Slavery was the foundation of the antebellum South. More than any other characteristic, it defined Southern political, cultural, and social life. It also united the South as a section different from the rest of the country. John Caldwell Calhoun of South Carolina was committed to both state's rights and slavery as seen as the South's only protection from destruction by the industrious North. John C. Calhoun, the South's recognized intellectual and political leader from the 1820s until his death in 1850, devoted much of his remarkable intellectual energy to defending his two-part political philosophy. One side of his theory was devoted to the rights of the minority sections, more importantly the South needed particular defense in the federal union. The second part was an incongruity that offered slavery as an institution that promoted everyone involved.
Calhoun's commitment to his two-part defense and his efforts to expand them to the fullest would give him an exceptional role in American history as the political, spiritual, and moral voice for Southern autonomy. The fact was, he never wished the Southern states to sever themselves from the Union as they would eleven years after his death. Calhoun's experience and life's career as a public servant gave him the understanding he needed to redefine the theory of secession. Due to his impassioned writings on the interpretation of the constitution and state's rights, his speeches identified the federal government as encroaching in the very livelihood of the South; Calhoun, with great commitment augmented and molded the catalyst to the American Civil War.
To understand the man, it is important to begin with a brief history of the era in which he lived and how the resulting constitutional issues divided a nation. The judgment for slavery had been constructed into the colony of South Carolina with the first settlements. The British mandated the colonists to plant and export staples, but without the necessary labor, they could plant little. As necessity is the mother of invention, the necessity of workers prompted the importation of laborers. When rice became the big crop, the use of African slaves, who were already populating Virginia and the West Indies, became omnipotent, and Charleston, South Carolina was transformed into the slave center of the Western world. [1]
Black African slaves at one point represented twenty-percent of the total population, and in some areas up to sixty-percent. Charleston, South Carolina had the deepest complexion in comparison to other southern cities, where the slave presence was colorful and crucial. The West Coast of Africa served as a supplier for most of the slaves, having been brought directly in middle passage to America. More than 40,000 had been transported from 1742 to 1764, resulting in a more powerful African presence than in most other slave states. Slavery became the most important institution, second only by the government to ensure the prosperity of the Southern states where the peculiar institution was so entrenched. [2]
John Caldwell Calhoun's personal history nurtured his fierce commitment to his beliefs; he was born to strong parents and began life on the frontier on March 14, 1782. His family was part of the Scots-Irish immigration to Pennsylvania in the early years of the 1700s. Before long they were on the move west to the Abbeville district of South Carolina, in a little haven named Long Cane Creek. The patriarch Patrick Calhoun participated in the political debate over ratification of the Constitution and served as representative for his district. In upcountry South Carolina during the cotton boom, his family, and many others experienced economic prosperity. The son of a thriving farmer who served as a public official, Calhoun was chosen and expected to follow in his father's footsteps. He was chosen early in life by his father who saw something great in him.
In order for John to fulfill his family obligation he required an education. The important matter of his learning was solved when Mr. Moses Waddell, a young North Carolinian and graduate of Hampden-Sydney College became familiar with the Calhoun family. Mr. Waddell had become quite a sensation on a preaching assignment at Long Cane, and while there met and courted John Calhoun's older sister, Catherine. In 1795, when John was 13 years old, he spent his winter on the other side of the Savannah River where Waddell had settled and conducted a small school. The school provided the kind of structured Spartan learning environment in which Calhoun prospered. Calhoun progressed rapidly, enjoying every moment of his new education, but was short-lived. Unfortunately, his father suddenly died followed immediately by the death of his sister, Mrs. Catherine Waddell. While his family mourned their loss fifty-miles away in Abbeville and Mr. Waddell made final arrangements for his wife, John was left alone at the plantation, with little white companionship. There was no kin to mourn with him for nearly three months. By himself, the boy found diversion from his loneliness with books.
Calhoun was fortunate that his brother-in-law Waddell was a librarian, maintaining a small library. John searched the books and devoured the historical works of Rollin's Ancient History, Robertson's Charles V., Voltaire's Charles XII and then turned to essays by Brown and John Locke within 14 weeks. So intense was his study that his eyes became seriously affected, he lost weight, and became a shadow of his former self. His mother was alarmed by his appearance and worried for his health. She called for him to return to Abbeville where exercise and amusing diversions soon restored his strength. [3] Life had changed for him, his mentor, his rock and sweet sister would never cross his path again. The tall figure of a man who had been father to his community as well as to his family was now a memory, his son wrestled with the deep emptiness he felt. For a boy of 13, he matured and dug down deep inside himself, finding the strength to cope with this, the greatest loss he had ever felt.
