CHAPTER VII

CALHOUN

After John Caldwell Calhoun, who was born March 18, 1782, the birth-year of Webster, had become large enough to go to the field, the most of his time until he was eighteen was spent in work on the plantation. His father had never had but six months' schooling. There were no schools in that region except a few "old field" ones, where the three R's only were taught. To one of these John went for a few months. The boy learned to read, and manifestly he had acquired some habit of reading. In his thirteenth year he was sent to school to his brother-in-law, Moses Waddell, who was an unusually good teacher. He found a circulating library in the house. This was his first access to books. He read old Rollin, and he probably moused about in Robertson's History of America and Life of Charles V, and Voltaire's Charles XII. Having laid Rollin aside, he assailed Locke's famous Essay; but when he got to the chapter on Infinity his health had become bad, doubtless due to his change from active to sedentary habits and from physical to mental activity. So he was taken back to his work at home. His father had died in the meanwhile, and his mother, who had great business talent, taught him, as we are told, "how to administer the affairs of a plantation."[41] It will appear in the sequel that he was superbly trained.[42] When he attained the age of eighteen the family had become convinced that he ought to be got ready for a profession. John, knowing himself to be the mainstay of his mother, and having resolved to be a planter, at first would not hear to this. But the family persisted. This doubtless influenced him to turn the subject carefully over in his mind; and the decision which he made showed an understanding of his own peculiar talents and needs, and also a prescience of his future which, when his youth, small opportunity of observation, and want of schooling are remembered, are very wonderful. He gave this family, who were not well-to-do, to understand he would not accept a limited and makeshift education. Naturally they asked what sort did he mean, and he answered, "The best school, college, and legal education to be had in the United States."[43] Then they asked, How long did he think all this would take, and he promptly answered seven years. To the average reader it seems that the time necessary to carry this unschooled lad through the course he proposed had been egregiously underestimated by him; but to the family, as they thought of the appertaining annual expenses, it must have looked very long. They had to give in. That irrefragable influence over his people which showed itself as soon as he came upon the public stage begins here. Some one long afterwards said of him, that if he could but talk with every man he would always have the whole United States on his side. It is more than probable that in the five years after he had left Waddell's school he had, in plantation management and other interests of the family, convinced them that he always acted or advised wisely. Another comment is in place here. Study of the record of his early life convinces you that very soon after, if not before, the commencement of his legal studies, he decided to make law only a stepping-stone by which to enter public life and also acquire the means to plant. I cannot help inferring that this was--somewhat vaguely it may be--his intention already formed when he dictated terms to the family as just told. It is not at all impossible that to him who afterwards astonished the world by the sureness of his prophecy there had even then been revealed the career awaiting; and so he resolved to get ready for college in two years, and pass the rest of the seven where, besides competent instructors, he would have cultivated society, libraries, and the best of opportunities to qualify himself for public life. Be our conjecture true or not, in two years after he had opened his Latin grammar he entered the junior class at Yale, and two years later he graduated with credit. After reading law in an office he took a year's course at the Litchfield law school in Connecticut, and then he went into an office again for a while. Some time in June, 1807, he hung out his shingle at Abbeville Court-house, as it was called up to the time of reconstruction. A few days afterwards in that month occurred the attack on the Chesapeake, and when the news came it caused a public meeting in the town. Some good report of him must have been bruited about in the community in advance of his coming. It is almost certain that his education had greatly developed those powers of conversation mentioned above, and that many listeners had greatly approved his views of the outrage, and the patriotic indignation he uttered over it. It is not stretching probability too far to assert that, young as he was, he was by far the ablest man that could be found in the locality to advise upon the burning question which had arisen so suddenly. He was selected to draft appropriate resolutions and present them. There is no record of these or of his speech. But as we know that the resolutions carried, and that tradition still reports admiringly of the speech, we may be sure that his performance in both was extraordinarily good. Although there had been a strong popular prejudice in the county--or district, as it was then called--against lawyer representatives, October 13, 1807, less than four months after the meeting just described, he was elected to the legislature at the head of the ticket.

In that day presidential electors were appointed by the State legislatures. Shortly after the session of this legislature to which Calhoun had been elected opened, there was an informal meeting of the republican members to make nominations for president and vice-president. The first was unanimously given to Madison. When the other was up, Calhoun declared his conviction that there was soon to be war with England. At such a time there should be no dissension in the party. He gave strong reasons why George Clinton should not be nominated, as had been proposed; and he suggested John Langdon of New Hampshire as the proper man. The thorough acquaintance with the grave situation which he manifested, the due respect he showed Clinton while opposing his nomination, and the ability with which he discussed the question, advanced him at once to a place among the most distinguished members of the legislature.

"Several important measures were originated by Mr. Calhoun while in the legislature which have become a permanent portion of the legislation of the State, and he soon acquired an extensive practice at the bar."[44] He kept in the very midst of the political swim. His reputation as an honest, true, and able adviser had become so great and influential that the people, in their warm approval of the strong measures he advocated as preparation for the threatened war, pushed him out as their candidate for congress and elected him most triumphantly in October, 1810. The first session of this, the twelfth congress, commenced November 4, 1811. Clay, then speaker of the house, evidently expecting much of him, gave him the second place in the committee on foreign relations. There came before the house a measure contemplating an increase of the army in view of the war which appeared to many to be nearer than ever. John Randolph was against it. In March, 1799, a year before Calhoun started to school, Randolph, then not twenty-six years old, had fearlessly met the great Patrick Henry in stump discussion, and had, in the opinion of his auditors, got the better of it. He was elected to congress in this year. Steadily since then he had developed, until he was now one of the most prominent figures upon the national stage. While his powers of discussion of a subject were great, the power that especially characterized him was that of nonplussing his antagonist with a snub or a sarcasm. Randolph made an earnest speech. Calhoun replied. It is not enough to say of this speech that it evinces full mastery of the subject. It presents every important view most effectively, satisfactorily answering everything which had been said on the other side. And it is especially happy in the wise use made at each proper place of the commands of morality and patriotism.

