Confederate "Heritage" Month, April 23: Calhoun and Jefferson on slavery (2)

In the previous post in this series, I discussed part of John Calhoun's "Speech on the Oregon Bill" of June 27, 1848 and how he used the words and reputation of Thomas Jefferson to bolster his own pro-slavery position. And I talked about how Jefferson's famous dismay over th Missouri Compromise of 1820 confronted Jefferson with the dilemma that his own gradual-emancipation strategy for freeing the slaves had become unrealistic in the face of increased aggressiveness on the part of slaveowners and their representatives.

But Calhoun then found himself condemning the most famous piece of Jefferson's literary production, the Declaration of Independence. While commentators today are more apt to take Jefferson's antislavery positions and even his more general positions on democracy and individual liberty as cynical covers for support of slavery, The Dark Prince of American Reaction John Calhoun, thought Jefferson was altogether serious about the sentiments in the Declaration, and Calhoun condemned one of them in harsh terms.

That sentiment was the Declaration's position that "all men are created equal". People today are more conscious of the extent to which Jefferson and the leaders of the Revolution really meant men only. But that consideration wasn't what was on Calhoun's mind. He told the Senate:

Now, let me say, Senators, if our Union and system of government are doomed to perish, and we to share the fate of so many great people who have gone before us, the historian, who, in some future day, may record the events ending in so calamitous a result, will devote his first chapter to the ordinance of 1787, lauded as it and its authors have been, as the first of that series which led to it.

If he should possess a philosophical turn of mind, and be disposed to look to more remote and recondite causes, he will trace it to a proposition which originated in a hypothetical truism, but which, as now expressed and now understood, is the most false and dangerous of all political errors. The proposition to which I allude, has become an axiom in the minds of a vast majority on both sides of the Atlantic, and is repeated daily from tongue to tongue, as an established and incontrovertible truth; it is, that “all men are born free and equal.”

This is one way in which Calhoun was a straightforward reactionary. That phrase in the Declaration expressed a fundamental principle of democracy and liberal freedoms, that each individual has a basic level of rights as a human being (or at least as a man!) that must be recognized and respected. It was also an expression of a basic principle of the liberal concept of the rule of law, that the law applies equally to all.

As democrats recognized even in the late 18th century, the actual application of equal rights and the rule of law was heavily influenced by class and status considerations. But Calhoun was not at all advocating overcoming such barriers. He rejected the entire principle. He begins with an refutation of the kind we hear these days from aspiring rightwing podcasters:
Taking the proposition literally, (it is in that sense it is understood,)

Taking the proposition literally (it is in that sense it is understood), there is not a word of truth in it. It begins with “all men are born,” which is utterly untrue. [!!] Men are not born. Infants are born. They grow to be men. And concludes with asserting that they are born “free and equal,” which is not less false. They are not born free. While infants they are incapable of freedom, being destitute alike of the capacity of thinking and acting, without which there can be no freedom. Besides, they are necessarily born subject to their parents, and remain so among all people, savage and civilized, until the development of their intellect and physical capacity enables them to take care of themselves. They grow to all the freedom of which the condition in which they were born permits, by growing to be men. Nor is it less false that they are born “equal.” They are not so in any sense in which it can be regarded; and thus, as I have asserted, there is not a word of truth in the whole proposition, as expressed and generally understood. [my emphasis]

Ben Shapiro would be proud. Incidentally, the rapid-fire speech of some rightwing pundits was also something that Calhoun was known to practice in his speeches. It's an old rightwing habit, I guess.

As Calhoun insists there, the American public did take that basic principle of democracy and the rule of law very seriously, i.e., "literally ... is in that sense it is understood"; "the whole proposition, as expressed and generally understood." And Calhoun wanted to change that common opinion!

He continues with some weak theoretical nitpicking against John Locke and Algernon Sidney. But his real point is not about differences between individuals but alleged difference between races. Because the dominant slaveowners' justification for slavery had become the notion that black people were inherently inferior to whites and incapable of creating or practicing civilization on the supposedly elevated level of the slavedrivers. The slaveowners who held human beings as property and bought and sold them as such.

