Paul Starobin is writing a book about Charleston on the eve of the Civil War.

He is cast in bronze, feet planted on a granite-column perch with a cloak draped over his shoulders and a scroll in his left hand, towering over Charleston from a height of eighty feet from the base of his monument at Marion Square. John C. Calhoun, a Vice President and a Senator, the antebellum peer of Daniel Webster and Henry Clay, the author of lofty treatises on government, is a mighty symbol—for Charleston, for his native State of South Carolina, for the South, and for a political tradition still resonant in America.

But exactly what does Calhoun stand for? It’s a question worth asking as South Carolina—and the nation—plunges into debate over symbols from the past in the aftermath of the June 17 massacre of nine blacks at Emanuel African Methodist Episcopal Church in downtown Charleston. The church is located, as it happens, on Calhoun Street, just one block from the Calhoun Monument.


With the suspect appearing to identify with the Southern Confederate cause, South Carolina lawmakers are moving to take down the Confederate battle flag that has long flown over the grounds of the state capitol in Columbia. As for Calhoun, he died in 1850, ten years before South Carolina left the Union—the first state to do so, sparking the chain reaction that led to the formation of the Confederacy. But his name, and the muscular interpretation of the doctrine of States’ Rights for which he was best known, were reverently invoked by Southern secessionists. White Charlestonians in particular made a cult of Calhoun after his death, with icon-like daguerreotypes of his image available on the street for sale. At Calhoun’s funeral in Charleston, the town’s homes draped in black, Robert Barnwell Rhett, the proprietor of The Charleston Mercury and a leader of the Southern secession movement, hailed Calhoun as “the discoverer of the true principles of free government.”

Calhoun was a stout defender of the slave system. At the same time, he had complicated views on secession, Southern nationalism, relations between the States and federal power and the nature of democracy. Those in the disunion camp, as it was called back then, “do not do not think of the difficulty involved in the word; how many bleeding [pores] must be taken up on passing the knife of separation through a body politic,” he told his daughter in 1838. “We must remember, it is the most difficult process in the world to make two people of one.”

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Calhoun was born in 1782 in the frontier backcountry of South Carolina, in the Abbeville district of the Appalachian foothills. His father, who died when Calhoun was thirteen, was a Scots-Irish immigrant and an elected politician, and the son, after graduating Yale and then reading law and establishing himself as a farmer, turned to politics himself.

He seems to have been one of those men who was old even when he was young, never one to joke, “careworn, with furrowed brow,” as Clay of Kentucky once described him. Charleston came to love him, but he didn’t love Charleston back. As the seat of the low-country’s rich planter class, Charleston was famous for its indolent and hedonistic ways. In 1807, with the town afflicted by malaria, Calhoun pronounced the disease a just punishment for “the misconduct of the inhabitants; and may be considered as a curse for their intemperance and debaucheries.” He was buried in Charleston, at St. Philip’s Episcopal Church cemetery, not out of his own wishes, but only because his son gave way to the South Carolina governor’s insistence on it.

Calhoun was enormously ambitious, hungry for the presidency, but never able to win the nomination of his party, the Democrats. Early in his career he had the reputation of being a fervent nationalist with his hawkish support for the War of 1812 against the British. From 1817 to 1825, he served as James Monroe’s secretary of war. The issue that brought him renown, defining him as a preeminent protector of the South, was not slavery but the federal tariff. The tariff was an immensely divisive issue for 1820s America and unavoidably so. Its purpose, after all, was to protect the nation’s young manufacturing industry, concentrated in the North, from foreign imports. The South, with its focus on agriculture, experienced the tariff as oppressive: A sheltered Northern manufacturer could charge high prices for an everyday item like shoes, and a Southerner had to pay that price, the profit lining the pockets of the shoe-factory owner.

Taking on Daniel Webster of Massachusetts, a supporter of the tariff and of expansive federal powers generally, Calhoun took the view that the tariff was not only onerous but also unconstitutional. After all, by what authority granted by the Founders could Washington levy, in effect, a tax, designed, not simply to raise revenue for the Treasury, but to favor one section of the country over another? And from this axiom Calhoun derived his famous tenet of Nullification (even though that was not his favored term). Nullification held that a State could invalidate within its own borders a federal law, like the tariff, deemed unconstitutional. This was the Tenth Amendment to the Constitution—“The powers not delegated to the United States by the Constitution…are reserved to the States…”—on steroids.

The theory was put to the test in South Carolina during the presidency of Andrew Jackson, elected in 1828, with Calhoun, vice president under Jackson’s predecessor, John Quincy Adams, remaining in that office. The combustible Jackson, “Old Hickory,” didn’t think much of Nullification. He sent the navy to Charleston harbor to keep South Carolina from making good on its bid to stop payment of the federal tariff.

Jackson also, privately, threatened to hang Calhoun. South Carolina was forced to retreat from Nullification, with Clay stepping in to forge a compromise on the tariff. Calhoun resigned his vice presidency in 1832, devoting his energies to battling for his increasingly outnumbered section in the Senate, where he served until his death.