Mr. Pinkney has instructively and entertainingly illustrated this speech by his excerpts.[45] To them I here add another, which I would have you consider,--Randolph had strenuously insisted that the cause of this war, said by the other side to be impending, should first be defined; and until this plain duty was done there should be no preparation. To this Calhoun said:

"The single instance alluded to, the endeavor of Mr. Fox to compel Mr. Pitt to define the object of the war against France, will not support the gentleman from Virginia in his position. That was an extraordinary war for an extraordinary purpose. It was not for conquest, or for redress of injury, but to impose a government on France which she refused to receive--an object so detestable that an avowal dared not be made."

This is a thrust which Randolph especially could appreciate.

The more I examine this first speech of a very young member of congress upon a question of such transcendent importance to the people of the United States, the more sound, able, complete,--to sum up in one word,--the more statesmanly it appears. I am confident that whoever will weigh it carefully will agree with me. He will not be surprised to learn that it carried the house decisively. Even in Randolph's own State it drew great praise. But its fame went abroad everywhere, and it was revealed to America that she had found among her public men another giant.

In the year 1800 Calhoun was a lad of eighteen, without even a complete common school education. Represent to yourself clearly what he had accomplished in the interval from the year last mentioned to December 12, 1811, when, not yet thirty, he made the speech we have just considered. If any public man of America, burdened with such disadvantages, has surpassed, or even equalled, this meteoric stride, I do not now recall him. I am not emphasizing especially that he got to congress in such a short while. What I do especially emphasize is that he so early won place as an eminent statesman. In these eleven years he lost no time at all in idleness, or probation, or waiting.

January 8, 1811, some three months after his election to congress, he married his cousin, Floride Calhoun--not a first cousin, but a daughter of a first cousin. His letters of courtship, not to her, but, in the old style, to her mother; his only letter to her, written shortly before the marriage; and other letters from and to him afterwards, all of which you can read in the Correspondence,--show him to be such a lover, father, brother, son-in-law, brother-in-law, grandfather, etc., as everybody wants. Some South Carolinian, adequately gifted, ought to tell befittingly the tale of Calhoun's beautiful domestic life.

I must now mention some other facts which will further enlighten you as to the man.

I was fourteen when Calhoun died. For four or five years before, and afterwards until I went to the brothers' war, I heard much of Calhoun from relatives in Abbeville county and the Court House. I still recall most vividly what a paternal uncle habitually said of the brightness and unexampled impressiveness of Calhoun's eyes, and the charm and instructiveness of his conversation. In Georgia there was not a public man whose course in politics commended itself to all of my acquaintances. I had become accustomed to hearing much disparagement of Toombs and of Stephens, with whom I was most familiar. But my South Carolina relatives, and every man or woman of that State whose talk I listened to; every boy or girl with whom I talked myself, yea, all of the negroes,--always warmly maintained the rightfulness of Calhoun's politics, national or State. I thought it a good hit when a Georgia aunt of mine dubbed the Palmetto State "The Kingdom of Calhoun," and Abbeville Court House "its capital." This universal political worship was a great surprise to me. But there was a still greater one to come. That was, that according to all accounts, and without any contradiction, in spite of his living away from home the most of his time, he yet gave his planting interests and all else appertaining the very best management, and with such unvarying financial success it would be unkind to compare Webster's money-wasting and amateur farming at Marshfield. In this community, where he seemed to be known as well as he was before he removed to Fort Hill, some sixty miles distant, in 1825, he had become a far greater authority in business than he had even attained in politics. His acquaintances all sought his advice, which they followed when they got it; thus making this busiest of public servants their agricultural oracle.

The reader will find in Starke's memoir and the Correspondence ample proofs of that diligent attention of Calhoun to his home affairs which made him the exceptionally successful planter that he was. Starke happily calls him "the great farmer-statesman of our country."[46]

Now let us see where he made his mark as an able business man in another place. He was Monroe's secretary of war from 1817 to 1825. When he entered the office he found something like $50,000,000 of unsettled accounts outstanding, and jumble in every branch of the service. He soon brought down the accounts to a few millions. And he reduced the annual expenditure of four to two and a half millions, "without subtracting a single comfort from either officer or soldier," as he says with becoming pride. He established it, that the head of every subordinate department be responsible for its disbursements. His economy was not parsimonious. He was especially popular at West Point, for which he did great things, and with the officers and men of the army.

And if one chose to look through the belonging parts of the Correspondence and the other accessible pertinent records, he will find ample proofs that he was ever alert to all the duties of his office, performing each one, whether important or trivial, with the height of skill and diligence.

Consider, as to his career in the war department, this language of one of the most inveterate of his disparagers:

"Many of his friends and admirers had with regret seen him abandon his seat in the legislative hall for a place in the president's council. They apprehended that he would, to a great extent, lose the renown which he had gained as a member of congress, for they thought that the didactic turn of his mind rendered him unfit to become a successful administrator. He undeceived them in a manner which astonished even those who had not shared these apprehensions. The department of war was in a state of really astounding confusion when he assumed charge of it. Into this chaos he soon brought order, and the whole service of the department received an organization so simple and at the same time so efficient that it has, in the main, been adhered to by all his successors, and proved itself capable of standing even the test of the civil war."[47]

