 Greetings from the National Archives. I'm David Ferriero, Archivist of the United States, and it's my pleasure to welcome you to today's virtual book talk with Robert Elder, author of Calhoun, American Heretic. Before we begin, I'd like to tell you about two upcoming programs you can view on our YouTube channel. On Thursday, February 25th at 7 PM, we invite you to the panel discussion on the Black Family, Representation, Identity, and Diversity, which is a theme of this year's Black History Month. The panel will discuss the Black Family as the foundation of African American life and history and examine its place in history, literature, the arts, and social policy. And on Friday, February 26th at 7 PM, we'll host current and former members of the Harlem Globe Trotters in a program called Spinning in the Globe, the History and Legacy of the Harlem Globe Trotters. Drawing on National Archives records, this panel discussion will focus on the history and legacy of the Globe Trotters. In the first sentence of the acknowledgments section of Calhoun, American Heretic, Robert Elder states, the first debt that any biographer of John C. Calhoun owes is to the editors of Calhoun's published papers who painstakingly collected, edited, and published those documents over the course of more than half a century. That sentiment may be expressed by biographers of many of the great figures of our history. And I'm proud that a great number of these projects, including the 28 volumes of the papers of John C. Calhoun, have received funding from the National Historical Publications and Records Commission, a part of the National Archives. The NHPRC supports a wide range of activities to preserve, publish, and encourage the use of documentary sources created in every medium ranging from quill pen to computer, relating to the history of the United States. John C. Calhoun, vice president under two presidents, cabinet secretary under three presidents, and senator has reemerged as a subject of historical debate. Robert Elder brings us a closer look at this contentious figure in his timely biography described by Jonathan Horne in his Wall Street Journal book review as a timely and thought-provoking biography of the South Carolina statesman whose doctrines and debates set the stage for the Civil War. Robert Elder teaches American history at Baylor University in Waco, Texas. His research focuses on the cultural, intellectual, and religious history of the American South in the 19th century. Moderating the conversation today will be Rachel Sheldon, the director of the George and Anne Richard Civil War Center and an associate professor of history at Pennsylvania State University. Her research and teaching interests include slavery and abolition, the Civil War, the US South, and political and constitutional history. And she's the author of Washington Brotherhood, Politics, Social Life, and the Coming of the Civil War. Now let's hear from Robert Elder and Rachel Sheldon. Thank you for joining us today. So Bob Elder, I'm so excited to talk to you about your wonderful book, Calhoun. And I wanted to start just by asking you, why did you want to write a book about Calhoun? Thanks, Rachel. That's a great question. You know, I think it goes back to, I remember reading in a graduate seminar in David Potter's book, The Impending Crisis, this phrase about Calhoun, where Potter called Calhoun the most majestic champion of error since Milton Satan. And I was an English major in college, and I was fascinated by this idea that Calhoun was this figure that someone would compare to Satan and Milton, which if you've read Milton, Satan is one of the most fascinating characters, right? He's really smart and devious and diabolical. So that sort of stuck with me. And then actually, when I decided to write the book, was right after the shootings in Charleston in 2015. And after that happened, a lot of people started connecting that violence with Calhoun, both in Charleston, the statue to Calhoun in Charleston, and then protests at Yale over Calhoun College. And I realized that nobody had written a biography of Calhoun at that point in like 23 years or something, and now it's been almost 30, which for figures of comparable importance is almost unimaginable. And also that Calhoun kind of stood in for this interpretation of the Old South as backwards-looking, pre-modern, all of that is tangled up with slavery, obviously, that modern scholarship had changed dramatically in the 20 years since the last biography came out. And so I thought that a biography of him was not only needed, but that it would look much different than the biographies did 20 or 30 years ago because our interpretation of his environment has changed so much, especially the scholarship on slavery and capitalism. Slavery is a kind of fundamental part of global capitalism, and Calhoun as one of the primary defenders of that system looks very different in the context of that scholarship. And luckily, an editor of basic books, Dan Gersel, had the same idea I did, and we found each other sometime, I think in early 2016. So that's a pretty quick turnaround for writing a book. So you must have had some idea about the kinds of things that you wanted to address when you got to Calhoun, but maybe just for people who are not as familiar with him, can you give us sort of a trajectory of his life, maybe three or four really key moments for him or things that matter in