ever in his hand, would discourse for many an hour in his
even, soft, deliberate tone, on any one of the great
subjects of American policy which we might happen to start,
always amazing us with the moderation of estimate and speech
which so impetuous a nature has been able to attain. Mr.
Webster, leaning back at his ease, telling stories, cracking
jokes, shaking the sofa with burst after burst of laughter,
or smoothly discoursing to the perfect felicity of the
logical part of one's constitution, would illuminate an
evening now and then. Mr. Calhoun, the cast-iron man, who
looks as if he had never been born and could never be
extinguished, would come in sometimes to keep our
understandings on a painful stretch for a short while, and
leave us to take to pieces his close, rapid, theoretical,
illustrated talk, and see what we could make of it. We found
it usually more worth retaining as a curiosity, than as
either very just or useful. His speech abounds in figures,
truly illustrative, if that which they illustrate were true
also. But his theories of government (almost the only
subject upon which his thoughts are employed), the squarest
and compactest that ever were made, are composed out of
limited elements, and are not, therefore, likely to stand
service very well. It is at first extremely interesting to
hear Mr. Calhoun talk; and there is a never-failing evidence
of power in all that he says and does, which commands
intellectual reverence; but the admiration is too soon
turned into regret, into absolute melancholy. It is
impossible to resist the conviction, that all this force can
be at best but useless, and is but too likely to be very
mischievous. _His mind has long lost all power of
communicating with any other_. I know of no man who lives in
such utter intellectual solitude. He meets men and harangues
by the fireside as in the Senate; he is wrought like a piece
of machinery, set going vehemently by a weight, and stops
while you answer; he either passes by what you say, or
twists it into a suitability with what is in his head, and
begins to lecture again. Of course, a mind like this can
have little influence in the Senate, except by virtue,
perpetually wearing out, of what it did in its less
eccentric days; but its influence at home is to be dreaded.
There is no hope that an intellect so cast in narrow
theories will accommodate itself to varying circumstances;
and there is every danger that it will break up all that it
can in order to remould the materials in its own way. Mr.
Calhoun is as full as ever of his Nullification doctrines;
and those who know the force that is in him, and his utter
incapacity of modification by other minds, (after having
gone through as remarkable a revolution of political opinion
as perhaps any man ever experienced,) will no more expect
repose and self-retention from him than from a volcano in
full force. Relaxation is no longer in the power of his
will. I never saw any one who so completely gave me the idea
of possession. Half an hour's conversation with him is
enough to make a necessitarian of anybody. Accordingly, he
is more complained of than blamed by his enemies. His
moments of softness by his family, and when recurring to old
college days, are hailed by all as a relief to the vehement
working of the intellectual machine,--a relief equally to
himself and others. These moments are as touching to the
observer as tears on the face of a soldier."
Of his appearance in the Senate, and of his manner of speaking, Miss
Martineau records her impressions also:--
"Mr. Calhoun's countenance first fixed my attention; the
splendid eye, the straight forehead, surmounted by a load of
stiff, upright, dark hair, the stern brow, the inflexible
mouth,--it is one of the most remarkable heads in the
country."
"Mr. Calhoun followed, and impressed me very strongly. While
he kept to the question, what he said was close, good, and
moderate, though delivered in rapid speech, and with a voice
not sufficiently modulated. But when he began to reply to a
taunt of Colonel Benton's, that he wanted to be President,
the force of his speaking became painful. He made
protestations which it seemed to strangers had better have
been spared, 'that he would not turn on his heel to be
President,' and that 'he had given up all for his own brave,
magnanimous little State of South Carolina.' While thus
protesting, his eyes flashed, his brow seemed charged with
thunder, his voice became almost a bark, and his sentences
were abrupt, intense, producing in the auditory a sort of
laugh which is squeezed out of people by the application of
a very sudden mental force. I believe he knew not what a
revelation he made in a few sentences. _They were to us
strangers the key, not only to all that was said and done by
the South Carolina party during the remainder of the
session, but to many things at Charleston and Columbia which
would otherwise have passed unobserved and unexplained_."
This intelligent observer saw the chieftain on his native heath:--
"During my stay in Charleston, Mr. Calhoun and his family
arrived from Congress, and there was something very striking
in the welcome he received, like that of a chief returned to
the bosom of his clan. He stalked about like a monarch of
the little domain, and there was certainly an air of
mysterious understanding between him and his followers."
