The only actual difference between the two great patriots was that to Calhoun the dread alternative of looking outside the union for defence and protection of home and fireside was commended by a cruel fate, while a kind fate withheld it from Webster.
I shall corroborate the foregoing by some pertinent excerpts from Calhoun’s speeches in the United States senate. And as my purpose is to build everywhere in this book, as far as possible, upon only the most obvious facts and to vouch therefor the most accessible authorities, I take the excerpts from quotations made by Von Holst:
“It is to us a vital question. It involves not only our liberty, but, what is greater (if to freeman anything can be), existence itself. The relation which now exists between the two races in the slaveholding States has existed for two centuries. It has grown with our growth, and strengthened with our strength. It has entered into and modified all our institutions, civil and political. None other can be substituted. We will not, cannot, permit it to be destroyed.... Come what will, should it cost every drop of blood and every cent of property, we must defend ourselves; and if compelled, we should stand justified by all laws, human and divine; ... we would act under an imperious necessity. There would be to us but one alternative,—to triumph or perish as a people.”[58]
“To destroy the existing relations would be to destroy this prosperity [of the southern States] and to place the two races in a state of conflict, which must end in the expulsion or extirpation of one or the other. No other can be substituted compatible with their peace or security. The difficulty is in the diversity of the races.... Social and political equality between them is impossible. The causes lie too deep in the principles of our nature to be surmounted. But, without such equality, to change the present condition of the African race, were it possible, would be but to change the form of slavery.”[59]
“He must be blind, indeed, who does not perceive that the subversion of a relation which must be followed with such disastrous consequences can be effected only by convulsions that would devastate the country, burst asunder the bonds of union, and engulf in a sea of blood the institutions of the country. It is madness to suppose that the slaveholding States would quietly submit to be sacrificed. Every consideration—interest, duty, and humanity, the love of country, the sense of wrong, hatred of oppressors and treacherous and faithless confederates, and, finally, despair—would impel them to the most daring and desperate resistance in defence of property, family, country, liberty, and existence.”[60]
The student unfamiliar with the confederate side of the brothers’ war can find the whole of it clearly stated in these short passages re-enforced by the cognate ones quoted above from the speech of March 4, 1850. The maintenance of the then existing relations between white and black was vital both to liberty and existence. Because of the world-wide diversity of the two races they cannot be socially or politically equal (a subject which we will deal with specially after a while). And it was the duty of the south to fight to the bitter end “in defence of property, family, country, liberty, and existence.” This is the marrow of the quotations. They convincingly show not only the grasp of the statesman, but the prescience of the prophet, as has been plainly proved by the brothers’ war and what followed in its track.
Opposition to the tariff, which in his judgment favored the manufacturing at the expense of the staple States, seems to have been the first thing that led Calhoun to take a pro-Southern stand in politics.[61] It finally produced the famous nullification episode, which we have already somewhat discussed. In this his platform was simply anti-tariff. But the current, without his being aware of it, was carrying him resistlessly and rapidly on into the anti-abolition career in which his life ended. It was the petition presented in 1835 to congress against slavery in the District of Columbia which, it seems, was the first thing that opened his eyes to the menace of abolition. Note his wonderful foresight. Compare him with Cicero just before the outbreak of the war between Pompey and Cæsar; or with Demosthenes before Philip discloses his purpose towards Greece; or with Carl Marx, predicting the future of co-operative enterprise. Cicero almost foresees nothing—he mostly fears; Marx is utterly mistaken. The divination of Demosthenes is far superior, and it is clear; yet it is belated when it comes. But Calhoun sees with “appalling clearness,” as Von Holst says, all the storm-cloud from which tempest and tornado will ravage the entire land, just as its first speck shows on the horizon; and nobody else will see that. If this abolition movement is not stopped in its incipiency, it will soon get beyond all control. This he says over and over in his public place. What a horrible spectre of the future haunted him for the rest of his life! The south in her self-defence forced out of the union, and then perhaps overcome in war. After her braves have perished, and their dear ones at home have been plunged in the depths of want, the triumphant abolitionists will have the former slaves to lord it over them.
His conscience commanded him to stand by slavery as the fundamental condition of his people’s well-being; it also at the same time commanded him to strain all his energies to save the union by making it the protector instead of the assailant of slavery. This was the insuperable task which the powers in the unseen put him in the treadmill to do. From the time he commenced the discussion of the anti-slavery petitions until his exclamation over the “poor south,” on his death-bed, life was to him but a deepening agony of solicitude and utmost effort,—solicitude for his country and section, effort to avert the danger that became greater and more awful to him every day. He strove after remedies under the constitution. The more he recalled the success of the single stand of South Carolina against the tariff, the prouder he became of being the author of nullification. Its dearness to him was that it was peaceable as well as efficient. The better opinion of the State-rights school is that nullification is an absurdity, and that South Carolina’s only true remedy against the tariff was to secede if it were not repealed. But he knew better than everybody else that secession meant internecine war between the sections, and this influenced him to exalt peaceable nullification above bloody secession.
It needs not to consider each barrier, whether party combinations, admission of new slave States, legislation, etc., that he tried to erect against the incoming oceanic wave. But we must briefly consider the amendment of the constitution which he proposed. He wanted the north and the south each to have a president, as he said, “to be so elected, as that the two should be constituted the special organs and representatives of the respective sections in the executive department of the government; and requiring each to approve all the acts of congress before they shall become laws.”[62] Do this, he urged, and neither section can use the powers of government to injure the other, for whatever proposed law menaces a section will be vetoed by its president. It profits the student of the science of government to consider the historical examples which Calhoun adduced here. They are indeed so apt that the hearing which has ever been denied him should be granted him at least academically. He says: “The two most distinguished constitutional governments of antiquity both in respect to permanence and power had a dual executive. I refer to those of Sparta and Rome.”[63]