Confederate "Heritage" Month 2020, April 19: John Calhoun calls for national class solidarity among the wealthy in support of slavery

John C. Calhoun is a very significant historical figure, who I like to describe in sober and careful terms as the patron saint of everything vile and evil in American politics since 1832.

And, yes, he did look like Satan on a bad hair day.

But he was a smart reactionary, unfortunately. And he was a real reactionary. Quasi-monarchist Alexander Hamilton looks like Maximilien Robespierre compared to Calhoun.

Calhoun kept up with developments in Europe. And his view of the class conflict there was sharp enough that Richard Hofstadter famously called him the "Marx of the master class".

I think that may be giving the old traitor a bit too much credit. But he did have a class analysis in which he could make a pitch for class solidarity among Southern planters and Northern industrial and financial capitalists in the face of revolutionary threat from the unwashed masses. Richard Current gives close attention to this aspect of Calhoun's political theory and propaganda in his John C. Calhoun (1966):

.[Calhoun argued that] if the quarrel over [slavery in] the territories should end in disunion, the Northerners and not the Southerners ought to reckon the cost of that event. If left to itself, the North would run the risk of disruption from within, but slavery would save the South.

[Calhoun:] From the conservative character of the institution [slavery], it would prevent that conflict between labor and capital, which must ever exist in populous and crowded communities, where wages are the regulator between them - and thereby secure and preserve with us a settled and quiet condition of things within, which can never be experienced in such communities. The North, on the contrary, would have no central point of union to bind its various and conflicting interests together; and would, with the increase of its population and wealth, be subject to all the agitation and conflicts growing out of the divisions of wealth and poverty and their concomitants, capital and labor, of which already there are so many and so serious. [my emphasis]

Calhoun even flirted at one point with a kind of quasi-populist appeal to Northern workers. But his goal was, first and foremost, to preserve and extend the institution of chattel slavery.