Chapter VII: Part 7

During Mr. Calhoun's first term in the Vice-Presidency,--1825 to 1829,--a most important change took place in his political position, which controlled all his future career. While he was Secretary of War,--1817 to 1824,--he resided with his family in Washington, and shared in the nationalizing influences of the place. When he was elected Vice-President, he removed to a plantation called Fort Hill, in the western part of South Carolina, where he was once more subjected to the intense and narrow provincialism of the planting States. And there was nothing in the character or in the acquirements of his mind to counteract that influence. Mr. Calhoun was not a student; he probed nothing to the bottom; his information on all subjects was small in quantity, and second-hand in quality. Nor was he a patient thinker. Any stray fact or notion that he met with in his hasty desultory reading, which chanced to give apparent support to a favorite theory or paradox of his own, he seized upon eagerly, paraded it in triumph, but pondered it little; while the weightiest facts which controverted his opinion he brushed aside without the slightest consideration. His mind was as arrogant as his manners were courteous. Every one who ever conversed with him must remember his positive, peremptory, unanswerable "_Not at all, not at all_" whenever one of his favorite positions was assailed. He was wholly a special pleader; he never summed up the testimony. We find in his works no evidence that he had read the masters in political economy; not even Adam Smith, whose reputation was at its height during the' first half of his public life. In history he was the merest smatterer, though it was his favorite reading, and he was always talking about Sparta, Athens, and Rome. The slenderness of his far tune prevented his travelling. He never saw Europe; and if he ever visited the Northern States, after leaving college, his stay was short. The little that he knew of life was gathered in three places, all of which were of an exceptional and artificial character,--the city of Washington, the up-country of South Carolina, and the luxurious, reactionary city of Charleston. His mind, naturally narrow and intense, became, by revolving always in this narrow sphere and breathing a close and tainted atmosphere, more and more fixed in its narrowness and more intense in its operations.

This man, moreover, was consumed by a poor ambition: he lusted after the Presidency. The rapidity of his progress in public life, the high offices he had held, the extravagant eulogiums he had received from colleagues and the press, deceived him as to the real nature of his position before the country, and blinded him to the superior chances of other men. Five times in his life he made a distinct clutch at the bawble, but never with such prospect of success that any man could discern it but himself and those who used his eyes. It is a satisfaction to know that, of the Presidency seekers,--Clay, Webster, Calhoun, Douglas, Wise, Breckenridge, Tyler, Fillmore, Clinton, Burr, Cass, Buchanan, and Van Buren,--only two won the prize, and those two only by a series of accidents which had little, to do with their own exertions. We can almost lay it down as a law of this Republic, that no man who makes the Presidency the principal object of his public life will ever be President. The Presidency is an accident, and such it will probably remain.

Mr. Vice-President Calhoun found his Carolina discontented in 1824, when he took up his abode at Fort Hill. Since the Revolution, South Carolina had never been satisfied, and had never had reason to be. The cotton-gin had appeased her for a while, but had not suspended the operation of the causes which produced the stagnation of the South. Profuse expenditure, unskilful agriculture, the costliest system of labor in the world, and no immigration, still kept _Irelandizing_ the Southern States; while the North was advancing and improving to such a degree as to attract emigrants from all lands. The contrast was painful to Southern men, and to most of them it was mysterious. Southern politicians came to the conclusion that the cause at once of Northern prosperity and Southern poverty was the protective tariff and the appropriations for internal improvements, but chiefly the tariff. In 1824, when Mr. Calhoun went home, the tariff on some leading articles had been increased, and the South was in a ferment of opposition to the protective system. If Mr. Calhoun had been a wise and honest man, he would have reminded his friends that the decline of the South had been a subject of remark from the peace of 1783, and therefore could not have been caused by the tariff of 1816, or 1820, or 1824. He would have told them that slavery, as known in the Southern States, demands virgin lands,--must have, every few years, its cotton-gin, its Louisiana, its Cherokee country, its _something_, to give new value to its products or new scope for its operations. He might have added that the tariff of 1824 was a grievance, did tend to give premature development to a manufacturing system, and was a fair ground for a national issue between parties. The thing which he did was this: he adopted the view of the matter which was predominant in the extreme South, and accepted the leadership of the extreme Southern, anti-tariff, strict-constructionist wing of the Democratic party. He echoed the prevailing opinion, that the tariff and the internal improvement system, to both of which he was fully committed, were the _sole_ causes of Southern stagnation; since by the one their money was taken from them, and by the other it was mostly spent where it did them no good.

He was, of course, soon involved in a snarl of contradictions, from which he never could disentangle himself. Let us pass to the year 1828, a most important one in the history of the country and of Mr. Calhoun; for then occurred the first of the long series of events which terminated with the surrender of the last Rebel army in 1865. The first act directly tending to a war between the South and the United States bears date December 6, 1828; and it was the act of John C. Calhoun.

