Calhous on the Slavery QuestionCalhous on the Slavery QuestionJohn Calhoun was nothing but a racist that enforced slaveryCalhouns view was that slavery ought not to be considered, as it exists in the United States, in the abstract; but rather as a political institution, existing prior to the formation of the government and expressly recognized in the Constitution. The framers of that instrument regarded slaves as property, and admitted the right of ownership in them.
Calhoun’s fundamental enterprise was to defend the institution of slavery. To do so, he first had to overturn the principles of the American Founding. He started with the Declaration of Independence, arguing that the proposition all men are created equal as now understood, has become the most false and dangerous of all political errors. Thus Calhoun transformed the Democratic Party of Jefferson into the Party of Slavery.
The growth of the Northern abolition movement and attempts by Northern politicians to push the federal government to act against slavery confirmed for Calhoun that the North intended to exercise its power as a majority to the detriment of Southern interests. He responded to these attacks with the argument that the Constitution gave Congress no regulatory power over slavery. Even compromise was not possible, in his opinion.
As the antislavery movement continued to build up steam, Calhoun continually found himself having to defend slavery on moral, ethical, and political grounds. Calhoun had a large role in bringing about slavery. 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.
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, but in turn, slavery had to continue.
In 1870, the Southern states of Georgia, Georgia, Mississippi, and South Carolina expanded their cotton resources dramatically. By 1870, more than half a million acres of cotton had been planted in the states of Mississippi, and Georgia and Mississippi had the nation’s largest cotton belt.
Calhoun did not merely talk about expanding markets, but also the development of an economy of scale and scale that would give Southern elites the opportunity to build a business empire for themselves and their families. In doing so, the historian Charles Hays has established an example of how the expansionist agenda can produce a profit-driven economy through an unending campaign of massive trade increases that would take place without the intervention of political power. The expansionist agenda is thus one that was the key to a lasting, sustained American socialist government.
Thomas Gage was a liberal in his time. He became chairman of the Democratic Caucus of the Southern Congress, a small group of white Democrats based outside the Southern area and who was not affiliated with a party. Gage believed in government being a government, and this view has been taught at Harvard University. In fact, Gage believes we all should be “a federal government” with a “constitutional government.” These beliefs are held by Gage’s contemporaries during his life as the nation’s first Senator, first Congressman, then Secretary of the Treasury, and then Chairman of the National Conference of the States. His political ideology is not “right and wrong” but merely an “insuperable delusion” of a conservative political school.
Despite his commitment to the “right and wrong” philosophy, Gage was also a lifelong member of the Democratic Party. He recalled in his autobiography “The Man of the Blue House,” and his biography “The Man of the Red House” saying:
It is time to let the American people know that our federal government must not be seen as a giant business empire, but rather as a system of power designed to bring about their economic and religious progress. Our government can, and should, pursue their goals with a healthy degree of restraint; it must be accountable to the concerns of individual liberty; it cannot be subject to the tyranny of money. It should not go far enough, and it cannot be allowed to succeed.”
A number of gentry men of the right wing of the Democratic Party also opposed gentry government. These businessmen and business executives included William James, John Locke, and William Howard Taft, among others. In a letter to fellow delegates of the Southern Association of Commerce, James said that when government was to succeed in the nation, “it must include, for men to whom the liberty of the states is subordinate, the rule of law of liberty and of right.” The following year they also introduced legislation to create a statewide “No Gentry Government,” the repeal of the Jeffersonian laws of 1816, the adoption of the Gentry Act of 1830, and another law that would have repealed the Federal Act of 1778. They also proposed to establish a “Slavery Free
In 1870, the Southern states of Georgia, Georgia, Mississippi, and South Carolina expanded their cotton resources dramatically. By 1870, more than half a million acres of cotton had been planted in the states of Mississippi, and Georgia and Mississippi had the nation’s largest cotton belt.
Calhoun did not merely talk about expanding markets, but also the development of an economy of scale and scale that would give Southern elites the opportunity to build a business empire for themselves and their families. In doing so, the historian Charles Hays has established an example of how the expansionist agenda can produce a profit-driven economy through an unending campaign of massive trade increases that would take place without the intervention of political power. The expansionist agenda is thus one that was the key to a lasting, sustained American socialist government.
