John C. Calhoun, American portrait by Coit Margaret L

Author:Coit, Margaret L
Language: eng
Format: epub
Tags: Calhoun, John C. (John Caldwell), 1782-1850
Publisher: Boston, Houghton Mifflin
Published: 1961-03-13T16:00:00+00:00

freedom for men of superior capacity to exploit the basic inequalities of their fellow men. Was it not more just legally to acknowledge inequalities and to protect men from the selfishness of their fellows? Yes, argued Calhoun, the Northern wage slave was free, free to come South to work in the pestilential swamps at the dangerous tasks at which the life of no valuable slave could be risked; ""^ free to hold a job so long as he would vote for the political choice of his employers; free to work fourteen hours a day at seven dollars a week until his health gave way.'^ His earnings were taxed to provide for the paupers and jail-loungers whose 'freedom' permitted them the luxury of not choosing to work; but this burden did not weigh upon the Southern slave. 'Slavery makes all work and it ensures homes, food, and clothing for all. It permits no idleness, and it provides for sickness, infancy, and old age.''" Both systems, he insisted, rested on the principle of labor exploitation, but the South had no ugly labor scrap-heap; the master was compelled by law to mortgage his acres, if necessary, to provide adequately for old and sick slaves. The master was responsible to society for the welfare of his slaves; no one was responsible for the freeman but himself.

The paradox was, of course, that slavery for the Negro restricted the freedoms of the whites. Freedom could not live anywhere in a slave society. Free speech, for example, was silent on one subject, slavery, in accordance with one of the strangest gentlemen's agreements in all history. Even of Jefferson's Virginia, with its liberal, humanistic 'free trade' in ideas, Thomas Ritchie could write in 1832 that there had been a 'silence of fifty years.' ^^

Freedom of the press remained—on the books. A few valiant, fiery, individualistic editors like the fighting Quaker, William Swain, of the Greens-borough Patriot, and a sprinkling in Kentucky, Tennessee, and Western Virginia, dared denounce slavery to the end, and went unscathed. These were the exceptions. Others, less fortunate, suffered boycotts, cancellation of subscriptions, were even shot down in duels! By 1845 the Richmond Whig was openly praising the mob destruction of an abolitionist paper in Lexington, Kentucky; although never in the South were there such crimes against the press as the lynching of Lovejoy in Illinois.

'Letters to the editor' urging abolition of slavery were returned as 'too strong for the times.' Yet, despite the pressures of wealth and vested interests and the fears of the poor whites, most of the editors 'sincerely agreed with their readers on the slavery question.' The 'lives of the free Negroes in Southern communities' they saw as a demonstration of their 'unfitness for freedom.'

In Jefferson's time there had been a tolerance toward anti-slavery doctrines. Virtually every great Virginian of the eighteenth century was on record against slavery. At twenty-one, Henry Clay had been openly urging

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