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Out of the chambers of Congress, he was either devoting himself to the acquisition of knowledge pertaining to the immediate subject of the duty before him or else he was indulging in those social interviews in which he so much delighted.

My honorable friend from Kentucky has spoken in just terms of his colloquial talents. They certainly were singular and eminent. There was a charm in his conversation not often found. He delighted especially in conversation and intercourse with young men. I suppose that there has been no man among us who had more winning manners, in such an intercourse and conversation with men comparatively young, than Mr. Calhoun. I believe one great power of his character, in general, was his conversational talent. I believe it is that, as well as a consciousness of his high integrity, and the greatest reverence for his intellect and ability, that has made him so endeared an object to the people of the State to which he belonged.

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Mr. President, he had the basis, the indispensable basis, of all high character; and that was unspotted integrity — unimpeached honor and character. If he had aspirations, they were high, honorable, and noble. There was nothing grovelling or low or meanly selfish that came near the head or the heart of Mr. Calhoun. Firm in his purpose, perfectly patriotic and honest, as I am sure he was, in the principles that he espoused, and in the measures that he defended, aside from that large regard for that species of distinction that conducted him to eminent stations for the benefit of the republic, I do not believe he had a selfish motive or selfish feeling.

However, sir, he may have differed from others of us in his political opinions or his political principles, those principles and those opinions will now descend to posterity under the sanction of a great name. He has lived long enough, he has done enough, and he has done it so well, so successfully, so honorably, as to connect himself for all time with the records of his country. He is now an historical character. Those of us who have known him here will find that he has left upon our minds and our hearts a strong and lasting impression of his person, his character, and his public performances, which, while we live, will never be obliterated. We shall, hereafter, I am sure, indulge in it as a grateful recollection that we have lived in his age, that we have been his contemporaries, that we have seen him and heard him and known him. We shall

delight to speak of him to those who are rising up to fill our places. And, when the time shall come when we ourselves shall go, one after another, in succession to our graves, we shall carry with us a deep sense of his genius and character, his honor and integrity, his amiable deportment in private life, and the purity of his exalted patriotism.

VON HOLST ON CALHOUN.

From his Life of Calhoun.

Life is not only "stranger than fiction," but frequently also more tragical than any tragedy ever conceived by the most fervid imagination. Often in these tragedies of life there is not one drop of blood to make us shudder, nor a single event to compel the tears into the eye. A man endowed with an intellect far above the average, impelled by a high-soaring ambition, untainted by any petty or ignoble passion, and guided by a character of sterling firmness and more than common purity, yet, with fatal illusion, devoting all his mental powers, all his moral energy, and the whole force of his iron will to the service of a doomed and unholy cause, and at last sinking into the grave in the very moment when, under the weight of the top-stone, the towering pillars of the temple of his impure idol are rent to their very base,— can anything more tragical be conceived? . .

It was his solemn conviction that throughout his life he had faithfully done his duty, both to the Union and to his section, because, as he honestly believed slavery to be "a good, a positive good," he had never been able to see that it was impossible to serve at the same time the Union and his section, if his section was considered as identical with the slavocracy. In perfect good faith he had undertaken what no man could accomplish, because it was a physical and moral impossibility: antagonistic principles cannot be united into a basis on which to rest a huge political fabric. Nullification and the government of law; State supremacy and a constitutional Union, endowed with the power necessary to minister to the wants of a great people; the nationalization of slavery upon the basis of States-rightism in a federal Union, composed principally of free communities, by which slavery was considered a sin and

a curse; equality of States and constitutional consolidation of geographical sections, with an artificial preponderance granted to the minority, these were incompatibilities, and no logical ingenuity could reason them together into the formative principle of a gigantic commonwealth. The speculations of the keenest political logician the United States had ever had ended in the greatest logical monstrosity imaginable, because his reasoning started from a contradictio in adjecto. This he failed to see, because the mad delusion had wholly taken possession of his mind that in this age of steam and electricity, of democratic ideas and the rights of man, slavery was "the most solid foundation of liberty." More than to any other man, the South owed it to him that she succeeded for such a long time in forcing the most democratic and the most progressive commonwealth of the universe to bend its knees and do homage to the idol of this "peculiar institution"; but therefore also the largest share of the responsibility for what at last did come rests on his shoulders.

No man can write the last chapter of his own biography, in which the Facit of his whole life is summed up, so to say, in one word. If ever a new edition of the works of the greatest and purest of pro-slavery fanatics should be published, it ought to have a short appendix,— the Emancipation Proclamation of Abraham Lincoln.

