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John C. Calhoun |
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XII
A Unionist Comes Home
Quotes from:
JOHN C. CALHOUN American Portrait
by Margaret L. COIT,
Houghton Mifflin Company.
Boston, 1950.
(page 174.)
Pendleton, South Carolina:
“Here lived the men
of Calhoun's own flesh and bone
and spirit.”
“Here were the Jeffersonian Puritans,
who sought only happiness
and the salvation of their souls,
asking always of all law:
‘ Will it
leave us alone?
Will it leave us free? ’ ”
7
“These were men
‘still close to the pioneers in spirit’;
not poor whites,
but tough-minded farmers
with an instinct for penetrating to fundamentals.
They had fought the Revolution
knowing well that not England,
but the commercial dominance of England,
had been their enemy.’ ”
“They had favored the loose alliance
of North and
South
under the
Articles of Confederation;
but when, as they
saw it,
‘commercial, financial, and special interests’
found the Federation
‘too weak to serve
their purposes,’
their ‘suspicions were aroused.’ ”
8
“They remembered
Pat Calhoun’s denunciation of the
new Constitution as
‘taxation without representation.’
They knew ‘the fathers,’
not as revolutionists,
but as conservatives,
men of property,
intent on safeguarding
the interests
of property.
For two hundred years
the South had been a colonial dependency of
Great Britain.
Would it exchange its dear-bought freedom
to become a colony of
the commercial North? ”
(page 175.)
“The South had not won freedom in ’76.
It had changed masters.
This was why the Piedmont farmers
had shied off
from the
idea of
a Federal Union.
As a separate country,
they could have
bargained independently
with Old
or New England
for the
cheap manufactured goods
they wanted.”
“Not even the Virginia Dynasty
could reverse the Hamiltonian trend.
As written, the Constitution
might guarantee a federal
and not a national government;
but would it be interpreted as written?
Now, as Jefferson had feared,
it seemed that industry and finance
were to become the master,
not the servants, of agriculture
and commerce.
That the South was yoked
in an unequal Union, by the
eighteen-twenties
was already becoming apparent.
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Furthermore, slavery was wiping out
any chance for the South
to compete with the North industrially.
Southern capital was too submerged
in the peculiar institution
to leave any surplus for untried enterprises.
Slavery had doomed the South to remain agricultural.”
“Earlier,
slavery and political prejudice
had separated the log-cabin
farmers of the frontier
from the planters of
the coast.”
“Day by day,
year by year,
slavery was drawing
the two classes together.
A man could
raise an
extra bale or
two of cotton,
buy a raw
‘hand’ cheap, train him, work him,
and double his cotton output
in a single season.
Within ten years
he would be pushing on
into the big landholding class.
He might still spit tobacco and make crude jokes
on the steps of
the cross-roads store
and ride to town
in his shirt-sleeves,
but he would send
his wife to church
in a carriage and
his boys to the
state universities.”
(page 176.)
“Slaves meant money
and money meant education,
and education
and the tastes of
a gentleman were
all that the aristocrats
of Charleston and
Virginia had had
a few generations earlier.
Socially, as well as economically,
it was possible, in a
very short time, for
‘up-country gentlemen’
to assume the manners, the habits,
and the privileges of
the planting class.”
“Profitable
as slavery might seem
to the newcomer
to the planting class,
his shrewd vision was
not dulled.
Since 1816,
he had been buying
in a protected market
and selling in an
open one.
The merciless pressures
of world capitalism,
with its demands on
a cotton economy
that were stretching
his farm into
a plantation,
had made
his choice inevitable.
He could
be rich
or he could
be poor.
He could be
a part
of the
once-hated
‘planting aristocracy’—
or its victim.
Against the capitalism
of the North,
his only hope
was to join the
rival capitalism
of the South.”
Isonomia.US
LandGrab.US
Eminent Domain - Condemnation:
reduces Private Property to a priviledge,
and creates Nomads.
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