Calhoun: American Heretic by Robert Elder

Abstract

Reviewed by: Calhoun: American Heretic by Robert Elder Melissa DeVelvis (bio) Calhoun: American Heretic. By Robert Elder. (New York: Basic Books, 2021. Pp. 656. Cloth, $35.00.) In his sweeping and timely biography of John C. Calhoun, Robert Elder brings a “titan” of the U.S. Senate into the twenty-first century. Rather than viewing Calhoun as a man “out of step with the flow of history,” Elder argues that he “belongs at the center of the stories we tell about our past” (xiv). Elder painstakingly unpacks Calhoun’s political philosophy as it developed over fifty years to argue that he was a modern politician, not a demagogue clinging to slavery and the past, as some have claimed. A proponent of free trade, westward expansion, and internal improvements, Elder’s Calhoun was dedicated to the Union, provided that this union preserved slaveholding privileges. In telling the story of Calhoun’s life, from 1782 to 1850, Elder also crafts a story of the United States. This origin story—of both man and nation—is dependent on the subjugation and enslavement of Africans and African Americans. Calhoun’s political philosophy and its evolution, expressed publicly throughout his career but culminating in two posthumous treatises, A Disquisition on Government and A Discourse on the Constitution and Government of the United States (both published in 1851), receive the most attention in Elder’s work. Elder convincingly argues that Calhoun’s ideas of the concurrent majority and his belief that the United States was not a nation but a “federal republic of sovereign states” have shaped constitutional thinking into the twenty-first century (488). The concurrent majority, or “unanimous consent of all the interests in a given society” (484), would provide minority interests with veto power and protect a country from the “absolutism” of a pure democracy (482). Elder guides the reader through Calhoun’s thought processes, from fully endorsing the War of 1812, to inventing and justifying nullification, to fiercely debating the addition of California and Oregon to the Union. Through every milestone, Elder informs the reader when Calhoun was acting in line with his stated beliefs and when, perhaps in the name of his own ambition or to preserve slavery, he contradicted his principles. The readability of these sections says much about Elder’s skills as an author. Elder also creates a nuanced picture of Calhoun as a man. Calhoun’s closest confidantes were often women, such as his mother-in-law, Floride Bonneau Colhoun, and favorite child, Anna. He highly valued Anna’s [End Page 262] political mind, to the point that she frequently accompanied Calhoun to Washington and served as his secretary. In the case of Calhoun’s wife Floride, Elder encountered the historian’s worst nightmare: most of her correspondence was either destroyed or lost. Without this resource, Elder cannot tell us much about the Calhouns’ relationship or Floride’s notable ostracism of Peggy Eaton. In her surviving letters, however, we learn that she was far from a benevolent slave owner and frequently expressed her frustrations from the plantation at Fort Hill when her husband refused to sell enslaved people whom she found difficult. What is perhaps most remarkable about Elder’s work is his attention to the enslaved men and women that surrounded Calhoun. It is more widely known that Calhoun was a white supremacist who reshaped slavery from a “necessary evil” to a “positive good” and asserted that Black slavery was “the best guarantee to equality among whites” (178). Elder, however, gives names to the people Calhoun enslaved whenever possible. In tracing Calhoun’s life, we also follow the lives of Sawney, his wife Tilla, and his children, Issey and Young Sawney, who resisted the Calhouns’ control through arson and running away. Elder reminds the reader of the Black families separated during every move, marriage, and death of the white Calhoun family. Calhoun’s state, idealized nation, and livelihood were entirely dependent on slave labor. Yet Calhoun’s dedication to slavery, Elder notes, did not mean he was “old-fashioned” (340). Instead, Calhoun argued that American progress could not exist without U.S. slavery, and he applied an international lens to support his antiabolitionist stance. Elder’s argument...