John C. Calhoun (1782-1850) was the pre-eminent representative of the doctrine of State Rights, as Daniel Webster was the pre-eminent representative of the doctrine of National Sovereignty, in the great controversy which raged in the country uninterruptedly in various forms from the time of the Constitutional Convention until its final settlement by the logic of events in the Civil War. "Liberty and union, now and forever, one and inseparable," was the great watchword of Webster. It was this emblazoned on our ensign which he wished might greet his last earthly vision. "If you should ask me," Calhoun once said, "the word that I would wish engraven on my tombstone, it is Nullification." It was in the debate between Webster and Calhoun in February, 1833, immediately after the passage of the nullification act by South Carolina,—an act declaring the national tariff act of 1832 null and void and forbidding the collection of duties at any port in the State, threatening secession if interfered with, and in the famous debate between Webster and Senator Hayne, of South Carolina, three years before, while South Carolina was threatening nullification and while Calhoun was Vice-President of the United States and president of the Senate, that the two opposing principles received their most powerful presentation upon the floor of Congress. The student should read (Calhoun's Works, vol. i.) Calhoun's speech on the Revenue Collection (Force) Biil, February 15-16, 1833, and his speech on his Resolutions in support of State Rights, February 26, 1833. The first of these famous resolutions was, "That the people of the several States comprising these United States are united as parties to a constitutional compact, to which the people of each State acceded as a separate and sovereign community, each binding itself by its own particular ratification; and that the union, of which the said compact is the bond, is a union between the States ratifying the same." The student should also read the various addresses prepared by Calhoun for the legislature and people of South Carolina during the nullification period, 1828-32, setting forth their theory of their relation to the general government (Calhoun's Works, vol. vi.).

But perhaps nowhere else did Calhoun expound his views so systematically as in his "Discourse on the Constitution and Government of the United States," whose introductory sections are reprinted in the present leaflet. This was the second of two important essays in political philosophy written in 1849, but not published until after his death. The first of the two essays was a general "Disquisition on Government"; and of this posthumous work John Stuart Mill spoke as that of one who had "displayed powers as a speculative political thinker superior to any who has appeared in American politics since the authors of The Federalist.'" These essays occupy together the whole of the first volume of Calhoun's Works. It must not be supposed that the theory that the United States is a confederacy was exclusively a Southern theory, and the theory of a nation a Northern one. Both theories have been operative in both sections. See Powell's "Nullification and Secession in the United States. Hayne's great speech upon State Rights should always be read in connection with Webster's famous reply to it, especially for its historical survey of the attitude of New England and the North in 1815 and preceding years. A still more powerful presentation of this-one of the greatest of all American political papers-is the address of John Quincy Adams, first published by Henry Adams in his "Documents relating to New England Federalism." The strong national theory and sentiment upon which our government now rests have been a gradual development; and Webster's great speeches were even more important for the history which they made than for that which they expounded.

The

The most scholarly and critical life of Calhoun is that in the American Statesmen Series, by Von Holst, whose Constitutional History of the United States is also largely devoted to the study of the long struggle with the State Rights doctrine, of which Calhoun was the great champion. There is an earlier biography by John S. Jenkins, in which several of Calhoun's most significant and representative speeches are incorporated; and this will be of use to those who do not have access to the edition (in 6 vols.) of Calhoun's Works. long article on Calhoun in the Cyclopædia of American Biography was written by J. Randolph Tucker, and is of unusual value. The lives of Webster and his replies to Calhoun and Hayne should be consulted. The bibliography for the whole period of Calhoun's public life in Channing and Hart's "Guide to American History" is very complete and well arranged. See especially the sections on "Theories of the Constitution," ""Tariff and Nullification, 1828-32," and "Public Controversy as to Slavery."

PUBLISHED BY

THE DIRECTORS OF THE OLD SOUTH WORK,

Old South Meeting-house, Boston, Mass.

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ADDRESS AT COOPER INSTITUTE, NEW YORK, FEB. 27, 1860.

:- The facts

Mr. President and Fellow-citizens of New York: with which I shall deal this evening are mainly old and familiar; nor is there anything new in the general use I shall make of them. If there shall be any novelty, it will be in the mode of presenting the facts, and the inferences and observations following that presentation. In his speech last autumn at Columbus, Ohio, as reported in the "New-York Times," Senator Douglas said:

Our fathers, when they framed the government under which we live, understood this question just as well, and even better, than we do now.

I fully indorse this, and I adopt it as a text for this discourse! I so adopt it because it furnishes a precise and an agreed starting-point for a discussion between Republicans and that wing of the Democracy headed by Senator Douglas. It simply leaves the inquiry: What was the understanding those fathers had of the question mentioned?

What is the frame of government under which we live? The answer must be, "The Constitution of the United States." That Constitution consists of the original, framed in 1787, and under which the present government first went into operation, and twelve subsequently framed amendments, the first ten of which were framed in 1789.

Who were our fathers that framed the Constitution? I suppose the "thirty-nine" who signed the original instrument may

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