Some men reserve out of the pillage of their fellows a great fund to signalize their graves. Stronger cars must be made, bridges strengthened, and too narrow passages avoided by long circuits in order that their huge piles be transported to the conspicuous spot selected in a fashionable cemetery. How the funerals which a weeping people give a Calhoun, Liebknecht, Pingree, Altgeld, and other true ones dwindle such monuments into smallness and contempt!
I must add something here to what has been said in the foregoing of Calhoun’s speeches. Somebody must after a while do for him what the compilation called “The Great Speeches and Orations” has done so well for Webster. His very greatest effort is that against the force bill, delivered in the United States senate February 15 and 16, 1833. As an appeal in behalf of the rights of the minority against the oppressive majority it is unequalled. All through it, from its most befitting exordium to the righteous indignation of the closing sentence, there are passages which “the world will not willingly let die.” No one who has ever given it attention can forget the paragraph defending Carolina against the charge of passion and delusion; that demolishing as by a tornado the assertion of a senator that the bill was a measure of peace; the far-famed one as to metaphysical reasoning; what is said as to the nature of the contest between Persia and Greece; the rupture in the tribes of Israel graphically expounded; the first mention of the government of “the concurring majority” as distinct from and far better than that of the absolute majority; the lesson to us of the Roman tribunes. To read this speech becomingly, purge yourself of all prejudice; by an adequate effort of the historical imagination see all the main things of the then situation, and put yourself fully in Calhoun’s place; so that you cannot fail to feel all of his deep earnestness. You will have succeeded when you can rightly appreciate this outburst:
“Will you collect money when it is acknowledged that it is not wanted? He who earns the money, who digs it from the earth with the sweat of his brow, has a just title to it against the universe. No one has a right to touch it without his consent except his government, and this only to the extent of its legitimate wants. To take more is robbery; and you propose by this bill to enforce robbery by murder.”
When I pronounced that against the force bill, the greatest of his speeches, I was not unmindful of his last, that of March 4, 1850, not four weeks before his death. I can hardly class it as a speech. It was a revelation of the woe in store for America if the abolition movement was not checked. Its analysis and demonstration of the preponderant power of the north, and its retrospection over the progressive stages by which the former equilibrium of the sections had been destroyed, are as clear-sighted as its prediction. Never in all history has an actor in a revolution described its course behind him so understandingly, nor its future course with such true prophecy.
Let us give you the fewest possible selected brief passages that will do something towards possessing you of the core of Calhoun’s valedictory to the United States and the South.
This is first in order: “How can the union be saved? There is but one way by which it can with any certainty; and that is by a full and final settlement, on the principles of justice, of all the questions at issue between the two sections. The south asks for justice, simple justice, and less she ought not to take. She has no compromise to offer but the constitution, and no concession or surrender to make.”
The vital concern of his section against abolition, and what it must do to avoid it, he tells in these passages:
“[The South] regards the relation [of master and slave] as one which cannot be destroyed without subjecting the two races to the greatest calamity, and the section to poverty, desolation, and wretchedness, and accordingly she feels bound, by every consideration of interest and safety, to defend it.”
“Is it not certain that if something is not done to arrest it [the abolition movement], the south will be forced to choose between abolition and secession?”
If the south must choose secession, he justifies her by the example of Washington, with a calm and repose that prove his deepest conviction of its rightfulness, and with a power that cannot be confuted. He says: