Statesmen of the old South; or From radicalism to conservative revolt

Front matter

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Preface

THE substance of the following papers has been presented in the form of popular lectures at the University of California, the University of Indiana, the University of Chicago, Richmond and Randolph Macon Colleges and it cannot be expected that the treatment of these interesting Southern leaders of the olden time will be found entirely free from the defects of the lecture method. Still it is hoped that the point of view and the interpretation of certain facts and conditions of the Southern and national evolution may justify the publication of these studies.

The author is under obligations to Mr. C. D. Johns, of the University of Chicago, for reading the entire proof and for making the index.

Wm. E. DodD:

University of Ghiicago July 20, 191 1

Contents

Preface vii

Thomas Jefferson i

Index 239

II

In 1824 Calhoun was as popular in Pennsylvania as was Jackson, and friends in that state were the first to bring forward the South Carolina candidate for the presidency, and he in turn was not averse to assuring manufacturing interests in the North that he was as good a protectionist as Clay or Adams. But Jackson was the idol already of the Southwest, Tennessee, western Georgia, Alabama and Mississippi. The ruthless policy of the hero of New Orleans toward the Indians stimulated the border appetite for new lands, and what delighted the Southwest pleased also the Northwest where the presence of the Indians was as unwelcome as in Georgia. Jackson's fame had been greatly enhanced by his exploits in Florida and he was rather liked for his summary hanging of a few foreigners, especially Englishmen and Spaniards, even if it jeopardized the peace of the country ; and the more the older leaders like Clay attacked the bold general the more resolutely the people called for Jackson as their future standard bearer. Nothing was clearer in early 1824 than that Jackson had won the lasting friendship of the West.

As Calhoun was stronger in the older section of the country and especially in the older South, he joined his forces to those of the older candidate, being convinced — and in fact Jackson repeatedly declared that he was too old to run for the presidency — that four years later the West would appreciate his conduct and he would be made president. Thus we have the first understanding, the first practical agreement, whereby the West was to support the South and Calhoun in the presidential game. Calhoun was chosen vice-president, receiving almost unanimous support, while Jackson was, as the rough charges of the day would have it, defrauded of the presidency by a bargain consummated in the House of Representatives between Clay and Adams. This made a new trial of strength between Adams and Jackson certain and Calhoun kept aloof from the conflict though he was regarded as a friend of the

I doughty general. Clay continued his almost disreputable effort to consolidate the North, East and .West in his own behalf by urging a tariff as absurdly high as even the wool growers could ask. Calhoun was compelled to sacrifice much of his strength in the North in order to retain even a remnant of his popularity in the South where the opposition to the tariff had become almost fanatical. Still Calhoun was elected vice-president with Jackson as president in 1828 and almost without opposition. He was everywhere regarded as the successor to Jackson in 1832 if only the tariff quarrel should not upset all plans.

However, the way of the politician is as hard as the rewards are sometimes high. Calhoun must bring Jackson to a low tariff view and he must keep his South Carolina people "in hand'* until the President could effect the change. But Jackson was not willing to sacrifice his following in Pennsylvania which Clay was hoping he would do in order to please South Carolina. The West, his base of operations, was not aroused about the tariff anyway. On the other hand South Carolina had, even then, a reputation for having 8 things her own way and particularly now that the enemies of Calhoun had such a good chance to punish him for his too broad nationalism. The tomahawk was therefore taken up with vigor in the Palmetto state in 1827-28. William Smith who had been accused of profiting to the extent of $25,000 from Hamilton's funding system, when the former was a member of the House, and who had taken "orders from the Treasury," now came out boldly against Calhoun and all his ways. President Thomas Cooper of the College of South Carolina, who had made so much difficulty for John Adams in 1800, also took up the hatchet. Before the assembly of the legislature of 1828, it seemed that a great majority of the people of the state were ready to repudiate Calhoun. McDuffie and Cheves, both former nationalists, now repudiated what Calhoun had so long stood for. The Vice-President's one redeeming act had been his deciding vote in the Senate in 1827, which defeated the tariff bill of that year.

Calhoun's ambition for the presidency was indeed about to encounter rough sailing; his polit-

JOHN C. CALHOUN iiS

ical existence was even in the greatest danger. How could he stem the tide ?

Such a crisis as this had been evident perhaps to astute men from the beginning, for he had always to reckon upon an alliance of the South and West, and the West, in the nature of things, must favor a tariff in order to secure to the national government the revenue to build her highways to eastern markets; besides Kentucky and Ohio and even Indiana and Illinois were not averse to a high tariff on commodities which they did not consume, and which was supposed to secure them a high price for their hides. The Clay scheme of a union between the West and the North was now as natural as had been the similar cooperation of the South and West in Jefferson's day. The two sections, however friendly, could not work together now that the South had come to oppose almost unanimously the so-called "American system" which Clay had long advocated.

South Carolina, to make matters worse, was hastening along the road which led to revolution when the whole country would be against her.

ii6 STATESMEN OF THE OLD SOUTH

Her remedy for the tariff was refusal to obey the law ; the port of Charleston was to decline to pay the customs which the federal law exacted. This m.eant war. To prevent this Calhoun cast himself into the breach. He wrote the South Carolina Exposition of 1828 which the legislature adopted as the language of the state without giving out the name of the distinguished author. The Exposition found a way to nullify national law without violating the constitution ! The state, all states, had a reserved right to refuse obedience to so-called national law^s enacted in violation of the national constitution and the state, not the federal courts, was to decide when a law was unconstitutional ! This was what South Carolina desired, for, though her people are and were then brave as any in the world, war with the federal government was not sought. Meanwhile Calhoun was to do what ''in him lay" to hasten Jackson's favorable action on the tariff, while the people of the state refrained from all hostile movements until he had ample time to move. Calhoun was thus the link between Columbia and Washington, the only guarantee of peace in South Carolina. It was a fearful responsibility but Calhoun was compelled to assume it; yet all his good intentions proved unavailing. The right and patriotic course was the one Calhoun selected and had this course been followed Calhoun must have succeeded Jackson as president and South Carolina would not have risked nullification. An evil day it was that broke the friendly feeling between the President and the Vice-President, and a still more unfortunate one when Clay in 1832, declared he would have his high tariff increased once more, against "the South, the Democratic party, and the devil. "^

Calhoun held impetuous South Carolina in tow from 1828 to 1832, and this was a feat which not only showed the great powder of the man but his love for the nation. What he hoped to do was to bring congress to a reasonable tariff, say a general average of 20%, with which all the South would have been pleased and which would have been ample protection to Northern manufactures, and then, attaining the leadership of the country, go on with the great nationalizing work of knit- *McMaster: History of the United States, VI, 135.

ii8 STATESMEN OF THE OLD SOUTH

ting the South and West together. And in view of what the tariff has done for us and of Calhoun's unequaled influence and power as shown in after years, who will say this was not the correct course? It had been the union of the South and West which sustained Jefferson's administrations ; cooperation of South and West was still the basis of the national policy ; and there are those among us to-day who look for a solution of our twentieth century troubles only from a friendly understanding between these really democratic sections of the country.

But the sweets of high office proved very appetizing to Jackson. He did not feel so old at the end of his term as when he had first been named for president by his friend, WilHam B. Lewis, in 1823. And when Van Buren, the "boss" of New York, who had become almost necessary to the Administration, persuaded the New York Courier and Enquirer to call for a second term, he did not peremptorily decline to be a candidate. Calhoun's paper. The National Telegraph, opposed at once the New York proposition as premature. A newspaper controversy followed which must have aroused suspicions in the mind of the President. In March, 1830, Lewis drafted a petition, asking the President to ''stand a second time" and sent it to a friend in Pennsylvania. The document came to Washington in due time signed by sixty-eight politicians and prominent characters with no hint that its origin was not in the Keystone state. The "spontaneous" call from the great state of Pennsylvania was soon published in the leading papers of the country. Calhoun's suspicions were now aroused and he gave out word among his friends that the "old hero" must be opposed, and the Pennsylvania legislature refused to endorse unanimously the "spontaneous" call. But New York, by the same process of diligent cultivation, added the weight of her growing numbers to the demand that the President "sacrifice himself" for the party and the country. Calhoun was outclassed.