What Miss Martineau says of the impossibility of Calhoun's mind
communicating with another mind, is confirmed by an anecdote which we
have heard related by Dr. Francis Lieber, who, as Professor in the
College of South Carolina, was for several years the neighbor and
intimate acquaintance of Mr. Calhoun. The learned Professor, upon his
return from a visit to Europe, called upon him, and in the course of
the interview Mr. Calhoun declared, in his positive manner, that the
slaves in the Southern States were better lodged, fed, and cared for
than the mechanics of Europe. Dr. Lieber, being fresh from that
continent, assured the Secretary of State that such was not the fact,
as he could testify from having resided in both lands. "Not at all,
not at all," cried Calhoun dogmatically, and repeated his wild
assertion. The Doctor saw that the poor man had reached the condition
of absolute unteachableness, and dropped the subject. There could not
well be a more competent witness on the point in dispute than Dr.
Lieber; for, besides having long resided in both continents, it was
the habit and business of his life to observe and ponder the effect of
institutions upon the welfare of those who live under them. Calhoun
pushed him out of the witness-box, as though he were an idiot.
A survey of the last fifteen years of Calhoun's life discloses nothing
upon which the mind can dwell with complacency. On the approach of
every Presidential election, we see him making what we can only call a
_grab_ at a nomination, by springing upon the country some unexpected
issue designed to make the South a unit in his support. From 1830 to
1836, he exhausted all the petty arts of the politician to defeat
General Jackson's resolve to bring in Mr. Van Buren as his successor;
and when all had failed, he made an abortive attempt to precipitate
the question of the annexation of Texas. This, too, being foiled, Mr.
Van Buren was elected President. Then Mr. Calhoun, who had for ten
years never spoken of Van Buren except with contempt, formed the
notable scheme of winning over the President so far as to secure his
support for the succession. He advocated all the test measures of Mr.
Van Buren's administration, and finished by courting a personal
reconciliation with the man whom he had a hundred times styled a fox
and a political prostitute. This design coming to naught, through the
failure of Mr. Van Buren to reach a second term, he made a wild rush
for the prize by again thrusting forward the Texas question. Colonel
Benton, who was the predetermined heir of Van Buren, has detailed the
manner in which this was done in a very curious chapter of his "Thirty
Years." The plot was successful, so far as plunging the country into a
needless war was concerned; but it was Polk and Taylor, not Calhoun,
who obtained the Presidency through it. Mr. Calhoun's struggles for a
nomination in 1844 were truly pitiable, but they were not known to the
public, who saw him, at a certain stage of the campaign, affecting to
decline a nomination which there was not the slightest danger of his
receiving.
We regret that we have not space to show how much the agitation of the
slavery question, from 1835 to 1850, was the work of this one man. The
labors of Mr. Garrison and Mr. Wendell Phillips might have borne no
fruit during their lifetime, if Calhoun had not made it his business
to supply them with material. "I mean to _force_ the issue upon the
North," he once wrote; and he did force it. On his return to South
Carolina after the termination of the Nullification troubles, he said
to his friends there, (so avers Colonel Benton, "Thirty Years," Vol.
II. p. 786,)
"that the South could never be united against the North on
the tariff question; that the sugar interest of Louisiana
would keep her out; and that the basis of Southern union
must be shifted to the slave question."
Here we have the key to the mysteries of all his subsequent career.
The denial of the right of petition, the annexation of Texas, the
forcing of slavery into the Territories,--these were among the issues
upon which he hoped to unite the South in his favor, while retaining
enough strength at the North to secure his election. Failing in all
his schemes of personal advancement, he died in 1850, still protesting
that slavery is divine, and that it must rule this country or ruin it.
This is really the sum and substance of that last speech to the
Senate, which he had not strength enough left to deliver.
We have run rapidly over Mr. Calhoun's career as a public man. It
remains for us to notice his claims as a teacher of political
philosophy, a character in which he influenced his countrymen more
powerfully after he was in his grave than he did while living among
them.
