Search Results

This chapter discusses Charleston secessionists’ campaign to honor John C. Calhoun. It highlights the role of the Ladies’ Calhoun Monument Association (LCMA), one of the first southern women’s groups to assume a leading role in civic memory. It argues that as a secessionist project that survived the death of the Confederacy, the Calhoun Monument illustrates the postwar adjustments of white southern commemoration. Waning enthusiasm for the Nullifier fostered a proposal to channel the LCMA’s funds to the Home for Mothers, Widows, and Daughters of Confederate Soldiers, an institution established by LCMA leaders. Only when frustrated in this attempt to implement a more expansive view of women’s commemorative citizenship did the LCMA commission a statue of Calhoun. As an artifact of secession as well as a tribute to the Lost Cause, the Calhoun Monument encouraged ruminations on the fluidity of personal identity and the self-destructiveness of racial slavery that Confederate commemoration ordinarily aimed to suppress.

This chapter discusses the ideological evolution and political ascendancy of John C Calhoun as the author of nullification and leader of southern sectionalism in the United States Congress between 1821 and 1844. It also discusses Calhoun’s influence on the early Congressional careers of Robert M.T. Hunter and James Murray Mason of Virginia.

This chapter examines the speakership elections of 1839 and 1847, each of which highlighted the conflicting impulses of party and region at a time when national party leaders were striving for greater organization over House affairs. It explores the dynamics of roll call votes once the House began electing Speakers and other officers through viva voce voting, first in the 26th Congress (1839–1841), when the officer choices were dictated by a small group of nominal Democrats led by John C. Calhoun, and then in the succeeding four Congresses. The chapter also considers whether the coalition that elected Speakers in the early nineteenth century could look like a governing coalition, or even a procedural cartel. It shows that controlling the speakership was no guarantee of controlling the floor for the remainder of the antebellum period.

Although during the 1840s James Polk cultivated the image of a Southern moderate on the slavery question, his early career contradicted this impression. In 1832 he had provoked a furious debate in the U.S. House of Representatives, aimed at discouraging any criticism there of slavery, which foreshadowed later debates over the “gag rule.” In October 1839, as governor of Tennessee, he publicly adopted the Calhounite view that it would be unconstitutional for the federal government to take any antislavery action, even in the District of Columbia or in the federal territories. Both publicly and behind the scenes, Polk promoted the view that disunionism would be an inevitable consequence of the enactment of the (allegedly) abolitionist-tainted slavery policies of the Whig Party. Polk acted from political conviction, but also in accordance with his own economic interest, as he doubled his Mississippi plantation investment during the twelve months before October 1839.

This chapter begins with biographical sketches of David Rice Atchison of Missouri and Andrew Pickens Butler of South Carolina. The chapter also discusses the elections of Atchison, Butler, Hunter and Mason to the United States Senate, their political allegiance to Calhoun and advocacy of slavery’s expansion westward. It concludes with Calhoun’s opposition to the Compromise package of 1850 and his death one month before its passage.

Much of Andrew Jackson’s first presidential term was consumed by two self-precipitated quarrels with Vice President John C. Calhoun—one over Cabinet member John Eaton and his saucy wife, Peggy and the other over Calhoun’s earlier actions as secretary of war when Jackson invaded Spanish Florida in 1818. The death of his beloved wife, Rachel, shortly after his election (which he blamed on his political adversaries) contributed to his extreme behavior. While Jackson manipulated both disputes to serve political and policy ends, he also obsessed over them to a dangerous degree, raging cholerically against his imagined enemies and concocting lurid conspiratorial fantasies with Calhoun at their center. Jackson’s character in the White House shows the paradoxical picture of a politician who was at once shrewd, farsighted, vengeful, and at times nearly unhinged.

In the first half of the nineteenth century a broad set of interconnected movements serve to transform the understanding of citizenship into an increasingly individual basis. The issue of chattel slavery becomes increasingly prominent as the invention of the cotton gin shows that it is likely to remain economically viable; it is defended in the South as a positive good for all. In the context of the Dred Scott decision that denied citizenship to blacks, Frederick Douglass poses the issue of black citizenship the most forcefully. Abolitionism grows in strength but meets resistance in both North and South. A feminist movement develops: as with blacks, it demands citizenship for a group as a whole, rather than on an individual basis. Communitarian movements seek to recover some quality of shared virtue. All these movements raise the question of slavery in one form or another.

This chapter discusses liberal economic thought in the Southern and Northeastern discourses. Regional historical contexts account for the internal and trans-Atlantic divisions within antebellum liberal political economy. Southern free traders like John Calhoun and Thomas Cooper tied their brand of laissez-faire to a politically and economically inspired states’ rights and agrarian defense of slavery. In theoretically significant ways, Southerners divorced their version of free trade from Northeastern and British liberalism. Divisions widened as slavery was raised to the fore of domestic politics, and made permanent when British laissez-faire grew attached to industrialization. Northeastern free traders like Francis Wayland and John McVickar pursued a style of laissez-faire that comported with the Smithian tradition by focusing on the moral and theological benefits of free trade universalism. Northeastern liberals largely ignored the economic benefits of free markets. And the mid-century secular turn in economics, especially in British thought, completed the breach between American and European expressions of intellectual capitalism.

