continually struck with the evidences of his magnitude. He was, as
we have said, a very large person. His brain was within a little of
being one third larger than the average, and it was one of the
largest three on record. His bodily frame, in all its parts, was on
a majestic scale, and his presence was immense. He liked large
things,--mountains, elms, great oaks, mighty bulls and oxen, wide
fields, the ocean, the Union, and all things of magnitude. He liked
great Rome far better than refined Greece, and revelled in the immense
things of literature, such as Paradise Lost, and the Book of Job,
Burke, Dr. Johnson, and the Sixth Book of the Aeneid. Homer he never
cared much for,--nor, indeed, anything Greek. He hated, he loathed,
the act of writing. Billiards, ten-pins, chess, draughts, whist, he
never relished, though fond to excess of out-door pleasures, like
hunting, fishing, yachting. He liked to be alone with great
Nature,--alone in the giant woods or on the shores of the resounding
sea,--alone all day with his gun, his dog, and his thoughts,---alone
in the morning, before any one was astir but himself, looking out upon
the sea and the glorious sunrise. What a delicious picture of this
large, healthy Son of Earth Mr. Lanman gives us, where he describes
him coming into his bedroom, at sunrise, and startling him out of a
deep sleep by shouting, "Awake, sluggard! and look upon this glorious
scene, for the sky and the ocean are enveloped in flames!" He was akin
to all large, slow things in nature. A herd of fine cattle gave him a
keen, an inexhaustible enjoyment; but he never "tasted" a horse: he
had no horse enthusiasm. In England he chiefly enjoyed these five
things, the Tower of London, Westminster Abbey, Smithfield Cattle
Market, English farming, and Sir Robert Peel. Sir Robert Peel he
thought was "head and shoulders above any other man" he had ever met.
He greatly excelled, too, in describing immense things. In speaking of
the Pyramids, once, he asked,
"Who can inform us by what now unknown machines mass was
thus aggregated, to mass, and quarry piled on quarry, till
solid granite seemed to cover the earth and reach the
skies."
His peculiar love of the Union of these States was partly due,
perhaps, to this habit of his mind of dwelling with complacency on
vastness. He felt that he wanted and required a continent to live in:
his mind would have gasped for breath in New Hampshire.
But this enormous creature was not an exception to the law which
renders giants harmless by seaming them with weakness, but for which
the giants would possess the earth. If he had been completed
throughout on the plan on which he was sketched, if he had been as
able to originate as he was powerful to state, if he had possessed
will proportioned to his strength, moral power equal to his moral
feeling, intellect on a par with his genius, and principle worthy of
his intellect, he would have subjugated mankind, and raised his
country to a point from which it would have dropped when the
tyrannizing influence was withdrawn. Every sphere of life has its
peculiar temptations, which there is only one thing that can enable a
man to resist,--a religious, i.e. a disinterested devotion to its
duties. Daniel Webster was one of those who fell before the seductions
of his place. He was not one of those who find in the happiness and
prosperity of their country, and in the esteem of their
fellow-citizens, their own sufficient and abundant reward for serving
her. He pined for something lower, smaller,--something personal and
vulgar. He had no religion,--not the least tincture of it; and he
seemed at last, in his dealings with individuals, to have no
conscience. What he called his religion had no effect whatever upon
the conduct of his life; it made him go to church, talk piously, puff
the clergy, and "patronize Providence,"--no more. He would accept
retaining fees, and never look into the bundles of papers which
accompanied them, in which were enclosed the hopes and the fortune of
anxious households. He would receive gifts of money, and toss into his
waste-paper basket the list of the givers, without having glanced at
its contents; thus defrauding them of the only recompense in his power
to grant, and the only one they wished. It shocked him if his
secretary came to the dinner-table in a frock-coat, and he would
himself appear drunk before three thousand people. And yet, such was
the power of his genius, such was the charm of his manner, such the
affectionateness of his nature, such the robust heartiness of his
enjoyment of life, that honorable men who knew his faults best loved
him to the last,--not in spite of them, but partly in consequence of
them. What in another man they would have pronounced atrocious,
appeared in him a kind of graceful rollicking helplessness to resist.
Such, as it seems to our very imperfect judgment, was Daniel Webster,
one of the largest and one of the weakest of men, of admirable genius
and deplorable character; who began life well and served his-country
well and often, but held not out faithful to the end. American
statesmen are called to a higher vocation than those of other
countries, and there is nothing in the politics of America which _can_
reward a man of eminent ability for public service. If such a person
feels that his country's happiness and greatness will not be a
satisfying recompense for anything he can do for her, let him, as he
values his peace and soul's health, cling to the safe obscurity of
private life.
JOHN C. CALHOUN
There were two ways of getting to South Carolina in Colonial times.