In his last years, Calhoun sought to arrive at a general theory of democratic government. His idea was to cast his stubborn defense of the rights of the South in the Union as a principled defense of the rights of any minority segment of a democratic society. The federal system, he noted, was never intended to operate steamroller-like by a simple, fifty percent plus one, numerical majority. In A Disquisition on Government, six years in the making and finished in 1849, he offered as one ideal the trial by jury, with its members having a “disposition to harmonize” until a unanimous verdict is reached. In laboring to show that this sort of government, by “concurrent majority,” requiring the “consent of each interest,” would not be impractical, Calhoun drew on examples from history going back to the Roman Republic.

Although this may not have been his intention, Calhoun’s philosophy, with his exaltation of the veto power, and especially his theory of Nullification, seeded the ground for secession. After all, if a state had a right not to honor a federal law, then why not a right to break from the federal compact? In the 1840s, radical secessionists in South Carolina, with increasing vehemence, called for the state to leave the Union on its own. Calhoun viewed that strategy as a mistake and in his last years helped to thwart it. Secession could only make sense, he believed, if slave-states went out of the Union as a bloc. He saw himself as a hard-headed political realist, not a romantic martyr for a cause.

As for slavery, Calhoun, like fellow southerner Thomas Jefferson, was a slaveholder. But whereas Jefferson condemned slavery as a “moral depravity,” and in so doing exposed himself to the charge of hypocrisy, Calhoun bluntly argued that slavery was “a positive good”—for the slave. “I appeal to facts,” he declared in an 1837 speech. “Never before has the black race of Central Africa, from the dawn of history to the present day, attained a condition so civilized and so improved, not only physically, but morally and intellectually.”

This notion of slavery as enlightened was a common one in the South of Calhoun’s time, and held by some in the North, too. Calhoun, characteristically, went one step further in his analysis, in proclaiming a law of history. “I hold then,” he said in his 1837 address, “that there never has yet existed a wealthy and civilized society in which one portion of the community did not, in point of fact, live on the labor of the other.”

It is this sort of thinking that led the liberal historian Richard Hofstadter, writing in 1948, to dub Calhoun “The Marx of the Master Class.” In the minds of progressives of this era, who championed Big Government initiatives like the New Deal, Calhoun was simply a reactionary and an apologist, unable to view the workings of a civilization except from a rear-view mirror, locked in a defensive crouch bent on protecting the supposedly eternal privileges of his native section and of his race.

Black Southerners certainly were under no illusion about Calhoun. After the Civil War, with Charleston in rubble, a reporter for The New York Tribune—the Abolitionist newspaper of Horace Greeley—came across a family of freed blacks living in the abandoned office space of The Charleston Mercury. At their feet was a bust of Calhoun, “shattered into pieces,” with the family “enthusiastically claiming responsibility.”

And yet Calhoun’s ideas remained in some form intact, even after the crushing of the secession movement and emancipation of the slaves. Charleston helped to make sure of that, unveiling the first version of a Calhoun Monument at Marion Square in 1887 and the second one in 1896.

His most enduring legacy, surely, is his insistence on States’ Rights as a counter to an overweening federal government. Of course, the invocation of States’ Rights can be seen as code for a whites-driven agenda geared towards thwarting federal efforts to enforce the civil rights of blacks. In 1962, Mississippi Governor Ross Barnett went up against the Kennedy Administration in Washington in his ultimately losing battle, presented as a sacred matter of States’ Rights, to “do everything in my power to prevent integration in our schools.” Iterations of that confrontation took place all over the South in the 1960s.

But as Calhoun showed with his argument against the tariff, the States’ Rights cause is a broad and varied American tradition with roots in the early decades of the republic. In the mid-20 th century, as a new generation of conservatives sought to challenge the thinking that had led, in their mind, to oppressive federal government, timidly accepted by ‘go along’ Republicans like Dwight D. Eisenhower, they looked to Calhoun for nourishment. In The Conservative Mind, published in 1953, Russell Kirk paid homage to Calhoun as “the most resolute enemy of national consolidation and of omnicompetent democratic majorities.” In The Conscience of a Conservative, published in 1960, Arizona’s Barry Goldwater devoted the third chapter to States’ Rights, with a Calhoun-like riff calling on the federal government, in the name of freedom, “to withdraw promptly and totally from every jurisdiction which the Constitution reserved to the states.”

Nowadays, Calhoun-ism is most easily glimpsed in the anti-Washington, conservative and libertarian movements firmly entrenched in the Republican Party. The entire State of Texas, which recently passed a law to “repatriate $1 billion of gold bullion from the Federal Reserve in New York,” can seem like a testament to Calhoun’s habit of mind. And yet, ‘live free or die’ libertarians, in particular, are unfaithful to Calhoun if they read too much of an anti-governmental message into his thought. “A Disquisition on Government” starts with the proposition that man is “a social being,” not a solitary creature, and “government is necessary to the existence of society.” The tough question for Calhoun was how best to restrain a government’s “tendency to abuse of power.”

At the same time, some causes popular with liberals embrace a kind of Calhoun-ism. When Colorado voters, in 2012, approved a referendum amending the State’s Constitution to legalize recreational marijuana—in the face of a federal law that expressly prohibited pot—wasn’t that a type of Nullification, a calculated invalidation of a despised decree of a haughty Washington? The irony is as pungent as a bong hit, with the severe Calhoun never known to pursue any form of recreational activity.

The anti-Washington perspective in America isn’t only about the South or the Tea Party. Somehow, in the 21 st century, Calhoun manages to stand for both an anachronism and an archetype.