Now let us glance at his magnificent success in winning for the United States the vast territory of Texas and Oregon. The latter had long been in dispute between us and England. Ever since 1818 it had been jointly occupied under agreement. We wanted all of it; and of course as our settlements in the west approached nearer and nearer, our desire for it mounted. And England wanted all of it too. Soon after Texas achieved her independence she applied for admission into our union, but as the settlers had carried slavery with them free-soil opposition kept her out. Texas got in debt, and the only thing for her to do was to tie to some great power willing to receive her. England, seeing her opportunity, was trying to propitiate Mexico in order, with the favor of the latter, to get Texas for herself. Of course the south wanted Texas to come in, but the free-soilers did not. And the north wanted Oregon; and although its soil and climate did not admit of slavery, the south was against its acquisition unless the concession be made that it be permitted to slavery to occupy all the suitable soil of the Territories. As early as 1843 Calhoun, with his piercing vision, saw the situation clearly. If the dispute as to Oregon provoked war, England could throw troops thither from China by a much shorter route than ours, the latter going as it did from the States on the Atlantic coast around Cape Horn. That would be bad enough for us. But suppose England gets Texas. A hostile power, with a vast empire of land, will spring up under the very nose of the States, where our adversary will acquire a base of operations in the highest degree unfavorable to us. Then England will rise in her demands as to Oregon, and perhaps win all of it from us. In an affair of inter-dependent contingencies it is of the first importance to do the right thing instead of the wrong thing first. Texas was ripe, Oregon was not. Calhoun saw the first thing to do was to annex Texas. For when England cannot secure that base of operations in Texas she will shrink from making Oregon a cause of war, and while she is hesitating, Oregon--which is near to us and far from her--is steadily filling with population in which settlers from the United States more and more preponderate; and at the same time the populous States are fast approaching. After a while the inhabitants will all practically be on our side, and they will have hosts of allies to the eastward in supporting distance, which would give us an invincible advantage in case war for Oregon does come. This is what Calhoun styled "masterly inactivity" on our part, and which, had it been fully carried out as he advised, Oregon would now extend much further north than it does. To sum up in a line, he saw that activity as to Texas and inactivity as to Oregon was each masterly.

But the hotheads of the south and the fanatical wing of the anti-slavery men at the north rose up, obstructing his way like mountains. At the same time there was lack of vision in even the leaders of each section who could rise to patriotism above prejudice. Polk blundered in not continuing Calhoun as secretary of State, in which place he had made so good a beginning that it soon accomplished the annexation of Texas. In his inaugural Polk asserted that our title to Oregon was good, and to be maintained by arms if need be; and he went further away from "masterly inactivity" in his first annual message. He evoked great popular excitement, and "Fifty-four forty or fight!" and "All of Oregon or none!" came forth in passionate ejaculations in every corner of the land. Calhoun had been called from retirement to take Texas and Oregon in hand, and when Polk made a new secretary he went back into the retirement for which he greatly longed. The record shows that the best men of all parties, north and south, felt that as Tyler's secretary he was the man of all to manage the two matters so vitally important to the United States, and they deeply regretted that the place was not continued to him by Polk. And now instead of the happy settlement they had been sure the master would effect, the country was face to face with a war that portended direful disaster to each section. The eyes of patriots turned to Calhoun again; and as he cannot be secretary, he must be in the senate. And a way being made, he was seated in due time. It needs not to go into much detail. The situation had changed greatly. The especial thing to do now was to avoid war. And as a resolution to terminate the joint occupation had been passed by congress, and as the ire of Great Britain had been greatly aroused, there must at once be a settlement of the Oregon controversy. And so the controversy was compromised and averted, this good result being mainly due to the efforts of Calhoun. Even Von Holst calls his speech of March 16, 1846, great. It will live forever. It is paying it gross disrespect to treat it as mere oratory, even if one concede to it the highest eloquence. It voices the ripest wisdom of the ablest practical statesman dealing with a most momentous public affair, in a crisis delicate and perilous in the extreme. The vindication of the true course of action is majestic. But to my mind the great achievement of the speech is his sublime philanthropic deprecation of war between England and America. When the papers told us at the outbreak of our war with Spain that all the British subjects on the warships of the latter had thrown up their places, it seemed to me that nothing else could so fairly omen co-operation of England and America in the near future to democratize and make happy the world. And I believe that that inexpressibly sweet token of Anglo-American brotherhood would have been postponed at least a half-century, if not much longer, had it not been for that speech.

This speech likewise discomfited pro-slavery and anti-slavery fanatics alike, and won the hearty approval of the wisest and best of every part of the country.

Calhoun's self-education merits the closest attention. Railroaded through school and college, as he was, his tuition was necessarily defective in some important particulars. In the main he spelled accurately, but the Correspondence shows that he wrote "sylable," "indisoluably," "weat" for wet, "merical" for miracle, "sperit," "disappinted," "abeated," etc. It is doubtless to be regretted that he did not have larger familiarity with polite literature. Admitting these faults, still we must know he had been uncommonly studious and thoughtful to win his degree in four years after his start to school; but his systematic study, careful observation, and hard thinking really commenced with his entrance of public life, and were kept up to his very death. Note this pertinent excerpt from Webster's memorial speech, in which I italicize a passage happily describing his studies:

"I have not, in public nor private life, known a more assiduous person in the discharge of his appropriate duties. I have known no man who wasted less of life in what is called recreation, or employed less of it in any pursuits not connected with the immediate discharge of his duty. He seemed to have no recreation but the pleasure of conversation with his friends. _Out of the chambers of congress, he was either devoting himself to the acquisition of knowledge pertaining to the immediate subject of the duty before him_, or else he was indulging in those social interviews in which he so much delighted."

