Von Holst's Calhoun

IN the peaceful days of Mr. Monroe, the British minister at Washington was Mr. Stratford Canning, afterwards better and more widely known as Lord Stratford de Redclyffe. Some years ago, this gentleman met in London a wellknown American clergyman, and referring, in the course of conversation, to his life in Washington, he said, “ And, by the way, what ever became of that young war minister of yours, Calhoun ? ” Lord Stratford de Redclyffe had grown gray in diplomacy, and in dealing with questions relating to foreign nations. He could, without doubt, have given the history of every despicable occupant of the throne of Turkey for the last fifty years, and could have told of every intrigue of the miserable court and cabinet of that wretched country. He could probably have repeated the name of every princeling in Germany. But he did not know what had become of his contemporary, Calhoun.

This little anecdote carries with it a moral worth drawing, even at the expense of digressing briefly. Calhoun was, in the first place, a most remarkable man, of great intellectual power. He moreover embodied, typified, and led one of the great social and political forces in the United States, which, in its conflict with other forces, produced a civil war, lasting four years, and affecting more or less every part of the civilized world. Of the people engaged in that war, and among whom Calhoun was a great leader, the ablest historian of England in the Eighteenth Century, Mr. Lecky, has said in his last volume, “ The future destinies and greatness of the English race must necessarily rest mainly with the mighty nation which has arisen beyond the Atlantic.” Unfortunately, the diplomatist in his ignorance, and not the historian with his thought and knowledge, is the typical Englishman. In the days of Dickens’s American Notes, Americans would have been annoyed by such a remark as that made by Lord Stratford de Redclyffe. Now they are amused. But it is worth the while of Englishmen to take the little anecdote on another side, and inquire whether ignorance of America, usually accompanied by arrogance, has paid in the long run. Ignorance of America brought England to her knees in Paris in 1782, gave a lasting shock to her naval reputation in 1812, and carried her commissioners to Washington in 1872, with an apology on their lips. This willful ignorance is really worth remedying, for if persisted in it may easily prove an even more costly luxury to England in the future.

Another foreign gentleman has not only differed from Lord Stratford de Redclyffe in thinking it worth his while to find out what became of the “ young war minister,”but he has embodied the results of his study and reflection in the admirable volume which forms the subject of the present notice.¹ Dr. Von Holst has made no attempt to give us a biography, in the ordinary sense of the term. We know scarcely more of the man Calhoun after reading this volume than before. A much better idea of the “ great nullifier ” as a living creature of flesh and blood can be obtained from Mr. Parton’s vigorous essay than from all the three hundred and fifty pages of Dr. Von Holst. We do not propose, however, to criticise Dr. Von Holst for what he has not done, for that is criticism of the most worthless sort. He has seen fid to study Calhoun in a certain way, and he has written a most interesting and valuable book, and made a most important contribution to American history.

