Today is John C. Calhoun’s 243 birthday. Several years ago, I took some time to visit John C. Calhoun’s grave in Charleston, SC., a massive stone monument at St. Philip’s Episcopal Church erected in the 1880s to honor the State’s greatest son. Calhoun’s body had been exhumed three times, once from Washington D.C. after he died in 1850 so it could be moved back to South Carolina, once to protect it from marauding Union soldiers during the War (he was placed in an unmarked grave), and once again to return it to the “strangers” section of St. Philip’s after the Yankees went home. He never attended St. Philip’s, and he was not a native of Charleston, making him a “stranger” to the city. Calhoun called the Abbeville district in South Carolina home. His plantation, Ft. Hill, is at the center of the Clemson University campus. Charlestonians used to be suspicious of outsiders. It should have stayed that way.
While I was standing under the tree which shades his tomb, a non-Charleston family walked into the cemetery, examined Calhoun’s grave, and in their northern Midwest accent remarked, “John C. Calhoun. I wonder who that is? Oh, he was Vice-President. Come here, kids, look at the Vice-President.”
At least they showed a bit of respect. These Northerners could be tolerated.
Not so for the Yankees. They came back, and what they couldn’t accomplish during the War–the desecration of Calhoun’s grave–has since been managed by those who pulled down his monument at Marion Square in 2020. If you can’t dig up the dead man, remove any monument to his legacy. The majority of the monument now rests in an undisclosed warehouse to prevent vandalism and further destruction, a potential problem from the time it was constructed in 1896.
Modern activists will explain that Calhoun needs to be removed from the public sphere because he represents a dark chapter in American history. If you polled establishment “historians” about Calhoun, I can guarantee that over ninety percent would simply label him the “defender of slavery”. Most have probably never read anything written by the man but excerpts from his now infamous “Positive Good” speech in 1837.
For people like Heather Cox Richardson or Larry Arnn, two people on supposedly opposite ends of the political spectrum, Calhoun represents different demons in American history.
Arnn, the President of Hillsdale College, would argue that Calhoun betrayed the real founding of the United States and advanced Hegelian positions that have become ingrained in the modern Democratic Party, i.e. minority rights, special interest groups, etc. and a nefarious “theory of State’s Rights” at odds with the Constitution. Arnn’s sidekick and host of the “Hillsdale Dialogue”, Hugh Hewitt, calls Calhoun “evil.” Arnn certainly read Calhoun’s Disquisition, but his positions on Calhoun are so ahistorical and filled with so many mistakes that no one should take him seriously, particularly American conservatives.
Richardson was Joe Biden’s court historian, and claims that you can draw a direct line from Calhoun to Barry Goldwater to Donald Trump in her book How the South Won the Civil War. For all of her faults, Richardson is correct that Lincoln and the Republican Party of the 1860s were the progressives of their day. Calhoun was the outlier, a “heretic” that was as dangerous in 1850 as Trump is in 2025. Arnn would disagree with Richardson on Lincoln, and he would contest that Calhoun had any influence on the modern Republican Party, but this explains the unified opposition from American ideological historians in relation to not only Calhoun, but much of Southern history. In other words, Arnn and Hewitt really aren’t that “conservative.”
How should we remember Calhoun? Clyde Wilson, the foremost authority on the great man, has called him a “Statesman for the 21st Century.”
Calhoun has much to offer modern America. His “concurrent majority” offers a solution to razor thin “numerical majorities” and would force the general government to shrink. A super majority to pass any legislation would ensure that only necessary spending bills would make it to the President’s desk for a signature. They would be few and far between. It would also maintain the federalism the founding generation considered to be the only reasonable way to organize a government over so large a territory. Calhoun understood that the “compact theory” was in reality a “compact fact.” He made clear that his political philosophy was grounded in the “Republican school” of “Jefferson, Madison and Monroe.” He emphasized in 1837 in a speech on the support of Michigan as a free and sovereign State, that he was a “conservative in its broadest and fullest sense…and because I am a conservative I am a State rights man.” Of course, by States, Calhoun did not mean the “State” as a corporate person with sovereignty. He insisted in 1833 that the “people of the States” had the final authority, as the Constitution was created by them as “separate and sovereign communities and not as a mass–as a single community.” This position was no different than what John Taylor of Caroline or St. George Tucker or, frankly, almost any man in favor of the Constitution argued in 1788.