John Calhoun was a great reader but not a bookworm or political fanatic during his teenage years. He recounted that he had a fondness for hunting and fishing and other country sports and said once that he had "always come home with at least a squirrel in his bag." [4] John followed the same path in his early life as his older brothers before him learning how to plow and sow; how to harvest wheat and cultivate the valuable new cash crop, cotton plants that everyone in the backcountry was beginning to grow. Farming was hard work, labor intensive. In South Carolina at the end of the 18th century if a young planter was learning how to farm, it meant he would be working with and learning how to direct slaves. There is a story that claims Calhoun had a skinny, dark-skinned slave named Sawney who would go fishing and hunting and work in the field with the young Calhoun. As the story goes, supposedly Sawney said that "many times in the boiling sun me and marsh John has plowed together." Many years later Calhoun gave his companion Sawney special privileges, living out his life on the plantation, lending credence to the story. [5]
Beyond the plantation there was his constant yearning to attend school. He was charged with learning more than his father had, to be the finest republican in America, the spark of change. John's older brothers were determined that John should attend university and through an agreement between the brothers, John was given seven years to earn his degree, all his expenses would be covered and the plantation would be maintained during his absence. [6] While he was preparing to leave to school in 1801, his mother Catherine Caldwell Calhoun died on May 14th. John told a cousin he had "never experienced so sever [sic] and unexpected shock" as he did upon hearing the news. [7] Once his mother burial was over John felt it was time to go. He traveled to New Haven, Connecticut in1802 to enroll in the fall semester at Yale College under the leadership of Timothy Dwight, the fiery president of Yale and strong advocate of a different kind of federalism which didn't give so much power to the people. During one of their moral question sessions, Dwight as the question, "What is the legitimate source of power?" John Calhoun, hearing his father's words, said "the people." [8]
Wrapped in mufflers and clothed with mittens, students sat in a single classroom during the winter months, listened to lectures for ninety minutes a day, and spent the rest of the time reading the authorities cited and formally writing up notes, which were eventually compiled in five thick volumes. What amazed Calhoun's fellow students was not so much the ease with which he absorbed details of the law as the effortless way he appeared to use his knowledge in debates. As his Maryland friend Virgil Maxey recalled, Calhoun rarely argued from an outline or took notes of opponent's arguments. "He relied on his too tenacious memory for preserving the order established in his own mind." [9]
After graduating, he remained in Connecticut and attended the Litchfield Law School, to study under Tapping Reeve, a vocal supporter of a strong federal government. As promised, John had accomplished an education, law degree, and acceptance to the bar within the time allowed by his brothers. Calhoun returned home to South Carolina. [10] He soon inherited his father's extensive land and slave holdings which amounted to five farms and 31 Negroes. He became the farmer and patriarch of the plantation. He continued his law practice and followed the circuit for a few years. He was successful and was elected to the South Carolina legislature in 1808. The young man who came down to Columbia in November 1808, to take his seat in the Legislature had a new maturity and depth of understanding.