The work upon which his reputation as a thinker will rest with
posterity is his Treatise on the Nature of Government. Written in the
last year of his life, when at length all hope of further personal
advancement must have died within him, it may be taken as the
deliberate record or summary of his political opinions. He did not
live to revise it, and the concluding portion he evidently meant to
enlarge and illustrate, as was ascertained from notes and memoranda in
pencil upon the manuscript. After the death of the author in 1850, the
work was published in a substantial and elegant form by the
Legislature of South Carolina, who ordered copies to be presented to
individuals of note in science and literature, and to public
libraries. We are, therefore, to regard this volume, not merely as a
legacy of Mr. Calhoun to his countrymen, but as conveying to us the
sentiments of South Carolina with regard to her rights and duties as a
member of the Union. Events since its publication have shown us that
it is more even than this. The assemblage of troublesome communities
which we have been accustomed to style "the South," adopted this work
as their political gospel. From this source the politicians of the
Southern States have drawn all they have chosen to present to the
world in justification of their course which bears the semblance of
argument; for, in truth, Mr. Calhoun, since Jefferson and Madison
passed from the stage, is almost the only thinking being the South has
had. His was a very narrow, intense, and untrustworthy mind, but he
was an angel of light compared with the men who have been recently
conspicuous in the Southern States.
This treatise on government belongs to the same class of works as
Louis Napoleon's Life of Caesar, having for its principal object one
that lies below the surface, and the effect of both is damaged by the
name on the title-page. The moment we learn that Louis Napoleon wrote
that Life of Caesar, the mind is intent upon discovering allusions to
recent history, which the author has an interest in misrepresenting.
The common conscience of mankind condemns him as a perjured usurper,
and the murderer of many of his unoffending fellow-citizens. No man,
whatever the power and splendor of his position, can rest content
under the scorn of mankind, unless his own conscience gives him a
clear acquittal, and assures him that one day the verdict of his
fellow-men will be reversed; and even in that case, it is not every
man that can possess his soul in patience. Every page of the Life of
Caesar was composed with a secret, perhaps half-unconscious reference
to that view of Louis Napoleon's conduct which is expressed with such
deadly power in Mr. Kinglake's History of the Crimean War, and which
is so remarkably confirmed by an American eyewitness, the late Mr.
Goodrich, who was Consul at Paris in 1848. Published anonymously, the
Life of Caesar might have had some effect. Given to the world by
Napoleon III., every one reads it as he would a defence by an
ingenious criminal of his own cause. The highest praise that can be
bestowed upon it is, that it is very well done, considering the object
the author had in view.
So, in reading Mr. Calhoun's disquisition upon government, we are
constantly reminded that the author was a man who had only escaped
trial and execution for treason by suddenly arresting the treasonable
measures which he had caused to be set on foot. Though it contains but
one allusion to events in South Carolina in 1833, the work is nothing
but a labored, refined justification of those events. It has been even
coupled with Edwards on the Will, as the two best examples of subtle
reasoning which American literature contains. Admit his premises, and
you are borne along, at a steady pace, in a straight path, to the
final inferences: that the sovereign State of South Carolina
possesses, by the Constitution of the United States, an absolute veto
upon every act of Congress, and may secede from the Union whenever she
likes; and that these rights of veto and secession do not merely
constitute the strength of the Constitution, but _are_ the
Constitution,--and do not merely tend to perpetuate the Union, but are
the Union's self,--the thing that binds the States together.
Mr. Calhoun begins his treatise by assuming that government is
necessary. He then explains why it is necessary. It is necessary
because man is more selfish than sympathetic, feeling more intensely
what affects himself than what affects others. Hence he will encroach
on the rights of others; and to prevent this, government is
indispensable.
But government, since it must be administered by selfish men will feel
more intensely what affects itself than what affects the people
governed. It is, therefore, the tendency of all governments to
encroach on the rights of the people; and they certainly will do so,
if they can. The same instinct of self-preservation, the same love of
accumulation, which tempts individuals to over-reach their neighbors,
inclines government to preserve, increase, and consolidate its powers.
Therefore, as individual selfishness requires to be held in check by
government, so government must be restrained by _something_.
This something is the constitution, written or unwritten. A
constitution is to the government what government is to the people: it
is the restraint upon its selfishness. Mr. Calhoun assumes here that
the relation between government and governed is naturally and
inevitably "antagonistic." He does not perceive that government is the
expression of man's love of justice, and the means by which the people
cause justice to be done.
Government, he continues, must be powerful; must have at command the
resources of the country; must be so strong that it can, if it will,
disregard the limitations of the constitution. The question is, How to
compel a government, holding such powers, having an army, a navy, and
a national treasury at command, to obey the requirements of a mere
piece of printed paper?