Meanwhile, however. Van Buren's friend, James A. Hamilton, son of Alexander Hamilton, had visited Georgia seeking to pacify William H. Crawford, bitter enemy of both Jackson and Calhoun. He learned there that Crawford, whom

Jackson credited with having sought to have him punished for his high-handed conduct in Florida in 1 8 19, had not opposed the General on that occasion but that Calhoun was the man who had done the fatal deed. With evidence of this in his possession, Hamilton consulted Lewis. Lewis, wise man that he was, kept his information eighteen months until Jackson had reason to suspect the South Carolinian of a "hasty" ambition. Then, as though it were only a small matter, he asked his chief if he had not known all along that Calhoun was his enemy. Astonished at what seemed to be true, Jackson ordered the letter, which Hamilton had brought back from Georgia two years before to be produced. Lewis coached Hamilton not to produce the letter but to secure one from Crawford direct which should settle the question at once.

Lewis' web was not complete and he held back the Georgia evidence. This was in the winter of 1829-30. Calhoun was endeavoring to hold South Carolina back "while he brought Jackson around," and prepared the way for his own succession. He stood as yet for protection in

Pennsylvania and for Internal improvements in the West. At this juncture the Peggy O'Neal gcandal reached a climax, and all the blame for the trouble about Mrs. Eaton, the former barmaid, now wife of Secretary Eaton of the Cabinet, was laid to Mrs. Calhoun's charge. Mrs. Eaton's reputation in Washington was of the worst; but this would have had no political significance if she had not suddenly become the wife of a member of the Cabinet. In this new role she must either be received in Washington society or be "snubbed." Since her husband was a Tennesseean and very intimate with the President, the latter alternative was exceedingly dangerous for any "Cabinet lady." Jackson was warned early of the coming storm; but storms either social or otherwise had no terrors for "Old Hickory." He decided to break a lance for Mrs. Eaton whom he declared to be as pure as fresh-driven snow, and woe to any one who opposed him.

Mrs. Calhoun came from an old Charleston family, and any one who has any knowledge of the Charleston aristocracy knows that no lady who hailed from that proud city would for a moment allow a Tennessee backwoods man to dictate to her in matters social, even if a husband's political fortunes were at stake. Mrs. Calhoun was the wife of the Vice-President. She was the most popular woman in Washington and her husband was the most popular man. If Mrs. Calhoun refused to recognize Mrs. Eaton it would be verydoubtful whether any other lady in the city would "know" her. And Mrs. Calhoun refused to recognize Mrs. Eaton and declined to take any suggestions, if any were offered, from her distinguished husband. The gauntlet was thrown down and Jackson hastened to take it up. On September lo, 1829, the President summoned a cabinet meeting to discuss Mrs. Eaton's case and to give his advisers his opinion which was practically a command to compel their ladies to visit the unwelcome recruit to Washington official life. Jackson's commands were for once ignored.

With Mrs. Calhoun the chief sinner in this matter, Calhoun's burdens became too great for the ordinary politician to bear — though Calhoun was no ordinary politician. The understanding about the succession rested upon the most unstable foundation and all Calhoun's plans for the future depended upon this understanding being carried out. It was an understanding much like that between Jefferson and Madison or Monroe and John Quincy Adams, except that Calhoun, not Jackson, was the greater partner. Never has there been a political agreement between public leaders in this country fraught with more possibility for good than this, and yet this was broken with the utmost disregard of truth and fair dealing.