The Honorable Senator from South Carolina:

It follows from all this that the quantum of power on the part of the government, and of liberty on that of individuals, instead of being equal in all cases, must necessarily be very unequal among different people, according to their different conditions. For just in proportion as a people are ignorant, stupid, debased, corrupt, exposed to violence within and danger from without, the power necessary for government to possess, in order to preserve society against anarchy and destruction becomes greater and greater, and individual liberty less and less, until the lowest condition is reached, when absolute and despotic power becomes necessary on the part of the government, and individual liberty extinct. So, on the contrary, just as a people rise in the scale of intelligence, virtue, and patriotism, and the more perfectly they become acquainted with the nature of government, the ends for which it was ordered, and how it ought to be administered, and the less the tendency to violence and disorder within, and danger from abroad, the power necessary for government becomes less and less, and individual liberty greater and greater. Instead, then, of all men having the same right to liberty and equality, as is claimed by those who hold that they are all born free and equal, liberty is the noble and highest reward bestowed on mental and moral development, combined with favorable circumstances. Instead, then, of liberty and equality being born with man; instead of all men and all classes and descriptions being equally entitled to them, they are high prizes to be won, and are in their most perfect state, not only the highest reward that can be bestowed on our race, but the most difficult to be won — and when won, the most difficult to be preserved. [my emphasis]

The slaveowners' narrative, of course, held black people to be an "ignorant, stupid, debased, corrupt" people who could only be ruled by tyranny. While representation in a republic should be a matter for whites, who are "a people" who have managed to "rise in the scale of intelligence, virtue, and patriotism." But he wasn't advocating Jeffersonian equality even among white men. Liberty in his view "is the noble and highest reward bestowed on mental and moral development, combined with favorable circumstances." And he explicitly states that "liberty and equality" are definitively not for "all men and all classes and descriptions." (my emphasis) Calhoun is making a racial argument here. But he's making a class argument as well, both on the behalf of the slaveowning planters, aka, the Slave Power.

And he saw the sinister Jeffersonian influence at work in Europe, then experiencing what we now remembers as the revolutions of 1848:

[Maintaining the power and liberties of the white race has] been made vastly more so by the dangerous error I have attempted to expose, that all men are born free and equal, as if those high qualities belonged to man without effort to acquire them, and to all equally alike, regardless of their intellectual and moral condition. The attempt to carry into practice this, the most dangerous of all political error, and to bestow on all, without regard to their fitness either to acquire or maintain liberty, that unbounded and individual liberty supposed to belong to man in the hypothetical and misnamed state of nature, has done more to retard the cause of liberty and civilization, and is doing more at present, than all other causes combined. While it is powerful to pull down governments, it is still more powerful to prevent their construction on proper principles. It is the leading cause among those which have placed Europe in its present anarchical condition, and which mainly stands in the way of reconstructing good governments in the place of those which have been overthrown, threatening thereby the quarter of the globe most advanced in progress and civilization with hopeless anarchy, to be followed by military despotism. Nor are we exempt from its disorganizing effects. We now begin to experience the danger of admitting so great an error to have a place in the declaration of our independence. For a long time it lay dormant; but in the process of time it began to germinate, and produce its poisonous fruits. It had strong hold on the mind of Mr. Jefferson, the author of that document, which caused him to take an utterly false view of the subordinate relation of the black to the white race in the South; and to hold, in consequence, that the former, though utterly unqualified to possess liberty, were as fully entitled to both liberty and equality as the latter; and that to deprive them of it was unjust and immoral. To this error, his proposition to exclude slavery from the territory northwest of the Ohio may be traced, and to that the ordinance of ’87 [that excluded slavery from the Northwest Territory], and through it the deep and dangerous agitation which now threatens to ingulf, and will certainly ingulf, if not speedily settled, our political institutions, and involve the country in countless woes. [my emphasis]

Because for Calhoun, democratic republics and the equal rule of law could only produce "hopeless anarchy". But let's give the old reactionary credit. He was right to see the democratic revolutionary elements of the American Revolution in the European revolutions of 1848.

Calhoun here was frankly stating that the basic concepts of the American democracy were incompatible with the slave system and the racist ideology by which the planters justified it ideologically. Abraham Lincoln agreed with him about that incompatibility. But he took a different side. In his Letter to Joshua Speed of August 24, 1855, Lincoln wrote, with particular reference to the xenophobic Know-Nothing party (formally the American Party:

As a nation, we began by declaring that "all men are created equal." We now practically read it "all men are created equal, except negroes" When the Know-Nothings get control, it will read "all men are created equal, except negroes, and foreigners, and Catholics." When it comes to this I should prefer emigrating to some country where they make no pretence of loving liberty - to Russia, for instance, where despotism can be taken pure, and without the base alloy of hypocracy [sic].

As it turned out, in 1856 Czar Alexander II liberated the Russian serbs from their feudal status, declaring, "It is better to abolish serfdom from above than to wait until the serfs begin to liberate themselves from below." Because of that, historians sometimes draw parallels between Lincoln and Alexander II as similar "liberators". Alexander's government maintained good relations with Lincoln's Union government during the Civil War.

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.