It was the year of that Presidential election which placed Andrew Jackson in the White House, and re-elected Mr. Calhoun to the Vice-Presidency. It was the year that terminated the honorable part of Mr. Calhoun's career and began the dishonorable. His political position in the canvass was utterly false, as he himself afterwards confessed. On the one hand, he was supporting for the Presidency a man committed to the policy of protection; and on the other, he became the organ and mouthpiece of the Southern party, whose opposition to the protective principle was tending to the point of armed resistance to it. The tariff bill of 1828, which they termed the bill of abominations, had excited the most heated opposition in the cotton States, and especially in South Carolina. This act was passed in the spring of the very year in which those States voted for a man who had publicly endorsed the principle involved in it; and we see Mr. Calhoun heading the party who were electioneering for Jackson, and the party who were considering the policy of nullifying the act which he had approved. His Presidential aspirations bound him to the support of General Jackson; but the first, the fundamental necessity of his position was to hold possession of South Carolina.

The burden of Mr. Calhoun's later speeches was the reconciliation of the last part of his public life with the first. The task was difficult, for there is not a leading proposition in his speeches after 1830 which is not refuted by arguments to be found in his public utterances before 1828. In his speech on the Force Bill, in 1834, he volunteered an explanation of the apparent inconsistency between his support of General Jackson in 1828, and his authorship of the "South Carolina Exposition" in the same year. Falsehood and truth are strangely interwoven in almost every sentence of his later writings; and there is also that vagueness in them which comes of a superfluity of words. He says, that for the strict-constructionist party to have presented a candidate openly and fully identified with their opinions would have been to court defeat; and thus they were obliged either to abandon the contest, or to select a candidate "whose opinions were intermediate or doubtful on the subject which divided the two sections,"--a candidate "who, at best, was but a choice of evils." Besides, General Jackson was a Southern man, and it was hoped that, notwithstanding his want of experience, knowledge, and self-control, the advisers whom he would invite to assist him would compensate for those defects. Then Mr. Calhoun proceeds to state, that the contest turned chiefly upon the question of protection or free trade; and the strife was, which of the two parties should go farthest in the advocacy of protection. The result was, he says, that the tariff bill of 1828 was passed,--"that disastrous measure which has brought so many calamities upon us, and put in peril the liberty and union of the country," and "poured millions into the treasury beyond the most extravagant wants of the country."

The passage of this tariff bill was accomplished by the tact of Martin Van Buren, aided by Major Eaton, Senator from Tennessee. Mr. Van Buren was the predestined chief of General Jackson's Cabinet, and Major Eaton was the confidant, agent, and travelling manager of the Jacksonian wire-pullers, besides being the General's own intimate friend. The events of that session notified Mr. Calhoun that, however manageable General Jackson might be, he was not likely to fall into the custody of the Vice-President. General Jackson's election being considered certain, the question was alone interesting, who should possess him for the purposes of the succession. The prospect, as surveyed that winter from the Vice-President's chair, was not assuring to the occupant of that lofty seat. If General Jackson could not be used as a fulcrum for the further elevation of Mr. Calhoun, would it not be advisable to begin to cast about for another?

The tariff bill of 1828 was passed before the Presidential canvass had set in with its last severity. There was time for Mr. Calhoun to withdraw from the support of the man whose nearest friends had carried it through the Senate under his eyes. He did not do so. He went home, after the adjournment of Congress, to labor with all his might for the election of a protectionist, and to employ his leisure hours in the composition of that once famous paper called the "South Carolina Exposition," in which protection was declared to be an evil so intolerable as to justify the nullification of an act founded upon it. This Exposition was the beginning of our woe,--the baleful egg from which were hatched nullification, treason, civil war, and the desolation of the Southern States. Here is Mr. Calhoun's own account of the manner in which what he correctly styles "_the double operation_" was "pushed on" in the summer of 1828:--

"This disastrous event [the passage of the tariff bill of
1828] opened our eyes (I mean myself and those immediately
connected with me) as to the full extent of the danger and
oppression of the protective system, and the hazard of
failing to effect the reform intended through the election
of General Jackson. With these disclosures, it became
necessary to seek some other ultimate, but more certain
measure of protection. We turned to the Constitution to find
this remedy. We directed a more diligent and careful
scrutiny into its provisions, in order to understand fully
the nature and character of our political system. We found a
certain and effectual remedy in that great fundamental
division of the powers of the system between this government
and its independent co-ordinates, the separate governments
of the States,--to be called into action to arrest the
unconstitutional acts of this government by the
interposition of the States,--the paramount source from
which both governments derive their power. But in relying on
this our ultimate remedy, we did not abate our zeal in the
Presidential canvass; we still hoped that General Jackson,
if elected, would effect the necessary reform, and thereby
supersede the necessity for calling into action the
sovereign authority of the State, which we were anxious to
avoid. With these views the two were pushed with equal zeal
at the same time; which double operation commenced in the
fall of 1828, but a few months after the passage of the
tariff act of that year; and at the meeting of the
Legislature of the State, at the same period, a paper known
as the South Carolina Exposition was reported to that body,
containing a full development, as well on the constitutional
point as on the operation of the protective system,
preparatory to a state of things which might eventually
render the action of the State necessary in order to protect
her rights and interest, and to stay a course of policy
which we believed would, if not arrested, prove destructive
of liberty and the Constitution."--_Works_, II. 396.

