Calhoun: American Heretic
By Robert Elder
Basic Books, 2021

The Wall Street Journal, in its review of Calhoun: American Heretic, Robert Elder’s new biography of John C. Calhoun (out in a hefty hardcover from Basic Books), made the odd comment that it was “much-needed.” It isn’t. Calhoun has been the subject of a wide swath of historical and biographical study, including Merrill Peterson’s terrifically involving 1987 book The Great Triumvirate and Irving Bartlett’s full-dress 1955 book, a genuinely great work of biography. In the sweepstakes of thoroughly repulsive Americans, Calhoun has had a respectable amount of study - not nearly as much as Richard Nixon, true, but certainly more than, say, Roy Cohn. 

Which raises the question of why Elder thinks it’s important to return to studying the repellant former South Carolina Senator and Vice President, who’s best remembered as the most ardent defender of slavery in 19th century America. Elder makes some stabs at his thinking:

It is long past time to reevaluate whether John C. Calhoun was indeed out of step with the flow of history. In order to answer that question we have to consider him anew. It may be an uncomfortable exercise since, if done honestly, it will not confirm our comfortable preconceptions about him or about our history. Just as we can no longer dismiss slavery as a premodern labor system whose influence was restricted to one section of the country, opposed to modernity and antithetical to capitalism, a past that has no connection to our present, so we can no longer dismiss John C. Calhoun as the dark foil of an inevitable American progress and freedom. Instead, any honest accounting, he belongs at the center of the stories we tell about our past. 

This is deeply, complicatedly odd. There’s no elaboration of what could possibly be meant by “the flow of history” (nor how that might be different from “inevitable American progress”), nor is there a demonstration that “we” have ever had “comfortable preconceptions” about Calhoun. He was a tireless, extremely vocal advocate of slavery. He was not, as some very strange convolutions have made him in recent years, an impressive political theorist. He was a zealous slavery-praiser, viewing it not only as an economic reality that required accommodation but a moral right, a thing that should exist, quite apart from economics or tradition. Even his fellow slave-owners seldom bothered to go to his extremes, and only the worst racists ever since have gone to those extremes. No one on either side of those extremes has ever considered slavery “a past that has no connection to our present.” 

All of this is strange. It gives the very palpable but muffled sense that the author isn’t quite saying what he means. If this is true, it would be fairly easy to guess what that is: “The summer of 2020 demonstrated that racist tensions are still very much alive in the United States - therefore, John C. Calhoun, one of the worst racists in American history, is more relevant than ever.” 

To the extent that readers can either ignore this kind of contention or agree with it, Elder’s book will be very rewarding. He’s extremely versed in the period and its huge personalities, and throughout the book he uses a vividly readable prose style. His narration of Calhoun’s political life makes for unfailingly gripping reading:

In 1840 Calhoun had one eye on British hypocrisy and the other eye on the presidential election, and both spectacles made his stomach turn … To Calhoun, the lack of substance at a time when the country faced so many important questions was infuriating. “I … cannot believe that the people can be humbugged by the fooleries resorted to in order to deceive them by supporters of [William Henry] Harrison,” he wrote … “let it turn as it may, we must not despair.”

A smart, bristling new life of Calhoun is no bad or redundant thing, and Elder’s book is a very worthy modern companion to Bartlett’s from 70 years ago. 

The only problem is the author’s murky justification for presenting the book in the first place, which is an admittedly trivial problem. “If we reduce [Calhoun] to his defense of slavery, which set him apart even in his own day,” Elder writes, “we may miss the fact that when Calhoun proclaimed the United States, not the Confederacy, ‘the government of the white man,’ it was possibly the least controversial thing that he ever said.” 

Again, this is deeply, almost obdurately odd. Yes, when Calhoun called the United States “the government of the white man” it was perhaps the least controversial thing he’d ever said. It was the commonly held opinion of the day. Surely the point of re-examining a vicious figure like this isn’t the least controversial thing he ever said but the most controversial things he ever said - things that, as Elder points out, were controversial even in his own day. The world-wide Black Lives Matter protests of the summer of 2020 - the inescapable candidate for what’s on Elder’s mind here - do not demonstrate in some contorted way that the ghost of John C. Calhoun still somehow dominates the country; the protests demonstrate just the opposite. Calhoun was indeed a dark foil of American progress and freedom, an extreme racist lunatic in his own day, and an extreme racist lunatic today. Good as Elder’s biography is, let’s hope it’s Calhoun’s last.

Steve Donoghue is a founding editor of Open Letters Monthly. His book criticism has appeared in The Boston Globe, The Wall Street Journal, The Washington Post, and The American Conservative. He writes regularly for The National, The Vineyard Gazette, and The Christian Science Monitor. His website is http://www.stevedonoghue.com.