understanding Calhoun? Sure. So he's born in 1782 as the, he's the son of Scott's Irish immigrants in the upcountry of South Carolina, or the back country as it was called then. And I think that's actually a really key part about understanding Calhoun is that growing up in the upcountry of South Carolina was very different than growing up in the low country of South Carolina. There's these dramatic political, cultural differences between the two places. And Calhoun grew up in the upcountry during a time period where cotton agriculture was just starting to reach the upcountry. The cotton boom was just starting in the very late 1790s, early 1800s. And so one of the things to understand about Calhoun is that he always associated cotton and slavery with economic progress. And even with, as strange as it is to us, he associated with cultural and societal progress because this is what made his part of South Carolina wealthy. And I think that's kind of a key thing to understand about him, as well as the fact that the political culture of the upcountry was much more small democratic, kind of Jeffersonian democratic than the low country was, where there was still a lot, when he was growing up, was still a lot of federalist leaning groups and a lot of sympathy for the federalists. But Calhoun grew up in a part of the state that was kind of firmly in this Jeffersonian Republican tradition, and his father was a political leader. His father, Patrick, was a political leader in the upcountry. And then he's educated at Yale and in Litchfield, Connecticut at one of the first kind of actual law schools in the United States. And what's interesting about that is that he's a Jeffersonian Republican in kind of the heart, the hotbed of federalism during those years. And I think that that actually speaks really, I think, to just his ambition, that he really believed that this education, he needed to get this education to do what he wanted to do, which from a very early age, it's clear he wanted to be famous and powerful and influential. He had a massive ambition. He's elected to Congress from South Carolina in 1810, and the War of 1812 shapes his entire outlook on the world, but especially his outlook on the British. For the rest of his life, he is suspicious of the British and them trying to extend hemispheric influence over the Americas. And I think that's another key moment, is that he sees in the War of 1812 that the nation is not powerful enough or cohesive enough that it's lucky to survive the war. And so he throws all his energy in for the next few years as Secretary of War under Monroe into building the United States into the sort of power that could resist Great Britain. And that meant internal improvements. It meant a national bank. It meant an army and a navy and a system of fortifications and West Point. And Calhoun has certainly not the primary or only figure doing any of those things. But as Secretary of War, he's a key part of it. And then he's vice president under two very different presidents, John Quincy Adams and Andrew Jackson. And I think the key moment in his trajectory that changes the rest of his life is his falling out with Jackson and the nullification crisis, which is really the moment when Calhoun's trajectory, which had been headed straight up and many people assumed towards the presidency, really shifts and doesn't reverse. But for the rest of his life, he's negotiating and trying to balance between his national aspirations and the tensions of having to respond to what was an increasingly growing radicalism in South Carolina, which he contributes to and co-ops, but also moderates at key moments. And then in the 1830s and 1840s, he becomes primarily known by then for his defense of slavery in the face of abolitionism, especially his famous 1837 speech where he calls slavery a positive good. And then by the end of his life, he has become one of the primary voices in American politics, warning that if there's not some sort of fundamental settlement between the North and the South, by which he means slavery has to be protected in ironclad terms, that secession will be the result. And he dies in 1850. But along in complicated life, just for my own interest, I want to ask you about the political system and his influence on the political system. I always think of him as popping up at really important moments and just being in the right place at the right time in order to move forward. So what can you tell us about what his role in the political system is and sort of where he fits politically? So Calhoun himself is, he kind of moves through the rise of the two-party system. And he's always kind of tacking within that system to try to maintain his national influence. So in the 1820s and 1830s, when national politics is all about Andrew Jackson, he tends, even though he's a Jeffersonian, he was a Jacksonian, but his split with Jackson means that he ends up allying during those years with Henry Clay and the Whigs somewhat. Although later he tells his daughter, I never agreed with anything about, I never agreed with them about anything other than we all hated Jackson. Which I think is somewhat true, although the Whigs represented a lot of things that Calhoun had used to be. So I don't know exactly how true it was. But then after Jackson, he really, for the rest of his life, is within the orbit of the Democratic Party. But he does kind of break with them at key