Mr. Calhoun omits, however, to mention that the Exposition was not presented to the Legislature of South Carolina until after the Presidential election had been decided. Nor did he inform his hearers that the author of the paper was Mr. Vice-President Calhoun. Either there was a great dearth of literary ability in that body, or else Mr. Calhoun had little confidence in it; for nearly all the ponderous documents on nullification given to the world in its name were penned by Mr. Calhoun, and appear in his collected works. If the Legislature addressed its constituents or the people of the United States on _this_ subject, it was he who prepared the draft. The South Carolina Exposition was found among his papers in his own handwriting, and it was adopted by the Legislature with only a few alterations and suppressions. There never was a piece of mischief more completely the work of one man than the nullification troubles of 1833-34.

The South Carolina Exposition, when Mr. Calhoun had completed it, was brought before the public by one of the usual methods. The Legislature of South Carolina passed the following resolutions:--

"_Resolved_, That it is expedient to protest against the
unconstitutional and oppressive operation of the system of
protective duties, and to have such protest entered on the
journals of the Senate of the United States. Also, to make a
public exposition of our wrongs, and of the remedies within
our power, to be communicated to our sister States, with a
request that they will co-operate with this State in
procuring a repeal of the tariff for protection, and an
abandonment of the principle; and if the repeal be not
procured, that they will co-operate in such measures as may
be necessary for averting the evil.

"_Resolved_, That a committee of seven be raised to carry
the foregoing resolution into effect."

The resolution having been carried, the following gentlemen were appointed to father Mr. Calhoun's paper: James Gregg, D.L. Wardlaw, Hugh S. Legaré, Arthur P. Hayne, William C. Preston, William Elliott, and R. Barnwell Smith. The duty of this committee consisted in causing a copy of Mr. Calhoun's paper to be made and presenting it to the Legislature. This was promptly done; and the Exposition was adopted by the Legislature on the 6th of December, 1828. Whether any protest was forwarded to the Secretary of the United States Senate for insertion in the journal does not appear. We only know that five thousand copies of this wearisome and stupid Exposition were ordered to be printed, and that in the hubbub of the incoming of a new administration it attracted scarcely any attention beyond the little knot of original nullifiers. Indeed, Mr. Calhoun's writings on this subject were "protected" by their own length and dulness. No creature ever read one of them quite through, except for a special purpose.

The leading assertions of this Exposition are these:--1. Every duty imposed for protection is a violation of the Constitution, which empowers Congress to impose taxes for revenue only. 2. The _whole_ burden of the protective system is borne by agriculture and commerce. 3. The _whole_ of the advantages of protection accrue to the manufacturing States. 4. In other words, the South, the Southwest, and two or three commercial cities, support the government, and pour a stream of treasure into the coffers of manufacturers. 5. The result must soon be, that the people of South Carolina will have either to abandon the culture of rice and cotton, and remove to some other country, or else to become a manufacturing community, which would only be ruin in another form.

Lest the reader should find it impossible to believe that any man out of a lunatic asylum could publish such propositions as this last, we will give the passage. Mr. Calhoun is endeavoring to show that Europe will at length retaliate by placing high duties upon American cotton and rice. At least that appears to be what he is aiming at.

"We already see indications of a commercial warfare, the
termination of which no one can conjecture, though our fate
may easily be. The last remains of our great and once
flourishing agriculture must be annihilated in the conflict.
In the first instance we will[1] be thrown on the home
market, which cannot consume a fourth of our products; and,
instead of supplying the world, as we would with free trade,
we would be compelled to abandon the cultivation of three
fourths of what we now raise, and receive for the residue
whatever the manufacturers, who would then have their policy
consummated by the entire possession of our market, might
choose to give. Forced to abandon our ancient and favorite
pursuit, to which our soil, climate, habits, and peculiar
labor are adapted, at an immense sacrifice of property, we
would be compelled, without capital, experience, or skill,
and with a population untried in such pursuits, to attempt
to become the rivals, instead of the customers, of the
manufacturing States. The result is not doubtful. If they,
by superior capital and skill, should keep down successful
competition on our part, we would be doomed to toil at our
unprofitable agriculture,--selling at the prices which a
single and very limited market might give. But, on the
contrary, if our necessity should triumph over their capital
and skill, if, instead of raw cotton we should ship to the
manufacturing States cotton yarn and cotton goods, the
thoughtful must see that it would inevitably bring about a
state of things which could not long continue. _Those who
now make war on our gains would then make it on our labor_.
They would not tolerate that those who now cultivate our
plantations, and furnish them with the material and the
market for the product of their arts, should, by becoming
their rivals, take bread from the mouths of their wives and
children. The committee will not pursue this painful
subject; but as they clearly see that the system if not
arrested, must bring the country to this hazardous
extremity, neither prudence nor patriotism would permit them
to pass it by without raising a warning voice against an
evil of so menacing a character."--_Works_, VI. 12.

The only question which arises in the mind of present readers of such passages (which abound in the writings of Mr. Calhoun) is this: Were they the chimeras of a morbid, or the utterances of a false mind? Those who knew him differ in opinion on this point. For our part, we believe such passages to have been inserted for the sole purpose of alarming the people of South Carolina, so as to render them the more subservient to his will. It is the stale trick of the demagogue, as well as of the false priest, to subjugate the mind by terrifying it.

