The Bonfire

JAMES CALHOUN’S NEW-WON stature as a result of his valor and heroic leadership in the Creek War during the summer of 1836 helped launch a political career. The following summer, he received a virtually “unanimous” vote, sending him as Decatur’s representative to the state’s general assembly in Milledgeville, the current capital. He returned for two more terms; then, after a period focused on growing his legal practice, a state senate seat followed from DeKalb County and, later on, from Fulton County. In the brick Gothic Revival capitol halls and chambers, he proved adept at both backroom political maneuvering and public administration. A recognized authority on the intricacies of the state’s tangled, multitier legal system, his legislative work helped codify property rights. That enabled investors to acquire rights-of-way needed to plan the railroad lines that would open Georgia’s interior to development.

Above all a “good government” legislator, he strived to consolidate the rule of law along civilization’s frontier, a chaotic region where the lynch mob’s rope—or an accused man’s vanishing into the wilderness—too frequently marked the final resolution of criminal cases. Civil disputes were often still resolved by duels. As a member of a celebrated Senate Judiciary Committee, his leadership helped close the door on vigilante justice—at least for accused white citizens. An entirely separate legal code determined a black person’s fate when such cases reached a court. The state assembly passed numerous reforms that James Calhoun coauthored to modernize the legal system, most importantly streamlining the judicial process from indictment through state supreme court appeals.

For many frontier Georgians, judicial matters, tort law, civil procedure, and legal statutes seemed arcane or, worse, out-and-out intrusions into their lives, but Calhoun understood the practical benefits his fellow citizens would enjoy from his outwardly bureaucratic efforts at reform. As late as 1858, one of his clients accused of murder was nearly pulled out of his jail cell by an angry mob intent on lynching the prisoner. Unarmed, Calhoun stopped them at the calaboose door with his sober arguments in favor of letting justice take its course. Though frontier-style punishment still occurred, for the state’s growing urban centers, codified laws and efficient, powerful courts meant more than safer streets and a way to settle arguments without resorting to violence. For the first time, towns hired sheriffs and deputies to enforce the law and ensure fair trade practices. They elected judges and juries to bring felons to justice.

The establishment of a modern legal system encouraged civil society to develop. Merchants and banks, tradesmen, builders, and investors of all kinds, even the small farmers bringing crops to market, could trust increasingly that whatever financial risk they ran and whatever reward they aspired to depended not on a gun but business conditions.

Calhoun seemed destined for great things. In a land where a man bore his family name like a shield of honor, he possessed a Southern one that would have amounted to royal lineage on another continent. Despite this “honorable parentage,” recalled one who knew him, “he claimed nothing from them.” He need not. The name echoed through the government chambers. He counted as legislative and personal friends among the most influential men in the state, including Alexander Stephens, Robert Toombs, and Howell Cobb, politicians with national renown who would rise from Milledgeville to Washington, where they would serve as powerful congressmen, senators, and cabinet members in several administrations. Calhoun seemed to be on course for a similar ascent to high national office.

DURING HIS FIRST TERM in office, Calhoun dealt with the brutal business of purging the last sovereign Indian nation from within Georgia’s borders. The gold discovered within Cherokee country made it too valuable to be left to the Cherokee. An 1832 Georgia State-sponsored land lottery law had raffled off the entire Cherokee territory to whites. The Cherokee were legally barred from participating in a chance to win back their own farms and towns.

The state and federal governments moved to lay the groundwork for the tribe’s final removal to its designated land in the far West. Once again, the white governments turned to native leaders who were not empowered to negotiate on the tribe’s behalf. With the Creek and Seminole wars as a backdrop, in 1836 a dissident Cherokee group led by Major Ridge agreed to terms for the peaceful, compensated departure of all remaining tribe members in the region. Nearly all 20,000 tribe members protested against the agreement, but congressional ratification of the Treaty of New Echota gave the natives a two-year deadline to complete their move to the trans-Mississippi West.

