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.

Confederate "Heritage" Month 2022, April 14: John Calhoun as one of his first biographers saw him

It doesn't seem quite right to do a Confederate "Heritage" Month series without mentioning the evil spirit of American history, John C. Calhoun:

Herman Eduard Von Holst (1841-1904) was one of Calhoun's early biographers.

Von Holst was born in a German town in what is now Estonia, then a part of the Russian Empire. He became a German historian of the United States, and the English translation. His series of book on US Constitutional history won him wide recognition in the United States as an important historian.

Holst served several years in the legislature of the Grand Duchy of Baden (Germany) and campaigned unsuccessfully in 1890 for the Imperial Diet on the National Liberal party ticket.

Holst did a biography of Calhoun that first appeared in 1882, John C. Calhoun. Richard Current in his own 1966 biography of that same title mentioned Holst's book as one of the three early biographies he considered "worth noting," also commenting that it "was lacking in objectivity."

A contemporary sketch of Holst by Albert Bushnell Hart wrote of Horst's Calhoun biography that in it, "the slavery question is here grouped about the political life of the champion of slavery in Congress, whose singular and contradictory character has aroused the sympathetic interest of the author."

Without trying to evaluate the general worth of Horst's Calhoun biography, I'll quote a few excerpts from it, relying here in the 1899 edition. This is a comment from the editor's introduction, not from Holst himself.

Calhoun was in fact an embodied idea; his individuality and that idea were welded into a single entity; his life expressed that idea, and expressed nothing else. Correct and even austere in his character, interested in nothing outside of slavery, he owed such picturesqueness as he had to the singleness of his purpose and the intensity of his faith in the great social and political institution of the South. ...

... apart from slavery, there were few other matters which he cared about at all, and there were absolutely none others which he cared about much. [my emphasis]

Someone whose entire being was committed to defending the idea and institution of slavery. Yeah, that's not a bad brief description of Calhoun.

Holst himself wrote, "From about 1830 to the day of his death, Calhoun may be called the very impersonation [embodiment] of the slavery question."

Holst does seem to admire some of Calhoun's personal qualities, perhaps in the sense of a biographer learning to love his monster. For instance:

The champion of slavery, who, with head erect, flashing eye, and the deep-toned voice of solemn conviction and apostolic infallibility, dares the whole civilized world, is every inch a man, though a sadly mistaken one[.] (emphasis in original)

But Holst doesn't buy into the Lost Cause narrative of slavery that became the acceptable history of the Civil War and what caused of unreconciled Southern whites immediately after Appomattox:

Slavery, in consequence of the enormous development of the cotton culture, had become the determining principle of the whole political, economical, and social life of the Southern States, and a protective tariff was absolutely incompatible with the interests of the slave-holders. ...

No white man [in the slave South] could ever lose "caste." No matter how lazy, poor, ignorant, and depraved he might be, yet, by virtue of the color of his skin, he was a born member of the aristocracy, and absolutely nothing could deprive him of his place in it; for the gulf which separated the whites from the negroes could no more be bridged over than that between heaven and hell. As the human mind is constituted, no more powerful incentive could be offered to the mass of the population to sink deeper into nerveless shiftlessness. The middle classes are the backbone of every civilized community, and slavery prevented the formation of a well-to-do, intellectual, and progressive middle class more effectually than any express law could have done.

The greater the difference between this real aristocracy [the planter class] and the bulk of the white population actually was in every respect, the more the former was forced to affect absolute equality with the lowliest of their fellow citizens. These had to be persuaded that their interests were identical with' those of the rich planters; and, as they had in fact more to suffer from the effects of slavery than the slaves themselves, this could only be accomplished by systematically instilling into them a dull self-conceit and suicidal arrogance, which mistook shreds and tatters for purple and ermine. They looked down upon every other form of civilization with an air of contemptuous superiority, which would have been exceedingly ludicrous if it had not been infinitely sad. (my emphasis)

No, this wasn't compatible with the Lost Cause narrative, in which slavery had been a tragic but necessary and mostly benevolent institution, which would have faded away politely if the evil Abolitionists and damnyankees hadn't made such an issue of it.

Yet it was as certain as a proposition of Euclid that the conflict was irreconcilable, and therefore "irrepressible," because freedom and slavery are antagonistic ideas, acting with equal energy upon the intellectual, political, economical, social, and moral life of a people. It has been truly said that "compromise is the essence of politics;" genuine compromises, however, can only be concluded with regard to measures, never between principles, that is, between intellectual and moral conceptions which, in their very essence, are the opposite poles of an idea. (my emphasis)