moments, especially towards the end of his life where he becomes convinced that the two-party system is actually weakening the South's ability to defend itself and that what really needs to happen is a unified southern front. They need to reject party affiliations. And so by the very late 1840s, he is trying to manufacture a unified southern front or southern party that can resist anti-slavery and abolitionism. The southern equivalent of the Free Solo Party in 1848 is what he's really shooting for by then. He always prides himself on political independence and he thinks, or at least he says, that the two-party system is one of the big problems that the Founding Fathers could not have foreseen and therefore there needs to be a reassessment, a constitutional reassessment, to account for the fact that now all of a sudden you have these two massive national political parties that could co-opt all three branches of the government in a way that the Founding Fathers never foresaw. And so many of his constitutional theories are aimed at trying to guard against that sort of situation. But he works within the party system but he never finds a... Well, he's not Martin Van Buren. He's not adept at the party machinery. He's a little too stubborn and idealistic or delusional at times to really work within the party system. He prides himself too much on independence sometimes to work within the party system. I always wonder if he would have regretted that viewpoint looking back at 1860 when much of the Deep South had become a one-party region and therefore became ever more interested in secession. Maybe that's exactly what he wanted and we can talk about that in a few minutes. I think he would have looked at that and said, well, even though it's sort of within this old two-party system, this is what I wanted, right? This is what I was trying to do. So even though you're calling yourself, I think that what happens in 1860 politically is what he had been trying to do. It happened in a way he didn't quite expect. Let's talk a little bit about Calhoun's views about slavery. You mentioned them in talking about his life and he's very much known for this view of slavery as a positive good. Can you tell us a little bit about where that comes from and how that influenced the people around him? I like how you talked before about the feedback loops between Calhoun and the people that he represented. One of the remarkable things about Calhoun, given what he becomes famous for, is that before the 1830s, Calhoun is not one of the... There are plenty of voices, as you well know, after the Missouri crisis in 1820, there are plenty of voices saying that slavery is the national issue and there are plenty of Southern voices warning, like Robert Turnbull warning that the North and anti-slavery forces are coming for slavery. Calhoun isn't one of those, mainly because he wants to be president and he has to maintain this very... this cautious view about slavery. And so he doesn't talk about it a lot. There's one famous exchange between he and John Quincy Adams during the Missouri crisis that John Quincy Adams records where Calhoun says, you know, in the South, we consider Thomas Jefferson's words in the declaration to only apply to white people. So clearly he has opinions about it. But it's not until the 1830s, it's not until after the abolitionist kind of upswell in the early 1830s. So William Lloyd Garrison founds the liberator in 1831. The American Anti-Slavery Society is founded in 1833. Britain abolishes slavery throughout its empire in 1833. The Nat Turner Rebellion, you know, is in 1831. And it's in response to that, that Calhoun senses, I think, that the old defense of slavery that people like Thomas Jefferson had made and that a lot of Southerners still made, which was the necessary evil defense of slavery, that that was no longer going to cut it as a political ideology, that it left too much, it conceded too much to abolitionists and their allies. And Calhoun also, yeah. So he fashions, I think, quite consciously this political ideology that slavery is perfectly suited for the modern world, both in terms of the two major developments of the modern world, democracy and capitalism. And Calhoun's argument, which he gives most fully in this famous 1837 speech, is that, is this slavery because of racial differences, and he uses a lot of racial theories, scientific theories, we would call them, pseudo-scientific today, but in his day, there were scientific theories about the inferiority of black people, and he says, given these scientific facts and the fact that within capitalism there has to be an exploited class, then we are incredibly fortunate that we have a class that can never be part of the political system because they're inferior, they need to be taken care of, they need to be exploited. I mean, he's very forthright. He says basically that elites have always exploited the lower classes. We're just being more honest about it in slavery. And in terms of democracy, he says that racial slavery in particular produces this unvarying equality among whites. That it's this thing that is able to produce in a unique way in the modern world the conditions for actual democratic equality between white people. And this makes it, he says, perfect for the modern world because look what happens in places like England and the North, where you have upper classes exploiting the lower classes, he says eventually there's