By the beginning of 1838 though, only about 2,000 tribe members had complied. Force would be needed for the rest. Would it lead to another bloody Indian war? Gov. G. R. Gilmer dispatched Rep. James Calhoun to survey conditions in the Cherokee territory. Calhoun traveled along the course of the new railroad line the state government was building, the Western & Atlantic, its bed presently being cut and graded directly through Cherokee land.

Reporting back to the governor on February 20, Calhoun was worried by what he didn’t see. He found relations between white and native residents remarkably calm. He had encountered none of the tensions that had presaged the outbreak of the Creek War. He noted many Cherokee men on the work crews building the new railroad. The natives, he reported, “make very good hands at work,” and their work teams were “making considerable progress.”

The peaceful progress raised the hair on the back of his neck. Whites showed no fear of what might happen. Those living and working in the northwestern corner of the state “do not apprehend that there will be any hostilities.” He found, “They seem to be pretty generally, so far as I could ascertain, of opinion that the Indians would leave without doing any mischief of consequence.” He feared they were being naïve about the consequences of the pending, longrumored removal of their neighbors and coworkers.

Despite the region’s calm and the native’s quiescence, he predicted another Indian war was in the offing. He wrote to the governor, “I am afraid that the people in the Cherokee Country have too much confidence in the Indians. . . . They should bear in mind the condition of the white citizens in the Creek nation at the time of the breaking out of hostilities there. If hostilities should break out there, the same results would be experienced that were in the Creek Country”—that is, insurrection, property destruction, civilian panic, bloodshed, and large-scale warfare.

A WARM MAY 24, 1838, marked the final sunrise on 12,000 years of Indian civilization in Georgia. The state of Georgia took official possession of Cherokee County, the last sovereign native nation within its borders. Under Gen. Winfield Scott, 7,000 troops descended upon an estimated 16,000 Cherokee. Uniformed soldiers, hurling insults and firing their rifles to terrorize and cow the population, swept through the small towns, isolated farms within the pine forests, riverside mills, and scattered dwellings. Men, women, and children were seized where they were found. There would be no opportunity to raise an alarm, let alone organize resistance. (In North Carolina, where a similar removal was underway, some Cherokees fled into the remote areas of the Appalachian Mountains and lived on there to gain a tribal reservation in later years.) The troops forced the Cherokee people at bayonet point into awaiting stockade-enclosed fields.

A soldier participating in the removal described what he saw:

Women were dragged from their homes by soldiers whose language they could not understand. Children were often separated from their parents and driven into the stockades with the sky for a blanket and the earth for a pillow. And often the old and infirm were prodded with bayonets to hasten them to the stockades. In one home death had come during the night, a little sad faced child had died and was lying on a bear-skin couch and some women were preparing the little body for burial. All were arrested and driven out leaving the child in the cabin. I don’t know who buried the body.

In less than two weeks, all the Cherokee homes and villages stood empty or destroyed. White squatters moved immediately into the better remaining structures. By June 3, the soldiers’ work in Georgia was done. Over the next five months, troops herded the 16,000 Cherokee people some six hundred miles west across the Mississippi River to Oklahoma. At least 4,000 died of starvation, cold, and disease along what came to be known as the Trail of Tears.

FOR JAMES CALHOUN, the final capture of the state’s western frontier marked an auspicious moment to live within and represent Georgia’s wilderness upland, perhaps not unlike what his forebears experienced when finally rid of their dangerous native neighbors eight decades ago. Senator John C. Calhoun, who had followed his young cousin’s rise with interest and familial pride, reached out from his U.S. Capitol office in Washington, where he was now the South’s greatest voice, writing a letter to commend James, though “still young,” for “the formidable start you have made.” He was confident that “you may accomplish all you desire.”

His belief in the young man’s political promise was to prove unfounded. James Calhoun would never scale the heights his apparent and oft-touted gifts indicated. As he strove for higher office, he faltered again and again. The aspiring political leader knew exactly what held him back: the national controversies that swept local politics aside.

