growth of America. The source of these strange perversions of reason is obviously the same. It was merely because slavery, in the one case, and the rotten borough system in the other, gave the orator or his party political power.35
Slavery in the antebellum South and rotten boroughs in England both endued minority classes with ruling power, at the expense of the natural sovereignty of the people they ruled. Although these respective ruling classes declared slavery and rotten boroughs to be common goods of their communities, this could be so only if, likewise, rule by the few was the best form of government. Jacob Collamer quoted Calhoun’s speech in 1838, also maintaining that in defending slavery, Calhoun was defending aristocracy. After declaring slavery the “most safe and stable basis for free institutions in the world,” Calhoun had said, “The Southern States are an aggregate, in fact, of communities, not of individuals. Every plantation is a little community, with the master at its head, who concentrates in himself the united interests; of capital and labor, of which he is the common representative. These small communities aggregated make the State in all, whose action, labor, and capital is equally represented and perfectly harmonized.”
Commenting on the nature of this political society sketched by Calhoun, Collamer said, “It is obvious that it is an aristocracy. He says that these communities, of which the master or owner is the head, aggregated, make the State, and the owner is the representative of these separate communities.” Second, those who did not own plantations and slaves were “essentially left out” of Calhoun’s account. But because the slaveholders filled out the class of “common representatives,” and not the nonslaveholders, this meant that in Calhoun’s sketch, the large majority of the people in the slave states was ruled.36 The slaveholders were the “common representatives” in the same sense as kings were “common representatives” of their realms. Led by Calhoun, the new public proclamations on the moral standing of slavery indicated a significant political change. By increasingly proclaiming the moral goodness of slavery, the leaders of the slave South were publicly embracing the moral goodness of their ruling power and were showing that they intended to preserve it, at the expense of republicanism, or rule of, by, and for the people.
Calhoun’s innovative doctrines on slavery and his innovative doctrines on constitutional government worked together for the same end and derived from the same source. The goodness of slavery and the goodness of minority rule both shared in the principle of natural inequality, and that principle defied the principle of natural equality in the Declaration of Independence. Charles Sumner succinctly identified this principle as the heart and soul of Calhoun’s labors, noting that “the sophistries of Calhoun” were established upon “the obvious inequalities of body and mind” and countered “the idea of human rights . . . enunciated in our Declaration of Independence.” Speaking to his constituents in 1858, Jehu Baker explained that the prevalence of support among Southern statesmen for Calhoun’s constitutional doctrines owed its origin to this “revolution of sentiment” among them: “Thus we see that an extreme pro-slavery opinion, utterly unknown in the conservative age of the country, has grown up in a certain portion of the Southern mind, and that a new, extreme and monstrous pro-slavery doctrine has been invented to accommodate that change of opinion.”37 Calhoun’s revolutionary gospel, the inequality of mankind, repudiated the principles of the fathers’ republicanism and repudiated the fathers’ Constitution that embodied those principles and protected that republicanism.
The Calhoun Revolution
Not only Southern statesmen but also the people in the free states emerged from the Missouri controversy in a much-altered condition. John Henderson recounted that once free-state people, “like the founders of the Republic,” had hoped for slavery’s “ultimate extinction” and trusted that the solution would come peacefully. In the meantime, they believed that it was their duty to respect its limits and keep it in its limits. But the battle in Congress over whether to admit Missouri with slavery durably shifted public opinion in the free states. When the “ardors of the Missouri Question” had subsided, Sumner noted, antislavery sentiment gave way to “indifference throughout the North.”38 Free-state people had adjusted themselves to new political circumstances, and their change aided Calhoun and his revolutionary followers in his grand empire-building project.
