A History of the American People

Charles Woodmason, said the cabins swarmed with children' butin many places have naught
but a gourd to drink out of, not a plate, knife or spoon, glass, cup or anything.' The Calhouns
were among those who organized the church and school, served as justices, and tried to civilize
the place a little. In those days justice was do-it-yourself, carried out by bands known as the
Regulators, who hanged murderers and thieves. Calhoun's father was a tax-collector who also
supervised elections, and served in the state legislature for thirty years. He owned thirty-one
slaves and referred to my family, black and white.'' He died when Calhoun was only thirteen, so the boy had to run the estate as a teenager and at the same time get himself through Yale. Calhoun had two years at college, where he studied law and revealed his obstinacy, clashing with the president, Timothy Dwight, over politics-Dwight was anti-Jefferson. The boy's dissertation wasThe Qualifications Necessary to Make a Statesman.' He had them. He was
probably the ablest public man America ever produced and it is not surprising that there were
later rumors that he was the real father of Abraham Lincoln. (But the same was said of John
Marshall.) Calhoun got to Washington via Charleston politics. In those days it was an uproarious
place, a man's town, the women taking refuge in church. It was also the slave capital of the
hemisphere-40 percent of Africans came through Charleston, the Ellis Island of Black Americans.’ Calhoun grew up six feet two with stiff black hair standing straight up from his head. He read himself into literature, classical and modern, and used his prodigious memory to good effect. His manners were those of the best kind of 18th-century gentleman. The journalist Ann Royall was dazzled by what she called hispersonal beauty' and frank and courteous manners-a model of perfection.' Harriet Martineau called him theIron Man,' inflexible in his principles and conduct
the only way to get him to change his mind was to appeal to his honor.' His enemy Daniel Webster called hima true man.' George Ticknor said he was the most agreeable man in conversation in Washington.' Margaret Bayard Smith referred to hissplendid eye' and his face
stamped with nature's aristocracy.' In his life, oratory, and writings, Calhoun tried to tackle one of the great problems of the modern age: how to reconcile centralized and democratic power with the demands of people in unequal and different communities, small and large, to control their own lives. The problem has not been solved to this day, even theoretically. He argued that the political war against the South, and slavery, was being fought mainly by powerful lobbies rather than by the democratic wish of the people: he detected, very early on, the threat to American democracy represented by the lobby system, already growing. Thanks to the slaves he and his wife owned, he could pursue a public career, first in Charleston, then in Washington, of completely disinterested public service. Exactly the same argument had been used in defense of slavery in 5th-century BC Athens. The incongruities of this defense were revealed in a striking passage written by an Englishman, G. W. Featherstonehaugh, who was in the Carolinas in 1834. A traveling companion told him:In the North every young man has to scramble rapaciously to make his
fortune but in the South the handing down of slave plantations from father to son breeds
gentlemen who put honor before profit and are always jealous of their own, and are the natural
friends of public liberty.' The speaker, an educated man from South Carolina College, cited
Calhoun as an example of what he meant. He had the dignity which had belonged to Southern gentlemen from Washington down to the present time.' He hadnever been known to do a mean
action in his life.' In public life he `never omitted a chance to vindicate the Constitution from the
attempts of sordid people to violate its intentions.' This disquisition was interrupted by the arrival
of the coach, which had a captured runaway slave in chains on its top. Inside Featherstonehaugh