The first immigrants, many of whom were men of capital, landed at
Charleston, and, settling in the fertile low country along the coast,
became prosperous planters of rice, indigo, and corn, before a single
white inhabitant had found his way to the more salubrious upper
country in the western part of the Province. The settlers of the upper
country were plain, poorer people, who landed at Philadelphia or
Baltimore, and travelled southward along the base of the Alleghanies
to the inviting table-lands of the Carolinas. In the lower country,
the estates were large, the slaves numerous, the white inhabitants
few, idle, and profuse. The upper country was peopled by a sturdier
race, who possessed farms of moderate extent, hewn out of the
wilderness by their own strong arms, and tilled by themselves with the
aid of few slaves. Between the upper and the lower country there was a
waste region of sandy hills and rocky acclivities, uninhabited, almost
uninhabitable, which rendered the two sections of one Province
separate communities scarcely known to one another. Down almost to the
beginning of the Revolutionary War, the farmers of the upper country
were not represented in the Legislature of South Carolina, though they
were then as numerous as the planters of the lower country. Between
the people of the two sections there was little unity of feeling. The
lordly planters of the lower country regarded their Western
fellow-citizens as provincial or plebeian; the farmers of the upper
country had some contempt for the planters as effeminate,
aristocratic, and Tory. The Revolution abased the pride, lessened the
wealth, and improved the politics of the planters; a revised
Constitution, in 1790, gave preponderance to the up-country farmers in
the popular branch of the Legislature; and thenceforth South Carolina
was a sufficiently homogeneous commonwealth.
Looking merely to the public career of Calhoun, the special pleader of
the Southern aristocracy, we should expect to find him born and reared
among the planters of the low country. The Calhouns, on the contrary,
were up-country people,--farmers, Whigs, Presbyterians, men of
moderate means, who wielded the axe and held the plough with their own
hands, until enabled to buy a few "new negroes," cheap and savage;
called new, because fresh from Africa. A family party of them
(parents, four sons, and a daughter) emigrated from the North of
Ireland early in the last century, and settled first in Pennsylvania;
then removed to Western Virginia; whence the defeat of Braddock, in
1755, drove them southward, and they found a permanent abode in the
extreme west of South Carolina, then an unbroken wilderness. Of those
four sons, Patrick Calhoun, the father of the Nullifier, was the
youngest. He was six years old when the family left Ireland;
twenty-nine, when they planted the "Calhoun Settlement" in Abbeville
District, South Carolina.
Patrick Calhoun was a strong-headed, wrong-headed, very brave, honest,
ignorant man. His whole life, almost, was a battle. When the Calhouns
had been but five years in their forest home, the Cherokees attacked
the settlement, destroyed it utterly, killed one half the men, and
drove the rest to the lower country; whence they dared not return till
the peace of 1763. Patrick Calhoun was elected to command the mounted
rangers raised to protect the frontiers, a duty heroically performed
by him. After the peace, the settlement enjoyed several years of
tranquillity, during which Patrick Calhoun was married to Martha
Caldwell, a native of Virginia, but the daughter of an Irish
Presbyterian emigrant. During this peaceful interval, all the family
prospered with the settlement which bore its name; and Patrick, who in
his childhood had only learned to read and write, availed himself of
such leisure as he had to increase his knowledge. Besides reading the
books within his reach, which were few, he learned to survey land, and
practised that vocation to advantage. He was especially fond of
reading history to gather new proofs of the soundness of his political
opinions, which were Whig to the uttermost. The war of the Revolution
broke in upon the settlement, at length, and made deadly havoc there;
for it was warred upon by three foes at once,--the British, the
Tories, and the Cherokees. The Tories murdered in cold blood a brother
of Patrick Calhoun's wife. Another of her brothers fell at Cowpens
under thirty sabre-wounds. Another was taken prisoner and remained for
nine months in close confinement at one of the British Andersonvilles
of that day. Patrick Calhoun, in many a desperate encounter with the
Indians, displayed singular coolness, courage, adroitness, and
tenacity. On one memorable occasion, thirteen of his neighbors and
himself maintained a forest fight for several hours with a force of
Cherokees ten times their number. When seven of the white men had
fallen, the rest made their escape. Returning three days after to bury
their dead, they found upon the field the bodies of twenty-three
Indian warriors. At another time, as his son used to relate, he had a
very long combat with a chief noted for the certainty of his aim,--the
Indian behind a tree, the white man behind a fallen log. Four times
the wily Calhoun drew the Indian's fire by elevating his hat upon his
ramrod. The chief, at last, could not refrain from looking to see the
effect of his shot; when one of his shoulders was slightly exposed. On
the instant, the white man's rifle sent a ball through it; the chief
fled into the forest, and Patrick Calhoun. bore off as a trophy of the
fight his own hat pierced with four bullets.
