Confederate "Heritage" Month, April 22: Calhoun and Jefferson on slavery (1)

The Great Nullifier and arch-reactionary John Calhoun gave a speech in the Senate on June 27, 1848, weighing in on the controversy over slavery in territories that might be captured during the Mexican War then underway that had been concluded in February of that year. The immediate topic which he was addressing was actually on the question of slavery in Oregon, which became a US Territory and was not part of Mexico. But the territories that might be captured in the war were very much on Calhoun's mind. The Mexican War was generally enthusiastically supported by the slave states, but Calhoun had reservations about the war, because he thought that significant parts of Mexico were not suitable for slavery.

The speech is known as his "Speech on the Oregon Bill," and he elaborated some important parts of his worldview in it. The text was published in an Appendix for that date to the Congressional Globe: an abridged version is available from the Teaching American History website.

Calhoun's worldview was primarily centered around the view that chattel slavery in the American South was a great institution which much be preserved even at the cost of the destruction of the United States in the Constitutional form in which it then existed. While he makes some grand theoretical and Constitutional arguments in the speech, they are all transparently centered on his fight to preserve and extend slavery.

The secessionist threat is there in this speech:

I have believed, from the beginning, that this [slavery] was the only question sufficiently potent to dissolve the Union, and subvert our system of government; and that the sooner it was met and settled, the safer and better for all. I have never doubted but that, if permitted to progress beyond a certain point, its settlement would become impossible, and am under deep conviction that it is now rapidly approaching it — and that if it is ever to be averted, it must be done speedily. In uttering these opinions I look to the whole. If I speak earnestly, it is to save and protect all. [my emphasis]

In other words: Nice Union you've got there, Yankees. It'd be a shame if something happened to it.

Twenty-first century neo-Confederates can relate to that Calhounian attitude. It's another way his dark soul goes marching on.

This speech is also an interesting example of contention over historical symbols in the politics of a particular day. In this speech, he centers the figure of Thomas Jefferson in a way that emphasizes Jefferson's ambiguous legacy on slavery.

Calhoun introduces Jefferson as the main sponsor of the idea of excluding slavery from the Northwest Territory, which eventually became part of the Northwest Ordinance of 1787. This set the stage for a north-south political split over slavery. And that is probably the most significant contribution of Jefferson to the antislavery cause. It's common these days for American progressives to dismiss Jefferson's antislavery position as complete cynicism on his part. He was, of course, a slaveowner himself.

But his position was much more complicated than that. And Calhoun's speech reflected that. Jefferson was astute enough as a politician and student of history and philosophy to know that slavery was incompatible with liberal democracy and the rule of law, as the classical liberal theory of politics and governance understood them.

Calhoun next brings Jefferson forward as a witness against restriction of slavery, based on Jefferson's dismay over the Missouri Compromise, which established a new territorial limit on slavery. In a famous letter that Calhoun quotes, Jefferson says of the Missouri Compromise:

I had for a long time ceased to read the newspapers or pay any attention to public affairs, confident they were in good hands, and content to be a passenger in our bark to the shore from which I am not distant. but this momentous question, like a fire bell in the night, awakened and filled me with terror. I considered it at once as the knell of the Union. it is hushed indeed for the moment. but this is a reprieve only, not a final sentence. a geographical line, coinciding with a marked principle, moral and political, once conceived and held up to the angry passions of men, will never be obliterated; and every new irritation will mark it deeper and deeper. [my emphasis]

Jefferson sounds a bit "burned out" in that passage. But it shows how events were presenting him in dramatic fashion with the limitations of his own position. Jefferson was never a Calhounist nullifier. But he was inclined to see states as a defender of basic liberal principles. But he also did have some personal and political commitment to the institution of slavery.

Jefferson, like virtually all white antislavery Americans back then, viewed the abolition of slavery as something that would be done by states and it would accompany a decrease in the number of black people as a proportion of the population. Because that's how emancipation happened in the Northern states like New York. Jefferson letter on the Missouri Compromise reflected this outlook:

I can say with conscious truth that there is not a man on earth who would sacrifice more than I would, to relieve us from this heavy reproach, in any practicable way. the cession of that kind of property, for so it is misnamed, is a bagatelle which would not cost me in a second thought, if, in that way, a general emancipation and expatriation could be effected: and, gradually, and with due sacrifices, I think it might be.

This was an unrealistic expectation at that time. In fact, the proposal by New York Congressman James Tallmadge, Jr. for excluding slavery from Missouri that set off the immediate controversy was based on the gradual-emancipation model other states had used. The representatives of the Slave Power in Congress weren't willing to tolerate it. But Jefferson was clear-headed enough to realize that he had no practical idea of that such a result could be achieved without a serious national convulsion, which Jefferson also hoped to avoid. He continues directly, "I think it might be. but, as it is, we have the wolf by the ear, and we can neither hold him, nor safely let him go. Justice is in one scale, and self-preservation in the other." (my emphasis)

But for John Calhoun in 1848 threatening the Yankees with secession and civil war, Jefferson position that "justice is in one scale," i.e., the abolitionist side and "self-preservation (of the planter class as it then existed] in the other", was pretty weak tea. That was the best he could do to try to position the image and historical aura of Thomas Jefferson on the side of treason and secession. But Calhoun didn't care about justice.

Or, more generously, for John Calhoun, "justice" was indistinguishable from the interest of slaveowning planters as they themselves conceived it in 1848.

In tomorrow's post, we'll look at Calhoun's further thoughts on Jefferson and liberal republican government.