From his first speech in congress to the end of his life you note that he has always mastered the pertinent facts, literature, and guiding principles of whatever he has to do with, whether in speech or action. This indicates continuous, most industrious, and most wise self-instruction. I believe it was Mr. Parton who said that Jefferson was the best educated man of his time. His full equipment from all belonging learning and science was surpassed only by the versatility with which he instantly solved all new questions. But Calhoun's was more of a special training than Jefferson's. Having for some years learned by doing,--doing after the best study and reflection, consistent with due promptness, that he could give each thing he had to do,--his capital of knowledge and developed faculty had become all-sufficient. Stephens, a profound student of both Jefferson and Calhoun, makes this comparison:

"Amongst the many great men with whom he associated, Mr. Calhoun was by far the most philosophical statesman of them all. Indeed, with the exception of Mr. Jefferson, it may be questioned if in this respect the United States has ever produced his superior."[48]

Government--that is, good democratic government--he studied all his life with rare devotion. His two special works,[49] and the parallel parts of his speeches, warmly commended by such a thinker and friend of democracy as John Stuart Mill, are sufficing proof. In all the long tract from Plato and Aristotle down to the popularization of direct legislation, which commences with the publication of Mr. Sullivan's pamphlet a few years ago, there is to be found nobody who has penetrated so deeply into the secrets of those principles by which alone true democracy must be maintained. With what clear vision does he read us lessons from the unanimous veto of the Roman tribunes; the political history of the twelve tribes of Israel; the balance of interests in the English constitution and our own, intended to guarantee what he calls government of the concurrent majority. His illustration from the confederacy of Indian Tribes is to be especially emphasized as demonstration of his industry in collecting his materials and of his great insight.[50]

I must give still another example, which I am sure will yet benignly enlighten America.

Ever since Adam Smith fell into my hands in early manhood I have had a strong predilection for political economy. My conviction during the brothers' war that proper management of the currency of the confederacy was indispensable to the success of our cause initiated me into an earnest study of the science of money. And later intense interest in the greenback question, and afterwards the silver question, added to the impetus. The longer I observed the more plainly I saw a few private persons controlling the coinage, the greenbacks, and the national bank currency of purpose to monopolize government credit, and also fix the interest rate and the price level, at any particular time, as suited their selfish interests. The remedy became clear,--government must retake and fulfil all its money functions. Especially must it keep the country supplied with a volume of money which never becomes either redundant or contracted. How to do this properly brought up the question, What is money? What is it that makes a sheep, or cow, or coin, or piece of paper, money? For the true answer to this question is the very beginning and foundation of all monetary science. I took up Ricardo again, who, with a solitary exception mentioned a little farther on, had, from the time I turned into him during my study of the confederate currency, of all the economists by profession, showed to me the best understanding of the real nature of money; and of course John Stuart Mill, Jevons, Carl Marx, and others of less note, were examined. The result confirmed Ricardo in his primacy; although I felt that the true nature of money was assumed--rather vaguely--by him, and not clearly expressed as it ought to be. I believed myself familiar with all the important work of Calhoun. Somehow I had overlooked his contributions to this subject. A few brief quotations from the more unimportant of these I found in certain American books, which made me read the pertinent speeches.[51] It was a most inexpressible surprise to me to find that he had perfected Ricardo. Briefly stated, this is the true doctrine according to Calhoun. It is not legal-tender laws, nor is it intrinsic value, which makes even gold go as money. Well, what is it? Calhoun was not the first to answer it, for others had given the true answer; but they ran away from it as soon as they made it. He divined the full satisfactoriness of the true answer, which he demonstrated to be true by a method as nearly mathematical as the case admits of. And he lightens up what was dark before by showing that that is money, and good money, whatever it may be,--gold, silver, paper, property, what not,--which the government receives in payment of its dues. The practice of the government,--not laws, nor the market value of different materials of money,--this is the great thing. If the United States should refuse to receive gold for its dues, that would so greatly lessen the demand for gold as money that the coin would depreciate and drop out of circulation. Nothing--not the precious metals, not diamonds of the first water, not radium, not the bills of the best bank, not greenbacks, not treasury notes can maintain themselves as money if the government will not receive it. This is the first half of the subject. Calhoun adds the other by showing that whatever the government makes money, its volume can always be kept of the proper quantity,--which proper quantity varies with the needs of commerce,--so as to avoid the too much or too little. His illustration from the treasury notes of North Carolina, which could not be a legal tender under the federal constitution, but which circulated briskly and buoyantly and stayed at par for many years, because they were received without discount by the State, and also because their volume was kept within bounds, will yet greatly help the cause of honest money.

In the achievement just told Calhoun not only excelled the economists of his day, but he is yet in advance of all of the present except Del Mar,[52]--the only economist who has excelled Ricardo in divining the essence of money. These two alone explain clearly and fully why it is that bankers keep such tenacious grip upon the money function of government--they thereby so shape its practice that their wares shall be money, with all the incidents of profit therefrom, and no others shall. Del Mar never quotes him; and I almost know he has never studied his views upon this subject.

America will yet have a "rational money," a term which Prof. Frank Parsons has happily chosen as the name of his invaluable book.[53] To win it she must fight many battles with the money power. When this war of the people is waging by the people for the people, the doctrine of Calhoun will be the banner of the right. After the sordid money oligarchy is overthrown and the United States is blessed with a people's money, that benign deliverance will add prodigiously to the fame of Calhoun.

My space does not admit of telling you how deeply Calhoun loathed the spoils system. That must be borne in mind, and taken into account in any true estimate of him as a statesman.

I deem it especially important to have you consider his standing with the people of his State. Literally his word was law in South Carolina. Hayne in 1832, and Huger in 1845, resigned their seats in the national senate to give place to him. Everybody in his State always wanted him to lead, and everybody always wanted him to lead according to his own will. This unwonted influence, utterly without precedent, was due to the accurate measure which the masses had taken of him. As he lived and aged among them they knew him better and better to be irreproachable in private and public life, the ablest of the able, the most diligent of the diligent, and the truest of the true as a representative or official, and of that severe and lofty virtue which scorns all popularity that is not the reward of righteousness. And so he became example, model, worship, to all classes. The forty years political ascendency of Pericles in the Athenian democracy is the only befitting historical parallel which I can think of. Familiar with the State from boyhood, I have long thought its people the most advanced of the south. In spite of the revenge wreaked upon her in war, and in spite of the direr devastation of the twelve years of negro rule following the fall of the Confederate States, that little community, with her dispensary and her system of really direct nomination,[54] to say nothing of her wise management of all her material resources, is teaching the nation lessons of the highest wisdom. These are the people from whom Calhoun won a crown more resplendent than any other of our States has ever bestowed upon a loved son. How eloquent were her last offices. Read Mr. Pinkney's extracts from the "Carolina Tribute," narrating the reception of his mortal remains in Charleston:[55] the novel procession of vessels, displaying emblems of mourning, the solemn landing at noon, an imposing train moving amid houses hung with black, "a Sabbath-like stillness" resting on the city, "The solemn minute gun, the wail of the distant bell, the far-off spires shrouded in the display of grief, the hearse and its attendant mourners waiting on the spot, alone bore witness that the pulse of life still beat within the city, that a whole people in voiceless woe were about to receive and consign to earth all that was mortal of a great and good citizen."