going to be revolution in that situation because it can't last. And I tell in the book the story of how when he makes this speech one of his fellow Virginia senators stands up and basically points out how radical this argument is. Says, the rest of us don't subscribe to this. Jefferson, Madison, Washington didn't subscribe to this. They all thought slavery was a necessary evil. And yet by 1860 it's Calhoun's argument about slavery that Alexander Stevens really pins as the foundation of the Confederacy in his famous cornerstone speech. And so Benjamin Silliman who was one of Calhoun's tutors at Yale when Calhoun died, wrote in his diary about how over his lifetime Calhoun had entirely changed the way of thinking about slavery in the south so that there was little chance for any sort of compromise or even acknowledgement that it was a bad thing. And when you think about it, the necessary evil defense left room for some sort of compromise. I mean if that's what you believe about slavery you might be open to something like gradual emancipation but Calhoun's aggressive shift to this pro-slavery positive good argument really takes that off the table as it becomes more dominant in the 1840s and especially after his death in the 1850s. The irony of that is that while Calhoun argues for it as a positive good for white people and black people that he's constantly surrounded by examples in his own life of black resistance to slavery and he simply ignores these or in terms of his, he doesn't incorporate them into his theories in any significant way. So I tell the story of this family that Calhoun's family enslaved his father, Calhoun's father Patrick buys an enslaved man named Adam sometime before the Revolutionary War we're not sure when. And that man's family is enslaved to Calhoun's family for three generations. Adam has a son named Sonny who grows up with Calhoun and Sonny and his wife Tilla have two children, young Sonny and a daughter named Issy and both Issy and Sonny and young Sonny so Adam's grandchildren both of them commit acts of real resistance. Issy tries to burn down the family's house at one point during Calhoun's presidential run in 1844 and young Sonny is being sent to a plantation that Calhoun owned with his son Andrew in Alabama and young Sonny burns down the over the white overseers tent in the middle of the night and tries to escape and under Calhoun's theory these should have been the people who were most attached to the family who were most, you know, who benefited from slavery and yet, you know, these are the people who are resisting it most violently. So there are contradictions to his theory that he simply ignores. I always wonder about this with Washington politicians in general is that they're surrounded by resistance in Washington which is a hotbed of abolitionism and it doesn't seem to register too many of them where they live. Yeah, well I think, you know, one of the things about Calhoun that I included the lessons of Calhoun which we could get to at the end but human beings are really good at self-deception and we all are I think Calhoun was a master at it I think and there's no better evidence for that I think than that he was constantly surrounded by evidence that enslaved people resisted their enslavement but and yet he made these the arguments about it being a positive good for them as well as for white people in public. We talked a little bit about the about the secession crisis and what Calhoun might have thought of that. Some people call him the founding father of the Confederacy. What do you make of that? Do you think that's an accurate description of him? What do you think he would have thought about secession and the creation of the Confederacy more generally? I think that I'm going to do the historians dodge on this one which is say yes and no. So on the on the no side on the no side I think it's pretty clear that Calhoun never turned secession into a political program in other words he was not one of the politicians and they existed who were constantly trying to get their states and the South to secede Calhoun was his entire constitutional theories nullification his idea of the concurrent majority this idea that you had to have consensus in the government that this was the central principle of the Constitution and his proposal at the very end of his life in his last speech that maybe the US should institute a dual executive one North and one South all these things were his attempts to preserve the union on Southern terms that he wasn't interested in preserving a union without slavery or a union in which the South was vulnerable to the political majorities that were developing in favor of anti-slavery so he wasn't Henry Clay in the sense of he wanted real compromise but he didn't want disunion at the same time he thought it might happen he constantly kind of warned about it but he never actually worked for it and I think there's a difference there so Elizabeth Varen in her book about disunion makes this distinction between different disunionists and I think Calhoun falls into another category that she would call process disunionists which means he's constantly warning that that secession and disunion may happen if the North doesn't relent and that frequently crosses the line into a threat and yet he's never actually working for it for a political program on the yes side, Calhoun is one of the main defenders of the compact theory