Political scientist Thomas F. Schaller examines in detail the unique role of South Carolina in American history and politics. The center of the Nullification Crisis of the nineteenth century, as well as the first state to secede, the Palmetto State has consistently been at the forefront of opposition to the federal government and a virulent insistence on the sanctity of states’ rights. Its importance continues today, as Schaller demonstrates, including the prominent role that the state's primary and customary visits to Bob Jones University play for the GOP presidential nominating process. From the 1770s South Carolina embraced the resister's role with relish and John C. Calhoun—perhaps its favorite son—is virtually synonymous with the antebellum “nullification” movement and the doctrine of interposition. Schaller examines why it is that South Carolina has repeatedly distinguished itself as a federal outlier to the Republic—a state first to secede, and often last to accede—to the laws and norms embraced by much of the rest of the nation. In doing so, he links the past to the present.

This chapter focuses on the period from the early 1840s to James MacQueen’s death in 1870. It follows MacQueen’s geographical theories and commercial proposals as they flowed beyond the Niger basin. The concerns are his acceptance within the British geographical establishment, after he was elected Fellow of the Royal Geographical Society in 1845, and subsequent career as a Victorian ‘critical’ (or ‘armchair’) geographer; the use of his ideas by the Southern US proslavery ideologue and politician, John C. Calhoun; his relationship to the missionary-explorer David Livingstone; and his involvement in the Nile controversy, when he took the side of Richard Burton against John Hanning Speke. Thus, the chapter simultaneously brings the narrative to a close while also revealing the continuing entanglements of slavery, geographical knowledge, exploration, race and empire that were evident throughout MacQueen’s career.

This chapter examines Everett’s service as US minister to Britain with a special eye towards the multiple slavery-related issues with which he and his British counterparts dealt. These included such issues as Britain’s drive for American cooperation in the abolition of the Atlantic slave trade, British liberation of American fugitive slaves headlined by the Creole case, and the American government’s drive to annex Texas. Everett continued to occupy a conservatively antislavery position, which put him in tension with President John Tyler and the Southern-friendly Secretaries of State under which he mostly worked.

George M. Bibb had a distinguished career as a lawyer, judge, and politician. He served as chief justice of the Kentucky Court of Appeals before embarking on a national career as a US senator (first as a Democratic-Republican and later as a Jacksonian Democrat), secretary of the treasury in the cabinet of President John Tyler, and one of the most active advocates before the US Supreme Court that Kentucky would produce. In between, he served as judge of the chancery court in Louisville. His father, Richard Bibb, was a major figure in the emancipation and African colonization movement.

This chapter focuses on the critique of capitalism offered by George Fitzhugh, John C. Calhoun, and James Henry Hammond. It pays particular attention to their indictment of the wage system as exploitative and immiserating of the working class.

This chapter summarizes the understandings of federalism which anchored the American political order since the time of the Founding, discussing its major controversies in early American history such as Andrew Jackson’s tariff battle with John Calhoun. This decentralized federalism linked a federal government limited to constitutionally enumerated powers with states exercising robust police powers on behalf of citizens’ welfare. Even after the Civil War and Reconstruction, both Republicans and Democrats shared and maintained the deep commitment to states’ rights even as they reviled nullification. That devotion to federalism initially led to the Webb-Kenyon Act, which guaranteed federal support of states’ decisions to prohibit alcohol. Aided by a unique policy window, careful efforts to reconcile prohibition to states’ rights, and mastery of single issue pressure politics, the Anti-Saloon League and its leader Wayne Wheeler achieved the Eighteenth Amendment, advanced by progressive Texas Senator Morris Sheppard. Both the amendment and the implementing Volstead Act were attacked, especially by libertarian lawyers like Elihu Root, as hostile to both the spirit and perhaps the text of the Constitution. In a perfunctory opinion that enabled a decade of intense constitutional debate, the Supreme Court endorsed the ASL’s handiwork in the National Prohibition Cases.

This chapter examines how economic, political, and social changes in early nineteenth-century Charleston, South Carolina, influenced De Bow’s life. Born at a time when financial panic, sectional crisis, and potential slave revolts altered the mood and outlook of Charleston, De Bow accepted opportunities as they came, failed at many of them, and eventually settled on writing as his best chance of escaping his difficult childhood. As a young adult he emerged from Charleston with a sharp intellect, an articulate tongue, and a talented pen. His emergence as a local thinker and writer caught the attention of some of the city’s most prominent businessmen, who asked him to represent Charleston at an upcoming commercial convention in Memphis, Tennessee. It would be during this trip, while sitting with John C. Calhoun, that De Bow decided to leave Charleston for New Orleans and start a monthly journal dedicated to southern economic development.

The afterword deals briefly with constitutional issues Jefferson and Madison faced after the Constitution and the Bill of Rights were adopted. These included questions involving the need for Senate approval of the removal of an executive official whose appointment required Senate confirmation; Congress’s authority to charter a national bank, enact a protective tariff, or subsidize internal improvements; the allocation between Congress and the president of power over foreign policy; the constitutionality of the Alien and Sedition Acts; and the president's authority to execute the Louisiana Purchase. The afterword concludes that during the ratification debate, Madison had represented the Constitution as creating a government of limited and carefully enumerated powers, and that he generally honored those representations. Madison, however, advocated states’ rights less aggressively and less consistently than did Jefferson, and unlike Jefferson, was willing to defer to the Supreme Court in resolving conflicts between state and national authority. In fact, after Jeffeson died in 1826, Madison spent much of the rest of his life combating the nullification theory espoused by John C. Calhoun, who claimed a state could lawfully nullity a federal statute.