This Patrick Calhoun illustrates well the North-of-Ireland character;
one peculiarity of which is the possession of _will_ disproportioned
to intellect. Hence a man of this race frequently appears to striking
advantage in scenes which demand chiefly an exercise of will; while in
other spheres, which make larger demands upon the understanding, the
same man may be simply mischievous. We see this in the case of Andrew
Jackson, who at New Orleans was glorious; at Washington almost wholly
pernicious; and in the case of Andrew Johnson, who was eminently
useful to his country in 1861, but obstructive and perilous to it in
1866. For these Scotch-Irishmen, though they are usually very honest
men, and often right in their opinions, are an uninstructable race,
who stick to a prejudice as tenaciously as to a principle, and really
suppose they are battling for right and truth, when they are only
wreaking a private vengeance or aiming at a personal advantage.
Patrick Calhoun was the most radical of Democrats; one of your
despisers of conventionality; an enemy of lawyers, thinking the common
sense of mankind competent to decide what is right without their aid;
a particular opponent of the arrogant pretensions of the low-country
aristocrats. When the up-country people began to claim a voice in the
government, long since due to their numbers, the planters, of course,
opposed their demand. To establish their right to vote, Patrick
Calhoun and a party of his neighbors, armed with rifles, marched
across the State to within twenty-three miles of Charleston, and there
voted in defiance of the plantation lords. Events like this led to the
admission of members from the up-country; and Patrick Calhoun was the
first to represent that section in the Legislature. It was entirely
characteristic of him to vote against the adoption of the Federal
Constitution, on the ground that it authorized other people to tax
Carolinians; which he said was taxation without' representation. That
was just like a narrow, cranky, opinionative, unmanageable Calhoun.
Devoid of imagination and of humor, a hard-headed, eager politician,
he brought up his boy upon politics. This was sorry nourishment for a
child's mind, but he had little else to give him. Gambling, hunting,
whiskey, and politics were all there was to relieve the monotony of
life in a Southern back settlement; and the best men naturally threw
themselves upon politics. Calhoun told Miss Martineau that he could
remember standing between his father's knees, when he was only five
years old, and listening to political conversation. He told Duff Green
that he had a distinct recollection of hearing his father say, when he
was only nine, that that government is best which allows to each
individual the largest liberty compatible with order and tranquillity,
and that improvements in political science consist in throwing off
needless restraints. It was a strange child that could remember such a
remark. As Patrick Calhoun died in 1795, when his son was thirteen
years old, the boy must have been very young when he heard it, even if
he were mistaken as to the time. Whether Patrick Calhoun ever touched
upon the subject of slavery in his conversations with his children, is
not reported. We only know that, late in the career of Mr. Calhoun, he
used to be taunted by his opponents in South Carolina with having once
held that slavery was good and justifiable only so far as it was
preparatory to freedom. He was accused of having committed the crime
of saying, in a public speech, that slavery was like the "scaffolding"
of an edifice, which, after having served its temporary purpose, would
be taken down, of course. We presume he said this; because
_everything_ in his later speeches is flatly contradicted in those of
his earlier public life. Patrick Calhoun was a man to give a reason
for everything. He was an habitual theorizer and generalize!', without
possessing the knowledge requisite for safe generalization. It is very
probable that this apology for slavery was part of his son's slender
inheritance.
John Caldwell Calhoun--born in 1782, the youngest but one in a family
of five children--was eighteen years old before he had a thought of
being anything but a farmer. His father had been dead five years. His
only sister was married to that famous Mr. Waddell, clergyman and
schoolmaster, whose academy in North Carolina was for so many years a
great light in a dark place. One of his brothers was a clerk in a
mercantile house at Charleston; another was settled on a farm near by;
another was still a boy. His mother lived upon the paternal farm; and
with her lived her son John, who ploughed, hunted, fished, and rode,
in the manner of the farmers' sons in that country. At eighteen he
could read, write, and cipher; he had read Rollin, Robertson,
Voltaire's Charles XII., Brown's Essays, Captain Cook, and parts of
Locke. This, according to his own account, was the sum of his
knowledge, except that he had fully imbibed his father's decided
republican opinions. He shared to some degree his father's prejudice,
and the general prejudice of the upper country, against lawyers;
although a cousin, John Ewing Calhoun, had risen high in that
profession, had long served in the Legislature of South Carolina, and
was about to be elected United States Senator on the Jeffersonian
side. As late as May 1800, when he was past eighteen, preference and
necessity appeared to fix him In the vocation of farmer. The family
had never been rich. Indeed, the great Nullifier himself was a
comparatively poor man all his life, the number of his slaves never
much exceeding thirty; which is equivalent to a working force of
fifteen hands or less.
