Calhoun: American Heretic by Robert Elder

Abstract

Reviewed by: Calhoun: American Heretic by Robert Elder Matthew G. Schoenbachler Calhoun: American Heretic. By Robert Elder. (New York: Basic Books, 2021. Pp. xiv, 640. $35.00, ISBN 978-0-4650-9644-2.) It has been a generation since early American historians—professional and amateur alike—rediscovered the neglected art of biography and began writing studies of Revolutionary leaders in truly prodigal numbers. This fascination has more recently extended to nineteenth-century politicians, as presses have poured forth biographies of Henry Clay, Andrew Jackson, and John Quincy Adams. Up to this point, however, any extended and serious reconsideration of John C. Calhoun has been conspicuously absent. Why historians have kept their distance is not difficult to understand. Calhoun was the leading advocate of the "positive good" proslavery argument, a man for whom slaveholding was "'the very sun of his political system,'" in the words of Frederick Douglass (pp. 356, 474). And so, the city of Charleston, South Carolina, has recently taken down a seventy-five-foot-tall statue of Calhoun, while Yale University and Clemson University have removed his name from their campuses. All of this makes the appearance of Robert Elder's Calhoun: American Heretic remarkable. More remarkable still is Elder's old-fashioned determination to understand Calhoun in the context of his time. Expecting to [End Page 374] find a monster, readers will find something perhaps more horrifying: an individual capable of genuine decency who loved his family dearly but who also sincerely believed that the survival of republican government required white supremacy and Black degradation. That said, Elder has no desire to excuse Calhoun, still less to praise him: "We do not have to honor John C. Calhoun, nor should we. But he has not left us the luxury of forgetting him" (p. 546). Elder skillfully portrays the contradictions of Calhoun's early life and career. Born into the backcountry elite, Calhoun early "absorbed the lessons that slavery taught to young white men of the slaveholding class" (p. 23). Yet he was never quite at ease in the genteel society of Lowcountry South Carolina. And although raised a southern Jeffersonian through and through, young Calhoun was educated by stern New England Federalists Timothy Dwight and Tapping Reeve. His nationalist aspirations in his early political career—evident, for example, in his ardent advocacy of internal improvements and his ingenious re-creation of the War Department under President James Monroe—slowly gave way to the inexorable logic of cotton and slavery, transforming him into a prophet of southern nationalism. In the last thirteen years of his life—as the South became increasingly isolated in the Age of Emancipation—Calhoun constructed his abiding, revanchist legacy. He not only pioneered the positive good argument but also formulated the theory of concurrent majority, which held that social groups with significant power (slaveholders, for example) should be able to veto legislation inimical to their interests. Calhoun also insisted that the Constitution of the United States had created a proslavery nation and that slavery rendered class divisions among the white population irrelevant. Elder's brief but perceptive epilogue traces the Calhounian image in the American mind—the story of how a man who was the very symbol of treason and white supremacy in the Civil War era was transformed into an advocate of minority rights in the twentieth century and, finally, in our time, to a heretic who "seems to represent the antithesis of the American idea of equality, inclusion, and popular democracy" (p. 543). And here we see an astonishing irony, albeit one unremarked by Elder. Large parts of Calhoun's heresies have today become the history profession's orthodoxy: that the Constitution is a fundamentally proslavery document, and that race should be so dominant as to overshadow or even efface class. One wishes that Elder had more fully engaged with previous studies of Calhoun and that the later portions of the book sustained the analytical rigor of the earlier chapters. But none of this obscures the fact that Elder has done what good historians do: attempt to understand the experiences, social forces, and native tendencies that shape individuals and societies without indulging in careless and easy moralizing. Polished, well-written, and exhaustively...