Within the free states, slavery became a wedge issue. Struck by the slave states’ determination to expand the boundaries of slavery over Missouri, free-state people realized for the first time that if they refused accommodation, the South might secede. That crisis taught them that they would henceforth have to choose between preserving the Union or firmly opposing proslavery policy. In the aftermath of the Missouri controversy, many chose the Union. The Missouri Compromise had saved the Union, though conceding the state and possibly all land south of 36°30´ to slavery. The narrow escape from disunion influenced many in the free states to temper or silence their antislavery convictions. Representative John Broomall of Pennsylvania blamed “the spirit of conservatism and cowardice in the North” for compromising with proslavery interests. Zachariah Chandler recounted that the prior generation was “ready to compromise any principle; anything to save the Union.” James Ashley also identified this prior pattern of Northern conduct. Despite being “conscientiously opposed to the institution of slavery,” “thousands of patriotic citizens in the free States” cooperated and aided “this privileged class” composed of “Calhoun and his political disciples.”39
The result was Northern moral decline. In 1858, noting the extraordinary and humiliating yet true claim by Senator James Hammond of South Carolina that slaveholders had ruled the nation for the prior sixty years, Elihu Washburne traced Northern demoralization to their submission to the “rule of an oligarchy.” When slave-state statesmen pressed their demands, the Northern people “sometimes vigorously resisted, but oftener feebly opposed and then finally acquiesced.” Soon enough, a “still greater outrage” would be committed, and the North would again submit. “This continued submission, this eternal acquiescence, has dulled the sensibilities of the people of the North to that extent, that too many of them confound the surrender of sacred rights with the dictates of an honest patriotism.”40
Too many Northern people had refrained from acting on their beliefs, the natural rights principles of the Declaration, upon which the Union was consummated. They did this in a misguided attempt to carry out their patriotic duty to preserve the Union. But their appeasement of the oligarchy facilitated the gradual destruction of the republican model of government founded upon those principles.
This shift in public opinion influenced the conduct and policy of their representatives. In Congress, said James Wilson, “whenever slavery became excited and angry,” free-state statesmen would “try to appease its wrath by offering it some new hold on the life of the nation, some greater advantage over free government and human liberty.” Wilson added, “When slavery cried ‘Give, give,’ by force of habit and loss of conscience, we always responded by offering more than it demanded of us. We were the slaves of the slave power.”41
Into the breach stepped the new abolitionists, zealous men like William Lloyd Garrison, who denounced free-state indifference to slavery and preferred a stern antislavery policy over the preservation of the Union. In the free states, abolitionism could be construed as unpatriotic because it threatened disunion. Hence, unionism and antislavery sentiment became antagonistic, sometimes violently so, and the Republicans looked back upon this free-state history with regret. John Farnsworth remembered the subsequent “dragging of Garrison through the streets of Boston with a rope around his neck to be hanged; the issuing of a message by the Governor of Massachusetts, Edward Everett, declaring that the men agitating the slavery question were indictable at common law; . . . the murder of Lovejoy at Alton [Illinois].”42
George Julian noted that the Nat Turner slave revolt in Virginia in 1831 galvanized the rise of the new abolitionism, but in that decade the new abolitionism met opposition from the national government and opposition, sometimes deadly, in the free states. After the 1837 murder of Elijah Lovejoy in the free state of Illinois, the mayor of Boston compared his assassins “to the patriots of the Revolution.” In 1838, the year Calhoun blessed slavery on the floor of the U.S. Senate, a mob burned Pennsylvania Hall, built by the Pennsylvania Anti-Slavery Society. President Jackson’s postmaster Amos Kendall approved the “rifling of the mails and the suppression of the circulation of anti-slavery newspapers in the South.” Congress enacted “gag rules” to suppress the reading of antislavery petitions. President Van Buren had “prostitute[d] our foreign policy to the service of slavery and the slave trade.” The national government’s “unconstitutional espousal of slavery” disgraced the nation.43
Slave-state statesmen knew “the devotion of the free States to the Union, and the forbearance of the North” and used this Northern devotion to their strategic advantage, wrote Isaac Arnold. Henceforth, they repeatedly deployed the wedge that they had discovered during the Missouri controversy, to split free-state people and their national representatives between their conflicting allegiances to antislavery principles and to the Union. Relying upon the strength of Northern unionism, Arnold continued, slave-state statesmen “habitually threatened disunion whenever necessary,” in order to isolate antislavery constituencies and advance their proslavery policy. With many Republicans, James Ashley concurred with Arnold, that the statesmen had taken advantage “of the well-known loyalty of the people of the free States to the Constitution and the Union, and their habitual respect for all laws . . . by threatening to dissolve the Union.”44
On the part of the Southern statesmen, the prospective dissolution of the Union did not strike the same sensitive chord with them, because their affection for the Union had slackened since the Missouri controversy, due to the intervention of Calhoun’s new doctrines. “State sovereignty,” said Martin Thayer in 1864, had for the prior thirty years become so generally embraced by Southern statesmen, and had so dulled their affection for the Union, that they did not hesitate “to cast off their allegiance as they would a worn-out garment.”45 Whereas the free-state people became indifferent toward anti-slavery policy in favor of the Union, the slave-state statesmen had became increasingly indifferent toward union in favor of the further establishment of their ruling power and the extension of slavery.