IN THAT SAME 1839 LETTER, the “Cast-Iron Man” warned his up-and-coming cousin that he should not expect an easy time of it in the rough-and-tumble politics of the age. He confessed, “My political course has, indeed, been one of great difficulty; as any public man’s must be, who honestly performs his duty, without regard to personal consequences.”

Honestly performing his duty came easily enough for James Calhoun, but unlike the senator, he would pay a price for his sense of duty that would keep him pinned down in his home district. Twice in succession he ran for a congressional seat, and twice he lost. (A third, much later effort at a race for the House of Representatives proved equally futile.) He had little chance, despite his many assets and personal popularity.

James Calhoun, like a large percentage of the antebellum nation’s men of wealth and high standing, from the South and North, was a political Whig. He was an avowed supporter of popular causes including sectional rights and the nation’s self-proclaimed Manifest Destiny to conquer the continent. However, unlike Senator Calhoun in Washington, he would not move from his Whig alignment to side with his home district’s dominant political organization, the Democratic Party, because, above all else, he believed in the need for effective governance in the ripening republic. The need was especially evident in his frontier home, where the population had doubled, then doubled again, while raw local institutions failed to keep pace. The frontier was an anarchic place, lacking the foundations of civil order necessary to build a thriving American civilization. James Calhoun went to Milledgeville—and he hoped beyond—to create the conditions that would boost the region’s opportunity and affluence.

Good government, though, mattered little to the large majority of voters, many of them newly arrived in western Georgia. Most settlers rolling into the region in fact resented government, whether in Milledgeville or the dimly perceived federal government 650 miles and several weeks’ travel away in Washington, D.C. Government legislators were thought by many to erect legal structures that more often than not acted as an imposition on their freedom to pursue their individual interests. Government meant tariffs on goods, laws against the taking of native land, high and mighty bankers with their notes and interest, militia drafts, schools and sheriffs, state roads and lands, and debt, duties, and taxes to pay for them. Mostly, it meant a publicly supported official’s interference in the conduct of their lives. In the South, yeoman farmers toiling to make their small piece of red dirt feed their family formed the largest bloc of voters, and to their eyes the Whig Party had come to represent all those dominant people and institutions the men once known as Virginians resented most: banks and corporations, city dwellers, Yankees and Puritans—abolitionists all—plus the plantation owners, the bloated self-styled squires who looked down on the crackers. The frontiersmen despised those who dared tell them where they could settle and what laws would govern their lives and property. Little wonder that in Calhoun’s almost entirely rural DeKalb County district, Jacksonian Democrats outnumbered Whigs by nearly two to one.

Calhoun’s personal popularity, keen legal mind, and in-state legislative effectiveness overcame the odds, winning him local races despite his party’s deep minority status. Those assets were not enough to overcome the Democratic candidates’ enormous majority among voters, though, when it came to the races for U.S. Congress.

Senator John Calhoun tacitly appealed to his talented cousin to consider switching parties if he hoped to climb the political ladder. Party meant little to the elder Calhoun, an outlook shared by most men of an earlier political generation. He had already made several canny moves from his early days. Why should his young cousin not climb his way up via the most convenient ladder?

IN EARLY 1846, U.S. Senator Calhoun sent James a copy of his already widely circulated speech calling for a compromise—eventually passed—to avoid going to war with Britain over the disputed northern boundary of the vast Oregon Territory in the Northwest. America was in the process of sealing its continentwide hold on the land, its Manifest Destiny. The position Calhoun staked out pitted him against Jacksonian president James K. Polk’s administration, as well as against the public’s enormous support for annexation well beyond the forty-ninth-parallel compromise he favored—as the Democratic slogan went, it would be “Fifty-four-forty, or fight.” His views even placed him against his own party in Congress. He seemed to have set a course for himself at odds with his own political future.