Mr. Calhoun concludes his Exposition by bringing forward his remedy for the frightful evils which he had conjured up. That remedy, of course, was nullification. The State of South Carolina, after giving due warning, must declare the protective acts "null and void" in the State of South Carolina after a certain date; and then, unless Congress repealed them in time, refuse obedience to them. Whether this should be done by the Legislature or by a convention called for the purpose, Mr. Calhoun would not say; but he evidently preferred a convention. He advised, however, that nothing be done hastily; that time should be afforded to the dominant majority for further reflection. Delay, he remarked, was the more to be recommended, because of

"the great political revolution which will displace from
power, on the 4th of March next, those who have acquired
authority by setting the will of the people at defiance, and
which will bring in an eminent citizen, distinguished for
his services to his country and his justice and patriotism";

under whom, it was hoped, there would be "a complete restoration, of the pure principles of our government." This passage Mr. Calhoun could write _after_ witnessing the manoeuvres of Mr. Van Buren and Mr. Eaton! If the friends of Mr. Adams had set the will of the people at defiance on the tariff question, what had the supporters of General Jackson done? In truth, this menace of nullification was the second string to the bow of the Vice-President. It was not yet ascertained which was going to possess and use General Jackson,--the placid and flexible Van Buren, or the headstrong, short-sighted, and uncomfortable Calhoun. Nullification, as he used daily to declare, was a "reserved power."

At the time of General Jackson's inauguration, it would have puzzled an acute politician to decide which of the two aspirants had the best chance of succeeding the General. The President seemed equally well affected toward both. One was Secretary of State, the other Vice-President. Van Buren, inheriting the political tactics of Burr, was lord paramount in the great State of New York, and Calhoun was all-powerful in his own State and very influential in all the region of cotton and rice. In the Cabinet Calhoun had two friends, and one tried and devoted ally (Ingham), while Van Buren could only boast of Major Eaton, Secretary of War; and the tie that bound them together was political far more than personal. In the public mind, Calhoun towered above his rival, for he had been longer in the national councils, had held offices that drew upon him the attention of the whole country, and had formerly been distinguished as an orator. If any one had been rash enough in 1829 to intimate to Mr. Calhoun that Martin Van Buren stood before the country on a par with himself, he would have pitied the ignorance of that rash man.

Under despotic governments, like those of Louis XIV. and Andrew Jackson, no calculation can be made as to the future of any public man, because his future depends upon the caprice of the despot, which cannot be foretold. Six short weeks--nay, not so much, not six--sufficed to estrange the mind of the President from Calhoun, and implant within him a passion to promote the interests of Van Buren. Our readers, we presume, all know how this was brought to pass. It was simply that Mr. Calhoun would _not_, and Mr. Van Buren _would_ call upon Mrs. Eaton. All the other influences that were brought to bear upon the President's singular mind were nothing in comparison with this. Daniel Webster uttered only the truth when he wrote, at the time, to his friend Dutton, that the "Aaron's serpent among the President's desires was a settled purpose of making out the lady, of whom so much has been said, a person of reputation"; and that this ridiculous affair would "probably determine who should be the successor to the present chief magistrate." It had precisely that effect. We have shown elsewhere the successive manoeuvres by which this was effected, and how vigorously but unskillfully Calhoun struggled to avert his fate. We cannot and need not repeat the story; nor can we go over again the history of the Nullification imbroglio, which began with the South Carolina Exposition in 1828, and ended very soon after Calhoun had received a private notification that the instant news reached Washington of an overt act of treason in South Carolina, the author and fomenter of that treason would be arrested and held for trial as a traitor.

One fact alone suffices to prove that, in bringing on the Nullification troubles, Calhoun's motive was factious. When General Jackson saw the coming storm, he did two things. First, he prepared to maintain the authority of the United States by force. Secondly, he used all his influence with Congress to have the cause of Southern discontent removed. General Jackson felt that the argument of the anti-tariff men, in view of the speedy extinction of the national debt, was unanswerable. He believed it was absurd to go on raising ten or twelve millions a year more than the government could spend, merely for the sake of protecting Northern manufactures. Accordingly, a bill was introduced which aimed to do just what the nullifiers had been clamoring for, that is, to reduce the revenue to the amount required by the government. If Mr. Calhoun had supported this measure, he could have carried it. He gave it no support; but exerted all his influence in favor of the Clay Compromise, which was expressly intended to save as much of the protective system as could be saved, and which reduced duties gradually, instead of suddenly. Rather than permit the abhorred administration to have the glory of pacificating the country, this lofty Roman stooped to a coalition with his personal enemy, Henry Clay, the champion and the soul of the protectionist party.

No words can depict the bitterness of Calhoun's disappointment and mortification at being distanced by a man whom he despised so cordially as he did Van Buren. To comprehend it, his whole subsequent career must be studied. The numerous covert allusions to the subject in his speeches and writings are surcharged with rancor; and it was observed that, whenever his mind reverted to it, his manner, the tone of his voice, and every gesture testified to the intensity of his feelings. "Every Southern man," said he on one occasion,

"who is true to the interests of his section, and faithful
to the duties which Providence has allotted him, will be
forever excluded from the honors and emoluments of this
government, which will be reserved only for those who have
qualified themselves by political prostitution for admission
into the Magdalen Asylum."