In the free states, indifference or forbearance expressed a middle position between intransigent opposition to and active support for proslavery policy. Proslavery statesmen would repeatedly lay new demands on these moderate compromisers, testing how long their unionism would hold a majority of the free-state people to this middle position. The instrumentality of Southern statesmanship from Calhoun onward ensured that the free-state people would continuously agonize over whether to sacrifice the antislavery convictions in favor of union or to risk disunion and affirm a stronger antislavery position. James Doolittle quoted Calhoun in his own language, exhorting his followers and stating his own intention to “force the issue” upon the North, meaning to continue to press the slavery issue, until the Northern people either acquiesced to new Southern demands or, by their resistance, justified Southern secession. Looking back during the war, Thomas Shannon admitted, “I believe now that since the days of Calhoun there has never been a middle ground.”46 In retrospect, Shannon understood that every concession to the oligarchy was a prelude to a new demand, until the nation might become fully revolutionized, a slaveholding oligarchy in its entirety.
Looking forward from 1844, antislavery statesmen might have reasonably calculated that they could afford a policy of forbearance toward their proslavery counterparts. Looking at the map of the United States at that time with the eye of a future secretary of state, James Blaine explained that slavery had no place to go. North of the Missouri Compromise line, slavery was forever prohibited, and the territorial populations there were increasing. Wisconsin would soon be ready for admission. South of the line, Mexico (which still claimed Texas and lands west of Texas) blocked the growth of the U.S. slave territory in a westward direction. Only the Oklahoma Territory was available, and that was set aside as an Indian reservation. The northern boundary of the American Oregon country had not yet been established and required a new treaty with Great Britain. Democratic presidential candidate James Polk and Whig leader John Quincy Adams both advocated a northern boundary to be established at 54°40´, which would have included half of present-day British Columbia, reaching the Alaskan panhandle, and it seemed that the British government was ready to accept this. Western Canada was slated for annexation into the American Union. The natural extension of the country seemed to point northwesterly, around Mexico and into western Canada, following the path of a crescent. Southern statesmen recognized this. They favored relinquishing the American claim to the northern portion of Oregon, which might have added more free states to the nation, and they calculated that the annexation of Texas, and a prospective cession of more land from Mexico, would open the westward growth of slavery. Their aim was to redirect the future extension of the nation directly westward, which was more conducive to proslavery aims. With respect to Oregon, the reply of Senator Edward Hannegan to a proslavery senator in 1845, Blaine wrote, captured “the whole case.” Hannegan responded, saying, “If Oregon were good for the production of sugar and cotton, it would not have encountered this opposition. Its possession would have been at once secured.”47
In his one-year term of office as secretary of state in 1844–45, Calhoun was instrumental in changing the direction of American expansion in keeping with proslavery strategy. He checked the northwesterly expansion of the country and ensured westward expansion, setting the stage for the next great collision, over the slave or free status of the territories wrested from Mexico in the 1840s. Calhoun’s proslavery objective in pursuing annexation, Jacob Collamer reminded the Senate, was plainly stated in his official letter to the American minister to France. John Bingham quoted representations from Secretary of State Calhoun to the Mexican government, which also confirmed the proslavery policy intentions.48
Blaine pointed out that while Polk was campaigning for the presidency on the 54°40´ platform for Oregon, Secretary of State Calhoun personally initiated private negotiations with the British minister, settling the boundary at 49°. As for Texas, Calhoun knew that annexation of Texas and inevitable war with Mexico would open a new opportunity to seize westward land and avert slavery’s restriction to the southeastern corner of the future United States. Blaine cited the British government, which maintained that the defeat of annexation would seal slavery’s abolition in Texas, and, further, it would mortally wound slavery in the existing United States. Calhoun acted accordingly. To seize Texas, Calhoun used state-sovereignty theory against Mexico. Texas, he instructed the American minister to Mexico, had never been a rebellious province but an independent sovereignty, and framed thus, the American policy toward annexation advanced under Calhoun’s hand. Blaine noted that the same state-sovereignty logic deployed against the Mexican government on behalf of Texas was later deployed against the American government by the slave states, prior to secession.49 The implication was that by loosening the bonds between these lands and their respective national governments, Calhoun and the oligarchic class were following a congruent logic with the same end in view—to carve a slave empire out of the sovereign territory of Mexico and the United States, which they eventually achieved. At the same time, by independently securing the curtailment of the northwesterly expansion of the United States, Calhoun aimed to weaken the free section of the United States. His statecraft was preparing to give the slave section of the country leverage, so that either the whole United States would become a slave empire on the ashes of republicanism or the South would become an independent empire, leaving a relatively weakened union of free states to fend for itself.
