John C. Calhoun

It'll talk about poor whites, women, the LGBTQ community, and especially African Americans in the state's history.

And our whole goal is to get folks to understand that, yes, South Carolina is the home to John C. Calhoun, to Ben Tillman, James Burns, uh, a, a, a who's who of terrible people in the history of the United States.

Um, I've actually joked that one day I would like to do a 64-person tournament of, of worst Southern politicians of all time.

Uh-huh.

As for the future, that was in the hands of Providence.

business theories of politics As the statesmen of Hamilton School and the planters of Calhoun's had their theories of government and politics, so the leaders in business enterprise had theirs.

It was simple and easily stated.

It is the duty of the government, they urged, to protect American industry against foreign competition by means of high tariffs on imported goods, to aid railways by generous grants of land, to sell mineral and timber lands at low prices to energetic men ready to develop them, and then to leave the rest of the initiative and drive of individuals and companies.

On the same side must be placed the labor of those who had valiantly fought in form and field to save the Union, and who regarded their continual Republican supremacy after the war was after the war as absolutely necessary to prevent the former leaders in a succession from coming back to power at the same time there were undoubtedly some of the baser sort who looked on politics as a game and who made use of carpet-bagging in the south to win the spoils that might result from it At all events, both by laws and presidential acts, the Republicans for many years kept a keen eye upon the maintenance of their dominion in the South.

Their declaration that neither the law nor its administration should admit any discrimination in respect of citizens by reasons of race, color, or previous condition of servitude, appealed to idealists and brought results in elections.

Even South Carolina, where reposed the ashes of John C. Calhoun, went Republican in 1872 by a vote of 3 to 1.

Republican control was made easy by the force bills described in a previous chapter, measures which vested the supervision of elections and federal officers appointed by Republican presidents.

Yeah, I've been...

I was reading John C. Calhoun's Disquisition on Government.

Got it down here somewhere.

And his argument for why government is necessary is the exact same argument that anarchists or laissez-faire economists make for why laissez-faire would work.

Quoting, the recurring pattern of change expresses the more or less permanent core of human nature as it functions politically.

The instability of all governments and political forms follows in part from the timeless human appetite for power.

I really need to make my, after Teal, I really need to read Disquisition on Government by John C. Calhoun, because he talks so much about stuff like this.

Hmm.

But that's the way to understand George Sorrell.

And in America, when people think of the right, you know, they think of Jeffersonians who, you know, like John C. Calhoun, or they think of like America's first guys in the 21st century.

you know, and, like, the tafty Republicans who were, you know, who were anti-New Deal and anti-interventionists.

And both of those guys, I mean, even the latter, obviously, they were kind of traditional Hamiltonian nationalists, but, you know, their whole idea is, you know, like, get the government off your back, you know, um... you know, and decentralized authority and, you know, the kind of hustle on their own terms, the kind of class identities that most kind of European paradigms suggest are what informs political reality.

So something like Jefferson Davis or others who would make these arguments, not just that slavery was, well, a necessary evil, which is something that you would read quite a bit at the founding, time of the founding, where the founding fathers or founding generation would talk about slavery as maybe a necessary evil argument.

Davis and John C. Calhoun, people like that, they talked about it as a positive good.

This was good not just for the economy of the white South.

This is good for the enslaved people.

If slave states form and enter the union, the number of slave states are going to increase, and that's going to have its impact on Congress and representation and votes.

And if free states form and there are no more slave states because Congress can outlaw slavery in the federal territories, then The slave states, it's going to they're going to be surrounded by free states.

And and John C. Calhoun and others are just horrified at the thought of this.

This is what the the the Dred Scott decision.

Within this rowdy milieu, there was nonetheless a growing constituency for Philip Sober guardrails.

The most eloquent plea for protections against zealous majorities came from the South Carolina statesman John C. Calhoun.

His Disquisition on Government, published posthumously in 1851, captured the view of the imperiled minority to which Calhoun himself belonged, slaveholders.

It is, of course, Noah's flood on your wedding day, ironic that slaveholders would see themselves as oppressed, but a population boom in the North and the mainstreaming of anti-slavery politics there raised the threat of a legislative majority abolishing their property.