In the summer of 1810, Calhoun was out at the stump at every little crossroad village campaigning for congress. By September 1811, Calhoun was headed to Washington, arriving with all the other new members to the U.S. Congress. Ironically, when Calhoun, the future champion of states' rights and secession, disembarked in Washington, he was a devoted federalist like his former law professor, Reeves. He aligned himself with the federalist section of the Republican Party led by the gentleman from Kentucky, Henry Clay, speaker of the house. Calhoun was immediately drawn to and became an important member of the party's War Hawk faction, which prodded President James Madison's administration to enter into the War of 1812, the nation's second war with Great Britain. [11] When hostilities ceased in 1815, Calhoun led the call for a protective national tariff on imports - a calculation he hoped would cultivate both Southern and Northern industrial development. The young republic's infrastructure was being discussed in Congress during this time. Calhoun was an ardent supporter of the improvements considered. He supported all the proposals introduced to spend federal money, pressuring his fellow members he said, "bind the Republic together with a perfect system of roads and canals…. Let us conquer space…. We are under the most imperious obligation to counteract every tendency to disunion." [12]
In 1817 Calhoun moved from the legislature to the position of secretary of war under President James Monroe's administration and devoted himself to fortifying America's military. His work revitalized the U.S. Military Academy at West Point. The improvements and reforms he initiated in the army's administrative structure have continued into the 21st century. "If ever there was perfection carried into any branch of the public service," one federal official wrote, "it was that which Mr. Calhoun carried into the War Department." [13] Calhoun's success at improving the Union's war-making ability meant the federal military would be stronger but, less frugal than before. Part of Calhoun's plan required money to be spent in order to maintain the country's military. "His schemes are too grand and magnificent…," a detractor in Congress wrote. "If we had a revenue of a hundred million, he would be at no loss how to spend it." [14]
Calhoun anticipated his achievements as war secretary would serve as a springboard to the presidency. When in 1824, that dream fell through, Calhoun had no problem accepting the vice presidency under staunch federalist John Quincy Adams. John Quincy was delighted to have Calhoun in his administration, having held him in high regard since their days together in Monroe's cabinet. Adams was particularly impressed by Calhoun's 'ardent patriotism,' believing Calhoun was "above all sectional and factious prejudices more than any other statesman of the Union with whom I have ever acted." [15] John was careful of the image he cultivated during the 1824 election campaign.
Just as Calhoun was firmly positioned under the federalist mantle, Southerners were progressively taking an anti-federal-government posture. In the North, the economy that industry created grew in influence and supremacy every day. In the meantime, the swiftly expanding cultivation of cotton and other cash crops was committing the South to a pastoral culture and economy, which depended on slavery. The United States was dividing into two increasingly self-conscious sections with very different priorities. More and more, as the issue of slavery was placed center-stage in American politics, the South found itself defending its way of life. Due to the South's investment in large-scale agriculture, any attack on slavery was an attack on the Southern economy itself.
The issue came to a head in 1819 with Missouri and the great debate over whether to allow the territory to become a state. The resulting historic Missouri Compromise of 1820 allowed the territory to enter the Union as a slave state while Maine entered as a free state, maintaining the fragile balance between free and slave states at 12 each. The compromise prohibited slavery in the remainder of the Louisiana Purchase north of Missouri's southern border. For a brief period of time, the Missouri Compromise soothed the sectional break that slavery had generated, but the compromise also awakened the South to the fact that the country had divided along sectional lines, it was considered a distinct section - a section that was plainly viewed as a minority in the Union, in comparison to the Northern states, which enjoyed growth in political representation and a boom in population, which inevitably created more power. [16]
Southerners grew increasingly anxious during the 1820s about the North controlling the federal government and how that position threatened the South and its "peculiar" institution. South Carolinians looked for leaders, in their ranks, who would limit federal power. Calhoun became a target for sharp disapproval from leading South Carolina personages, including Thomas Cooper, the president of the state college. In 1824, Cooper published a pamphlet, which was widely circulated, attacking Calhoun. "He spends the money of the South to buy up influence in the North," Cooper grumbled. [17] Calhoun could not ignore the political changes swirling around him. In order to maintain his status as a Southern leader and reach his political goals he had to change his stance as well as his associations. He recognized it would be a mistake to maintain his connection with Adams, whose ideas on the expansion of federal power, and promotion of national strength development drew a bitter response in South Carolina. So, as the tide changed Calhoun switched sides once Andrew Jackson began preparing to challenge Adams in the 1828 presidential election. Calhoun jumped on the Democratic bandwagon. Calhoun's change in political views earned him the candidacy for vice president, and the ticket won. [18]
That same year, Congress passed a highly protective tariff that Southerners bitterly opposed, viewing the measure as sacrificing Southern agrarian interests to benefit Northern interests. South Carolina seemed to be a boiling pot for the protest against the so-called Tariff of Abominations. Responding to a call from the state legislature to report on the state of affairs, Calhoun furtively wrote an essay titled South Carolina Exposition and Protest. He asserted that states had a constitutional right to nullify any federal government actions they considered unconstitutional, which was a page directly from Thomas Jefferson thirty years earlier. Calhoun had become the chosen spokesperson for articulating Southern rights. When Congress adopted another high tariff in 1832 the South Carolina legislators used the principles Calhoun had voiced in his Exposition and Protest to declare the tariff "null and void." [19]
Whether John C. Calhoun had anticipated Andrew Jackson's response is unknown but, Jackson steadfastly refused to accept South Carolina's defiant stance, and the Nullification Crisis of 1832 was created. By this point, the relationship between President Jackson and Calhoun was crumbling fast. Differences between the two men had always been evident, but the problem had now become a personal conflict with Jackson's commitment to the supremacy of the national government. The two men would never be able to work together again, their political ideologies made it impossible. The presidency loomed over vice president Calhoun's head, when it became clear that Jackson would choose Martin Van Buren to succeed him as president, Calhoun counted his days before he quit the administration.
