He was analytically brilliant - almost to a fault. John Caldwell Calhoun (1782-1850) possessed one of the finest political intellects of his generation and stood a heartbeat away from the presidency at the apex of his career before fatally succumbing to a strong bout of sectionalism and southern nationalist sentiment. Due to his divisive politics, Calhoun is little known and completely uncelebrated in American history. Despite his fall from grace, one of Calhoun's more famous (or infamous) speeches in the Senate chamber has disquieting resonance to our world today..
Born in the backwoods of South Carolina in 1782, Calhoun managed to get elected to the US Congress and became instrumental in winning support for a declaration of war on England in 1812. His patriotism and leadership was awarded by President James Monroe with an appointment as Secretary of War for his two terms in office (1817-1825). In 1828, Calhoun received enough broad support to earn second place to the wildly popular military hero Andrew Jackson from Tennessee.
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As Vice-President four years later, Calhoun did the nearly unthinkable. He openly opposed a newly proposed tariff, supported by the President, claiming the financial bill favored of Northern industrial interests at the expense of South Carolina and the South. Rather than simply voice an alternative opinion, the Vice-President went so far as to promote the idea of 'nullification' whereby states had the right to 'nullify' federal laws against their interests. In short, this was a slippery slope recipe for dissolution of the union on latitudinal lines. Jackson, already alienated from his Vice-President for other reasons, would have none of it, and Calhoun wisely left his post after one term and successfully ran for US Senate in 1832.
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As the rift between the North and the South continued to grow throughout the course of the early and mid-19th century, Southerners began to expostulate their views on 'the peculiar institution' ('peculiar' meaning 'unique') - as slavery was often called by its proponents. Indeed, a whole new body of apologetic literature was emerging to defend slavery, and politicians followed suit in the halls of Congress to act as spokesmen for their passionate constituents.
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In February 1837, Senator Calhoun rose in the Senate chamber and delivered one of the most famous speeches on behalf of slavery to ever be uttered onto the public record. Although his justifications for slavery were (of course) specious, an unsettling grain of truth existed in his contrasting analysis between wage-labor (capitalism) and slave labor. Declaring slavery as a 'positive good', Calhoun stated,
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'Compare his condition with the tenants of the poor houses in the more civilized portions of Europe - look at the sick, and the old and infirm slave, on one hand, in the midst of his family and friends, under the kind superintending care of his master and mistress, and compare it with the forlorn and wretched condition of the pauper in the poorhouse.'
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Was Calhoun correct in making a comparison between chattel slavery and the poor in industrial Europe? Regardless of how exploitative and demeaning wage-labor has been through the years - especially in the late 19th and early 20th centuries - it simply does not hold a candle to a life devoid of rights, dignity and personal identity. Furthermore, Calhoun clearly misrepresented the reality of many or perhaps most slaves. A slave was often not 'under the kind and superintending care of his master and mistress' or in 'the midst of his family and friends'. Black families were frequently broken up by slave traders according to gender, age and physical strength. Masters and mistresses could also be cruel. Whippings and beatings of every sort were common means used to coerce slaves into picking more cotton, picking more vegetables or just obeying the rules to the letter. Recalcitrant slaves could be - and indeed were - murdered on the spot. Slave owners rarely faced justice for crimes committed against slaves. And why should they? If a slave was not a human being, then no one could be said to be killed. If not murder, a slave owner could sell his feisty African laborer 'down the river' to New Orleans or Mississippi where sadistic overseers were known to use torture techniques to quash any independent thought or action.
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The part Calhoun got partially right was in his comparison to the paupers of Europe. London, in particular, defined the socio-economic nadir of the industrial revolution. During the rise of the factory system, the city experienced an unprecedented influx of people from the countryside and immigrants from abroad. The result was massive overcrowding, unsafe tenement housing and a state of utter squalor for much of the population.
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Henry Mayhew, a reporter for the Morning Chronicle, painted a vivid (and disturbing) description of a 'tidal ditch' - the catch-all sanitation drain in the poorer areas of the city - writing, 'As we gazed in horror at it, we saw drains and sewers emptying their filthy contents into it...We heard bucket after bucket of filth splash into it.' One can imagine the putrid odors and germ-infested air over an above-ground sewage 'system'. Near these tidal ditches stood a ragged population begging or stealing anything possible in order to survive one more day - all only a few miles away from some of the richest people (captains of industry) in the world.
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Some slaves did indeed have better lives than some of the wretched souls in London from a purely economic standpoint. A 'house' slave could be treated as nearly one of the family and might be offered three meals a day for his (or more likely 'her') work. Thomas Jefferson's inner circle of slaves were certainly treated well. When the master returned to his beloved Monticello from the grueling politics of Washington, his 'closest' slaves would run towards him screaming 'Masa, Masa' with nothing but joy. Hence, it could be reasonably argued that the best treated slaves in the United States were indeed materially better off than their white counterparts in London. Once again, however, a slave, who possessed no rights and was traded as a commodity, was the unique object of total debasement. No matter how poor, a white pauper still had a name, rights under the law and a shred - if only one shred - of dignity.
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The fact that a comparison between wage-labor and slavery can be made - even to the smallest degree - ought to haunt us today. Approximately 1 out of every 6 persons lives in poverty worldwide. In the richest country in the world, the United States, 13% of its citizens are impoverished. Another significant percentage of people work two and three low-paying jobs just to survive from day to day.
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While these people do have rights under the law, are they not living in an economic system akin to 'a kinder, gentler slavery'?
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(Portrait: John C. Calhoun)
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J Roquen