James found himself in hearty agreement with the senator’s views. He applauded his cousin’s actions at the time. “I was one of the first nul[l]ifiers in Georgia though then very young,” James proclaimed and added, almost apologetically, “and eaven [sic] now I scarcely know of any great question but upon which I agree with you entirely.” This put him directly at odds with his own Whigs.

He stopped himself, though, and asked the obvious question that had to be on his cousin’s mind: “Then you will say I agree with the Democratic Party upon most all of the great questions of the day. Why are you a Whig?” He understood that on the most defining issue of what it meant to be an American, indeed of the continued life of the nation, he parted ways with his cousin’s party and the South’s now dominant political organization. It had to be an agonizing choice, for, with that, he blasted to pieces whatever hopes he may have held for winning national office from Georgia.

Remarkably, James’s party allegiance was driven not by grand ideological ideas like federal power, the creation or dissolution of a national bank, states’ rights, western expansion, or even the unspoken Southern fundamental of slavery’s future. He split from the Democrats over what seemed a less than consequential matter: good government and who would best be able to bring it to the young nation. He was a practical man, but for him practicality harbored a deep philosophical core. “I think the successful administration of the laws of the government of more importance, than a fiew, eaven great questions,” he insisted. The value of government—what defined a democratic nation—was found in its practical success in executing the laws of the land, its ability to serve its citizens fairly and efficiently. Good government would sustain the explosively fast-growing American nation better than resolution of the great questions that threatened even now to split it in two. Building and maintaining law and order was government’s preeminent role. That enabled all else, including peaceful debate and potential resolution of the “great questions.”

He was confident that if he were a Democrat, his advance to higher office would be smoothed and more than likely assured. The local Democratic Party, which “has ever treated me with great kindness” and helped him “very warmly” in his legal practice, made abundantly clear the future they planned for him if only he jumped. Still, he could not do it. As a result of his political principles, he lamented, “it has been a great misfortune to me to dif[f]er with the Democratic Party. Could I have acted with that party, & done justice to my honest opinions—I do not doubt but that I might have been elevated to respectable offices.”

THE YOUNGER CALHOUN’S moderate views were largely out of step with most of his neighbors’, but his ability to work behind the scenes helped put the brakes on what appeared at the time to be an unavoidable national train wreck. Still, he needed to break with the Southern States’ Rights political faction for good to do so, even as its leader John C. Calhoun used the little remaining energy left to him in his last, dying days to fight a compromise that his cousin James had worked so hard to see enacted.

Extension of the nation from coast to coast brought to a head the question of the place of slavery, protected in the original thirteen states by the Constitution but now abolished throughout the nation’s northern tier. White expansion throughout the Southeast, largely complete within that corner of the nation, continued westward. Mexico’s Texas territory was the natural next step—with only the weak Mexican government standing in the United States’ way. American settlers and disenchanted Mexicans in Texas first declared their independence in 1836. In 1845, Polk offered to purchase Texas outright, but Mexico refused. Despite Mexican opposition, Polk went ahead and formally annexed Texas with statehood, as a slave state, in March. By the following spring, Mexico and the United States were caught up in a bloody war. A greatly disproportionate number of Southerners joined the U.S. Army as it fought its way south into Mexico City. Mexico acceded to the victorious America’s peace terms in 1848, granting the United States all of its territory north of the Rio Grande. The United States at last reached from sea to sea.

The new territory promised almost boundless opportunity—especially after gold was discovered in California in 1849. But acquisition of the new territories brought the suppressed question of slavery, in the form of slaveholders’ rights, to a head. Most Northerners wished to exclude slavery entirely from the new territories. “Free soil and free men,” they cried. A Northern majority in Congress appeared ready to do just that. The potential to carve several additional free states out of the western territory cast a dangerous shadow over the South. Fire-eater James Henry Hammond of South Carolina expressed Southern fears that the North, with an expanded free-state majority, would “ride over us rough shod. . . . Our only safety is in equality of POWER. If we do not act now, we deliberately consign our children, not our posterity, but our children to the flames.”