Appropriately and impressively Mr. Pinkney closes his description of this forever memorable demonstration by quoting Carlyle's "How touching is the loyalty of men to their sovereign man."[56]

Some men reserve out of the pillage of their fellows a great fund to signalize their graves. Stronger cars must be made, bridges strengthened, and too narrow passages avoided by long circuits in order that their huge piles be transported to the conspicuous spot selected in a fashionable cemetery. How the funerals which a weeping people give a Calhoun, Liebknecht, Pingree, Altgeld, and other true ones dwindle such monuments into smallness and contempt!

I must add something here to what has been said in the foregoing of Calhoun's speeches. Somebody must after a while do for him what the compilation called "The Great Speeches and Orations" has done so well for Webster. His very greatest effort is that against the force bill, delivered in the United States senate February 15 and 16, 1833. As an appeal in behalf of the rights of the minority against the oppressive majority it is unequalled. All through it, from its most befitting exordium to the righteous indignation of the closing sentence, there are passages which "the world will not willingly let die." No one who has ever given it attention can forget the paragraph defending Carolina against the charge of passion and delusion; that demolishing as by a tornado the assertion of a senator that the bill was a measure of peace; the far-famed one as to metaphysical reasoning; what is said as to the nature of the contest between Persia and Greece; the rupture in the tribes of Israel graphically expounded; the first mention of the government of "the concurring majority" as distinct from and far better than that of the absolute majority; the lesson to us of the Roman tribunes. To read this speech becomingly, purge yourself of all prejudice; by an adequate effort of the historical imagination see all the main things of the then situation, and put yourself fully in Calhoun's place; so that you cannot fail to feel all of his deep earnestness. You will have succeeded when you can rightly appreciate this outburst:

"Will you collect money when it is acknowledged that it is not wanted? He who earns the money, who digs it from the earth with the sweat of his brow, has a just title to it against the universe. No one has a right to touch it without his consent except his government, and this only to the extent of its legitimate wants. To take more is robbery; and you propose by this bill to enforce robbery by murder."

When I pronounced that against the force bill, the greatest of his speeches, I was not unmindful of his last, that of March 4, 1850, not four weeks before his death. I can hardly class it as a speech. It was a revelation of the woe in store for America if the abolition movement was not checked. Its analysis and demonstration of the preponderant power of the north, and its retrospection over the progressive stages by which the former equilibrium of the sections had been destroyed, are as clear-sighted as its prediction. Never in all history has an actor in a revolution described its course behind him so understandingly, nor its future course with such true prophecy.

Let us give you the fewest possible selected brief passages that will do something towards possessing you of the core of Calhoun's valedictory to the United States and the South.

This is first in order: "How can the union be saved? There is but one way by which it can with any certainty; and that is by a full and final settlement, on the principles of justice, of all the questions at issue between the two sections. The south asks for justice, simple justice, and less she ought not to take. She has no compromise to offer but the constitution, and no concession or surrender to make."

The vital concern of his section against abolition, and what it must do to avoid it, he tells in these passages:

"[The South] regards the relation [of master and slave] as one which cannot be destroyed without subjecting the two races to the greatest calamity, and the section to poverty, desolation, and wretchedness, and accordingly she feels bound, by every consideration of interest and safety, to defend it."

"Is it not certain that if something is not done to arrest it [the abolition movement], the south will be forced to choose between abolition and secession?"

If the south must choose secession, he justifies her by the example of Washington, with a calm and repose that prove his deepest conviction of its rightfulness, and with a power that cannot be confuted. He says:

["The Union cannot] be saved by invoking the name of the illustrious southerner whose mortal remains repose on the western bank of the Potomac. He was one of us--a slaveholder and a planter. We have studied his history, and find nothing in it to justify submission to wrong. On the contrary, his great fame rests on the solid foundation that, while he was careful to avoid doing wrong to others, he was prompt and decided in repelling wrong. I trust that, in this respect, we have profited by his example.

Nor can we find anything in his history to deter us from seceding from the union should it fail to fulfil the objects for which it was instituted, by being permanently and hopelessly converted into a means of oppressing instead of protecting us. On the contrary, we find much in his example to encourage us should we be forced to the extremity of deciding between submission and disunion.

There existed then as well as now a union,--that between the parent country and her then colonies. It was a union that had much to endear it to the people of the colonies. Under its protecting and superintending care the colonies were planted, and grew up and prospered, through a long course of years, until they became populous and wealthy. Its benefits were not limited to them. Their extensive agricultural and other productions gave birth to a flourishing commerce which richly rewarded the parent country for the trouble and expense of establishing and protecting them. Washington was born and grew up to manhood under that union. He acquired his early distinction in its service; and there is every reason to believe that he was devotedly attached to it. But his devotion was a rational one. He was attached to it, not as an end, but as a means to an end. When it failed to fulfil its end, and, instead of affording protection, was converted into the means of oppressing the colonies, he did not hesitate to draw his sword and head the great movement by which that union was forever severed, and the independence of these States established. This was the great and crowning glory of his life, which has spread his fame over the whole globe, and will transmit it to the latest posterity."

