Calhoun Slavery Quotes

The anti-government rhetoric that continues to saturate our political life is rooted in [support for] slavery rather than liberty. The paralyzing suspicion of government so much on display today, that is to say, came originally not from average people but from elite extremists such as [John C.] Calhoun who saw federal power as a menace to their system of racial slavery.

Most people who wonder why our politics are so corrupt can’t draw the line from racist theories of limited democracy to today’s system, but the small group of white men who are funding the effort to turn back the clock on political equality can lay claim to a long ideological pedigree: from the original property requirement to people like John C. Calhoun, who advocated states’ rights and limited government in defense of slavery, to the Supreme Court justices who decided Shelby County and Citizens United. Over the past few decades, a series of money-in-politics lawsuits, including Citizens United, have overturned anticorruption protections, making it possible for a wealthy individual to give more than $3.5 million to a party and its candidates in an election cycle, for corporations and unions to spend unlimited sums to get candidates elected or defeated, and for secret money to sway elections. The result is a racially skewed system of influence and electoral gatekeeping that invalidates the voices of most Americans.

In perhaps the strangest statement published on the issue of arming slaves, the Mercury charged Robert E. Lee (who had not yet made his views public but was privately known to be a supporter) with being a Federalist-like Alexander Hamilton-someone who had always evidenced a "profound disbelief in the institution of slavery." This comparison was drawn in contrast to South Carolina's great Democratic/states' rights standard-bearer John C. Calhoun, and the paper put the question starkly as "JOHN C. CALHOUN VS. DANIEL WEBSTER and ROBERT E. LEE.

Secretary of State John Quincy Adams, who had spent much of his youth in Europe, expressed surprise and shock when John C. Calhoun, a fellow cabinet member, confided to Adams that one of the major benefits of racial slavery was its effect on lower-class whites, who could now take pride in their skin color and feel equal to the wealthiest and most powerful whites. Thus slavery, in Calhoun’s eyes, defused class conflict. Precisely because slavery was the most extreme instance of inequality, it helped to make other relationships seem relatively equal.

Virtually all of the Founding Fathers of our nation, even those who rose to the heights of the presidency, those whom we cherish as our authentic heroes, were so enmeshed in the ethos of slavery and white supremacy that not one ever emerged with a clear, unambiguous stand on Negro rights. No human being is perfect. In our individual and collective lives every expression of greatness is followed, not by a period symbolizing completeness, but by a comma implying partialness. Following every affirmation of greatness is the conjunction “but.” Naaman “was a great man,” says the Old Testament, “but . . .”—that “but” reveals something tragic and disturbing—“but he was a leper.” George Washington, Thomas Jefferson, Patrick Henry, John Quincy Adams, John Calhoun and Abraham Lincoln were great men, but—that “but” underscores the fact that not one of these men had a strong, unequivocal belief in the equality of the black man.

Progressives today are quick to fault “America” for slavery and a host of other outrages. America did this, America did that. As we will see in this book, America didn’t do those things, the Democrats did. So the Democrats have cleverly foisted their sins on America, and then presented themselves as the messiahs offering redemption for those sins. It’s crazy, but it’s also ingenious. We have to give them credit for ingenuity. The second whitewash is to portray the Civil War entirely in terms of the North versus the South. The North is supposedly the anti-slavery side and the South is the pro-slavery side. A recent example is Ta-Nehisi Coates’s article about the Confederate battle flag in The Atlantic.3 Now of course there is an element of truth in this, in that the Civil War was fought between northern states and southern states. But this neat and convenient division ignores several important details. First, the defenders of the Confederate cause were, almost without exception, Democrats. Coates cites many malefactors from Senator Jefferson Davis to Senator James Henry Hammond to Georgia Governor Joseph Brown. Yet while identifying these men as southerners and Confederates, Coates omits to identify them as Democrats. Second, Coates and other progressives conveniently ignore the fact that northern Democrats were also protectors of slavery. We will see in this chapter how Stephen Douglas and other northern Democrats fought to protect slavery in the South and in the new territories. Moreover, the southerners who fought for the Confederacy cannot be said to have fought merely to protect slavery on their plantations. Indeed, fewer than one-third of white families in the South on the eve of the Civil War had slaves. Thus the rigid North-South interpretation of the Civil War conceals—and is intended to conceal—the active complicity of Democrats across the country to save, protect, and even extend the “peculiar institution.” As the Charleston Mercury editorialized during the secession debate, the duty of the South was to “rally under the banner of the Democratic Party which has recognized and supported . . . the rights of the South.”4 The real divide was between the Democratic Party as the upholder of slavery and the Republican Party as the adversary of slavery. All the figures who upheld and defended American slavery—Senators John C. Calhoun and Stephen Douglas, President James Buchanan, Supreme Court Chief Justice Roger Taney, architect of the Dred Scott decision, and the main leaders of the Confederacy—were Democrats. All the heroes of black emancipation—from the black abolitionists Sojourner Truth and Frederick Douglass, to the woman who organized the Underground Railroad, Harriet Tubman, to the leader whose actions finally destroyed American slavery, Abraham Lincoln—were Republicans. It is of the utmost importance to progressive propagandists to conceal or at least ignore this essential historical truth.