About a decade earlier, he explained his understanding of American government in a letter to Virginia Representative Robert S. Garnett, Sr.:
If there is one portion of the Constitution, which I most admire, it is the distribution of power between the State and General governments. It is the only portion, that is novel and peculiar. The rest has been more, or less copied; this is our invention and is altogether our own, and I consider it to be the greatest improvement, which has been made in the science of government, after the division of power into Legislative, Executive and judicial. Without it, free States in the present condition of the world could not exist, or must have existed without safety, or respectability. If limited to a small territory, they must be crushed by the great monarchical powers, or exist only at their discretion; but if extend[ed] over a great surface, the concentration of power and patronage necessary for government would speedily end in tereny [sic; tyranny]. It is only by this admirable distribution, that a great extent of territory, with a proportional population and power can be reconciled with freedom and consequently, that safety and respectability be given to free States. As much then, as I value freedom, in the same degree, do I value State rights. But it is not only in the abstract, that I admire the distribution of power between the general government and the States. I approve of the actual distribution of the two powers, which is made by our Constitution. Were it in my power I would make no change.
Twenty years later, Calhoun wrote:
…that my adherence to the great conservative doctrine of State interposition, and confidence in its efficiency when properly called into action was never stronger than at present. I entertain no doubt that the salvation of our Union and the permanency of our free institutions depend on it. There can be no delusion great, than to hope to secure the one, or preserve the other, without it. As much as I value our Union and our glorious Federal system, in the same degree do I value State interposition, as the only means by which they can be saved.
These arguments are timeless. Could anyone argue that Calhoun did not correctly predict in 1824 that, “the concentration of power and patronage” has “speedily” ended in tyranny?
But being correct is not enough.
When “conservatives” like Arnn and Hewitt call Calhoun “evil”, they are unknowingly (or perhaps knowingly) providing fodder for leftists like Richardson. Hewitt’s idiotic insistence that the Calhoun statue in Charleston needed to be removed has no positive outcome. They can call Calhoun an evil Democrat enslaver, and Richardson will agree by insisting that the Democrats of the 1850s were the modern Republicans of today. Calhoun would have been opposed to Lincoln, a man she says the left can clearly claim as their own. These “conservative” tricks will not and cannot work.
Conservatives who run from Calhoun tragically abandon real American conservatism and embrace the discarded positions of their once leftist heroes like the Republicans of the 1860s.
If American conservatives really understood Calhoun and not some absurd establishment caricature of the man, the United States would be suffering from the massive debt, political anger, and tyrannical central authority of the twenty-first century. Nancy Pelosi would be as irrelevant as Donald Trump.
That is why these Lincolnians on both sides need Calhoun to rest peacefully under the shade of a tree or to remain in a warehouse and his relevant arguments erased from American history. Better to call him the “defender of slavery” than to wrestle with his cogent and historical political philosophy. When most Americans could not identify John C. Calhoun, and those that could, would certainly mention the word “slavery”, they win.
But in the end, America loses.
We, at the Abbeville Institute, continually try to change that. The Abbeville Institute is one of the only organizations that attempts to correct the establishment narrative on Calhoun.
If you like what we do, please consider a tax deductible contribution to the Abbeville Institute. We appreciate your generous support.
“John C. Calhoun. I wonder who that is?…”
I have always had the opinion that Hillsdale (with Hugh Hewitt et al) is a comic book college filled with histrionics of the past rather than history. A few years back they (it) were certain that John Kennedy was a “liberal” Democrat. Whether he was or wasn’t, his respect for Calhoun is, and was, well-known.
Conservative, or liberal, JFK at least had a respect for history and truth.
“Surely in the United States of America, where brother once fought against brother, we did not judge a man’s bravery under fire by examining the banner under which he fought.”
John Kennedy.
Don’t forget McKinley (a Union officer), Cleveland, Roosevelt, Wilson, Coolidge, FDR, Truman, Ike, Reagan… all spoke admiringly of Southerners. Some more than others, some merely giving us the benefit of the doubt, maybe. That’s good too.
Even Bill Clinton praised the United Daughters of the Confederacy for their achievements. There is a joke in there somewhere.
the more i understand of calhoun…on weighty issues he seems to lead the way. mega majority or nothing moves forward at the general govt level….and as a states rights man….that isn’t just confined to some slave issue.