Originally published on March 3, 2021 (Episode 198)
Introduction
John C. Calhoun was, for his contemporaries, an unforgettable presence whether they despised or cherished him. Harriet Martineau, an English social theorist and pioneering feminist, made the unforgettable observation below. Compared to others of his opponents, she was positively kind. They saw him as the human embodiment of Milton’s Satan, a burning bright Lucifer with magnetic personality and brilliant arguments for evil—in Calhoun’s case for the “positive good” of racial chattel slavery. Yet even his supposed followers could recoil from him, or resent the strong hands by which he guided them.
“Calhoun, the cast-iron man, who looks as if he had never been born, and never could be extinguished.” – Harriet Martineau
Calhoun was born of a Scots family in the South Carolina backcountry. Raised a Democratic Republican, he was educated in the Federalist bastions of Yale College and the Litchfield Law School. Within a few short years following his graduation he had become one of the leaders of the House of Representatives, and from 1818 to 1824 he served as one of the most dynamic and effective peacetime American Secretaries of War.
A contestant for President in the 1824 election, had he secured that office, the political history of the United States might have been somewhat altered. But as Vice President first to John Quincy Adams, and then to Andrew Jackson, he became enmeshed in South Carolina’s struggles against the tariff and the power of the Federal government. For nearly the rest of his life, following his falling out with Jackson and his departure in 1832 from the office of the Vice President, Calhoun would serve as Senator from South Carolina, and leader of the Southern forces arrayed against the Northern forces that were bent on destroying the “Southern way of life”—by which they meant chattel slavery.
While Calhoun’s arguments might be thought to have died with the last guns of the Civil War, his political theories have had a long and curious afterlife. All of this is made clear by Robert Elder in his new biography Calhoun: American Heretic.
About the Guest
Robert Elder is Assistant Professor of History at Baylor University. A historian of the American South, religion, and politics, he is the author of The Sacred Mirror: Evangelicalism, Honor, and Identity in the Deep South, 1790–1860 and Calhoun: American Heretic. This is his second appearance on Historically Thinking.
For Further Investigation
Robert Elder, Calhoun: American Heretic
William W. Freehling, Prelude to Civil War: The Nullification Controversy in South Carolina, 1816–1836
John Niven, John C. Calhoun and the Price of Union
Sean Wilentz, The Rise of American Democracy: Jefferson to Lincoln
Listen & Discuss
What does Calhoun’s career tell us about the contradictions of American democracy? Share your reflections in the comments — and pass this episode along to a friend who enjoys political history.
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