The gnawing question of America’s national identity exploded. Literal fistfights broke out on the floor of the Capitol in Washington. Threats of worse violence abounded. Many fire-eating Southerners declared themselves openly ready to go to war for their freedom from an increasingly tyrannical Northern majority. Even Senator Calhoun was shocked by what he saw among his Southern colleagues in Congress, who rose up “more determined and bold than I ever saw them. Many avow themselves disunionists, and a still greater number admit, that there is little hope of any remedy short of it.”

Disunionists considered this the moment and the cause they had long sought for a national split. From his Alabama power base, William Lowndes Yancey urged the South to “teach the North, that when we speak brave words, we will follow them, if needs be, by brave acts.” He told his followers that if the people in the North were not ready “to respect our rights, we will promptly dissolve all political connection with them.” Many in the Lower South cheered such fiery words. Ever hopeful of preserving the Union through a unified Southern polity, John Calhoun battled the Free Soilers, as well as Yancey, Hammond, and others ready to secede.

Back in Georgia, the issue was as hot as anywhere in the country. The Georgia Telegraph called for “secession . . . resistance, open unqualified resistance.” Tempers flared; violence struck home. On a fall day in 1848, then Whig congressman and Unionist Alexander Stephens bumped into Judge Francis H. Cone, a state supreme court justice and lead voice of opposition to any compromise with the Free Soilers, on the steps of Atlanta’s Thompson Hotel, one of several new inns built in the booming upstart railroad town. Bad blood already existed between the two men. The foolhardy, ninety-pound Stephens berated the two-hundred-pound Cone, who lashed out with a knife, slicing Little Alec multiple times, nearly severing his hand, and stabbing him deeply and almost mortally near the heart. Stephens barely survived. His hand was permanently mangled. Cone pled guilty to attempted murder and got off with an $800 fine.

ALTHOUGH STEPHENS WAS laid up for months, a force committed to reaching a solution to the crisis arose among his fellow Southern Whigs in concert with some of their Northern party brethren and more moderate Democrats. Record high cotton prices, which raised concerns about the economic debacle a true sectional split would bring, aided the desire to reach a compromise. As close as James Calhoun was to his cousin the senator on most political questions—and as personally devoted as he was—his moderate outlook gave him no doubt that he sided with those working to preserve the Union.

In Washington, moderate voices bid desperately to stave off secession. In September 1850, Congress enacted a legislative series, known collectively as the Compromise, put forth in the Senate by Kentucky’s Great Compromiser, Henry Clay, revised by a young Stephen Douglas of Illinois, and supported by a coalition including Massachusetts’s Daniel Webster. The acts postponed the question of slavery in the new territories until they had applied for statehood, granted California statehood as a free state, banned the slave trade in Washington, D.C., and, as recompense for the electoral imbalance in favor of the North, promulgated the Fugitive Slave Law. That engendered a system for capturing and repatriating runaway slaves and set criminal penalties for those harboring them. For slaveholders, this was the prime element enabling them to support the Compromise, and for abolitionists, it was the most repugnant. Vociferously opposed by an increasingly consumptive John Calhoun and even more vituperative fire-eaters and abolitionists, the Compromise nonetheless passed.

Its passage put the fire-eaters on the defensive throughout the Upper South and Northern border states, deflecting calls there for a sectional split back to a national debate about the best ways to resolve differences between the sections. Things were different in the Lower South, where the debate raged on. As cast by Calhoun, Hammond, Yancey, and others, the Compromise could only be viewed as a defeat of Southern interests, presaging far worse defeats to come. Calls went out for resistance, even the taking up of arms. South Carolina, above all, was ready to secede. If it did, Alabama would follow, and likely Georgia after that. Surely other Southern states would in turn.