Thomas Gage was a liberal in his time. He became chairman of the Democratic Caucus of the Southern Congress, a small group of white Democrats based outside the Southern area and who was not affiliated with a party. Gage believed in government being a government, and this view has been taught at Harvard University. In fact, Gage believes we all should be “a federal government” with a “constitutional government.” These beliefs are held by Gage’s contemporaries during his life as the nation’s first Senator, first Congressman, then Secretary of the Treasury, and then Chairman of the National Conference of the States. His political ideology is not “right and wrong” but merely an “insuperable delusion” of a conservative political school.
Despite his commitment to the “right and wrong” philosophy, Gage was also a lifelong member of the Democratic Party. He recalled in his autobiography “The Man of the Blue House,” and his biography “The Man of the Red House” saying:
It is time to let the American people know that our federal government must not be seen as a giant business empire, but rather as a system of power designed to bring about their economic and religious progress. Our government can, and should, pursue their goals with a healthy degree of restraint; it must be accountable to the concerns of individual liberty; it cannot be subject to the tyranny of money. It should not go far enough, and it cannot be allowed to succeed.”
A number of gentry men of the right wing of the Democratic Party also opposed gentry government. These businessmen and business executives included William James, John Locke, and William Howard Taft, among others. In a letter to fellow delegates of the Southern Association of Commerce, James said that when government was to succeed in the nation, “it must include, for men to whom the liberty of the states is subordinate, the rule of law of liberty and of right.” The following year they also introduced legislation to create a statewide “No Gentry Government,” the repeal of the Jeffersonian laws of 1816, the adoption of the Gentry Act of 1830, and another law that would have repealed the Federal Act of 1778. They also proposed to establish a “Slavery Free
. A number of gentry civil servants, including the former U.S. Secretary of Treasury, Alexander Hamilton & the late Thomas Paine, made a number of proposals for gentry government. The following year two of the founders of our present gentry party were elected to the U.S. Senate. Their plans for national government: 1. to prevent the federal government from interfering with the civil service of America—the civil service of a free country (as defined by S. 2 U. S. Code § 741) 2. to strengthen „ to preserve, strengthen, ‟, the right of all civil servants in the country to join the union at any time. 3. to promote the preservation of civil service, as well as civil government in the federal system; to prevent, prevent, inhibit, ₅, the reclassification of persons as “noncitizens” as required by the s. 2 U. S. Code, § 652.4) to protect human liberty, as defined in the s. 2 U. S. Code § 817.9—and to assure legal „, civil rights, as set out in the U. S. Constitution, and the civil liberties guaranteed by the constitution of the United States (or any combination thereof); and to provide for the protection of persons and the common defense and the law. No Gentry Government. 2. to maintain, strengthen ‟.; to assure, protect, reduce, or destroy the liberty (as defined in the s. 2 U. S. Code § 741) of the people of the United States. These plans were defeated by the U.S. Senate on 3 October 1830. 3. to promote: 1. freedom of trade †. 2. to establish the right of States to regulate commerce and industry in the territory of their own States by laws of the state, provided this right is limited to the commerce of their respective States.
A gentry government has been the fundamental basis of several States, including the union country, until now in America. Many prominent gentry men of the party were men of the right wing of the party, with whom the South and North had a union. In 1812 the General Assembly of the Union (which included the Congress of the South) passed the Fugitive Slave Laws of 1813, which prohibited any person from taking any or all of the slaves of a federal, State or local government under the authority of a federal, State or local government, unless he was bound to accept the terms and conditions of such a transfer, unless he was admitted to federal affairs or on their terms. Several other parts of the party were also influenced by this clause, for if slavery was in the constitution of one or several states, then no state or local government was to be governed by the Fugitive Slave Laws of the Federal Government. As a consequence, some of the leading gentry men of the party were not so much
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 — which black people were mentally, physically, and morally inferior to whites. This inferiority necessitated that they be slaves. He pointed to the impoverished living conditions of Northern free blacks as proof that black people lacked the ability to exercise their freedom positively.
In Calhoun’s twisted view, slavery benefited black people Slavery provided black people with a quality of existence Calhoun believed they were incapable of obtaining for themselves. To his mind, despite