The state legislature back in South Carolina chose John C. Calhoun to fill the United States Senate seat recently vacated by Robert Y. Hayne. This was perfect for the rancorous Calhoun; he now had a new, highly influential bully pulpit for his pro-Southern arguments. Senator Calhoun openly led the battle against the tariff, which in his opinion was a fanatical attempt by Congress to dictate the country's economic policy. This, Calhoun protested - in refutation of his earlier views - was an overextension of federal power. To be honest, Andrew Jackson was not a supporter of the high tariff, but he was incensed over Calhoun's actions, which he felt were bordering on treason. Jackson vociferously threatened to march himself down to South Carolina and personally hang Calhoun and his fellow nullifiers. [20]
Jackson's anger was liberated by drafting the Force Bill, as a response to the nullification. The Bill authorized the president to use military power to coerce South Carolina to comply with the tariff. The bill became the target of Calhoun's first speech upon returning to the Senate. He expressed outrage at the thought of "this government, the creature of the States, making war against the power to which it owes its existence." [21] Senator Henry Clay, the great compromiser, rescued his country on the eve of a major crisis by fashioning the Compromise Tariff of 1833. This compromise progressively lowered the offending tariff, but it also reconfirmed Congress's authority to enact such protective tariffs. South Carolina responded by repealing its nullification of the tariff, but in a final act of defiance, it nullified the Force Bill.
It was the tariff controversy that brought John C. Calhoun to the forefront as the leading representative for Southern interests; he emerged from the crisis with two important truths. The first was his emergence as the leading intellectual and political advocate of the South. The second was his development of a political philosophy which limited the federal government's power and thus protected the minority agricultural South and its investment in slavery. "I consider the tariff act as the occasion rather than the real cause of the present unhappy state of things," he confided to an associate early in the Nullification Crisis. "The truth can no longer be disguised, that the peculiar domestick institution of the Southern States and the consequent direction which that and her soil and climate have given her industry, has placed them…in opposite relation to the majority of the Union…." [22]
There were a select few in the South that supported a high tariff, but all the slave states were united on the issue of slavery. It made political sense to Calhoun to use the issue of slavery as a strong example for Southern states' rights. From 1833 to 1850 - as a member of the U.S. Senate, a private citizen, and during a stint as President John Tyler's secretary of state in 1844-1845 - he labored to defend the institution from any kind of attack, from perceived overextensions of federal power to abolitionist rhetoric. For him the stakes were high, nothing less than the survival of the South. "I have ever had but one opinion on the subject," Calhoun wrote. "Our fate as a people is bound up in the question." [23]
Calhoun's political thinking had taken a complete turnabout from the federalism of his early years. Now, his goal was to insure the power of the local agrarian planters by limiting the power of the federal government. "My aim is fixed," he proclaimed. "It is no less than to turn back the Government to where it commenced its operations in 1789…on the State Rights Republican tack." He worked endlessly to keep governmental power as decentralized as possible to allow the farmers to maintain power and protect the labor system that made their great wealth and status possible. To do this, Calhoun developed two major ideas that are perhaps his greatest legacy: the concepts of state interposition and concurrent majority. [24]
State interposition was first proposed in the Virginia and Kentucky resolutions of 1798, written by James Madison and Thomas Jefferson in response to the anti-Republican Alien and Sedition Acts. The enlightened social contract theory of earlier philosophers Thomas Hobbes and John Locke was applied to the U.S. Constitution. Their argument was clear, if representatives of the states had written the Constitution, the power of constitutional interpretation lies with the states. If a state believed the federal government was violating the terms of the national charter, it had the right to interpose itself between its people and the federal government to provide protection from oppression. The Fort Hill Address of July 1831 was the first time Calhoun openly and explicitly identified himself with the nullification cause. In that speech, he proclaimed that the right of state interposition was "the fundamental principle of our system" and that the federal government must accept that right in order to keep the Constitution and the Union secure. "The Constitution of the United States is, in fact, a compact, to which each State is a party," he argued. Since, in his view, "the States…formed the compact, acting as sovereign and independent communities…, the several States, or parties, have a right to judge of its infractions." [25]