Ulysses S. Grant, to name one prominent doubter who actually fought in the conflict, would call the Mexican War “one of the most unjust ever waged by a stronger against a weaker nation.” Even Sen. John C. Calhoun of South Carolina, who had at first so staunchly supported the war (as a way to extend slavery), began to have his doubts. He told the Senate: “A deed has been done from which the country will not be able to recover for a long time, if ever; it has dropped a curtain between the present and the future, which to me is impenetrable.” Nicholas Trist, the American envoy sent to Mexico City to negotiate the treaty, later recalled sitting down with the Mexican officials and trying to hide his guilt about concluding a treaty that sheared from Mexico nearly half of its territory: “Could those Mexicans have seen into my heart at that moment, they would have known that my feeling of shame as an American was strong…. For though it would not have done for me to say so there, that was a thing for every right-minded American to be ashamed of, and I was ashamed of it, most cordially and intensely ashamed of it.

the Calhoun School as a preserve in which idealistic and educated whites and blacks could interact freely. He also delighted in the effrontery the school presented to the white dominance that surrounded it.

When they become slaves to thoughts that pull them down they fall into another kind of slavery and no one can emancipate them from such bondage as that except themselves—not even a Lincoln. I say this because there is an increasing tendency among the youth of both races to assume that a system of government will unload them of all responsibilities for the care of aged parents, for sicknesses and accidents—often due to their own carelessness and neglect—and for their periods of unemployment, no matter how much their condition is due to laziness or failure to co-operate with others. I see this every day. ‘Let the government do it,’ they say, ignoring the fact that, in a democracy, they themselves help pay for the government’s disbursements. It looks to me at this time as if they wish to declare not their independence, but their dependence upon the government from the cradle to the grave.

These attacks on slavery provoked the defense of slavery that formed the cornerstone of the Democratic Party. The Democratic Party in the South invented the “positive good” school that argued slavery was good not only for the master but also for the slave. The champion of this school was the Democratic Senator John C. Calhoun. Northern Democrats, led by Senator Stephen Douglas, produced a subtler but no less invidious apologia for slavery: “popular sovereignty,” a doctrine that allowed each state and territory to decide for itself whether it wanted slavery.

All the figures who upheld and defended American slavery—Senators John C. Calhoun and Stephen Douglas, President James Buchanan, Supreme Court Chief Justice Roger Taney, architect of the Dred Scott decision, and the main leaders of the Confederacy—were Democrats.

As Calhoun first articulated, the rights of Southern slaveholders were protected by no less than the Constitution itself: Article IV, Section 2, Clause 3, which promised that those “held to service or labor in one state,” who escaped to another, would be “delivered up.” Without this promise, the South’s forefathers would never have signed the compact that drew them into the Union. Without the guaranteed rights to slave ownership, in other words, the United States of America would not exist. And yet, these promised rights were under siege daily, as fugitives disappeared into the North. This was the first grievance stated in the Address, and it spoke loudly for Southerners like Collins.

Adams disagreed. “I told Calhoun I could not see things in the same light.” And as he later reflected on the day’s discussion, he realized how thoroughly he disagreed with nearly everything Calhoun and the other Southerners said by way of defense of slavery. “It is, in truth, all perverted sentiment—mistaking labor for slavery, and dominion for freedom. The discussion of this Missouri question has betrayed the secret of their souls. In the abstract, they admit that slavery is an evil, they disclaim all participation in the introduction of it, and cast it all upon the shoulders of our old Grandam Britain. But when probed to the quick upon it, they show at the bottom of their souls pride and vainglory in their condition of masterdom. They fancy themselves more generous and noble-hearted than the plain freemen who labor for subsistence. They look down upon the simplicity of a Yankee’s manners, because he has no habit of overbearing like theirs and cannot treat negroes like dogs. It is among the evils of slavery that it taints the very sources of moral principle. It establishes false estimates of virtue and vice; for what can be more false and heartless than this doctrine which makes the first and holiest rights of humanity to depend upon the color of the skin? It perverts human reason, and reduces man endowed with logical powers to maintain that slavery is sanctioned by the Christian religion, that slaves are happy and contented in their condition, that between master and slave there are ties of mutual attachment and affection, that the virtues of the master are refined and exalted by the degradation of the slave; while at the same they vent execrations upon the slave-trade, curse Britain for having given them slaves, burn at the stake negroes convicted of crimes for the terror of the example, and write in agonies of fear at the very mention of human rights as applicable to men of color.” Adams had never pondered slavery at such length, and the experience made him fear for the future of the republic. “The impression produced upon my mind by the progress of this discussion is that the bargain between freedom and slavery contained in the Constitution of the United States is morally and politically vicious, inconsistent with the principles upon which alone our Revolution can be justified; cruel and oppressive, by riveting the chains of slavery, by pledging the faith of freedom to maintain and perpetuate the tyranny of the master; and grossly unequal and impolitic, by admitting that slaves are at once enemies to be kept in subjection, property to be secured or restored to their owners, and persons not to be represented themselves, but for whom their masters are privileged with nearly a double share of representation. The consequence has been that this slave representation has governed the Union.

Calhoun used and deviated from American political traditions. That is what made him an original thinker on the problem of slavery and democracy.

The Charleston Mercury approvingly quoted the abolitionist National Era’s description of Calhoun as “denying the doctrines of the Declaration of Independence” and maintaining that slavery “is the rightful condition of the laboring man, irrespective of color.

Whether pro or con, slavery was always the primary issue. Had the South not threatened secession since before there was a Union, since the earliest of the Continental Congress and Constitutional Convention, over this very issue? Had it not recurred in nearly every major national debate since then? Had not the arguments over its expansion and practices, the rights of owners, the return of fugitives, etc., spanned and punctuated every decade since, often multiple times? Had not the most prominent of southern leaders like Calhoun sounded the highest alert and direst threats repeatedly since the rise of abolition? For his part, Confederate Vice-President Alexander Stephens made it unmistakably clear what role slavery played for the newly-seceded South:

Slavery is an institution ordaines by Providence, honored by time, sanctioned by the Gospel, and especially favorable to personal and national liberty" Calhoun