Nothing shows more clearly the reality of this agreement than the personnel of the Cabinet. The Vice-President had named three members, Ingham, the Secretary of the Treasury, Branch, of the Navy, and Berrien, an anti-Crawford man from Georgia, Attorney-General. The remaining members. Van Buren, Eaton and Barry, the latter a particular enemy of Henry Clay, were attached to the President. The abler men, except Van Buren, were followers of Calhoun; and the great Treasury Department, with its army of important subordinates and many bank officials throughout the country, was held by his most intimate friend.

Under ordinary circumstances the Vice-President must have succeeded and this prospect was fully understood in South Carolina where the angry leaders were able to hold even themselves in restraint.

It was under this high pressure that Calhoun attended the famous dinner on Jefferson's birthday, April 13, 1830, and there heard the famous defiance from his chief which foreboded a complete break-up in the Administration. Jackson offered the toast: ''Our Federal Union: It must be preserved." Everyone saw that the shaft was aimed at the Vice-President and no one realized its significance more fully than the ambitious Carolinian. But on May i, the Crawford letter, applied for six months before, was received. It purported to give a faithful account of what transpired in the Monroe cabinet meeting of 1 8 18 in which Calhoun criticized Jackson's conduct in Florida. The President demanded an explanation of the "perfidy" of having opposed his interests. Jackson could not understand how any man could justly criticize any of his acts and he could not appreciate the honest anH faithful support which Calhoun had later given him. Crawford, who had long been a bitter enemy of the South CaroHna leader, had dealt this fatal blow, for with the President's opposition, there could be no chance for him to reach the White House in years to come. When the breach was complete Calhoun's friends resigned from the Cabinet, his paper, the Telegraph, was deprived of the support of the Administration and another organ, the Globe, was a little later established. Early in 183 1 the Administration which Calhoun had done so much to bring into existence and from which he had hoped so much, was rent asunder and the public knew that Calhoun and his friends were banished from court and in the highest disfavor. It was generally thought that the Peggy O'Neal affair had been the cause. Perhaps the first cause of the break had been the changed attitude of the President on the question of the succession. This change had been brought about by the intrigues of Lewis and Van Buren as well as by the love of power whicH grew upon Jackson with the passing of the years. It was already arranged that he was to have another term, that Van Buren was to succeed with two terms after which Benton of Missouri was to come in for eight years! The combination between the South and West which Jackson represented was not to be followed by a return of Southern men to the presidency but of Northern politicians who had been out of office too long already. The idea was to hold the West and the middle states together and destroy all chance of Clay's success. Van Buren was the only man who could carry on the work after 1837, for he controlled New York and would control Pennsylvania if a sufficiently liberal tariff allowance could be offered. It was natural therefore for Jackson to hate Nullification and denounce the state which he thought had given him his birth.

Calhoun in 1831, like Jefferson in 1798, presided over the Senate and from this throne of power he could checkmate and harass the headstrong President who had taken the bit in his teeth. Clay was returned to the Senate, after the sharpest fight of his life, in 1831, and while the imperious Kentuckian could not love the imperious Carolinian, both had good reason to loathe the * 'upstart and arrant martinet" of the White House. Before Clay's return to Washington in December, 1831, he had visited the Southwest and in New Orleans, Natchez, Memphis, he was received with an enthusiasm, an outpouring of the popular applause which convinced him that neither Jackson nor Calhoun was the master in that region. Later he received ovations in Ohio and Pennsylvania which remind the student of the great popular demonstrations which have been given in recent years to Bryan and Roosevelt. Clay entered the Senate in 1 83 1, convinced that nothing could prevent his election to the presidency the following autumn. Calhoun had watched the lower South with less scrutiny than South Carolina. Everywhere opposition to the tariff was growing, becoming almost fanatical in many of the older and more populous sections. At Hampden Sidney College, Virginia, the students resolved unanimously not to wear the "protected" clothing of the North and on commencement occasions in South Carolina and Georgia, men like George McDuffie appeared in homespun while their negro valets wore discarded broadcloth! Was Calhoun to be blamed if he, too, counted on the support of most Southern states? Had not the legislatures of every state from the Potomac to the Mississippi declared the tariff of 1828 both outrageous and contrary to the intentions of the founders of the republic? Calhoun thought that when he chose to make the issue the President and not himself would find public sympathy painfully lacking. And if Clay should join him what might not be done to bring Jackson to his senses.