His face, too, from this time, assumed that haggard, cast-iron, intense, introverted aspect which struck every beholder.

Miss Martineau, in her Retrospect of Western Travel, has given us some striking and valuable glimpses of the eminent men of that period, particularly of the three most eminent, who frequently visited her during her stay in Washington. This passage, for example, is highly interesting.

"Mr. Clay sitting upright on the sofa, with his snuffbox
ever in his hand, would discourse for many an hour in his
even, soft, deliberate tone, on any one of the great
subjects of American policy which we might happen to start,
always amazing us with the moderation of estimate and speech
which so impetuous a nature has been able to attain. Mr.
Webster, leaning back at his ease, telling stories, cracking
jokes, shaking the sofa with burst after burst of laughter,
or smoothly discoursing to the perfect felicity of the
logical part of one's constitution, would illuminate an
evening now and then. Mr. Calhoun, the cast-iron man, who
looks as if he had never been born and could never be
extinguished, would come in sometimes to keep our
understandings on a painful stretch for a short while, and
leave us to take to pieces his close, rapid, theoretical,
illustrated talk, and see what we could make of it. We found
it usually more worth retaining as a curiosity, than as
either very just or useful. His speech abounds in figures,
truly illustrative, if that which they illustrate were true
also. But his theories of government (almost the only
subject upon which his thoughts are employed), the squarest
and compactest that ever were made, are composed out of
limited elements, and are not, therefore, likely to stand
service very well. It is at first extremely interesting to
hear Mr. Calhoun talk; and there is a never-failing evidence
of power in all that he says and does, which commands
intellectual reverence; but the admiration is too soon
turned into regret, into absolute melancholy. It is
impossible to resist the conviction, that all this force can
be at best but useless, and is but too likely to be very
mischievous. _His mind has long lost all power of
communicating with any other_. I know of no man who lives in
such utter intellectual solitude. He meets men and harangues
by the fireside as in the Senate; he is wrought like a piece
of machinery, set going vehemently by a weight, and stops
while you answer; he either passes by what you say, or
twists it into a suitability with what is in his head, and
begins to lecture again. Of course, a mind like this can
have little influence in the Senate, except by virtue,
perpetually wearing out, of what it did in its less
eccentric days; but its influence at home is to be dreaded.
There is no hope that an intellect so cast in narrow
theories will accommodate itself to varying circumstances;
and there is every danger that it will break up all that it
can in order to remould the materials in its own way. Mr.
Calhoun is as full as ever of his Nullification doctrines;
and those who know the force that is in him, and his utter
incapacity of modification by other minds, (after having
gone through as remarkable a revolution of political opinion
as perhaps any man ever experienced,) will no more expect
repose and self-retention from him than from a volcano in
full force. Relaxation is no longer in the power of his
will. I never saw any one who so completely gave me the idea
of possession. Half an hour's conversation with him is
enough to make a necessitarian of anybody. Accordingly, he
is more complained of than blamed by his enemies. His
moments of softness by his family, and when recurring to old
college days, are hailed by all as a relief to the vehement
working of the intellectual machine,--a relief equally to
himself and others. These moments are as touching to the
observer as tears on the face of a soldier."

Of his appearance in the Senate, and of his manner of speaking, Miss Martineau records her impressions also:--

"Mr. Calhoun's countenance first fixed my attention; the
splendid eye, the straight forehead, surmounted by a load of
stiff, upright, dark hair, the stern brow, the inflexible
mouth,--it is one of the most remarkable heads in the
country."

"Mr. Calhoun followed, and impressed me very strongly. While
he kept to the question, what he said was close, good, and
moderate, though delivered in rapid speech, and with a voice
not sufficiently modulated. But when he began to reply to a
taunt of Colonel Benton's, that he wanted to be President,
the force of his speaking became painful. He made
protestations which it seemed to strangers had better have
been spared, 'that he would not turn on his heel to be
President,' and that 'he had given up all for his own brave,
magnanimous little State of South Carolina.' While thus
protesting, his eyes flashed, his brow seemed charged with
thunder, his voice became almost a bark, and his sentences
were abrupt, intense, producing in the auditory a sort of
laugh which is squeezed out of people by the application of
a very sudden mental force. I believe he knew not what a
revelation he made in a few sentences. _They were to us
strangers the key, not only to all that was said and done by
the South Carolina party during the remainder of the
session, but to many things at Charleston and Columbia which
would otherwise have passed unobserved and unexplained_."

This intelligent observer saw the chieftain on his native heath:--

"During my stay in Charleston, Mr. Calhoun and his family
arrived from Congress, and there was something very striking
in the welcome he received, like that of a chief returned to
the bosom of his clan. He stalked about like a monarch of
the little domain, and there was certainly an air of
mysterious understanding between him and his followers."