If he has not given us a portrait of the man Calhoun, Dr. Von Holst has presented a most vivid picture of the working of Calhoun’s intellect upon the great problem which finally absorbed his whole vitality, and of his influence and meaning in the history of the United States. In his full development Calhoun was a fanatic, and therefore essentially a man of one idea. In a brief study of his life, it is therefore legitimate to treat him solely with reference to that idea. This is what Dr. Von Holst has done. He shows us Calhoun entering Congress as one of the young nationalists, as a leader of the war party. Again we see him after the war, still a nationalist, outstripping the Federalists in his zeal for a tariff, a bank, internal improvements, and the full exercise of all the powers of the central government. Then comes the great change, after he has attained the vice-presidency, — a change which Dr. Von Holst does not satisfactorily account for, and which is perhaps incapable of solution. Whether the pressure of opinion in his native State drove him on, or whether, as is more probable, he saw suddenly, with the eyes of a prophet, the doom of slavery, certain it is that from an advanced nationalist Calhoun became a nullifier, and the most extreme advocate of states rights. his aspirations for the presidency held him in check for a few years, and then came the breach with Jackson, which put an end to his hopes. “ Embittered, but free,” He henceforth went his way alone, and became the champion of slavery and the very incarnation of the slave-holding principle. It would seem as if a close study of mental development and a severe analysis of arguments must be dry. This is precisely the work to which Dr. Von Holst has devoted the bulk of his book, and it is not going too far to say that he has succeeded in making it extremely dramatic. We cannot help following with intense interest the progress of Calhoun’s reasoning. as we watch the steps by which he pushed the cause of slavery forward ; making always stronger claims, and winning one disastrous victory after another. First, he bent his whole force to the maintenance of the principle of nullification, and to the establishment of constitutional doctrines which would have resulted in what his biographer well calls the “ systematization of anarchy.” The principle that slavery was wholly the affair of the several States having been settled, the next step was to make it the duty of the general government to protect it, and thus give it a national character. Nothing is more striking, nothing shows more clearly the indestructible vitality and force of the national principle, than Calhoun ’s attempt to nationalize slavery. Slavery, according to its great defender, was municipal in one direction, national in another ; and this contradiction was but one of the many into which Calhoun fell, with all his relentless logic and finespun ingenious reasonings. Dr. Von Holst takes up every argument made by Calhoun on every part of the great question, and shows remorselessly the absurdity in which the master logician of politics always ended. The trouble was of course in the utter badness of the cause. Slavery was dying, at war with all sound principles, social and economical, and in deadly hostility to the spirit of the age. Yet Calhoun sought to make it the foundation, “ the only durable foundation,” as he himself said, of a free state. He soon discovered that constitutional doctrines did not go far enough, and he then stepped boldly on to broader grounds, and proclaimed that slavery was “ a good, a positive good.” His last act was to form a sectional party in support of slavery, which had always been sectional itself, but which had until then had a national party as its defender.

Calhoun did more than any man to make civil war inevitable and to prepare the way for secession, and yet his honest and sincere purpose was to preserve the Union and slavery. He was always prophesying that slavery in the Union was doomed, and therefore the Union was doomed, too; but he failed to see that the knell of human slavery, whether in or out of the Union, had sounded, and that when slavery came in conflict with the principle of union it would be ground to powder. In the struggle for Texas, when Calhoun, as secretary of state, by mad devotion to his cause, so falsified facts, leaving in this way the one blot on his unsullied personal integrity, he himself proclaimed the utter hopelessness of the war that he was waging. If the mere neighborhood of a free state was fatal to the continued existence of slavery, what hope could there be for such a system ? Yet Calhoun fought on. He marshaled his principles, he arrayed his forces, he rallied his State; and behind all is the dark, inexorable fate, the unrelenting facts, which must sooner or later crush to atoms the vile system and everything that supports it. This is the element which casts over Calhoun’s arguments and strategy a lurid light, and makes dry reasoning on constitutional and economical questions assume an intense dramatic interest. The life of Calhoun and the devotion of his splendid talents to the accursed service of slavery make up one of the saddest tragedies in modern history. We cannot praise Dr. Von Holst more highly than by saying that he has appreciated this fact, and has done justice to it.

We disagree with Dr. Von Holst in his statement that the fame of Clay and Webster is growing dimmer. Both of these distinguished men are beginning to be more justly judged, but they were both typical characters and great figures in our history. They shine with a softer, but with a not less powerful light than of old. At the same time, we quite agree with Dr. Von Holst that Calhoun’s fame burns with a fierce intensity which is lacking in the case of his two great rivals. This is characteristic of the man. With all his ability and power, he was narrow, and he was a fanatic. But he was above all things intense. So far as his influence extended, — and it went further than that of anybody else in connection with the one absorbing question of the day, — he left a deeper imprint than any of his contemporaries on the history of his time. Pure and austere in his life, sincere and bold in his convictions, powerful in intellect and character, John C. Calhoun will go down to posterity as the champion and the embodiment of one of the most evil principles in the history of mankind, and of an institution which, when it fell, had wrought more harm and had more sins to answer for than any social or political system known to the civilized world in modern times.