By embracing state interposition, Calhoun dismissed the 1803 Supreme Court ruling in Marbury v. Madison, a ruling that claimed the power of constitutional interpretation exclusively for the judicial branch. He also contradicted his own earlier distaste for those who dabbled in constitutional interpretation. "The Constitution…was not intended as a thesis for the logician to exercise his ingenuity on," he proclaimed in 1817. Now, in defending the South's unique economy and society, Calhoun was scheming how to change policy and minds. He assisted in the development of a process for states to utilize their powers of interposition. He proposed a state convention should be called first to consider any federal action in question. If it was determined by the convention that the action infringed upon its rights under the Constitution, then the action could be declared "null and void," prohibiting the national government the power to execute the law within that state. The only means the federal government would have from that point would be to either amend the Constitution to legitimize its action or repeal the measure. If amendment was successful but, was considered unacceptable to the state, then the state had the right to secede from the Union. [26]
Calhoun, at this point in his political career, while developing the concept of nullification never intended for the states to secede. He sought only to the nation away from "the dangerous and despotic doctrine of consolidation" and back to "its true confederative character." This was especially important for the minority South. "The major and dominant party will have no need of these restrictions for their protection," Calhoun wrote. The minority, however, required "a construction of the Constitution which would confine these powers to the narrowest limits." [27]
The concept of nullification became a frightful thing, in any future debate over slavery the states would have the ability to define the terms of their membership in the Union. The southern states would surely deny the national government any regulatory power over slavery. Calhoun's second major contribution to American political thought, where slavery was essential, was the concept of the concurrent majority. Concurrent majority, as theorized by Calhoun, would protect slavery in a biased climate that was progressively more anti-slavery and in which the slaveholding South enjoyed too little representation to safeguard its interest. The purpose of the concurrent majority concept was to stop the North, with its population majority, from ruling the nation as a tyrant. From Calhoun's viewpoint, "to govern by the numerical majority alone is to confuse a part of the people with the whole," he argued. In order to formally adopt the concept of concurrent majority into law, the Constitution needed to be formally amended. Yet, that was not the end of concurrent majority. Calhoun envisioned each region having a chief executive invested with veto power over any congressional action, as well the power to execute any federal law in harmony with the interests of his region.
During the 1830s and 1840s, the Northern abolition movement and Northern politicians were gaining attention in their demands that the federal government act against slavery. This confirmed Calhoun's fears, the North planned to exercise its power as a majority to the disadvantage and ruin of Southern interests. He countered these attacks with the argument that the Constitution gave Congress no regulatory power over slavery. To Northern politicians who dismissed this argument and continued to push antislavery measures through Congress, he warned that the South "cannot remain here in an endless struggle in defense of our character, our property, and institutions." He said that if abolitionist agitation did not end, "we must become, finally, two peoples…. Abolition and the Union cannot co-exist." Even compromise was not possible, in his opinion. [28]
As the antislavery movement continued to build up steam, Calhoun continually found himself having to defend slavery on moral, ethical, and political grounds. By the 1830s it had already become unsatisfactory for Southern politicians to apologize for slavery and excuse it as a necessary evil; to do so would have been to admit that slavery was morally wrong. So a major shift in the Southern defense of slavery occurred, one that Calhoun had a large role in bringing about. Calhoun endorsed slavery as "a good - a great good," based on his belief in the inequality inherent in the human race. Calhoun believed that people were motivated primarily by self-interest and that competition among them was a positive expression of human nature. The results of this competition were displayed for all to see in the social order: those with the greatest talent and ability rose to the top, and the rest fell into place beneath them. [29]
Calhoun believed the concepts of liberty and equality, idealized during the Revolutionary period, were potentially destructive to this social order. With the stratification of society, those at the top were recognized as authority figures and respected for their proven wisdom and ability. If the revolutionary ideal of equality were taken too far, the authority of the elite would not be accepted. Without this authority, Calhoun argued, society would break down and the liberty of all men would be threatened. In his manifesto A Disquisition on Government, he asserted that liberty was not a universal right but should be "reserved for the intelligent, the patriotic, the virtuous and deserving." [30]