With what moving entreaty does he thus adjure the victorious north:

The north "has only to wish it to accomplish it--to do justice by conceding to the south an equal right in the acquired territory, and to do her duty by causing the stipulations relative to fugitive slaves to be faithfully fulfilled, to cease the agitation of the slavery question, and to provide for the insertion of a provision in the constitution, by an amendment, which will restore to the south, in substance, the power she possessed of protecting herself before the equilibrium between the sections was destroyed by the action of the government. There will be no difficulty in devising such a provision--one that will protect the south and which at the same time will improve and strengthen the government instead of impairing and weakening it."

"The responsibility of saving the union rests on the north, and not on the south. The south cannot save it by any act of hers, and the north may save it without any sacrifice whatever, unless to do justice and to perform her duties under the constitution should be regarded by her as a sacrifice."

This sleepless watchman since 1835 had again and again blown the trumpet as the sword of disunion was coming upon the land. Now, the grave yawning before him, he sees that sword nearer and sharper, and conscious that it is his last public duty he sends forth to all his country a blast of warning more earnest and more solemn than ever. Warning that the bloodiest of all wars is coming, and that between brothers. Warning--it is the whole of this dread deliverance. Here is the first paragraph:

"I have, senators, believed from the first that the agitation of the subject of slavery would, if not prevented by some timely and effective measure, end in disunion. Entertaining this opinion, I have on all proper occasions endeavored to call the attention of both the two great parties which divide the country to adopt some measure to prevent so great a disaster, but without success. The agitation has been permitted to proceed, with almost no attempt to resist it, until it has reached a point where it can no longer be disguised or denied that the union is in danger. You have thus had forced upon you the greatest and the gravest question that can ever come under your consideration,--How can the union be preserved?"

And this is the last paragraph:

"I have now, senators, done my duty in expressing my opinions fully and candidly on this solemn occasion. In doing so, I have been governed by the motives which have governed me in all stages of the agitation of the slavery question since its commencement. I have exerted myself during the whole period to arrest it with the intention of saving the union, if it could be done, and if it could not, to save the section where it has pleased providence to cast my lot, and which I sincerely believe has justice and the constitution on its side. Having faithfully done my duty to the best of my ability both to the union and my section, throughout this agitation, I shall have the consolation, let what will come, that I am free from all responsibility."

Had abolition been in charge of men, Calhoun, claiming, as appeared to them, the most palpable rights under current views of justice, under the constitution, under the law, and under patriotic duty, would have prevailed. He never understood, no more than the abolitionists themselves did, that providence was making an instrument of abolition to remove the only danger to the American union, and that providence was not under human constitutions, laws, and convictions of duty. As you meditate this superhuman achievement of the true citizen in his last stand for his doomed section, does it not help you to appreciate better the high saying of the Greeks, that the struggle of a good man against fate is the most elevating of all spectacles?

The speeches that will find place in the selection suggested above will not enrapture the reader with the proud diction, learning, ornateness, and exquisite finish of Webster, but he will find them everywhere to be proofs of the dictum of Faust:

"Es trägt Verstand and rechter Sinn Mit wenig Kunst sich selber vor; Und wenn's euch Ernst ist, was zu sagen, Ist's nöthig, Worten nachzujagen?"[57]

He will also note that many of the wisest and most eloquent passages are almost the extreme of choice, but chaste and severe, expression. Here read aloud the passage as to Washington quoted above from the speech of March 4, 1850, and you will hardly dissent.

America owes it to Calhoun to publish a cheap edition of his best speeches, and also of his "Dissertation on Government."

A word as to the "Dissertation" and the "Discourse on the Constitution of the United States." The project of these two books lay close to his heart for many years. He intended them as his last admonitions to the people of the great republic. Doubtless the special object of his retirement was to finish them, but he had to return to the senate. What we have of the books was written in the little leisure which he snatched from the pressure of public duties, domestic affairs, and ill-health. The resoluteness with which, in the midst of these difficulties, he worked at the self-imposed task proves a lofty and unselfish love. He did not finish them to his satisfaction. Darwin did not do that with his epoch-making "Origin of Species," for he found there was no need to do so. I believe that, as the essentials of the belonging part of evolution are all to be found in the "Origin of Species," so all the essentials of Calhoun's great doctrine of government are fully set forth in his two books. To me the "Dissertation" seems complete. I note with pleasure that, though slowly, it is steadily climbing to the lofty height which is its due place in the world's estimation. And the "Discourse"--of which he did not live to finish the final draft--surely leads all the productions of the State sovereignty school. The providence which opposed his wishes was kind to his country, to the world, and to himself in calling him from his desk; for it allowed him to get Texas and Oregon for us, to give mankind his Oregon speech, and his last, and thus to finish his good work and make his fame full.

The foregoing is intended to influence my readers to turn away from Von Holst, who wrote Calhoun's life, with the smoke and dust of the brothers' war still in his eyes, and from Trent, who merely says ditto to Mr. Burke, to Stephens, to the great Webster, to the touching "Carolina Tribute," to the happy and appreciative sketch of Pinkney, to the man himself and his grand career, in order to find the facts and principles by which one of America's very greatest ought to be judged. And I do hope that they now begin to discern that Calhoun was nothing at all of a doctrinaire, nor chop-logic, nor fanatic, nor professional politician, nor ignorant and over-zealous partisan, but was the very height of practical talent and an extraordinarily successful man of affairs, of more than Roman integrity, conscientious and diligent beyond almost all others in the duties of his place, and a foremost statesman of wide and profound culture. Whether I have accomplished my design or not, let me beg you to read for yourself with careful attention what Webster said of him in the United States senate just after his death. Remember two things as you read: (1) The speaker and the dead had been opposed to one another in politics for more than twenty years, the former being the great exponent of free-labor nationalization and the other the great exponent of slave-labor nationalization; (2) nobody ever weighed his public utterances more carefully than did Webster, and that he would not say anything which he did not believe, even as a politeness.

Let us now try to follow with proper discernment this man whom we hope we have proved to be good and wise through his titanic defence of the cause which fate had decreed must fail. As our explanation of how evolution, and not the north on one side nor the south on the other, brought forward the crisis in which slavery, the sole menace of American dismemberment, was to perish, is so nearly complete, we can be much briefer in the rest of the chapter.

