Last of the Classical Republicans: An Interpretation of John C. Calhoun

Abstract

LAST OF THE CLASSICAL REPUBLICANS: AN INTERPRETATION OF JOHN C. CALHOUN /. WÜliam Harris John C. Calhoun has always been something of an anomaly in the American political tradition. A politician who strovemightily to achieve the presidency, he is nevertheless remembered above all as a systematic thinker. Yet as a thinker he has always been hard to place within the political tradition because he thought and wrote in defense of a cause both lost and, in twentieth-century eyes, immoral. His contemporaries divided sharply in their interpretations ofhis career. Some, most notably John Quincy Adams, but including many southerners as well, saw him as poisoned by a grasping ambition, willing even to split the union in order to become president of a Southern confederacy. By contrast, most ofhis fellow South Carolinians, at least in public, saw him as a paragon of political virtue, consciously throwing away his chance for the greatest political prize in order to defend his section. Calhoun himself professed to be a conservative Union man, devoted only to the defense of liberty against tyranny. ] Withthe passage oftime, interpretations of Calhoun havemultiplied. Late nineteenth-century historians tended to see him in much the same terms as the abolitionists before the war: fatally flawed by ambition and by defense of an indefensible institution; the epitome and leader of the Slave Power. In the twentieth-century, Calhoun's reputation underwent a curious revival. Taking him at his word as a defender of minority rights, some argued that he should be seen as the theorist of the liberal broker state. His famous theory of the "concurrent majority" (of which more later) was, according to Peter Drucker, simply an accurate description of the informal workings of modern American politics, with every major interest group having an effective veto on major government policies.2 Richard Current effectively demolished this interpretation of Calhoun, who would have been displeased to be seen as promot1 For a brief but insightful discussion of the historiography on Calhoun, see Richard N. Current, John C. Calhoun (New York: Washington Square Press, 1966). 2 Peter F. Drucker, "A Key to American Politics: Calhoun's Pluralism," Review of Politics 10 (1948):412-26. 256CIVIL WAR HISTORY ing precisely the type of factional political dealing he blamed for America's troubles. Current himself, and afterwards, more famously, Richard Hofstadter, proposed another interpretation of Calhoun. "The key to Calhoun's political philosophy," Current wrote, ". . . is a concept of the class struggle."3 Or, as Hofstadter put it, Calhoun was the "Marx of the Master Class," anticipating much of Marx's economic analysis of society, while choosing the side of the ruling class instead of the proletariat.4 In the midst of the Civil Rights revolution, Calhoun seemed a less apt defender of minority rights in the abstract. At the same time two analyses of his thought emphasized its inconsistencies and illogicalities. William W. Freehling pointed out that Calhoun seemed unable to decide between economic interest and political corruption as the basic problematic of politics.5 And Louis Hartz argued that Calhoun's thought was fatally flawed by a mixture of Lockean liberalism and conservative organicism.6 I wish to suggest that all of these interpretations have some merit in illuminating aspects of Calhoun's thought, but that none have gotten to the heart of it. The problem has been a tendency to see Calhoun too much with the light of hindsight—in terms of what he did, or did not, correctly anticipate in later political thought or practice. I propose instead to follow a suggestion made by Pauline Maier, that Calhoun is most properly seen as a son of the eighteenth century.7 The proper context for Calhoun is not modern liberalism, Marxism, or organicism, but eighteenth-century republicanism. Indeed, I will suggest that in many respects Calhoun is a pre-eighteenth-century republican. Republican thought gives us the surest angle for understanding Calhoun's preoccupations , and the solutions he proposed for the political evils he perceived . It is also the key to both Calhoun's originality and limitations as a thinker. Calhoun's mature political theory began with Aristotle's dictum that man is essentially a social being, and that the social...