In a parallel movement, Calhoun and his followers began to bring the Democratic Party more firmly into their control. Previously, the party had not endorsed the policy of Texas annexation in its party platform, but Calhoun brought with him the Southern wing and gained the party’s endorsement of the policy. Martin Van Buren of New York, the party’s expected candidate for the presidency in 1844, had opposed the annexation. Through adroit maneuvering and with the support of his Southern wing, Calhoun secured Van Buren’s defeat for the nomination in favor of James Polk and destroyed Van Buren’s career in the party he once led.50 However, Northern Democrats were not entirely aware of the proslavery purpose of annexation at the time. Partly, this was due to deception. In an 1844 speech quoted by John Bingham, Senator James Buchanan of Pennsylvania, who was “then, and ever since, the willing and supple instrument of the slave power,” had argued that the annexation of Texas would result in limiting slavery.51
The annexation of Texas was accomplished, and the Mexican-American War came. But before the Treaty of Guadalupe Hidalgo in 1848 ended the war, a parallel war broke out in Congress over slavery in the expected Mexican cession of territories to be gained in addition to Texas. The treaty eventually confirmed the annexation of Texas and ceded an additional nine hundred thousand square miles of territory to the United States, including California. The conflict in Congress over the Mexican cession, wrote Blaine, “was the old Missouri struggle renewed,” but due to the revolutionary political developments in the slave South, the struggle was worse. The conflict “arose as suddenly as the agitation of 1820, but gave indications of deeper feeling and more prolonged controversy.”52
A comparison between the two crises highlighted how much Southern statesmen had radicalized. Slave-state statesmen were more justified in expecting Missouri’s admission as a slave state in 1820, because Congress had carved its territory out of the Louisiana Territory, in which France had kept slavery legal. After the Louisiana acquisition, the U.S. Congress organized the Orleans Territory and nevertheless prohibited foreign slave importations and the purchase and importation of slaves from anywhere beyond the territory. But Mexico had abolished slavery nationally, and so the midcentury debate in Congress determined the question of whether the U.S. Congress would newly implant slavery in lands that had been previously free.53 This was a substantially different circumstance in which proslavery statesmen established a new precedent. Blaine wrote, “Every acre of the nine hundred thousand square miles was free territory while under the rule of Mexico, and the Commissioners of that government were extremely anxious that the United States should give a guarantee that its character in this respect should not be changed.” Reflecting the sharply different character of his times, Nicholas Trist, the American commissioner, replied that if the ceded territory “were increased tenfold in value, and, in addition to that, covered a foot thick with pure gold, on the single condition that slavery should be forever excluded,” he wouldn’t “entertain the offer for a moment, nor even think of sending it to his government. No American President would dare to submit such a treaty to the Senate.”54
Awakened by the course of events, John Bingham said, outraged Northern Democrats, “now fully conscious of the ulterior designs of the slave power . . . determined to plant themselves on the platform of Jefferson,” by which Bingham meant the slavery prohibition in the Northwest Ordinance of 1787, drafted by Jefferson. In 1846 Northern Democrats led by David Wilmot in the House of Representatives first appended an amendment to a war appropriations bill, “which required that in all the territory to be acquired . . . slavery should be forever prohibited.” Democratic state legislatures in Michigan and New Hampshire passed resolutions affirming their support of the “fundamental principles of the ordinance of 1787.”55 This amendment, the Wilmot Proviso, did not, therefore, aim at abolishing slavery, but, rather, it would prevent slavery’s ingress into already free territory.