Power, says Mr. Calhoun, can only be resisted by power. Therefore, a
proper constitution must leave to the governed the _power_ to resist
encroachments. This is done in free countries by universal suffrage
and the election of rulers at frequent and fixed periods. This gives
to rulers the strongest possible motive to please the people, which
can only be done by executing their will.
So far, most readers will follow the author without serious
difficulty. But now we come to passages which no one could understand
who was not acquainted with the Nullification imbroglio of 1833. A
philosophic Frenchman or German, who should read this work with a view
to enlightening his mind upon the nature of government, would be much
puzzled after passing the thirteenth page; for at that point the
hidden loadstone begins to operate upon the needle of Mr. Calhoun's
compass, and he is as Louis Napoleon writing the Life of Caesar.
Universal suffrage, he continues, and the frequent election of rulers,
are indeed the primary and fundamental principles of a constitutional
government; and they are sufficient to give the people an effective
control over those whom they have elected. But this is all they can
do. They cannot make rulers good, or just, or obedient to the
constitution, but only faithful representatives of the majority of the
people and executors of the will of that majority. The right of
suffrage transfers the supreme authority from the rulers to the body
of the community, and the more perfectly it does this, the more
perfectly it accomplishes its object. Majority is king. But this king,
too, like all others, is selfish, and will abuse his power if he can.
So, we have been arguing in a circle, and have come back to the
starting-point. Government keeps within bounds the selfishness of the
people; the constitution restrains the selfishness of the government;
but, in doing so, it has only created a despot as much to be dreaded
as the power it displaced. We are still, therefore, confronted by the
original difficulty. How are we to limit the sway of tyrant Majority?
If, says Mr. Calhoun, all the people had the same interests, so that a
law which oppressed one interest would oppress all interests, then the
right of suffrage would itself be sufficient; and the only question
would be as to the fitness of different candidates. But this is not
the case. Taxation, for example: no system of taxation can be arranged
that will not bear oppressively upon some interests or section.
Disbursements, also: some portions of the country must receive back,
in the form of governmental disbursements, more money than they pay in
taxes, and others less; and this may be carried so far, that one
region may be utterly impoverished, while others are enriched. King
Majority may have his favorites. He may now choose to favor
agriculture; now, commerce; now, manufactures; and so arrange the
imports as to crush one for the sake of promoting the others. "Crush"
is Mr. Calhoun's word. "One portion of the community," he says,
"may be crushed, and another elevated on its ruins, by
systematically perverting the power of taxation and
disbursement, for the purpose of aggrandizing or building up
one portion of the community at the expense of the other."
_May_ be. But has not the most relentless despot an interest in the
prosperity of his subjects? And can one interest be crushed without
manifest and immediate injury to all the others? Mr. Calhoun says:
That this fell power to crush important interests _will_ be used, is
exactly as certain as that it _can_ be.
All this would be unintelligible to our foreign philosopher, but
American citizens know very well what it means. Through this fine
lattice-work fence they discern the shining countenance of the colored
person.
But now, what remedy? Mr. Calhoun approaches this part of the subject
with the due acknowledgment of its difficulty. The remedy, of course,
is Nullification; but he is far from using a word so familiar. There
is but one mode, he remarks, by which the majority of the whole people
can be prevented from oppressing the minority, or portions of the
minority, and that is this:
"By taking the sense of each interest or portion of the
community, which may be unequally and injuriously affected
by the action of the government, separately, through its own
majority, or in some other way by which its voice can be
expressed; and to require the consent of each interest,
either to put or to keep the government in motion."
And this can only be done by such an "organism" as will "give to each
division or interest either a concurrent voice in making and executing
the laws or _a veto on their execution_."
This is perfectly intelligible when read by the light of the history
of 1833. But no human being unacquainted with that history could
gather Mr. Calhoun's meaning. Our studious foreigner would suppose by
the word "interest," that the author meant the manufacturing interest,
the commercial and agricultural interests, and that each of these
should have its little congress concurring in or vetoing the acts of
the Congress sitting at Washington. _We_, however, know that Mr.
Calhoun meant that South Carolina should have the power to nullify
acts of Congress and give law to the Union. He does not tell us how
South Carolina's tyrant Majority is to be kept within bounds; but only
how that majority is to control the majority of the whole country. He
has driven his problem into a corner, and there he leaves it.
