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PERHAPS HE SHAMED them. Perhaps they decided that the best way to shut him up was to stop provoking him. At any rate, the censure resolutions against Adams all failed to win majorities, though the gag rule remained in force. Yet Adams’s outspoken opposition to slavery had another effect, one less favorable to his cause. It, and the swelling chorus of criticism by abolitionists, caused the defenders of slavery to mount a moral counterattack. Leading the charge, unsurprisingly, was John Calhoun.

Calhoun addressed the Senate at almost the same moment Adams was ridiculing the House. As proud and self-assured as he had ever appeared, Calhoun rejected the idea that the South had anything to apologize for about slavery, and he urged his fellow slaveholders to rally in their own defense. “I do not belong to the school which holds that aggression is to be met by concession,” he declared. “Mine is the opposite creed, which teaches that encroachments must be met at the beginning.” The Senate was debating a gag rule of its own; should it refuse to accept antislavery petitions? Calhoun thought it definitely should. To allow a questioning of the moral and constitutional basis of slavery would open the South to further and endless attack. “In this case in particular, I hold concession or compromise to be fatal. If we concede an inch, concession would follow concession—compromise would follow compromise, until our ranks would be so broken that effectual resistance would be impossible.”

Calhoun noted that at the time of the debate over Andrew Jackson’s force bill, he had predicted that the centralizing philosophy that motivated the measure would prompt Northern abolitionists to try to get the central government to suppress slavery. “A large portion of the Northern states believed slavery to be a sin, and would consider it as an obligation of conscience to abolish it if they should feel themselves in any degree responsible for its continuance,” Calhoun said. “I then predicted that it would commence as it has with this fanatical portion of society, and that they would begin their operations on the ignorant, the weak, the young, and the thoughtless, and gradually extend upwards till they would become strong enough to obtain political control.” That had been but four years ago. “And all this is already in a course of regular fulfillment.”

Things would get worse. “They who imagine that the spirit now abroad in the North will die away of itself without a shock or convulsion have formed a very inadequate conception of its real character. It will continue to rise and spread, unless prompt and efficient measures to stay its progress be adopted.” It had seized schools, pulpits and much of the Northern press. Reasonable men and women in the North did not yet buy what the abolitionists were selling. But this would change. “In the course of a few years they will be succeeded by those who will have been taught to hate the people and institutions of nearly one-half of this Union, with a hatred more deadly than one hostile nation ever entertained towards another.”

The result would be the rending of the Union. “By the necessary course of events, if left to themselves, we must become, finally, two people. It is impossible under the deadly hatred which must spring up between the two great nations, if the present causes are permitted to operate unchecked, that we should continue under the same political system. The conflicting elements would burst the Union asunder, powerful as are the links which hold it together.”

Calhoun stated the matter as starkly as he could. “Abolition and the Union cannot coexist.” He spoke as a friend of the Union, he said, and it was for the sake of the Union that he made his declaration. The South could not remain in the Union if the central government allowed the abolitionists to spread a doctrine that undermined the Southern way of life. “We of the South will not, cannot, surrender our institutions. To maintain the existing relations between the two races, inhabiting that section of the Union, is indispensable to the peace and happiness of both. It cannot be subverted without drenching the country in blood, and extirpating one or the other of the races. Be it good or bad, it has grown up with our society and institutions, and is so interwoven with them that to destroy it would be to destroy us as a people.”

Calhoun shifted from politics to morality, and in doing so set down a marker that transformed the debate over slavery. “Let me not be understood as admitting, even by implication, that the existing relations between the two races in the slaveholding states is an evil,” he said. “Far otherwise; I hold it to be a good, as it has thus far proved itself to be to both, and will continue to prove so if not disturbed by the fell spirit of abolition. I appeal to facts. Never before has the black race of Central Africa, from the dawn of history to the present day, attained a condition so civilized and so improved, not only physically, but morally and intellectually. In the meantime, the white or European race”—in the South—“has not degenerated. It has kept pace with its brethren in other sections of the Union where slavery does not exist. It is odious to make comparison; but I appeal to all sides whether the South is not equal in virtue, intelligence, patriotism, courage, disinterestedness, and all the high qualities which adorn our nature.”

Lest listeners mistake his point, Calhoun reiterated: “In the present state of civilization, where two races of different origin and distinguished by color and other physical differences, as well as intellectual, are brought together, the relation now existing in the slaveholding states between the two is, instead of an evil, a good—a positive good.”


WITH THIS SENTENCE, Calhoun added to the lexicon of slavery a phrase that became a battle cry of the South. Since independence, slavery had typically been treated as something evil—a necessary evil, perhaps, in those states that allowed slavery, but evil still. Calhoun understood that such a characterization yielded the moral high ground to the abolitionists; slaveholders would be at a constant disadvantage. By asserting instead that slavery was a “positive good,” he claimed moral parity for the South. The North was no better than the South; slaveholders had nothing to apologize for.

In fact, Calhoun claimed more than parity. “There never has yet existed a wealthy and civilized society in which one portion of the community did not, in point of fact, live on the labor of the other,” he said. This had been true in ancient times; it was true at present. And the American system, which allowed slavery, was more humane than the systems of Europe, which did not. “In few countries is so much left to the share of the laborer, and so little exacted from him, or is more kind attention paid to him in sickness or infirmities of age,” Calhoun said. “Compare his condition with the tenants of the poor houses in the more civilized portions of Europe—look at the sick, and the old and infirm slave, on one hand, in the midst of his family and friends, under the kind superintending care of his master and mistress, and compare it with the forlorn and wretched condition of the pauper in the poor house.”

Slavery, moreover, enhanced the stability of society. “Here I fearlessly assert that the existing relation between the two races in the South, against which these blind fanatics”—the abolitionists—“are waging war, forms the most solid and durable foundation on which to rear free and stable political institutions. It is useless to disguise the fact. There is and always has been, in an advanced stage of wealth and civilization, a conflict between labor and capital. The condition of society in the South exempts us from the disorders and dangers resulting from this conflict, which explains why it is that the political condition of the slaveholding states has been so much more stable and quiet than that of the North.”

The abolitionists would destroy the stability of the South without improving the material lot of those they professed to care about. This was why Southerners must make the case for the morality of their system. “If we do not defend ourselves, none will defend us; if we yield we will be more and more pressed as we recede; and if we submit we will be trampled underfoot. Be assured that emancipation itself would not satisfy these fanatics; that gained, the next step would be to raise the negroes to a social and political equality with the whites; and that being effected, we would soon find the present condition of the two races reversed. They and their Northern allies would be the masters, and we the slaves.”