What Miss Martineau says of the impossibility of Calhoun's mind communicating with another mind, is confirmed by an anecdote which we have heard related by Dr. Francis Lieber, who, as Professor in the College of South Carolina, was for several years the neighbor and intimate acquaintance of Mr. Calhoun. The learned Professor, upon his return from a visit to Europe, called upon him, and in the course of the interview Mr. Calhoun declared, in his positive manner, that the slaves in the Southern States were better lodged, fed, and cared for than the mechanics of Europe. Dr. Lieber, being fresh from that continent, assured the Secretary of State that such was not the fact, as he could testify from having resided in both lands. "Not at all, not at all," cried Calhoun dogmatically, and repeated his wild assertion. The Doctor saw that the poor man had reached the condition of absolute unteachableness, and dropped the subject. There could not well be a more competent witness on the point in dispute than Dr. Lieber; for, besides having long resided in both continents, it was the habit and business of his life to observe and ponder the effect of institutions upon the welfare of those who live under them. Calhoun pushed him out of the witness-box, as though he were an idiot.

A survey of the last fifteen years of Calhoun's life discloses nothing upon which the mind can dwell with complacency. On the approach of every Presidential election, we see him making what we can only call a _grab_ at a nomination, by springing upon the country some unexpected issue designed to make the South a unit in his support. From 1830 to 1836, he exhausted all the petty arts of the politician to defeat General Jackson's resolve to bring in Mr. Van Buren as his successor; and when all had failed, he made an abortive attempt to precipitate the question of the annexation of Texas. This, too, being foiled, Mr. Van Buren was elected President. Then Mr. Calhoun, who had for ten years never spoken of Van Buren except with contempt, formed the notable scheme of winning over the President so far as to secure his support for the succession. He advocated all the test measures of Mr. Van Buren's administration, and finished by courting a personal reconciliation with the man whom he had a hundred times styled a fox and a political prostitute. This design coming to naught, through the failure of Mr. Van Buren to reach a second term, he made a wild rush for the prize by again thrusting forward the Texas question. Colonel Benton, who was the predetermined heir of Van Buren, has detailed the manner in which this was done in a very curious chapter of his "Thirty Years." The plot was successful, so far as plunging the country into a needless war was concerned; but it was Polk and Taylor, not Calhoun, who obtained the Presidency through it. Mr. Calhoun's struggles for a nomination in 1844 were truly pitiable, but they were not known to the public, who saw him, at a certain stage of the campaign, affecting to decline a nomination which there was not the slightest danger of his receiving.

We regret that we have not space to show how much the agitation of the slavery question, from 1835 to 1850, was the work of this one man. The labors of Mr. Garrison and Mr. Wendell Phillips might have borne no fruit during their lifetime, if Calhoun had not made it his business to supply them with material. "I mean to _force_ the issue upon the North," he once wrote; and he did force it. On his return to South Carolina after the termination of the Nullification troubles, he said to his friends there, (so avers Colonel Benton, "Thirty Years," Vol. II. p. 786,)

"that the South could never be united against the North on
the tariff question; that the sugar interest of Louisiana
would keep her out; and that the basis of Southern union
must be shifted to the slave question."

Here we have the key to the mysteries of all his subsequent career. The denial of the right of petition, the annexation of Texas, the forcing of slavery into the Territories,--these were among the issues upon which he hoped to unite the South in his favor, while retaining enough strength at the North to secure his election. Failing in all his schemes of personal advancement, he died in 1850, still protesting that slavery is divine, and that it must rule this country or ruin it. This is really the sum and substance of that last speech to the Senate, which he had not strength enough left to deliver.

We have run rapidly over Mr. Calhoun's career as a public man. It remains for us to notice his claims as a teacher of political philosophy, a character in which he influenced his countrymen more powerfully after he was in his grave than he did while living among them.

The work upon which his reputation as a thinker will rest with posterity is his Treatise on the Nature of Government. Written in the last year of his life, when at length all hope of further personal advancement must have died within him, it may be taken as the deliberate record or summary of his political opinions. He did not live to revise it, and the concluding portion he evidently meant to enlarge and illustrate, as was ascertained from notes and memoranda in pencil upon the manuscript. After the death of the author in 1850, the work was published in a substantial and elegant form by the Legislature of South Carolina, who ordered copies to be presented to individuals of note in science and literature, and to public libraries. We are, therefore, to regard this volume, not merely as a legacy of Mr. Calhoun to his countrymen, but as conveying to us the sentiments of South Carolina with regard to her rights and duties as a member of the Union. Events since its publication have shown us that it is more even than this. The assemblage of troublesome communities which we have been accustomed to style "the South," adopted this work as their political gospel. From this source the politicians of the Southern States have drawn all they have chosen to present to the world in justification of their course which bears the semblance of argument; for, in truth, Mr. Calhoun, since Jefferson and Madison passed from the stage, is almost the only thinking being the South has had. His was a very narrow, intense, and untrustworthy mind, but he was an angel of light compared with the men who have been recently conspicuous in the Southern States.

