Robert Elder - Calhoun

I N THE EARLY MORNING HOURS of April 1, 1850, a young New York journalist named Joseph Scoville sat in a sparsely furnished room in a Washington, DC, boardinghouse, penning a letter to Thomas Green Clemson, the American charg daffaires in Belgium. I am writing this within a few feet of the venerated corpse of Mr. Calhoun, he wrote. I sat up with him the last night. I hardly know where or how to commence my letter. After relating the details of the famous senators final hours to Clemson, Calhouns son-in-law, Scoville closed, I have done now with politics. I will never serve under a lesser man, and his equal will never be found.

In New Haven, Connecticut, the aging Yale tutor and famous chemist Benjamin Silliman recorded a different reaction to the famous senators death. He was a first-rate young man, Silliman wrote of his old student, both for scholarship and talent, and for pure and gentlemanly conduct but his mind was of a peculiar structure, and his views also were often peculiar. With sadness, Silliman wrote, While I mourn for Mr. Calhoun as a friend, I regard the political course of his later years as disastrous to his country and not honorable to his memory, although I believe he had persuaded himself that it was right.

As the day progressed a steady stream of visitors came to see the body, dressed in the same black suit they had seen its owner wear on the Senate floor. The face, though deeply lined and emaciated by the

O NE HUNDRED AND SEVENTY years later, on June 17, 2020, amid ongoing protests throughout the country against racial injustice, Charleston mayor John Tecklenburg announced that the city would take down a monument to South Carolinas most famous political figure, which had stood in the citys Marion Square since 1896. That we as Charlestonians must reckon with Mr. Calhouns towering and deeply troubling legacy is a given, Tecklenburg said. That we must allow his memorial to continue to divide our city while we do that reckoning, however, is not a given.

The announcement in Charleston marked the culmination of John C. Calhouns remarkable reappearance in American national discourse more than a century and a half after his death. In the preceding years, journalists had noted a Calhoun revival in American politics, while one historian claimed that a conspiracy concocted by the modern right in the mid-twentieth century to undermine democracy and protect the interests of wealthy elites took its inspiration from him. Following a horrific, racially motivated shooting at a black church in Charleston in 2015, waves of protest against monuments to the Confederacy spread across the country, sparking calls to rename a residential college named for Calhoun at his alma mater, Yale University. A petition to rename Lake Calhoun outside Minneapolis, Minnesota, soon drew more than 1,700 signatures.history in an American context is impossible to explain without reference to John C. Calhoun.

F AME AND INFAMY ATTACHED themselves to Calhoun early in his life and have persisted since his death in 1850. Born to Scots-Irish immigrants in the backcountry of South Carolina in 1782, Calhoun was educated at Yale and elected to Congress in 1810. He played a central role in the War of 1812, served as secretary of war in the Monroe administration, and then as vice president under two very different presidents, John Quincy Adams and Andrew Jackson. It was during his term as Jacksons vice president that Calhoun drew on arguments first made by Thomas Jefferson and James Madison to craft his doctrine of state interposition or nullification, provoking a showdown between South Carolina and the national government. Parting with an earlier generation of southerners who viewed slavery as a necessary evil, as a US senator during the 1830s Calhoun formulated a defense of the peculiar institution as a positive good in a white democracy and became the foremost advocate of slaveholders right to carry their peculiar form of property into the new territories added by American imperialism in Mexico and the West. At the end of his life, in two of the most controversial and consequential political treatises in American history, A Disquisition on Government and A Discourse on the Constitution and Government of the United States, both published posthumously, Calhoun made the argument that every significant interest in a society should possess ironclad veto power in any legislative process, an idea that he called the concurrent majority. Calhouns aim was to save the Union as he thought it ought to be, but his theories helped lay the philosophical groundwork for southern secession a decade later.

Previous accounts of Calhouns life are of little help in explaining his sudden reappearance in the twenty-first century. The prevailing view of Calhoun among historians for the past half century and more

It is long past time to reevaluate whether John C. Calhoun was indeed out of step with the flow of history. In order to answer that question we have to consider him anew. It may be an uncomfortable exercise since, if done honestly, it will not confirm our comfortable preconceptions about him or about our history. Just as we can no longer dismiss slavery as a premodern labor system whose influence was restricted to one section of the country, opposed to modernity and antithetical to capitalism, a past that has no connection to our present, so we can no longer dismiss John C. Calhoun as the dark foil of an inevitable American progress and freedom. Instead, in any honest accounting, he belongs at the center of the stories we tell about our past. Unlike a monument, history cannot be torn down and bundled off to some dusty corner of a municipal warehouse without consequences. It must be told, fully, fairly, and honestly, or else we are left with a limited understanding of our past and no way to explain our present.