of the Constitution under which states don't surrender any of their sovereignty when they come into the constitutional arrangement and that underlies the theory of secession so he's one of the most articulate defenders throughout his life of that compact theory which he does to prove that the South should have that there should be a settlement between the North and the South even more than that though one of the things that scholars who study these romantic nationalist movements in the mid 19th century so in places like Hungary and Poland and Ireland one of the common components of those movements is a sense of historical grievance that we've been wronged for the past century the past 50 years whatever and Calhoun I think was the primary person who fashioned that narrative of grievance for the South that gets picked up in the 1850s and used as the justification for secession so in his final speech in the Senate in 1850 there's this whole litany of how the South has been oppressed in the Union the Missouri compromise, the tariff and now in 1850 they're being excluded from common territories in the Union like California and if you read the secession ordinances passed in the secession winter of 1860 and 61 as you know many of them read just like Calhoun's final speech and you know when the South Carolina when South Carolina built a new state house they laid the foundations for it in 1851 the year after Calhoun died and they put a copy of his final speech alone under the cornerstone of the state house and I think that more than anything else sums up kind of how you could see him as the father of the Confederacy and you know there's a banner of Calhoun hanging over the secession convention in Charleston when they leave the Union they put his picture on money on Confederate money I mean the Confederacy definitely adopts him as one of its founding fathers whether that is perfectly historically justified or not it usually isn't right in history it's like this you know Greek tragedy if you read Greek tragedy there's always this thing that happens where there's a prophecy and somebody spends their entire life trying to arrange their life so the prophecy doesn't happen and then it happens anyway and it ends up that they actually contributed to it happening without really knowing it and Calhoun's not quite that innocent but there's something of that sort of Greek tragic sense to his contribution to secession I don't think it's something he wanted although he may have supported it in the last effort there's no way to know I mean Slaveholders won so many major victories in the 1850s that you could see Calhoun in 1860 being one of the people who say like Jefferson Davis or Alexander Stevens that the slavery is safer within the Union out of it but it's impossible to know yeah fun to think about though anyway what do you think are some things that we have gotten wrong about Calhoun in the past just to sort of put out one that I think about a lot is sort of we talk a lot about ambition and Calhoun's ambitions and really maybe his ambition as it relates to Clay and Webster but there's a whole generation of folks who have enormous ambitions right is Calhoun sort of like that group or does he stand apart? I think he has huge ambitions that he never admits to himself or anybody around him and it's always like this silent force that is shaping kind of what he does even though he claims of course always to be following principle and there are definitely times where his kind of stubborn sense of like what he needs to do creates havoc for the people around him right so it definitely happens but yeah he is massively ambitious he runs for president twice when he's a real contender 1824 and 1844 but he's constantly sounding it out and at the end of his life when he proposes this dual executive idea he knew he was dying at that point but it's also impossible not to think that he kind of had himself in mind as maybe the southern executive but no he's every bit as ambitious as a Henry Clay or something like that when Henry Clay and Calhoun come into the House of Representatives together in 1811 right before the war of 1812 John Randolph sees both of them coming in and he says both of them are coming in with an eye to the presidency and we're going to have a war before the end of the session and he's right he's right about both those things so I can follow up about also things that people get wrong about Calhoun what are a few things that we should know that people get wrong about Calhoun so I think there might be two or three quick ones that one is the idea that he's this backwards-facing or old-fashioned reactionary so Calhoun is definitely a conservative there's no question about that but I think in the 1993 biography of him which is a wonderful book Irving Bartlett says that all the trends in the modern world like nationality and human rights those are all moving forward and Calhoun is sequestered alone in South Carolina and I think that misses both Calhoun's own self perception or his own perception of himself and sort of the reality of the situation which is that at every point in his life Calhoun saw himself as allied with the main force of his age which he thought was progress and so his arguments about slavery for instance are always that it is that he doesn't use the arguments about Rome and Greece he doesn't compare slavery to those sorts of things he doesn't compare it to feudalism