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Over the last two weeks a truly fascinating fight over the legacy of John C. Calhoun has erupted between two conservative publications, @amconmag and @nro. I'd love to write about this somewhere (know someone?). A thread.
This piece by @HunterDeRensis in @amconmag touched it off. DeRensis notes attacks on "minority rule" from the left, and warns that the left's ultimate goal is "the dismantling of institutional barriers to raw, uninhibited majority-rule." https://www.theamericanconservative.com/articles/the-case-for-minority-obstructionism/
"Republicans ought to straighten their backs against this fetishization of democracy," DeRensis writes, "And they’ll find guidance in one of the first-rate minds of the nineteenth century." Who is that, you ask? John C. Calhoun.
A few days later, @CameronHilditch responded in @NRO, calling Calhoun exactly the wrong person for modern conservatives to look to, especially on account of Calhoun's rejection of natural rights theory. https://www.nationalreview.com/2020/10/john-c-calhoun-wrong-example-for-modern-conservatives/
Calhoun, Hilditch writes, was a "foaming-at-the-mouth racist, a Hegelian Jacobin [you'd have to read it to understand] who spent his life and career trafficking in post-hoc rationalizations for human subjugation."
@jaynordlinger signal boosted the article, describing Calhoun as a "brainy racist" https://twitter.com/jaynordlinger/status/1316382998837821444
Part of @NROs sensitivity about Calhoun might stem from Sam Tanenhaus's 2013 article tying Calhoun to W.F. Buckley, NRO, and the modern conservative movement. https://newrepublic.com/article/112365/why-republicans-are-party-white-people
It was a charge that @JonahDispatch took strong issue with at the time, I should add. https://www.nationalreview.com/magazine/2013/03/25/sams-smear/
Nevertheless, Hilditch poked the hornet's nest. And yesterday @LeeCheek and @JohnGGrove1 responded to Hilditch in @amconmag, attacking his characterizations of Calhoun as "Hegelian" or "Jacobin" and defending Calhoun's conservative bona fides. https://www.theamericanconservative.com/articles/the-eternal-insight-of-john-c-calhoun/
Central to Cheek and Grove's defense is their claim that Calhoun offered "a moderate defense of slavery that was thoroughly mainstream for his day."
And while I agree with Cheek and Grove in some of their critiques, that's where I have to raise my hand.
If you read the Senate record of the 1837 speech in which Calhoun defended slavery as a "positive good," you see that he was attacking ANOTHER SLAVEHOLDER, Senator William Cabell Rives of Virginia, who had made the traditional "necessary evil" apology. https://memory.loc.gov/cgi-bin/ampage?collId=llrd&fileName=026/llrd026.db&recNum=364
After Calhoun finished, Rives responded that he did not subscribe to this "new school" of slavery's defenders, and cited "Washington, Jefferson, Madison, Marshall,” slaveholders all, who had “lamented the existence of slavery as a misfortune and an evil to their country.”
Rives, a fellow slaveholder, told Calhoun "you shock the generous sentiments of human nature, you go counter to the common sense of mankind, you outrage the spirit of the age.” That's how radical Calhoun's argument was.
Henry Clay, another slaveholder, thought Calhoun's argument was “indefensible, unintelligible, and brings reproach upon us." What he and Rives meant, in part, was Calhoun's rejection of natural rights theory.
But Calhoun who won out in the end. In 1861 when Alexander Stephens gave his famous "cornerstone speech, declaring the Confederacy founded on "the great truth that the negro is not equal to the white man" and that slavery was a natural and beneficial state, he nodded to this...
"Many who hear me, perhaps, can recollect well, that this truth was not generally admitted, even within their day.” Who had been the most influential person in making that position popular? Most people there that day knew.
There's lots that modern conservatives need to ponder about Calhoun. And not only conservatives I would argue. He wasn't a Hegalian or a Jacobin, to be sure, but neither was he a moderate on slavery.
And if you've read this far, just preorder the damn book. https://www.amazon.com/dp/0465096441/ref=cm_sw_r_tw_dp_x_LyWJFb2KSCV1B