The true beginning here is with the proposition that everything which Calhoun did as the southern leader was prompted by a righteous conscience and the highest and most unselfish patriotism. He was the very first to discern the full menace of abolition to the welfare of the people he represented. And when years afterwards the situation became darker and more serious, and more and more importunately put to him the question, If abolition can be avoided only by leaving the union, what ought the south to do? he answered to himself, with the fullest approval of his conscience, she must go out; for manifestly it is her paramount duty to protect her citizens against any such invasion of their rights as abolition. But he had no illusion as to peaceable secession; and he likewise worshipped the union, believing with deepest conviction that it is far better for neighboring communities to be federated than independent. And the memories of the great American history were as sweet to him as they were to Webster. To sum up, only one thing in his opinion could justify secession. That was control of the federal government by the abolitionists. If that comes, the south must seek her independence, even if it is beyond a sea of blood.

Abolition was on its way then to overturn the supports of comfort and domestic peace in the south, as it afterwards did. Suppose Webster had seen the imminence of such a dreadful evil to New England, would he not have felt that his duty to his section was now the great thing? My brother who wore the blue, ought he not to have so felt? If the union had been turned into a course which would not only impoverish and beggar the people of New England, but would for long years actually deprive the masses of those modes of business and labor by which they were subsisting themselves and their families, can it be thought that Webster, with his exalted admiration of the fathers, who endured all privations to win liberty from their oppressors, would not have been heart and soul for secession?

The only actual difference between the two great patriots was that to Calhoun the dread alternative of looking outside the union for defence and protection of home and fireside was commended by a cruel fate, while a kind fate withheld it from Webster.

I shall corroborate the foregoing by some pertinent excerpts from Calhoun's speeches in the United States senate. And as my purpose is to build everywhere in this book, as far as possible, upon only the most obvious facts and to vouch therefor the most accessible authorities, I take the excerpts from quotations made by Von Holst:

"It is to us a vital question. It involves not only our liberty, but, what is greater (if to freeman anything can be), existence itself. The relation which now exists between the two races in the slaveholding States has existed for two centuries. It has grown with our growth, and strengthened with our strength. It has entered into and modified all our institutions, civil and political. None other can be substituted. We will not, cannot, permit it to be destroyed.... Come what will, should it cost every drop of blood and every cent of property, we must defend ourselves; and if compelled, we should stand justified by all laws, human and divine; ... we would act under an imperious necessity. There would be to us but one alternative,--to triumph or perish as a people."[58]

* * * * *

"To destroy the existing relations would be to destroy this prosperity [of the southern States] and to place the two races in a state of conflict, which must end in the expulsion or extirpation of one or the other. No other can be substituted compatible with their peace or security. The difficulty is in the diversity of the races.... Social and political equality between them is impossible. The causes lie too deep in the principles of our nature to be surmounted. But, without such equality, to change the present condition of the African race, were it possible, would be but to change the form of slavery."[59]

"He must be blind, indeed, who does not perceive that the subversion of a relation which must be followed with such disastrous consequences can be effected only by convulsions that would devastate the country, burst asunder the bonds of union, and engulf in a sea of blood the institutions of the country. It is madness to suppose that the slaveholding States would quietly submit to be sacrificed. Every consideration--interest, duty, and humanity, the love of country, the sense of wrong, hatred of oppressors and treacherous and faithless confederates, and, finally, despair--would impel them to the most daring and desperate resistance in defence of property, family, country, liberty, and existence."[60]

The student unfamiliar with the confederate side of the brothers' war can find the whole of it clearly stated in these short passages re-enforced by the cognate ones quoted above from the speech of March 4, 1850. The maintenance of the then existing relations between white and black was vital both to liberty and existence. Because of the world-wide diversity of the two races they cannot be socially or politically equal (a subject which we will deal with specially after a while). And it was the duty of the south to fight to the bitter end "in defence of property, family, country, liberty, and existence." This is the marrow of the quotations. They convincingly show not only the grasp of the statesman, but the prescience of the prophet, as has been plainly proved by the brothers' war and what followed in its track.

Opposition to the tariff, which in his judgment favored the manufacturing at the expense of the staple States, seems to have been the first thing that led Calhoun to take a pro-Southern stand in politics.[61] It finally produced the famous nullification episode, which we have already somewhat discussed. In this his platform was simply anti-tariff. But the current, without his being aware of it, was carrying him resistlessly and rapidly on into the anti-abolition career in which his life ended. It was the petition presented in 1835 to congress against slavery in the District of Columbia which, it seems, was the first thing that opened his eyes to the menace of abolition. Note his wonderful foresight. Compare him with Cicero just before the outbreak of the war between Pompey and Cæsar; or with Demosthenes before Philip discloses his purpose towards Greece; or with Carl Marx, predicting the future of co-operative enterprise. Cicero almost foresees nothing--he mostly fears; Marx is utterly mistaken. The divination of Demosthenes is far superior, and it is clear; yet it is belated when it comes. But Calhoun sees with "appalling clearness," as Von Holst says, all the storm-cloud from which tempest and tornado will ravage the entire land, just as its first speck shows on the horizon; and nobody else will see that. If this abolition movement is not stopped in its incipiency, it will soon get beyond all control. This he says over and over in his public place. What a horrible spectre of the future haunted him for the rest of his life! The south in her self-defence forced out of the union, and then perhaps overcome in war. After her braves have perished, and their dear ones at home have been plunged in the depths of want, the triumphant abolitionists will have the former slaves to lord it over them.