Calhoun met the difficulty by presenting a new constitutional doctrine. James Doolittle recalled that in 1847, Calhoun, now a senator again, “introduced in the Senate a resolution declaring, for the first time, this doctrine, that the Constitution, of its own force, guaranties the right to take slaves into the Territories of the United States; and at the same time, another resolution denying the power of Congress to inhibit it.”56
According to Calhoun, since the states were sovereign under the Constitution and the territories were the common property of the states, the Constitution sustained the right to own slaves in the territories. Congress could not impair that constitutional right by prohibiting slavery in the national territories. To do otherwise would be prejudicial to the equal rights of the states. This doctrine aimed at overcoming the immediate, practical problem, as Henry Wilson said, of how to fasten slavery upon “the coming free territories of Mexico.” The implications of Calhoun’s new doctrine, of course, were much more far-reaching. Doolittle denied the fidelity of Calhoun’s doctrine to the Constitution: “Sir, the whole history of this Government, from the beginning down to 1847, was a history of prohibition or limitation of slavery on the part of Congress; and there never was an act organizing any Territory under the authority of the United States, which did not in the act itself recognize the power of Congress to legislate upon the subject of slavery previous to 1847.”57
With other Republicans, Doolittle remembered that when a member of President James Monroe’s cabinet, Calhoun had endorsed the constitutionality of the Missouri Compromise bill passed by Congress that did address slavery in the territories. But under the lead of Calhoun, Doolittle continued, “prominent men at the South” had “changed their ground” and “the ground of the Democratic Party.” Thereafter, said Doolittle, Calhoun and his followers insisted that the Constitution made “slavery national and freedom sectional.” This meant that the Constitution might tolerate slavery prohibitions only in the free states and possibly nowhere. Benjamin Wade recalled Senator Henry Clay’s reaction to Calhoun’s new doctrine. Clay was “amazed and astonished” and asked him, “Where do you find your constitutional warrant for it?” But Calhoun “did not deign to reply.”58
Calhoun knew that he did not need to reply to Clay. He had already outflanked Clay. In 1860 James Ashley pointed out that immediately after Jackson vacated the presidency, Calhoun had quietly determined to gain control of the Supreme Court. By an act of Congress in 1837, the organization of federal circuit courts was revised so that “the South, with less than half the population, and not more than one-fourth of the business in the Supreme Court, obtained a majority of the judges.” The district courts of Kentucky, Tennessee, and Missouri, all slave states, composed the Eighth Circuit and those of the slave states of Alabama, Louisiana, Mississippi, and Arkansas composed the Ninth Circuit. Yet since the 1837 act, the widely dispersed district courts of the free states of Iowa, Wisconsin, California, Minnesota, and Oregon “have not been erected into or attached to judicial circuits, and have no representative on the bench of the Supreme Court,” despite the fact that “these States contain a population, and have an amount of judicial business equal at least to one-third of those of the entire fifteen slave States.”59
When Calhoun served as secretary of state in the presidential administration of John Tyler in 1844, “For the first time, . . . the opinions of men selected for the Supreme Court on the question of slavery were made a test of their promotion.” Tyler nominated Samuel Nelson with Calhoun’s approval, due to “his reputed fidelity to this class interest.” Thereafter, Southern statesmen gained “control of the Senate committees, especially the Judiciary Committee, to which all nominations to the Supreme Court were referred.” Ashley then recounted the history of nominations withdrawn by the executive or rejected by the Judiciary Committee, due to “their known opposition to slavery, and their belief that Congress had the power . . . to abolish and prohibit slavery in all national Territories.” Nobody could say how many able nominees were rejected due to the test of slavery because “the official action of the Senate is locked up in its secret archives, into which the people are never permitted to look by the leaders of the [Democratic Party].” Nevertheless, the twenty-year pattern of known withdrawals, rejections, and approvals correlated with the interest of the proslavery majority on the Judiciary Committee.60
Looking back in 1860, Ashley showed what the results of this control were and could be in the future. The work of this “mere faction” ensured that the Supreme Court would deliver its proslavery opinion in Dred Scott. In Dred Scott, Justice Samuel Nelson had written, “The law of the State is supreme over the subject of slavery within its jurisdiction, except in cases where the power is restrained by the Constitution.” But because the Court held that “the national Constitution recognizes slaves as property,” Ashley continued, “It is difficult to see how it can be lawfully excluded from a Territory or State, or on what just principle the purchase and importation of slaves is declared piracy.” The Court could just as well strike down slavery prohibitions in the states and the ban on foreign slave importations, on the same grounds that the Court had struck down slavery prohibition in the territories. And just then, in 1860, a “second Dred Scott case” was due for adjudication by the Supreme Court, testing whether the state of New York could prohibit slavery. With a second Dred Scott decision in this case and the election of another proslavery president to enforce it, “the revolution inaugurated by Mr. Calhoun, less than twenty-five years ago, [would] be complete. There will then no longer be either free Territories or free States in the American Union, but every State and every Territory, so far as the action of the national Government can decree it, will be consecrated to the everlasting curse of human bondage.” The North would be absorbed into Southern oligarchy. Millions of Northerners would inherit the fate of “millions of the South who are crushed and groaning beneath this despotism—the poor whites as well as the free and slave colored.” And this was “the ultimate purpose of the ruling class of the South.”61 All of these consequences flowed from Calhoun’s successful attempt to control the Supreme Court and plant his doctrines, which astonished Clay in 1847, in constitutional law.
