Had abolition been in charge of men, Calhoun, claiming, as appeared to them, the most palpable rights under current views of justice, under the constitution, under the law, and under patriotic duty, would have prevailed. He never understood, no more than the abolitionists themselves did, that providence was making an instrument of abolition to remove the only danger to the American union, and that providence was not under human constitutions, laws, and convictions of duty. As you meditate this superhuman achievement of the true citizen in his last stand for his doomed section, does it not help you to appreciate better the high saying of the Greeks, that the struggle of a good man against fate is the most elevating of all spectacles?
The speeches that will find place in the selection suggested above will not enrapture the reader with the proud diction, learning, ornateness, and exquisite finish of Webster, but he will find them everywhere to be proofs of the dictum of Faust:
“Es trägt Verstand and rechter Sinn
Mit wenig Kunst sich selber vor;
Und wenn’s euch Ernst ist, was zu sagen,
Ist’s nöthig, Worten nachzujagen?”[57]
He will also note that many of the wisest and most eloquent passages are almost the extreme of choice, but chaste and severe, expression. Here read aloud the passage as to Washington quoted above from the speech of March 4, 1850, and you will hardly dissent.
America owes it to Calhoun to publish a cheap edition of his best speeches, and also of his “Dissertation on Government.”
A word as to the “Dissertation” and the “Discourse on the Constitution of the United States.” The project of these two books lay close to his heart for many years. He intended them as his last admonitions to the people of the great republic. Doubtless the special object of his retirement was to finish them, but he had to return to the senate. What we have of the books was written in the little leisure which he snatched from the pressure of public duties, domestic affairs, and ill-health. The resoluteness with which, in the midst of these difficulties, he worked at the self-imposed task proves a lofty and unselfish love. He did not finish them to his satisfaction. Darwin did not do that with his epoch-making “Origin of Species,” for he found there was no need to do so. I believe that, as the essentials of the belonging part of evolution are all to be found in the “Origin of Species,” so all the essentials of Calhoun’s great doctrine of government are fully set forth in his two books. To me the “Dissertation” seems complete. I note with pleasure that, though slowly, it is steadily climbing to the lofty height which is its due place in the world’s estimation. And the “Discourse”—of which he did not live to finish the final draft—surely leads all the productions of the State sovereignty school. The providence which opposed his wishes was kind to his country, to the world, and to himself in calling him from his desk; for it allowed him to get Texas and Oregon for us, to give mankind his Oregon speech, and his last, and thus to finish his good work and make his fame full.
The foregoing is intended to influence my readers to turn away from Von Holst, who wrote Calhoun’s life, with the smoke and dust of the brothers’ war still in his eyes, and from Trent, who merely says ditto to Mr. Burke, to Stephens, to the great Webster, to the touching “Carolina Tribute,” to the happy and appreciative sketch of Pinkney, to the man himself and his grand career, in order to find the facts and principles by which one of America’s very greatest ought to be judged. And I do hope that they now begin to discern that Calhoun was nothing at all of a doctrinaire, nor chop-logic, nor fanatic, nor professional politician, nor ignorant and over-zealous partisan, but was the very height of practical talent and an extraordinarily successful man of affairs, of more than Roman integrity, conscientious and diligent beyond almost all others in the duties of his place, and a foremost statesman of wide and profound culture. Whether I have accomplished my design or not, let me beg you to read for yourself with careful attention what Webster said of him in the United States senate just after his death. Remember two things as you read: (1) The speaker and the dead had been opposed to one another in politics for more than twenty years, the former being the great exponent of free-labor nationalization and the other the great exponent of slave-labor nationalization; (2) nobody ever weighed his public utterances more carefully than did Webster, and that he would not say anything which he did not believe, even as a politeness.
Let us now try to follow with proper discernment this man whom we hope we have proved to be good and wise through his titanic defence of the cause which fate had decreed must fail. As our explanation of how evolution, and not the north on one side nor the south on the other, brought forward the crisis in which slavery, the sole menace of American dismemberment, was to perish, is so nearly complete, we can be much briefer in the rest of the chapter.
The true beginning here is with the proposition that everything which Calhoun did as the southern leader was prompted by a righteous conscience and the highest and most unselfish patriotism. He was the very first to discern the full menace of abolition to the welfare of the people he represented. And when years afterwards the situation became darker and more serious, and more and more importunately put to him the question, If abolition can be avoided only by leaving the union, what ought the south to do? he answered to himself, with the fullest approval of his conscience, she must go out; for manifestly it is her paramount duty to protect her citizens against any such invasion of their rights as abolition. But he had no illusion as to peaceable secession; and he likewise worshipped the union, believing with deepest conviction that it is far better for neighboring communities to be federated than independent. And the memories of the great American history were as sweet to him as they were to Webster. To sum up, only one thing in his opinion could justify secession. That was control of the federal government by the abolitionists. If that comes, the south must seek her independence, even if it is beyond a sea of blood.
Abolition was on its way then to overturn the supports of comfort and domestic peace in the south, as it afterwards did. Suppose Webster had seen the imminence of such a dreadful evil to New England, would he not have felt that his duty to his section was now the great thing? My brother who wore the blue, ought he not to have so felt? If the union had been turned into a course which would not only impoverish and beggar the people of New England, but would for long years actually deprive the masses of those modes of business and labor by which they were subsisting themselves and their families, can it be thought that Webster, with his exalted admiration of the fathers, who endured all privations to win liberty from their oppressors, would not have been heart and soul for secession?