like some of his other contemporaries do Calhoun's point about slavery is that it is a fundamentally modern economic system that can underlay a global capitalist system and the more we know about slavery and that system the more we can see that he was right in the sense that slavery could function as the lynchpin of a global capitalist system like the cotton empire that Sven Becker talks about and Calhoun also saw his constitutional theories in the same way I mean of course they're conservative they're defensive those sorts of things but his argument in this is an essay that he published that's published after his death he publishes these two very consequential essays a disquisition on government and a discourse on the constitution and government of the United States and in those he argues that the world has changed so quickly that the transportation and communication revolutions have transformed the world in such a way that mass democracy requires a constitutional readjustment for it to work again and so he sees himself as kind of adapting to the conditions of the modern world he's also a very consistent defender of free trade in an era when that was being fought out and Calhoun is on the what ends up being the winning side of that at least if you look in the short term the world moved more towards his point of view on free trade so that's one way in which you do it the other way I think is that we typically see him within simply a US frame which is appropriate but it misses kind of how internationally engaged he always was I mean from the war of 1812 to the revolutions of 1848 at the end of his life he is constantly not only aware but interacting with international events and as I used a lot of insights from Matt Carp's book on foreign policy in the book Calhoun is one of the major shapers of American foreign policy in the 1840s so he hasn't retreated into a defensive crouch by that point he's very aggressively shaping major parts of American policy including being one of the key figures in annexing Texas as John Tyler's secretary of state so I think viewing him as just a state rights reactionary just doesn't capture his role on an international stage I have all these great articles I couldn't even use them all in the book from international newspapers in England and Ireland and France talking about Calhoun especially in the 1840s people are aware of him well outside the United States Texas being as important as it is I think that's particularly where we should be paying attention to what Calhoun is up to yeah and he's one of the driving forces that allows Tyler to get that in under the wire right before Paul comes in and Tyler's difficult but if you understand his relationship with Calhoun it helps so what do you think Calhoun's legacy is for today? that's a great and very complicated question so there's some there I think related to just the questions that Americans are asking right now but the questions that Americans ask constantly which is Calhoun's challenge is that he argues that any kind of equality requires inequality his argument is that equality among white Americans in his day was fundamentally underwritten by the oppression of enslaved people and his argument was that you can't get away from that dynamic and I think he was wrong we think he was wrong and yet the challenge I think is that reading him forces us to constantly face this question about the shape and composition of our democracy and to ask that question of is our freedom somehow being underwritten by somebody else's misery or something like that I think that's really important there are obvious constitutional questions where Calhoun's ideas are still incredibly relevant in the arguments we have about state versus federal power the role of a minority in a majoritarian system how far can you go in protecting the rights of a minority until you diminish the ability of a majoritarian system to actually function these are all really important questions one of the stories I tell at the end of the book is that Calhoun's theories have resurfaced in very unexpected ways outside the United States so his theory especially the idea that every significant group in a society should have a veto power essentially this idea of the mutual veto that was central to his idea of the concurrent majority that shaped and here I am I rely on the scholarship of a political scientist named James Reed and Reed traces how some of Calhoun's theories influenced the different proposals for the end of apartheid in South Africa where they were trying to figure out both sides to agree to something they eventually went with a majoritarian system significantly but it also influenced the peace agreement in Northern Ireland the Good Friday agreement in 1998 which instituted what they call a diarchy which is essentially a dual executive and it also required that both sides the nationalist and the unionist sides both have majority votes in favor of any significant change or decision and so Calhoun's theories even though they're made in defensive slaveholders have made it outside the United States into other contexts and because of that I think it's still really important to know his history not only for our own purposes within the United States knowing our own history but just to be aware of the forces out there in the modern world as well Thank you so much Bob, Calhoun I hope everyone will go out and pick up a copy Thank you Rachel