In the same year, 1847, Rufus Spalding addressed the state of the Union in a speech to the Ohio General Assembly, sixteen years before taking his seat in the U.S. House of Representatives in the Thirty-Eighth Congress. He warned of the unprecedented demands for slavery’s extension currently straining the nation. Though reprobating slavery, the founders acknowledged its existence under state law, in the Constitution. They assumed, he said, that slaveholders’ “self-interest if not philanthropy” would extinguish the institution. But “Time has demonstrated the fallacy of such belief.” The Constitution should have restricted slavery to the states where it already existed, because, unpredictably, “the demands of the slaveholders have been insatiate,” and the “people of the free states have uniformly acceded to their unjust demands. . . . All great questions of governmental policy, yea and of ecclesiastical also, are made to bow to the behests of ‘the peculiar institution.’” And “Yea, more than all this; it seeks to usurp the elective franchise itself, and we are now told with an air of superlative insolence and disdain, that political organization of party may henceforth do as it will, the slave states will elect the President.” Looking ahead toward the presidential election of 1848, Spalding affirmed, “And so they will choose the president—and rule in the councils of the nation—and perpetuate the evils of slavery—until the free citizens of the North, and of the East, and of the West shall, with united voice, say to the foul fiend—‘thus far shalt thou come and no farther.’”62
One month later in Congress, Representative James Dixon of Connecticut dug in his heels, just as Spalding said was required. Dixon warned the slave states that they “should have been satisfied with the protection of the Constitution,” but now “it is time for them to be told that they can go no further.” In this speech, Dixon became the first congressman who later served during Reconstruction to affix the oligarchy label to the new ruling statesmen in the South, in the halls of Congress. He blamed the success of the slavery-extending measures to annex Texas and instigate a war on Mexico on “recreant representatives of the Free States, who prostrated themselves in humble servility before the haughty and arrogant demands of a slaveholding oligarchy.” Future Reconstruction Republican Thaddeus Stevens was also present and prominent in the congressional debate, and he, too, denied that the Southern statesmen represented republican political societies. He commented, “Slaveholders form an untitled aristocracy, with numerous dependents. Individuals appropriate large tracts of territory to themselves, and thus prevent it from being thickly settled by freemen.” There was no middle class in the South like that in the North, because “slave countries never can have such a yeomanry; never can have a body of small proprietors who own the soil and till it with their own hands, and sit down in conscious independence under their own vine and fig tree.” The nonslaveholding freemen in the South could not meet this description; their class was “the most worthless and miserable of mankind.”63 The changed character of Southern statesmen’s demands, and the changed character of the statesmen themselves, was attracting greater attention by Northern statesmen, and they evinced a new interest in inquiring into the nature of Southern political society and their national representatives. The prospective extension of slavery would extend the breadth of these political societies, these rulers, and these ruled people. The extension of slavery threatened the founders’ republicanism.
Yet Northern politicians continued to find new “middle ground” to appease the oligarchy and preserve the Union. Senator Lewis Cass, a Democrat from Michigan, had at first supported the free-soil Wilmot Proviso, George Julian wrote. But then, facing Southern obstinacy and fearing Southern disunion, he turned against Wilmot, instead “proclaiming his gospel of ‘popular sovereignty’ in the Territories, which proved the seed-plot of immeasurable national trouble and disaster.”64 Cass’s policy, later picked up and advanced by Senator Stephen Douglas, transferred the question of whether to establish or prohibit slavery from the Congress to the people in the territories. This new “middle ground” gave the proslavery oligarchy another opening to plant slavery in all territory, including previously free territory, and Cass was their willing instrument.
The presidential election of 1848 took place amid the debate over the vast Mexican cession, and the slavery question dominated the campaign. Acting as “a perfect unit, and fully resolved upon the spread of slavery over our Territories,” Southerners in the Democratic Party unsurprisingly selected Cass as their nominee. Cass, Julian wrote, had earned the nomination “by multiplied acts of the most obsequious and crouching servility to his southern overseers. Again and again he had crawled in the dust at their feet.” The Whigs selected Zachary Taylor, a large slaveholder, who would also presumably serve the oligarchy well, and he was nominated primarily by the votes of Southern Whigs “who believed in the extension of slavery.” As a result, leading Massachusetts Whigs, including Henry Wilson, “left the Convention in disgust, and severed their connection with the party forever.”65 The slavery extensionists seemed to control both party nominees, which augured well for the plans of Calhoun and his followers.