WITH THE NATIONAL UNION at stake, the thirty-nine-year-old James Calhoun played an unsung but important role in gaining his state’s support for the Compromise. In late 1850, he was elected as a delegate to the state convention convened on December 10 to consider Georgia’s response to the Compromise. The die was cast ahead of time because he, like most of the popularly chosen men sent to Milledgeville, was an avowed Unionist. He formed part of a persuasive block at the convention that included Howell Cobb, the Georgia Democrat and Speaker of the House of Representatives who had steered the legislation through Congress; a now largely recovered Stephens; and fellow Whig congressman Robert Toombs. As part of a thirty-three-member committee, Calhoun helped draft and, following a tumultuous debate, push through the convention’s final resolutions. Together they came to be known as the Georgia Platform.

The platform declared the state’s fealty to the Union and urged “preservation of our much loved Union,” but only upon the condition that the compromise laws of 1850 remained in force. Above all, read the final resolution, continuation of the Union “depends” on enforcement of the Fugitive Slave Law. The convention in its platform presented a defense at once of slavery, state sovereignty, and the compact between the states and the national government in the formation of the Union. “Southerners,” proclaimed Cobb, “have a natural right to revolution [should their inalienable property rights be violated] but not a constitutional right of secession.” He would come to disavow those words, but for now he joined Calhoun and the other convention leaders in crisscrossing the state to win support for the Georgia Platform.

Though the Compromise seemed only a stopgap measure to hold together two fundamentally misaligned sections of the nation, the Georgia Platform proved a triumph for all wishing to keep the Union whole. Col. John Milledge of Augusta gushed as the convention’s Unionist outcome checked the drive toward secession, “The eyes of the world were upon [Georgia], but calm and inflexible, she came forth in the midst of unparalleled excitement, holding in her hands the destiny of this Empire. . . . Her voice was for peace and the Union. She joined it in 1776 and she saved it in 1850.” Georgia’s leadership in supporting the Compromise quickly brought its more resistant neighbor states into line and assured its popular acceptance. Radical disunionists had been defanged—for the moment.

NEAR DEATH, Senator John Calhoun saw the Compromise as a loose bandage over a massive, bleeding wound. He was convinced the Union could not hold under its terms. In the last days of his life, he prophesied the coming cataclysm with uncanny accuracy. “I fix its probable occurrence within twelve years or three presidential terms,” he told Virginia senator James M. Mason. “You and others of your age will probably live to see it; I shall not. The mode by which it will be done is not so clear; it may be brought about in a manner that no one now foresees. But the probability is, it will explode in a presidential election.” He died less than two weeks later, on March 31, 1850.

JAMES CALHOUN, having worked diligently to ensure Southern acceptance of the Compromise that Senator Calhoun died while fighting against, moved, like many Southern Whigs, from his rapidly dissolving party to the newly created Constitutional Union Party, which, as the name indicated, placed loyalty to the United States as laid out in the Constitution above any sectional feelings. He rose within the party’s ranks, which included many former Whigs, Northern and Southern. Loyal to his region, his country, and his party, he won election to the state senate in 1851 as part of an electoral wave in support of the Compromise that swept through much of the South. Loyalty to town and district, though, was another matter.

Within a year, he uprooted his family and law practice and moved, in 1852, from the small but refined village of Decatur to Atlanta, the new railroad stop growing up fast within the pine-forested hills and gullies a few short miles to the west. His brother Ezekiel moved his medical practice and home there as well.

Where once there had been only log cabins, a new city was sprouting. Two more rail lines, one from Macon and another from Augusta, followed the Western & Atlantic down from Chattanooga to the new upland mercantile hub. Though many respectable people still refused to move in among the roughhewn laborers who had come for the jobs building the new rail lines through the land the Cherokee once called home, the clear-sighted attorney and politician could see where Georgia’s future lay. Here, he would finally win “respectable” office, and the South would build its Gate City.