Half a cheer for John C. Calhoun

The July 6 edition of The Spectator World contains a section devoted to underrated/reviled Americans. I was asked to contribute. Consistent with my general ambition of being an equal-opportunity offender, I chose John C. Calhoun. The editors asked for just a couple of sentences. I gave them a little more. They trimmed my contribution. Here is the longer version:

In the encyclopedia of underrated Americans, there is no more unfairly reviled figure than John C. Calhoun (1782-1850), Yale valedictorian, Representative and Senator for South Carolina, Secretary of War, Secretary of State, and Vice-President under John Quincy Adams. Calhoun was one of the greatest orators of the age. His posthumously published Disquisition on Government is one of the most powerful admonitions about the tyranny of the majority ever penned. Unfortunately, Calhoun was also a supporter of slavery. And unlike many of his Southern contemporaries, he regarded slavery not just as a necessary evil but as a positive good, because it provided for slaves better than they could provide for themselves. You might, like me, think that Calhoun was wrong about that. But for the great engine of moral denunciation, Calhoun’s many virtues count for naught. A decade ago, in the high summer of political correctness, Yale renamed Calhoun College because, Yale’s president explained, Calhoun was a “white supremacist” who supported slavery. He forgot to mention that many of Yale’s residential colleges were named for slave owners or that Elihu Yale, for whom the whole university is named, was an active participant in the slave trade who had slaves flogged, hanged a stable boy for stealing a horse, and was eventually removed from his post in India for corruption. The liberal saint John Stuart Mill had a deeper understanding of Calhoun’s virtues. While he deplored Calhoun’s support of slavery, Mill also understood that Calhoun’s defense of state’s rights was an important weapon in the armory defending minority views. Calhoun, Mill wrote in Considerations on Representative Government, “has displayed powers as a speculative political thinker superior to any who has appeared in American politics since the authors of the Federalist.”

I am particular sorry The Spectator left out the quotation from Mill.