But the political middle ground in the North on which Southern statesmen had depended for their success began to weaken in the 1848 campaign. Previously, Julian wrote, some abolitionists had politically organized, forming the Liberty Party, but their presidential candidate, James Birney, received just under seven thousand votes in the 1840 campaign. This was “a small beginning, but it was the beginning of the end.” Increasingly bold proslavery policy measures strengthened the antislavery political movement around this small core. The Liberty Party first established the political creed opposing slavery’s extension that was later picked up by the larger and stronger antislavery parties in the future, the Free Soil and Republican Parties.66 In 1848 disaffected Whigs and Democrats fused with the remaining elements of the Liberty Party and formed the Free Soil Party. Meeting Calhoun’s new constitutional doctrine squarely, the party platform proclaimed that “Congress has no more power to make a slave than to make a king”; that is, the Constitution did not authorize Congress to establish slavery where it already had been prohibited. After much agony of conscience, Julian decided that he could no longer be true to his own convictions as a Whig and bolted for the Free Soilers. Whigs repeatedly charged him with “abolitionism” and labeled him an “apostle of disunion,” among other more vicious insults, and this, he said, was typical treatment for Whig Party “apostates.” Though residing in the free state of Indiana, Julian wrote, “I was threatened by mob violence by my own neighbors . . . as if slavery had been an established institution of the State.”67 Yet, ironically, the Whig Party announced in their convention, “The Whig Party is the only true Free Soil Party.” Misguided unionism explained the sharp contrast between Whig principles and the Whig course of political action. In the 1848 presidential election, support for an antislavery political party’s presidential nominee, in this case Free Soil candidate Martin Van Buren, jumped to just under one hundred thousand votes, and Free Soilers won seats in Congress.68 Opposition to slavery’s extension was beginning to gain a devoted political constituency.
James Blaine wrote that the proslavery leaders expected to legislate in favor of opening all the new territories to slavery or, at minimum, to extend the Missouri Compromise line to the Pacific, cutting California in half. But after winning the presidency in 1848, Zachary Taylor surprised Calhoun and his followers as well as the North by recommending the admission of California as a free state and that New Mexico remain in a territorial condition. Taylor was a Southerner and a large slaveholder but was prepared to act against slavery as the Southern fathers had, when the opportunity was presented. The rapid and fortuitous influx of antislavery men into California during the Gold Rush threw the power of numbers against slavery, and in 1849 they framed a free constitution, in the expectation of an enabling act from Congress for admission into the Union. This strengthened the president’s hand.69 When Congress convened in December 1849, Senator Henry Clay began introducing a series of compromise measures, intending to resolve forever the disputed questions about slavery, in the interests of lasting sectional peace. An exhausting debate ensued for months over how much each side was willing to compromise. Death and unexpected alliances magnified the uncertainty of the outcome. Calhoun died at the end of March 1850. The president and Clay, supported by Senator Daniel Webster of Massachusetts, found themselves at loggerheads, with Clay and Webster conceding more, and Taylor less, to the interests of slavery, until the president suddenly died in July 1850.70
Webster’s course of action departed from his prior antislavery policy and the antislavery feelings of his New England constituency. On March 7, 1850, he pleaded for Clay’s compromise measures for the sake of preserving the Union. He urged the recognition of slavery in Texas and all future states created from Texas, although the institution did not legally exist under the Mexican government. He criticized the North for not expeditiously rendering fugitive slaves to their Southern brethren. He strongly rebuked abolitionism in the North, equating abolitionism with disunionism. The long speech shocked his constituents.71 Henry Wilson blamed the conduct of Clay and Webster for demoralizing the antislavery cause and wrote that had Taylor lived, the resulting Compromise of 1850 would not have been so favorable to the slaveholding interests. But belying his judgment, Wilson also recorded pages of Southern statesmen’s angry threats to secede and declare independence on the floors of Congress and in a separate convention in Nashville that year. Clay and Webster might have well understood that they gained as much for the antislavery cause as could be gained. Anything less might have prompted Southern leaders to secede. The prospective admission of California with its “freely selected constitution” drove Senator Pierre Soulé of Louisiana to say that the consummation of this act would be “one of the most grievous, the most revolting, and the most