This treatise on government belongs to the same class of works as Louis Napoleon's Life of Caesar, having for its principal object one that lies below the surface, and the effect of both is damaged by the name on the title-page. The moment we learn that Louis Napoleon wrote that Life of Caesar, the mind is intent upon discovering allusions to recent history, which the author has an interest in misrepresenting. The common conscience of mankind condemns him as a perjured usurper, and the murderer of many of his unoffending fellow-citizens. No man, whatever the power and splendor of his position, can rest content under the scorn of mankind, unless his own conscience gives him a clear acquittal, and assures him that one day the verdict of his fellow-men will be reversed; and even in that case, it is not every man that can possess his soul in patience. Every page of the Life of Caesar was composed with a secret, perhaps half-unconscious reference to that view of Louis Napoleon's conduct which is expressed with such deadly power in Mr. Kinglake's History of the Crimean War, and which is so remarkably confirmed by an American eyewitness, the late Mr. Goodrich, who was Consul at Paris in 1848. Published anonymously, the Life of Caesar might have had some effect. Given to the world by Napoleon III., every one reads it as he would a defence by an ingenious criminal of his own cause. The highest praise that can be bestowed upon it is, that it is very well done, considering the object the author had in view.

So, in reading Mr. Calhoun's disquisition upon government, we are constantly reminded that the author was a man who had only escaped trial and execution for treason by suddenly arresting the treasonable measures which he had caused to be set on foot. Though it contains but one allusion to events in South Carolina in 1833, the work is nothing but a labored, refined justification of those events. It has been even coupled with Edwards on the Will, as the two best examples of subtle reasoning which American literature contains. Admit his premises, and you are borne along, at a steady pace, in a straight path, to the final inferences: that the sovereign State of South Carolina possesses, by the Constitution of the United States, an absolute veto upon every act of Congress, and may secede from the Union whenever she likes; and that these rights of veto and secession do not merely constitute the strength of the Constitution, but _are_ the Constitution,--and do not merely tend to perpetuate the Union, but are the Union's self,--the thing that binds the States together.

Mr. Calhoun begins his treatise by assuming that government is necessary. He then explains why it is necessary. It is necessary because man is more selfish than sympathetic, feeling more intensely what affects himself than what affects others. Hence he will encroach on the rights of others; and to prevent this, government is indispensable.

But government, since it must be administered by selfish men will feel more intensely what affects itself than what affects the people governed. It is, therefore, the tendency of all governments to encroach on the rights of the people; and they certainly will do so, if they can. The same instinct of self-preservation, the same love of accumulation, which tempts individuals to over-reach their neighbors, inclines government to preserve, increase, and consolidate its powers. Therefore, as individual selfishness requires to be held in check by government, so government must be restrained by _something_.

This something is the constitution, written or unwritten. A constitution is to the government what government is to the people: it is the restraint upon its selfishness. Mr. Calhoun assumes here that the relation between government and governed is naturally and inevitably "antagonistic." He does not perceive that government is the expression of man's love of justice, and the means by which the people cause justice to be done.

Government, he continues, must be powerful; must have at command the resources of the country; must be so strong that it can, if it will, disregard the limitations of the constitution. The question is, How to compel a government, holding such powers, having an army, a navy, and a national treasury at command, to obey the requirements of a mere piece of printed paper?

Power, says Mr. Calhoun, can only be resisted by power. Therefore, a proper constitution must leave to the governed the _power_ to resist encroachments. This is done in free countries by universal suffrage and the election of rulers at frequent and fixed periods. This gives to rulers the strongest possible motive to please the people, which can only be done by executing their will.

So far, most readers will follow the author without serious difficulty. But now we come to passages which no one could understand who was not acquainted with the Nullification imbroglio of 1833. A philosophic Frenchman or German, who should read this work with a view to enlightening his mind upon the nature of government, would be much puzzled after passing the thirteenth page; for at that point the hidden loadstone begins to operate upon the needle of Mr. Calhoun's compass, and he is as Louis Napoleon writing the Life of Caesar.

Universal suffrage, he continues, and the frequent election of rulers, are indeed the primary and fundamental principles of a constitutional government; and they are sufficient to give the people an effective control over those whom they have elected. But this is all they can do. They cannot make rulers good, or just, or obedient to the constitution, but only faithful representatives of the majority of the people and executors of the will of that majority. The right of suffrage transfers the supreme authority from the rulers to the body of the community, and the more perfectly it does this, the more perfectly it accomplishes its object. Majority is king. But this king, too, like all others, is selfish, and will abuse his power if he can.

So, we have been arguing in a circle, and have come back to the starting-point. Government keeps within bounds the selfishness of the people; the constitution restrains the selfishness of the government; but, in doing so, it has only created a despot as much to be dreaded as the power it displaced. We are still, therefore, confronted by the original difficulty. How are we to limit the sway of tyrant Majority?

If, says Mr. Calhoun, all the people had the same interests, so that a law which oppressed one interest would oppress all interests, then the right of suffrage would itself be sufficient; and the only question would be as to the fitness of different candidates. But this is not the case. Taxation, for example: no system of taxation can be arranged that will not bear oppressively upon some interests or section. Disbursements, also: some portions of the country must receive back, in the form of governmental disbursements, more money than they pay in taxes, and others less; and this may be carried so far, that one region may be utterly impoverished, while others are enriched. King Majority may have his favorites. He may now choose to favor agriculture; now, commerce; now, manufactures; and so arrange the imports as to crush one for the sake of promoting the others. "Crush" is Mr. Calhoun's word. "One portion of the community," he says,

"may be crushed, and another elevated on its ruins, by
systematically perverting the power of taxation and
disbursement, for the purpose of aggrandizing or building up
one portion of the community at the expense of the other."