His conscience commanded him to stand by slavery as the fundamental condition of his people's well-being; it also at the same time commanded him to strain all his energies to save the union by making it the protector instead of the assailant of slavery. This was the insuperable task which the powers in the unseen put him in the treadmill to do. From the time he commenced the discussion of the anti-slavery petitions until his exclamation over the "poor south," on his death-bed, life was to him but a deepening agony of solicitude and utmost effort,--solicitude for his country and section, effort to avert the danger that became greater and more awful to him every day. He strove after remedies under the constitution. The more he recalled the success of the single stand of South Carolina against the tariff, the prouder he became of being the author of nullification. Its dearness to him was that it was peaceable as well as efficient. The better opinion of the State-rights school is that nullification is an absurdity, and that South Carolina's only true remedy against the tariff was to secede if it were not repealed. But he knew better than everybody else that secession meant internecine war between the sections, and this influenced him to exalt peaceable nullification above bloody secession.

It needs not to consider each barrier, whether party combinations, admission of new slave States, legislation, etc., that he tried to erect against the incoming oceanic wave. But we must briefly consider the amendment of the constitution which he proposed. He wanted the north and the south each to have a president, as he said, "to be so elected, as that the two should be constituted the special organs and representatives of the respective sections in the executive department of the government; and requiring each to approve all the acts of congress before they shall become laws."[62] Do this, he urged, and neither section can use the powers of government to injure the other, for whatever proposed law menaces a section will be vetoed by its president. It profits the student of the science of government to consider the historical examples which Calhoun adduced here. They are indeed so apt that the hearing which has ever been denied him should be granted him at least academically. He says: "The two most distinguished constitutional governments of antiquity both in respect to permanence and power had a dual executive. I refer to those of Sparta and Rome."[63]

It is interesting to be informed that those same wise Iroquois from whom our fathers probably got the precedent of the old confederation, put in practice something very like what Calhoun advises. We append both the account and instructive comment of Morgan:

"When the Iroquois confederacy was formed, or soon after that event, two permanent war-chiefships were created and named.... As general commanders they had charge of the military affairs of the confederacy, and the command of its joint forces when united in a general expedition.... The creation of two principal war-chiefs instead of one, and with equal power, argues a subtle and calculating policy to prevent the domination of a single man even in their military affairs. They did without experience precisely as the Romans did in creating two consuls instead of one, after they had abolished the office of _rex_. Two consuls would balance the military power between them, and prevent either from becoming supreme. Among the Iroquois this office never became influential."[64]

But Calhoun lays much more stress upon another example,--that of the protection which the Roman plebeians got in tribunes elected from their own order alone, which tribunes could veto any act of the lawmaking organs, all of which were then actually in the hands of their oppressors, that is, the order of patricians; the result being that in course of time the plebeians achieved equality.[65]

Of course the inevitable could not be put off. And yet ought we not to admire the inventive genius of the statesman who of all proposed the remedy that promised the best? And ought we not also to cherish in affectionate memory this last and high effort of Calhoun to avert a dreadful brothers' war at hand, the end and consequences of which nobody could then forecast?

The situation of Rome granting tribunes to the plebs was widely different from ours. That was a case of giving a veto to one class only, and to a class which belonged to the entire body politic. Calhoun proposed not a single veto, but two; neither one to be given such a class as we have just mentioned, but a veto to each one of two geographical divisions, in one of which there was a developed, and in the other a nascent and almost complete, nationality, these two nationalities already closed with each other in a life and death grapple. His hope must have been to confine the combatants to an arena which could be effectually policed by the civil power, and in which all fighting except with buttoned foils be prevented. We may be almost sure that his heart broke when that presentiment which often comes to the dying as clear as sunlight revealed the bloody war that was quickening its approach.

O the unutterable pathos of his life from 1835 to 1850! During this time he was like the mother of a boy whom consumption has marked for its own. In advance of all others she reads the first symptom, nay, she anticipates it. All those who believe that they know him as well as she does, laugh at her fears with unsympathetic incredulity. But her eyes never fail to see grim death at the door, although bravely she hopes against hope, and fights, fights, fights. Inexorably, relentlessly the end, which others now begin to discern, comes on, but until the last breath of her darling she has ever some suggestion of change of place or climate, of a new remedy, of something else to be done. It is the supreme tragedy of her trial that while outwardly she is all self-gratifying love, inwardly she is all self-consuming misery. We say the love of a mother is greater than all other. But we know that she loves her country better than she does her child. Patriotism is as yet the strongest love of all. Realize that our exalted patriot was tending and nursing the cause of his country. Think of the noble Lee, his career of victory over, wearing away the winter at Petersburg, hourly expecting his line, so tensely stretched in order to face overwhelming odds, to break; think of him after it does break, on the retreat, when he has discovered that his supplies have gone wrong; and think of him when he must yield the sword as ever memorable as Hannibal's. The world has given Lee, and will long give him, rains of gracious tears. But he was never plagued with Calhoun's sharpened eyes to future disaster, and he was confident that he would reach the mountains almost until the very moment of surrender. Think rather of the great sufferers for high causes,--Bonnivard, wearing a pathway over the stone floor of his prison; Lear, of all of Shakspeare's heroes, in the deepest gulf of misfortune; and especially of Calvary and the crucifixion, for Jesus travailed for his brothers and sisters. It is here you must look for the like of Calhoun. For fifteen years that "mass of moan" which was coming to his dear ones pierced his ears plainer and plainer and made his heart sicker and sicker, and during this long bloody sweat he gave the rarest devotion and self-sacrifice to his country which he feared more and more was to plunge over the precipice. As we recall the scene of his death it makes us rejoice to know that the cross he had borne so long has at last been cast off and he has entered into the rest of the martyr-patriot. Then it occurs to us that he carried with him his affections,--too lofty not to be immortal,--and we cannot believe that the sad spirit ever smiled until Wade Hampton, twenty-six years afterwards, re-erected white domination in South Carolina.

Dixie will never forget that one who of all her sons loved her best and suffered for her the most. And it is my conviction that each noblest soul of the north will after a while revere in Calhoun the American parallel to the moral grandeur of Dante, of whom Michaelangelo said he would cheerfully endure his exile and all his misfortunes for his glory.