Calhoun believed the liberty Southerners enjoyed depended on slavery. Contrary to the writings of those who unabashedly celebrated the North's free labor system, antebellum Southern society, though definitely stratified, was highly fluid. Fortunes could be and were made in a single generation. Agriculture, specifically cotton, was what made that society so mobile. Cotton was a labor-intensive crop, and as a farmer acquired greater cotton wealth, he required a greater number of field hands to work his expanding fields. So the ownership of slaves became a measure of status and upward mobility. To destroy slavery, according to Calhoun, would be to destroy a powerful symbol of what motivated the Southern man to improve himself. In the end, Calhoun supported the institution of slavery for many reasons, but at the bottom of all his argument was this: he believed the African race was inferior. He shared the prevailing prejudices of the day - held in both the North and South - that black people were mentally, physically, and morally inferior to whites. This inferiority necessitated that they be slaves. "There is no instance of any civilized colored race of any shade being found equal to the establishment and maintenance of free government," Calhoun argued. He pointed to the impoverished living conditions of Northern free blacks as proof that black people lacked the ability to exercise their freedom positively. [31]
In Calhoun's view, slavery benefited black people. "Never before has the black race…from the dawn of history to the present day, attained a condition so civilized and so improved, not only physically, but morally and intellectually," he asserted in Congress. "It came to us in a low, degraded, and savage condition, and in the course of a few generations it has grown up under the fostering care of our institutions." [32] Slavery provided black people with a quality of existence Calhoun believed they were incapable of obtaining for themselves. To his mind, despite all the progress the race had supposedly made in America, to free the slaves and place them in situations where they would have to compete with white people on an equal basis would only result in catastrophe. The freed slave's inherent inferiority would place him at such a disadvantage that he would not be able to achieve the quality of life he enjoyed as a slave, Calhoun insisted.
Calhoun noted that slave-owners provided for their slaves from birth to infirmity. He urged critics of slavery to "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 poor house" in Europe and the North. In support of his argument, he cited census figures indicating that free blacks were much more likely to suffer mental or physical disabilities than were slaves. In the long run, Calhoun believed, regardless of what happened with slavery, the progress of civilization would in time doom the inferior African race to extinction. Until that time, he asserted, slavery at least gave black people security and made them useful.
When confronted with the argument that slavery was an exploitative labor system, Calhoun replied that in every civilization a propertied class emerged and exploited the labor of others. This enabled the master class to pursue intellectual and cultural endeavors that advanced the progress of civilization. "Slavery is indispensable to a republican government," he proclaimed. In the South it was inevitable, Calhoun argued, that the African race would be the exploited class. The South merely institutionalized this into a system that benefited both master and servant. The master got his labor and the slave received a standard of living far above what he could achieve on his own. While Calhoun was defending slavery, he extended his argument to indict the North and industrial capitalism. He asserted that the slave system was actually superior to the 'wage slavery' of the North. He believed that slavery, by intertwining the economic interests of master and slave, eliminated the unavoidable conflict that existed between labor and capital under the wage system. The amount of money a master invested in his slaves made it economically unfeasible to mistreat them or ignore their working and living conditions. In the North, the free laborer was as much a slave to his employer as was the black man in the South, Calhoun argued, but he lacked the protection the black slave enjoyed from a paternalistic master. [33]
With or without Calhoun, the Southern institution of slavery would have disappeared, but it will always remain a black mark on the history of the United States and on Calhoun's reputation. Still, Calhoun deserves a prominent place in the history of American political thought - if only for this irony: while he fought to protect the Southern minority's rights and interests from the Northern majority, he felt free to subordinate the rights of the African American minority to the interests of the South's white majority. After Calhoun's death on March 31, 1850, one of his greatest foes, U.S. Senator Thomas Hart Benton of Missouri, sternly rebuked an associate who suggested that he honor Calhoun with a eulogy in Congress. "He is not dead, sir - he is not dead," remarked Benton, a staunch Unionist. "There may be no vitality in his body, but there is in his doctrines." [34] Eleven years later, a bloody civil war would prove Benton was right.