unjustifiable wrongs that can be inflicted upon a people, living, as we do, under a constitutional compact which proposes to establish justice and promote the general welfare. It will remain a monument of legislative recklessness and oppression; it will shame history to record it.” Such distemper is instructive. How did the decision of the people of California to frame a free constitution and the congressional majority’s decision to admit California as a free state inflict a grievous, revolting, and unjustifiable wrong and constitute oppression? And a wrong upon whom? To what wronged “people” does Soulé refer? Certainly, the nonslaveholding whites and the slaves in the South felt no wrong done to them by the admission of California as a free state. The perceived wrong and perceived oppression were felt by Soulé and his ruling class. Indeed, California’s admission, wrote George Boutwell, presaged an irrecoverable reduction of the power of Southern statesmen in the national government.72
Webster, Blaine reflected, had sacrificed his reputation with his own people at home in one final act of appeasement to placate men like Soulé. Though edging close to the brink of secession, the South would remain in the Union, hopefully forever. At the point of their enactment, the compromise measures enjoyed the support of virtually all Southern representatives, Blaine wrote, while the North was divided.73 The final adjustment that became the Compromise of 1850 included the admission of California as a free state and the recognition of the New Mexico and Utah Territories, but without any restriction on states to be formed from those territories as slave or free and a much tougher fugitive-slave law. Boutwell pointed out that all the territory acquired from the Louisiana Purchase had been slave territory; hence, the Missouri Compromise line, prohibiting slavery to the north, was a gain for freedom. Though all the territory gained from the Mexican cession had been free, according to Mexican law, Texas was admitted as a slave state, and states formed from the New Mexico and Utah Territories were open to slavery. This was a loss for freedom. Nevertheless, the “great Senatorial leaders,” wrote Isaac Arnold, believed that “the agitation of the slavery question was forever silenced.”74
It could not be so. The South had changed. Another event that marked this change was the demise of Senator Thomas Benton of Missouri. Benton argued more forcefully against the compromise measures, and for a stronger antislavery policy, than Clay and Webster had. Benton was a slaveholder of the older kind, a slaveholding abolitionist. Josiah Grinnell remembered that Benton had said of himself, “I am a nominal slave owner, but can only say, not in pride, that I am not the first man whose practice and theories were divergent.” When Congress paused their debates to eulogize Calhoun’s passing, John Wentworth noted that Benton was as silent as Calhoun was when John Quincy Adams died. Prodding Benton, Webster urged Benton to act magnanimously toward the dead Calhoun, whereupon Benton replied, “He is not dead, sir—he is not dead. There may be no vitality in his body, but there is in his doctrines. . . . Whilst I am discharging my duty here, his disciples are disseminating his poison all over my State.” In response to Benton’s opposition to slavery’s expansion during the debates, the legislature of the slave state of Missouri refused to reelect him as their U.S. senator. Wentworth claimed, “It was Calhounism that defeated Senator Benton’s reelection to the Senate,” and Calhounism in Kentucky “must have eventually defeated Mr. Clay, had he lived”75
Though Calhoun was dead, the political revolution he led in the South was approaching completion, and the new generation of Southern statesmen in the nation’s capital had become restive revolutionaries. At one time, when South Carolina public men had “led the van” in support of slavery in America, said Henry Wilson, “they were disavowed by the leading men of the South, and by the men of all parties of the North.” In time, South Carolina had “impressed her ideas and imposed her policy on the South.” Calhoun had played the lead role in this enterprise of conversion. The progress of Calhoun’s career mirrored the progress of change in Southern statesmen. At last, South Carolina had “won her sister slaveholding states to her ideas and policy.” It came to pass that among the leading men in the South, “the social and political ideas of the fathers are proscribed,” but the social and political ideas of South Carolina had “attained a complete ascendancy.” The older dominant archetype of Southern statesman, like Senator Benton, had “been driven into retirement–they are ostracized, exiled, placed under the ban of empire.” The resulting conflict between North and South was, therefore, not “between the North and the South” per se. It was “between the rights of man and the privileges of an aristocratic, oligarchic class,” each principled position coinciding with a geographic locus. In the South, that locus had once been circumscribed tightly around South Carolina and Georgia, but gradually, the circle of influence expanded to wherever slavery existed and wherever Calhoun’s evangelism had spread.76