In his engaging biography of John C. Calhoun, Irving H. Bartlett reminds us that American political culture and the men who made it were not always as decadent and corrupt as they are today. Yet Bartlett’s book is not a partisan manifesto. He is respectful of Calhoun but not always sympathetic to his views, aspirations, and achievements.

One of Bartlett’s most important and original contributions is to show that Calhoun was not sui generis but was, instead, the product of his culture. Calhoun was born into the conservative but volatile society of the South Carolina backcountry in 1782. His father, Patrick Calhoun, although he died when John was a boy of 13, exercised a remarkable influence on his son’s temperament and worldview. A stern Scots-Irish Presbyterian, Patrick Calhoun taught his children that life is a perpetual struggle against evil. He also instilled in them an abiding love of liberty and an unqualified hatred of tyranny. For Patrick Calhoun, the obligations to God, family, neighborhood, and country defined the parameters of private and public life. John C. Calhoun fully absorbed his father’s convictions, preferring throughout his life study, toil, and duty to frivolity, idleness, and self-indulgence.

Bartlett traces Calhoun’s public life as a backcountry lawyer, state legislator, congressman, Vice President, senator, and Cabinet official. In examining Calhoun’s private life, Bartlett shows that the image of the “cast-iron man,” which has enjoyed remarkable durability among historians, utterly misrepresents his personality. Calhoun was a devoted son; an indulgent, even permissive, father; a dutiful, if somewhat remote, husband; and a conscientious planter and master of slaves.

Bartlett ably reviews Calhoun’s enduring contributions to political philosophy, his effort to “place political science on the same solid foundations as physical science.” But Bartlett’s most subtle and important insights emerge from his exploration of the dichotomies that structured Calhoun’s thought and career. Three themes, or more accurately three tensions, dominate the narrative: first, Calhoun’s effort to reconcile nationalism and sectionalism; second, his struggle to balance ambition against principle; third, his defense of slavery and republicanism.

Like most other scholars of Jacksonian politics, Bartlett acknowledges the enthusiastic nationalism that characterized Calhoun’s tenure in the House of Representatives. Upon entering Congress, Calhoun immediately identified himself with the “war hawks” who supported the conflict with Great Britain. After the War of 1812, Calhoun advocated internal improvements, favored a protective tariff, championed a national bank, and generally sought “to counteract every tendency to disunion.”

During the 1820’s, according to the familiar argument, Calhoun in response to the outcry raised in South Carolina against the tariff abandoned his early nationalism and embraced an ardent sectionalism. Bartlett does not posit such a sharp divergence between Calhoun’s commitment to nation and to section. In Bartlett’s view, Calhoun was first and last “a child of the Revolution.” He revered the Union and his affection for it never wavered.

But Calhoun could not support a Union that had become oppressive. When the government of the United States passed to the control of men more interested in using power for their own benefit than in attending to the good of the commonwealth, Calhoun sought to implement various mechanisms, nullification and the concurrent majority among them, to protect the rights and liberties of the minority section. Although he never abandoned his attachment to the Union, he maintained that his rivals had perverted it by transforming the government into an instrument of patronage.

Calhoun suffered to behold the nation abandoned to party hacks and spoilsmen. Only honorable, autonomous, and dispassionate gentlemen who were not prey to the intrigues or obsessions of the moment had the authority to rule. Never at ease with the mass politics that emerged during the first half of the 19th century, Calhoun himself found it impossible “to speak to the democratic spirit of the new age.”

Steadfast in his fidelity to the Old Republic, Calhoun always proclaimed to act from the most noble motives, without consideration of political advantage. Bartlett maintains that Calhoun may have rationalized to his own satisfaction “the fiction that he remained above the political scramble.” But he concludes that “it would be a mistake to take Calhoun at face value,” since “he was no selfless knight in shining armor.” Bartlett is doubtless correct that Calhoun at times acted to gratify his political ambition. But what politician does not? The real question is whether Calhoun was a political opportunist who sought to advance his career at the expense of the country. It seems to me that Calhoun sacrificed political ambition in defense of all that he cherished.

It would have been a simple matter for Calhoun to win the presidency, as his colleague Dixon Lewis of Alabama recognized, had he supported the popular war against Mexico. He refused to do so, arguing that the declaration of war had been unconstitutional. Even in victory, he was convinced that the war would bring disaster to the United States by requiring the imposition of a crushing debt, encouraging the centralization of power, necessitating the creation of a large standing army, and transforming a republic of free institutions into an empire bent on conquest. “Mexico is to us the forbidden fruit,” he told his fellow senators. “The penalty of eating it would be to subject our institutions to political death.”

Calhoun’s defense of slavery, however essential for his political survival in the South, was also in the final analysis more a matter of conviction than of expediency. Calhoun never questioned the natural inferiority of blacks and asserted, in unison with other pro-slavery theorists, that “there never yet has existed a wealthy and civilized society in which one portion of the community did not . . . live on the labor of the other.” For Calhoun and his Southern contemporaries, however, domestic slavery humanized the exploitation of labor, imposing reciprocal obligations on masters and slaves. Southerners deplored the political, social, and moral, if not the material, consequences of industrialism and capitalism that exposed men, women, and children alike to brutality, degradation, and hopelessness. They believed that a society in which some men took personal responsibility for the welfare of others was the sole preserve of republican freedom and Christian morality. From Calhoun’s point of view, whether the South stood or fell would determine the fate of the American Republic itself.

Calhoun did not live to witness the devastation of the South in the Civil War that he had warned against and had desperately sought to prevent. But he had seen enough by 1850 to know that the Old Republic in which he had come of age, and to which he owed whatever distinction he had earned, was swiftly passing into memory. He had, as Bartlett discerns, fought under the same banner as his father before him:

Calhoun knew that he was the son of a legend and had become a legend himself. Blessed with advantages of wealth and education far beyond anything his father possessed, he had tried to carry on his father’s struggles in a new and rapidly changing world. Patrick’s enemies were not his father’s enemies . . . but in many ways the stakes were the same for father and son. With one foot always in the wilderness, the father had put his life on the line to carve civilization out of a brutal frontier. The son . . . put his character on the line to preserve the political principles that civilization had created.

So much more imperative is it now to reflect on the life, thought, and character of John C. Calhoun, when the Old Republic is virtually beyond remembering in this grim and unheroic age.

 

[John C. Calhoun: A Biography, by Irving H. Bartlett (New York: W.W. Norton) 320 pp., $25.00]