Confederate "Heritage" Month 2022, April 15: John Calhoun as a twisted prophet

In yesterday's post, I quoted from the German historian Herman Von Holst's 1882, biography of John Calhoun, fanatical defender of slavery and patron saint of secession and Confederate treason.

His account is notable in the context of Lost Cause ideology for a couple of reasons. And Holst isn't operating from a Lost Cause perspective.

He gives a lot of attention to the ideological context in which Calhoun argued. He describes Calhoun as a defender of slavery who understood that the deep contradictory between chattel slavery and democracy, even the white-men's democracy will lingering property requirements for voting of the US in the early 19th century. He shows how Calhoun took the lead in insisting that slavery defenders had to defend it as a positive good. This was in contrast to the more common justification for slavery in the late 18th century that described it as a necessary evil that benefitted Africans by raising them to a "civilized" life.

As the profits from the cotton business and the slavery that supported it in the Southern slave states grew and the "Peculiar Institution" became more entrenched, defending slavery as a positive good and a more explicitly racist view of Africans as an inherently inferior race that must be kept in permanent subjugation became far more popular as ideological defenses of slavery. And Calhoun was a leader of that trend.

Holst's biography also is a reminder of how dominant a role the slavery issue became in national politics by the 1840s and how clear it was to many partisans that slavery was incompatible with the continued existence of the Union as a democratic, constitutional government. Holst writes at some length about the push to add Texas to the Union as a slave state and the Mexican War, including Calhoun's intense polemics on those issues and the intense argument over slavery in the wake of the latter.

To make the Lost Cause narrative's fable that the Civil War was over the North's disregard for "states' rights" and not at all about slavery, you have to basically ignore those key elements in the politics leading up to the Civil War. In fact, one can hardly understand US politics up until from 1776 to 1860 without taking the importance of the controversies over slavery seriously.