John C. Calhoun: “On the Slavery Question”

Explanation and Analysis of the Document

This speech, delivered March 4, 1850, caused Calhoun's legend to continue to grow after his death less than a month later. He knew he was near death when he wrote it; when he went to the Senate to deliver it, he could barely stand and hardly speak, so he handed the speech to Senator James Mason, who read it to the Senate for him. The galleries were crowded with people who had come to hear what they believed would be Calhoun's last speech; even senators who opposed his views listened respectfully. While Mason delivered the speech, Calhoun sat, his face lined and hollowed with age and illness and his trademark great mane of white hair splashing from each side of his head. He looked the part of a biblical prophet, worn out from bearing too many burdens. The speech was his last significant attempt to end talk of states seceding from the Union and to preserve the rule of constitutional law.

Although this speech is known as “On the Slavery Question,” it is not as narrow as the title implies. Calhoun's purpose is to enumerate the many grievances southern states have against the federal government and to explain how all of these grievances taken together are leading to secession, which would be a cataclysm that would end liberty for all Americans. He sees only tyranny resulting from secession and the civil war that would inevitably follow. The most important of the grievances he describes is taxation. Calhoun argues that southern states are taxed much more heavily than other states and that the taxes are spent more in the North than in the South, such that southern states are insufficiently benefiting from federal spending. The unfair taxation, he insists, impoverishes southern states. He asserts that this and other abuses by the federal government are the result of a perversion of the Constitution by politicians who have made Congress into a tyrannical organization that favors some states over others and who in the process have nearly destroyed the Constitution's protections of civil liberties throughout the nation.

He pleads with his listeners to revisit the history of the Revolutionary War and the writing of the Constitution and relearn the lessons of the Founders of the United States; he expects that they would discover that the federal government was supposed not to rule people's lives but to shield those lives from government control. If the Constitution were to be understood by all as intended to restrict government's control over people's lives, secession and civil war could still be averted—although by 1850 Calhoun believed that war was inevitable, because people would not heed his warnings.