Still Calhoun was a nationalist. He did not desire to see the issue made, least of all a clash of arms between the South which he thought would be united and the North which might follow an irate President. Hence the effort to bring Clay to an agreement that the tariff should be revised downward. The Kentucky leader was infatuated; he was certain that a high tariff was what the country wanted and that Clay was the most popular man in the nation. The great, uproarous assemblages which greeted him everywhere he went had intoxicated him. No man has ever been more certain of anything not actually realized than was he that Clay would be the next president and that Andrew Jackson would retire to Tennessee in 1833 a wiser if a sadder man.

Calhoun's suggestion that an alliance should be struck, whereby the tariff should go and with it the common enemy, was spurned. The tariff with all its unpopularity was boldly made an issue in

1832, though the question of whether the national bank should be re-chartered was raised by the President and welcomed by Clay.

In the spring of 1832 Calhoun, convinced that the North was joined to its idols and that there was no chance for an "adjustment of the tariff," turned all his great abilities to the "interposition" which he had outlined in 1828 and which South Carolina had been panting to apply. It is unnecessary here to outline the revolutionary course of that impetuous state during the years of 1832 and

1833. The program which Calhoun had sent to the legislature four years before in strictest secrecy had been made known as his, and a great majority of the people accepted the new doctrine without stopping to wonder at the amazing change of front of its author. What Calhoun sought in 1832 and 1833 was absolute unanimity in his state. In this he failed though his majority was overwhelming and from this time till his death the state was to him a willing slave, a pocket borough more unique than that of Henry Clay in Jventucky.

What amazed and chagrined Calhoun after the test of Nullification had been applied, was the failure of the South to respond. Not one state endorsed the new doctrine though Virginia dallied long with the dangerous thing. But if Calhoun was bitterly disappointed at the failure of the South to rise against the tariff. Clay was sore distressed to find that all the enthusiasm of the great popular gatherings which he aroused was only froth. Jackson was reelected by a majority as unexpected as it was unprecedented. In Louisiana the Clay electors were beaten two to one and in Mississippi where he had spoken to "acres of people" no votes at all were registered for him. Jackson's majority over both Clay and Wirt, who polled almost as many votes as the Kentuckian, was more than 150,000! The "old hero" was overflowing with joy when congress reassembled. The people had punished and humbled Clay; he would dispatch Calhoun in the shortest order. Though he had been something of a nullifier in times past he was no nullifier when Calhoun was in that camp.

South Carolina sent her idol to Washington in December, 1832, much after the fashion of the great German Reformer on his way to Worms in 1 52 1. Escorts of devoted followers saw him safe across the border where loyal North Carolinians hailed him as a second Luther ; in southern Virginia John Randolph sent him his dying blessing. But in Washington the atmosphere was sadly lacking in warmth and men peered at Calhoun with the sort of curiosity with which they greet great men whose course is thought to lead to ruin, perhaps ignominious death. Clay came on late, as well he might, after the awful blow of the preceding November. He had lost his dictatorial air; his short and ugly saying of the previous session "the South, the Democratic party and the devil" had lost its force. Common men who looked on that winter in Washington might well have wondered whose plight was the worse, that of Calhoun with his state at his heels or Clay repudiated by the nation in a way unknown to American politics.

