It is interesting to be informed that those same wise Iroquois from whom our fathers probably got the precedent of the old confederation, put in practice something very like what Calhoun advises. We append both the account and instructive comment of Morgan:
“When the Iroquois confederacy was formed, or soon after that event, two permanent war-chiefships were created and named.... As general commanders they had charge of the military affairs of the confederacy, and the command of its joint forces when united in a general expedition.... The creation of two principal war-chiefs instead of one, and with equal power, argues a subtle and calculating policy to prevent the domination of a single man even in their military affairs. They did without experience precisely as the Romans did in creating two consuls instead of one, after they had abolished the office of rex. Two consuls would balance the military power between them, and prevent either from becoming supreme. Among the Iroquois this office never became influential.”[64]
But Calhoun lays much more stress upon another example,—that of the protection which the Roman plebeians got in tribunes elected from their own order alone, which tribunes could veto any act of the lawmaking organs, all of which were then actually in the hands of their oppressors, that is, the order of patricians; the result being that in course of time the plebeians achieved equality.[65]
Of course the inevitable could not be put off. And yet ought we not to admire the inventive genius of the statesman who of all proposed the remedy that promised the best? And ought we not also to cherish in affectionate memory this last and high effort of Calhoun to avert a dreadful brothers’ war at hand, the end and consequences of which nobody could then forecast?
The situation of Rome granting tribunes to the plebs was widely different from ours. That was a case of giving a veto to one class only, and to a class which belonged to the entire body politic. Calhoun proposed not a single veto, but two; neither one to be given such a class as we have just mentioned, but a veto to each one of two geographical divisions, in one of which there was a developed, and in the other a nascent and almost complete, nationality, these two nationalities already closed with each other in a life and death grapple. His hope must have been to confine the combatants to an arena which could be effectually policed by the civil power, and in which all fighting except with buttoned foils be prevented. We may be almost sure that his heart broke when that presentiment which often comes to the dying as clear as sunlight revealed the bloody war that was quickening its approach.
O the unutterable pathos of his life from 1835 to 1850! During this time he was like the mother of a boy whom consumption has marked for its own. In advance of all others she reads the first symptom, nay, she anticipates it. All those who believe that they know him as well as she does, laugh at her fears with unsympathetic incredulity. But her eyes never fail to see grim death at the door, although bravely she hopes against hope, and fights, fights, fights. Inexorably, relentlessly the end, which others now begin to discern, comes on, but until the last breath of her darling she has ever some suggestion of change of place or climate, of a new remedy, of something else to be done. It is the supreme tragedy of her trial that while outwardly she is all self-gratifying love, inwardly she is all self-consuming misery. We say the love of a mother is greater than all other. But we know that she loves her country better than she does her child. Patriotism is as yet the strongest love of all. Realize that our exalted patriot was tending and nursing the cause of his country. Think of the noble Lee, his career of victory over, wearing away the winter at Petersburg, hourly expecting his line, so tensely stretched in order to face overwhelming odds, to break; think of him after it does break, on the retreat, when he has discovered that his supplies have gone wrong; and think of him when he must yield the sword as ever memorable as Hannibal’s. The world has given Lee, and will long give him, rains of gracious tears. But he was never plagued with Calhoun’s sharpened eyes to future disaster, and he was confident that he would reach the mountains almost until the very moment of surrender. Think rather of the great sufferers for high causes,—Bonnivard, wearing a pathway over the stone floor of his prison; Lear, of all of Shakspeare’s heroes, in the deepest gulf of misfortune; and especially of Calvary and the crucifixion, for Jesus travailed for his brothers and sisters. It is here you must look for the like of Calhoun. For fifteen years that “mass of moan” which was coming to his dear ones pierced his ears plainer and plainer and made his heart sicker and sicker, and during this long bloody sweat he gave the rarest devotion and self-sacrifice to his country which he feared more and more was to plunge over the precipice. As we recall the scene of his death it makes us rejoice to know that the cross he had borne so long has at last been cast off and he has entered into the rest of the martyr-patriot. Then it occurs to us that he carried with him his affections,—too lofty not to be immortal,—and we cannot believe that the sad spirit ever smiled until Wade Hampton, twenty-six years afterwards, re-erected white domination in South Carolina.
Dixie will never forget that one who of all her sons loved her best and suffered for her the most. And it is my conviction that each noblest soul of the north will after a while revere in Calhoun the American parallel to the moral grandeur of Dante, of whom Michaelangelo said he would cheerfully endure his exile and all his misfortunes for his glory.