Having thus arrived at the conclusion, that a law, to be binding on
all "interests," i.e. on all the States of the Union, must be
concurred in by all, he proceeds to answer the obvious objection, that
"interests" so antagonistic could never be brought to unanimous
agreement. He thinks this would present no difficulty, and adduces
some instances of unanimity to illustrate his point.
First, trial by jury. Here are twelve men, of different character and
calibre, shut up in a room to agree upon a verdict, in a cause upon
which able men have argued upon opposite sides. How unlikely that they
should be able to agree unanimously! Yet they generally do, and that
speedily. Why is this? Because, answers Mr. Calhoun, they go into
their room knowing that nothing short of unanimity will answer; and
consequently every man is _disposed_ to agree with his fellows, and,
if he cannot agree, to compromise. "Not at all." The chief reason why
juries generally agree is, that they are not interested in the matter
in dispute. The law of justice is so plainly written in the human
heart, that the fair thing is usually obvious to disinterested minds,
or can be made so. It is interest, it is rivalry, that blinds us to
what is right; and Mr. Calhoun's problem is to render "antagonistic"
interests unanimous. We cannot, therefore, accept this illustration as
a case in point.
Secondly, Poland. Poland is not the country which an American would
naturally visit to gain political wisdom. Mr. Calhoun, however,
repairs thither, and brings home the fact, that in the turbulent Diet
of that unhappy kingdom every member had an absolute veto upon every
measure. Nay, more: no king could be elected without the unanimous
vote of an assembly of one hundred and fifty thousand persons. Yet
Poland lasted two centuries! The history of those two centuries is a
sufficient comment upon Mr Calhoun's system, to say nothing of the
final catastrophe, which Mr. Calhoun confesses was owing to "the
extreme to which the principle was carried." A sound principle cannot
be carried to an unsafe extreme; it is impossible for a man to be too
right. If it is right for South Carolina to control and nullify the
United States, it is right for any one man in South Carolina to
control and nullify South Carolina. One of the tests of a system is to
ascertain where it will carry us if it _is_ pushed to the uttermost
extreme. Mr. Calhoun gave his countrymen this valuable information
when he cited the lamentable case of Poland.
From Poland the author descends to the Six Nations, the federal
council of which was composed of forty-two members, each of whom had
an absolute veto upon every measure. Nevertheless, this confederacy,
he says, became the most powerful and the most united of all the
Indian nations. He omits to add, that it was the facility with which
this council could be wielded by the French and English in turn, that
hastened the grinding of the Six Nations to pieces between those two
millstones.
Rome is Mr. Calhoun's next illustration. The _Tribunus Plebis_, he
observes, had a veto upon the passage of all laws and upon the
execution of all laws, and thus prevented the oppression of the
plebeians by the patricians. To show the inapplicability of this
example to the principle in question, to show by what steps this
tribunal, long useful and efficient, gradually absorbed the power of
the government, and became itself, first oppressive, and then an
instrument in the overthrow of the constitution, would be to write a
history of Rome. Niebuhr is accessible to the public, and Niebuhr knew
more of the _Tribunus Plebis_ than Mr. Calhoun. We cannot find in
Niebuhr anything to justify the author's aim to constitute patrician
Carolina the _Tribunus Plebis_ of the United States.
Lastly, England. England, too, has that safeguard of liberty, "an
organism by which the voice of each order or class is taken through
its appropriate organ, and which requires the concurring voice of all
to constitute that of the whole community." These orders are King,
Lords, and Commons. They must all concur in every law, each having a
veto upon the action of the two others. The government of the United
States is also so arranged that the President and the two Houses of
Congress must concur in every enactment; but then they all represent
the _same_ order or interest, the people of the United States. The
English government, says Mr. Calhoun, is so exquisitely constituted,
that the greater the revenues of the government, the more stable it
is; because those revenues, being chiefly expended upon the lords and
gentlemen, render them exceedingly averse to any radical change. Mr.
Calhoun does not mention that the majority of the people of England
are not represented in the government at all. Perhaps, however, the
following passage, in a previous part of the work, was designed to
meet their case:--
"It is a great and dangerous error to suppose that all
people are equally entitled to liberty. It is a reward to be
earned, not a blessing to be gratuitously lavished on all
alike;--a reward reserved for the intelligent, the
patriotic, the virtuous, and deserving; and not a boon to be
bestowed on a people too ignorant, degraded, and vicious to
be capable either of appreciating or of enjoying it."