Instead of the quiet succession to the presidency which Jackson and his friends had promised him in 1828, Calhoun was now threatened with a trial for treason and his state was put under the ban of the empire. But Jackson felt the justice of the cotton growers' complaint against the tariff and he prepared to sweeten the bitter pill which he was rnaking for South Carolina in the form of the famous Force bill. The tariff was to be reduced from an average of about forty per cent to twenty-five per cent. When Clay saw what was about to happen he seized the reins of legislation and "put through" the Senate in almost indecent haste the famous Tariff Reform bill of 1833, accomplishing with the aid of Webster and without great hostility from the protected interests, the same result the President was about to attain. A combination of the friends of Clay, Calhoun and Webster, who was not, however, wholly committed, had been effected and the sturdy old soldier in the White House who had just been reelected with an unprecedented majority was powerless i

JOHN C. CALHOUN I33

either to punish Calhoun and South CaroHna or reduce the tariff. The Force bill was passed, but South Carolina had already taken steps to avert the blow which was really not much of a blow. Calhoun had won ; by his threatened intervention the nation had been brought to terms ; the greatest and the extremest protectionist in the country had revised his own defiant tariff of a year before and the manufacturers themselves had yielded!

HI It has been customary in American historywriting to treat Calhoun from 1833 to his death in 1850, as an arch-conspirator, seeking the overthrow of the government which he served and upon which he had bestowed the best years of his life. I am constrained to view him differently. Calhoun was a nationalist at heart to the day of his death and in the intimacy of private correspondence he spoke of a severed nation "bleeding at every pore" — a state of things which he said he could not think of encouraging.^ What he

* Jameson, J. R, Correspondence of John C. Calhoun,, Am. Hist. Asso. Reports 1899, Vol. II, 391 • was striving for during the last seventeen years of his life was the building of a "solid" South which should follow his teaching implicitly and which, cast into the scales of national politics, would decide all great questions in its favor. And it cannot be doubted that he expected to be elevated to the presidency as a natural result — a position which he coveted as warmly as did Henry Glay himself. It was not his aim to break up the Union but to dominate it.

His method of uniting the people of the South was to show them that without such union the greatest interest of their section, slavery, was doomed. Calhoun sought to weld together his people on a basis of economic interest just as Clay had sought to build a "solid" North on the basis of a high tariff. On this subject parties had ceased to differ in large sections of the North. Rhode Island Democrats were "tariff" Democrats; Pennsylvania made protection a sine qua non of cooperation with the party of Jackson; Kentucky, Ohio and the Northwest voted solidly for that policy of the nation which was thought to operate in their favor. The South, regardless of party lines, had come to regard slavery as either a good thing or an evil which could not, and ought not, to be eradicated ; Whigs vied with Democrats in asseverating their loyalty to the "peculiar institution/' Slavery was uglier in outward appearance than protection, but in principle negro servitude and a protective tariff were alike — each meant the exploitation of the weaker and more ignorant classes of society by the wealthier and more intelligent. As a matter of morals there was no difference between the demand of the Western Reserve that a prohibitive tariff in favor of their wool be maintained by the federal government and that of South Carolina that negro slavery should be forever guaranteed. A high tariff on wool compelled the poor white man to give his labor to others without recompense; slavery compelled the negro to work for his master without reward.

While Calhoun never yielded a hair's breadthi on his main program — unity of the slave states — he never failed to reckon upon the support of the growing Northwest where slavery was not unpopular and where hatred and fear of the free negro had become a sort of mania. In Ohio, Indiana, Illinois and Iowa he had ardent and able followers, while half the senators from this region at the time of his death were then or had been owners of negro slaves. With a following, young, ardent and growing, the great South Carolinian laid down his program of national protection to slavery as a constitutional guarantee and on this point it will hardly be denied that he read the great document aright. The idea that slavery was a good thing which the churches ought to defend came easy to him after reading Professor Thomas R. Dew's famous pamphlet of the year 1832.^

Dew was the ablest publicist in Virginia, and one of the first in the country, a teacher of political science in William and Mary College, who had spent years in study and travel in Europe, especially in Germany where he had come into touch with the greatest thinkers of the time. He ridiculed the ideas of Jefferson about human equality, slavery and emancipation and he called Virginia's attention to the great advantage