John C. Calhoun: “On the Slavery Question”

About the Author

During his lifetime, John C. Calhoun was a larger-than-life figure; he was held almost in awe by many Americans. In his teens Calhoun displayed a voracious appetite for learning, poring over books and sucking up knowledge from wherever he could acquire it. At age fourteen, he became the manager of his family's farms and turned around his family's fortunes by making the farms profitable. Although he was from the backwoods of South Carolina, with little formal education, he earned admission to Yale College, where he cut a striking figure. He was six feet, two inches tall but was so thin that he seemed taller. He did not wear the stylish clothing of his rich classmates, seemingly oblivious to how his sturdy, rustic clothing and boots made him seem out of place. He spoke with a frontier twang that made him sound down-to-earth, a man of the people rather than part of southern aristocracy.

Even though he accomplished much in America's government—serving in the House of Representatives, in the Senate, as vice president in two separate administrations, and as a member of the cabinet—his modern reputation is dominated by his support for states' rights. He was heavily influenced by Thomas Jefferson's ideas about an agrarian democracy, in which people who were closely connected to the land would maintain American values of individual liberty, and he believed that such values were embodied in the U.S. Constitution, sometimes purposely and sometimes accidentally by the people who wrote the document and formed the United States. He viewed industrialization with suspicion; he believed that the agricultural production of slave states did much more to support the economy of the nation through the payments of tariffs and duties than did the machinery of the industries of other states. He believed that the formal institution of slavery was more honest than what he viewed as the industrial servitude of laborers in factories and mills. As an institution recognized by law, he argued, slavery put obligations on both slave and slave owner, including caring for slaves after they ceased to be able to work, whereas the slaves (as he viewed them) of free-state industries had no formal social contract and were left to starve and die homeless when their usefulness to industrialists ended. He was profoundly racist in his views. He believed that black Africans were inherently less capable of reasoning than were whites and that slavery actually enhanced the lives of black people by exposing them to the benefits of white American civilization.

If Calhoun's ill-informed views on ethnic groups had been all there were to his public career, his documents would have little to recommend themselves to modern people, but he was a wide-ranging thinker whose analyses of the Constitution and its effects on the everyday lives of Americans still resonate with the issues of modern times. For instance, his assessment of the Mexican-American War and its possible effects on America's future has found eerie echoes in wars that followed, even including the war in Iraq. Calhoun clung to the Constitution as if it were the only lifeboat in a sea of storms and sharks, and he cited it often as the key to holding the United States together; he believed that only with the states united as one nation could the civil rights of people be protected. It was his view that if any states succeeded in seceding from the United States, the protections of the Constitution would be lost for all Americans in all states and territories, and the experiment in self-government by the people would be lost to oppressive regimes in which the many labored for the comfort of a few. Thus, he resisted not only movements in New England to secede during the War of 1812 but also such movements even in his home state of South Carolina.

Calhoun believed that the United States was a truly revolutionary country, because the nation was, to his mind, a forthright rejection of Old World monarchies and aristocracies—a rejection of the notion that people were allowed to dominate others because of bearing hereditary aristocratic titles or because of having great wealth. His writings carry in them his defense of America's Constitution as a document intended to allow people to find their places in life based on their character. When he defends southern customs, he does so in the belief that the Constitution allows people in different places to pursue happiness in their own ways, without other people telling them what to do.

Thus, he was a champion of the civil rights of those in a minority, especially when a majority would try to impose its will on a minority. A government ruled strictly by a majority of its citizens would be a despotic government, because it would deny citizens the ability to pursue their own interests in whatever manner they might choose. To him, the issue of slavery epitomized the conflict between minority and majority, and the outcome of the conflict over slavery would be either despotism by a northern majority or a triumph of individual liberty for minorities throughout the United States. When read in chronological order, Calhoun's works reveal his growing belief that the original federal government of the United States was being reshaped into a central government and that the change was creating conflict between states that otherwise would have no cause to abuse one another. His writings were often directed toward finding ways to preserve individual liberty while adjusting to social and economic changes that were moving America toward a society in which everyone was supposed to be like everyone else rather than allowing for a diversity of opinions and ways of life.

Calhoun distinguished between the words federal and national to convey his ideas about what was wrong with America's government and what needed to be fixed. In his speeches and writings, federal refers to the nation's government as originally conceived by the writers of the Constitution. That document created a federal government in which state laws dominated society. He believed that the best democracy exists when local people handle their own affairs without interference from a national government, such that being smaller makes states better able to provide for local self-governance than a centralized national government could. When he uses the word national, he is referring to a kind of government in which all laws and customs are imposed on citizens by a national majority seeking to make everyone like themselves; this sort of government would be as bad as an Old World monarchy, because when minorities are denied the opportunity to live as they please, everyone's liberty is at an end.