problem by repatriating freed blacks to Africa. This was not just a humbugging tactical move on
the part of conscience-stricken slave-owners like himself. It was also backed by the powerful
Evangelical anti-slavery lobby in Britain, who set up the first repatriation colony in Sierra Leone.
So it was a liberal' solution, or seemed so at the time. In 1819 Monroe supported Congressional legislation to set up a similar, American-sponsored colony in West Africa, to be called Liberia. Being a Jeffersonian he could not actually bring himself to allow the United States to purchase land for this purpose. But he assisted in other ways, so that when the colony got going in 1824 its capital was named Monrovia after him. Some freed slaves did go to Liberia, where they immediately set themselves up as a ruling caste over the local Africans, a prime source of the country's poverty and its ferocious civil wars, which continue to this day. American blacks seem to have realized instinctively that it would not work, that they were better off in America even as slaves than in Africa. They were scared of being sent there. Ten years after its foundation, Madison sold sixteen of his able-bodied slaves to a kinsman for $6,000, they givingtheir glad
consent' because of `their horror of Liberia.'
By the time of Monroe's presidency, however, many Southern whites, especially their political
leaders, were brazenly defending slavery, not as an unavoidable evil but as a positive blessing for
blacks and whites alike. Christian churchmen joined in this campaign as best they could. As
early as 1822 the South Carolina Baptist Association produced a Biblical defense of slavery.
There was a notable closing of Southern Christian ranks after the black preacher Nat Turner led a
Virginia slave-revolt in 1831, in which fifty-seven whites were killed. In 1844 Bishop John
England of Charleston provided an elaborate theological justification to ease the consciences of
Catholic slave-owners.
To understand the level of sophistication, and the passionate sincerity, with which slavery was
defended we must look at the case of John C. Calhoun (1782-1850) of South Carolina. Calhoun
was one of the greatest of all American political figures, a distinguished member of both Houses
of Congress, a superb orator, a notable member of the Cabinet, and a political theorist of no
mean accomplishment. His Disquisition on Government and Discourse on the Constitution and
Government of the United States (published together in 1851) deserve to rank with Jefferson on
Virginia and the writings of Woodrow Wilson. Calhoun was of Ulster Scots-Irish origin, son of a
semi-literate Indian fighter, born a penniless boy with natural good looks, enormous charm, and
wonderful brainpower, very much in the tradition of Edmund Burke and Richard Brinsley
Sheridan, taking to politics as if he had been born to the purple. In the year of Jefferson's
inauguration, he was an eighteen-year-old farmer with virtually no formal education. Ten years
later he had graduated brilliantly from Yale, got himself elected to Congress, and found a
beautiful bride, Floride Bouneau, heiress to a large plantation in Abbeville, South Carolina.
Studying Calhoun's life gives one a striking picture of the way Americans of strong character
transformed themselves in a mere generation. In his childhood, life in the Carolina backwoods
was wild-literally: the last panthers were not killed till 1797 and the state paid bounties for their
skins, and wolfskins too. One maternal uncle had been killed by the Tories in cold blood (his
mother, like Jackson's, was a bitter hater of the English), another had been `butchered by thirty
sabre-cuts and a third immured for nine months in the dungeons of St Augustine.' His
grandmother had been murdered and one of his aunts kidnapped by Indians. There were many
ambushes and scalpings, and his father's old hat, with four musket holes in it, was a family
treasure. Despite a lack of education, his father became an expert surveyor (like Washington) and
built up a holding of 1,200 acres. But they were poor. A contemporary historian, the Rev.