In May, 1800, Calhoun's elder brother came home from Charleston to
spend the summer, bringing with him his city notions. He awoke the
dormant ambition of the youth, urged him to go to school and become a
professional man. But how could he leave his mother alone on the farm?
and how could the money be raised to pay for a seven years' education?
His mother and his brother conferred upon these points, and satisfied
him upon both; and in June, 1800, he made his way to the academy of
his brother-in-law, Waddell, which was then in Columbia County,
Georgia, fifty miles from the home of the Calhouns. In two years and a
quarter from the day he first opened a Latin grammar, he entered the
Junior Class of Yale College. This was quick work. Teachers, however,
are aware that late beginners, who have spent their boyhood in
_growing_, often stride past students who have passed theirs in
stunting the growth of mind and body at school. Calhoun, late in life,
often spoke of the immense advantage which Southern boys had over
Northern in not going so early to school, and being so much on
horseback and out of doors. He said one day, about the year 1845:
"At the North you overvalue intellect; at the South we rely
upon character; and if ever there should be a collision that
shall test the strength of the two sections, you will find
that character is stronger than intellect, and will carry
the day."
The prophecy has been fulfilled.
Timothy Dwight, Calvinist and Federalist, was President of Yale
College during Calhoun's residence there, and Thomas Jefferson,
Democrat and freethinker, was President of the United States. Yale was
a stronghold of Federalism. A brother of the President of the College,
in his Fourth-of-July oration delivered at New Haven four months after
the inauguration of Jefferson and Burr, announced to the students and
citizens, that "the great object" of those gentlemen and their
adherents was "to destroy every trace of civilization in the world,
and to force mankind back into a savage state." He also used the
following language:
"We have now reached the consummation of democratic
blessedness. We have a country governed by blockheads and
knaves; the ties of marriage, with all its felicities, are
severed and destroyed; our wives and daughters are thrown
into the stews; our children are cast into the world from
the breast forgotten; filial piety is extinguished; and our
surnames, the only mark of distinction among families, are
abolished. Can the imagination paint anything more dreadful
this side hell?"
These remarkable statements, so far from surprising the virtuous
people of New Haven, were accepted by them, it appears, as facts, and
published with general approval. From what we know of President
Dwight, we may conclude that he would regard his brother's oration as
a pardonable flight of hyperbole, based on truth. He was a Federalist
of the deepest dye.
Transferred to a scene where such opinions prevailed, it cost the
young republican no great exertion either of his intellect or his
firmness or his family pride to hold his ground. Of all known men, he
had the most complete confidence in the infallibility of his own mind.
He used to relate, that in the Senior year, when he was one of very
few in a class of seventy who maintained republican opinions,
President Dwight asked him, "What is the legitimate source of power?"
"The people," answered the student. Dr. Dwight combated this opinion;
Calhoun replied; and the whole hour of recitation was consumed in the
debate. Dr. Dwight was so much struck with the ability displayed by
the student, that he remarked to a friend that Calhoun had talent
enough to be President of the United States, and that we should see
him President in due time. In those innocent days, an observation of
that nature was made of every young fellow who showed a little spirit
and a turn for debate. Fathers did not _then_ say to their promising
offspring, Beware, my son, of self-seeking and shallow speaking, lest
you should be consigned to the White House, and be devoured by
office-seekers. People then regarded the Presidency as a kind of
reward of merit, the first step toward which was to get "up head" in
the spelling-class. There is reason to believe that young Calhoun took
the prediction of the Doctor very seriously. He took everything
seriously. He never made a joke in his life, and was totally destitute
of the sense of humor. It is doubtful if he was ever capable of
unbending so far as to play a game of football.
The ardent political discussions then in vogue had one effect which
the late Mr. Buckle would have pronounced most salutary; they
prevented Dr. Dwight's severe theology from taking hold of the minds
of many students. Calhoun wholly escaped it. In his speeches we find,
of course, the stock allusions of a religious nature with which all
politicians essay to flatter their constituents; but he was never
interested in matters theological. A century earlier, he might have
been the Jonathan Edwards of the South, if there had been a South
then. His was just the mind to have revelled in theological
subtilties, and to have calmly, closely, unrelentingly argued nearly
the whole human race into endless and hopeless perdition. His was just
the nature to have contemplated his argument with complacency, and its
consequences without emotion.
Graduating with credit in 1804, he repaired to the famous Law School
at Litchfield in Connecticut, where he remained a year and a half, and
won general esteem. Tradition reports him a diligent student and an
admirable debater there. As to his moral conduct, that was always
irreproachable. That is to say, he was at every period of his life
continent, temperate, orderly, and out of debt. In 1806, being then
twenty-four years of age, he returned to South Carolina, and, after
studying a short time in a law office at Charleston, he went at last
to his native Abbeville to complete his preparation for the bar. He
was still a law student at that place when the event occurred which
called him into public life.