_May_ be. But has not the most relentless despot an interest in the prosperity of his subjects? And can one interest be crushed without manifest and immediate injury to all the others? Mr. Calhoun says: That this fell power to crush important interests _will_ be used, is exactly as certain as that it _can_ be.

All this would be unintelligible to our foreign philosopher, but American citizens know very well what it means. Through this fine lattice-work fence they discern the shining countenance of the colored person.

But now, what remedy? Mr. Calhoun approaches this part of the subject with the due acknowledgment of its difficulty. The remedy, of course, is Nullification; but he is far from using a word so familiar. There is but one mode, he remarks, by which the majority of the whole people can be prevented from oppressing the minority, or portions of the minority, and that is this:

"By taking the sense of each interest or portion of the
community, which may be unequally and injuriously affected
by the action of the government, separately, through its own
majority, or in some other way by which its voice can be
expressed; and to require the consent of each interest,
either to put or to keep the government in motion."

And this can only be done by such an "organism" as will "give to each division or interest either a concurrent voice in making and executing the laws or _a veto on their execution_."

This is perfectly intelligible when read by the light of the history of 1833. But no human being unacquainted with that history could gather Mr. Calhoun's meaning. Our studious foreigner would suppose by the word "interest," that the author meant the manufacturing interest, the commercial and agricultural interests, and that each of these should have its little congress concurring in or vetoing the acts of the Congress sitting at Washington. _We_, however, know that Mr. Calhoun meant that South Carolina should have the power to nullify acts of Congress and give law to the Union. He does not tell us how South Carolina's tyrant Majority is to be kept within bounds; but only how that majority is to control the majority of the whole country. He has driven his problem into a corner, and there he leaves it.

Having thus arrived at the conclusion, that a law, to be binding on all "interests," i.e. on all the States of the Union, must be concurred in by all, he proceeds to answer the obvious objection, that "interests" so antagonistic could never be brought to unanimous agreement. He thinks this would present no difficulty, and adduces some instances of unanimity to illustrate his point.

First, trial by jury. Here are twelve men, of different character and calibre, shut up in a room to agree upon a verdict, in a cause upon which able men have argued upon opposite sides. How unlikely that they should be able to agree unanimously! Yet they generally do, and that speedily. Why is this? Because, answers Mr. Calhoun, they go into their room knowing that nothing short of unanimity will answer; and consequently every man is _disposed_ to agree with his fellows, and, if he cannot agree, to compromise. "Not at all." The chief reason why juries generally agree is, that they are not interested in the matter in dispute. The law of justice is so plainly written in the human heart, that the fair thing is usually obvious to disinterested minds, or can be made so. It is interest, it is rivalry, that blinds us to what is right; and Mr. Calhoun's problem is to render "antagonistic" interests unanimous. We cannot, therefore, accept this illustration as a case in point.

Secondly, Poland. Poland is not the country which an American would naturally visit to gain political wisdom. Mr. Calhoun, however, repairs thither, and brings home the fact, that in the turbulent Diet of that unhappy kingdom every member had an absolute veto upon every measure. Nay, more: no king could be elected without the unanimous vote of an assembly of one hundred and fifty thousand persons. Yet Poland lasted two centuries! The history of those two centuries is a sufficient comment upon Mr Calhoun's system, to say nothing of the final catastrophe, which Mr. Calhoun confesses was owing to "the extreme to which the principle was carried." A sound principle cannot be carried to an unsafe extreme; it is impossible for a man to be too right. If it is right for South Carolina to control and nullify the United States, it is right for any one man in South Carolina to control and nullify South Carolina. One of the tests of a system is to ascertain where it will carry us if it _is_ pushed to the uttermost extreme. Mr. Calhoun gave his countrymen this valuable information when he cited the lamentable case of Poland.

From Poland the author descends to the Six Nations, the federal council of which was composed of forty-two members, each of whom had an absolute veto upon every measure. Nevertheless, this confederacy, he says, became the most powerful and the most united of all the Indian nations. He omits to add, that it was the facility with which this council could be wielded by the French and English in turn, that hastened the grinding of the Six Nations to pieces between those two millstones.

Rome is Mr. Calhoun's next illustration. The _Tribunus Plebis_, he observes, had a veto upon the passage of all laws and upon the execution of all laws, and thus prevented the oppression of the plebeians by the patricians. To show the inapplicability of this example to the principle in question, to show by what steps this tribunal, long useful and efficient, gradually absorbed the power of the government, and became itself, first oppressive, and then an instrument in the overthrow of the constitution, would be to write a history of Rome. Niebuhr is accessible to the public, and Niebuhr knew more of the _Tribunus Plebis_ than Mr. Calhoun. We cannot find in Niebuhr anything to justify the author's aim to constitute patrician Carolina the _Tribunus Plebis_ of the United States.