Calhoun’s Answer to the Abolition Petitions

The historian Clyde Wilson has observed that John C. Calhoun’s congressional speeches are “always dealing with a real and known audience and with a subject requiring decision.” Calhoun was not merely expounding on theoretical or abstract points. This is important in understanding his response to the abolition petitions, including the one colloquially described as the “positive good” speech. Like all his speeches, it must be understood in the context of his time. As Garrick Sapp argues in “Context Matters”, that context cannot be understood without reference to “the surrounding debate.”

In 1783, the Supreme Judicial Court of Massachusetts ruled that slavery violated the constitution of Massachusetts—“the Court held that laws and customs that sanctioned slavery were incompatible with the new state constitution.” Massachusetts courts understood their values to be not only the sentiments of their own state, but of “the people of America” as distinct from British and European nations:

As to the doctrine of slavery and the right of Christians to hold Africans in perpetual servitude, and sell and treat them as we do our horses and cattle, that (it is true) has been heretofore countenanced by the Province Laws formerly, but nowhere is it expressly enacted or established. It has been a usage — a usage which took its origin from the practice of some of the European nations, and the regulations of British government respecting the then Colonies, for the benefit of trade and wealth.

But whatever sentiments have formerly prevailed in this particular or slid in upon us by the example of others, a different idea has taken place with the people of America, more favorable to the natural rights of mankind, and to that natural, innate desire of Liberty, with which Heaven (without regard to color, complexion, or shape of noses [and other?] features) has inspired all the human race.

What role does the Constitution play when one state has a different understanding of “American values” than another? Who decides which state has correctly understood the values of “the people of America”? Does the federal government have power to whip the errant state back in line with these values?

A contemporary example of a similar problem is the fact that many Southern states have totally or partially banned abortion. Abortion violates the values of the South, historically rooted in Christian and Biblical traditions. But Massachusetts has decided to go a different way. Massachusetts permits abortions and actively welcomes women from other states to travel to Massachusetts for that purpose.

Southern States believe abortion is murder of innocent unborn children, and murder is surely against the values of “the people of America.” On that premise, should Southern states have power to whip Massachusetts into conformity with American values?

That is the context in which to understand the constitutional principles defended by Calhoun. He consistently argued that the Constitution is a compact between equal and sovereign states. He foresaw that a Union in which some states can gang up on other states and try to bully them, by wielding control of federal machinery, would be an unstable union. It certainly would not reflect the Union into which the states originally entered.

The Constitution does not give any state—or any group of states who share the same values, whether the Southern or the New England states—power to force other states to comply with their own values. Nor does it give the federal government power to dictate to any state their moral and political values.

The question raised by the abolition petitions was whether anti-slavery activists could petition Congress to ban slavery. Slavery violated the values of Massachusetts for sure, but as Calhoun explained, it did not (at the time) violate the values of his own “gallant little state,” South Carolina.

Just as Massachusetts did not think secession was illegal when they themselves considered it a valid option, but suddenly regarded it as treason when South Carolina seceded, they most likely would not be impressed today if a group of Christian activists were to flood Congress with anti-abortion petitions denouncing the people of Massachusetts as barbarians who kill unborn babies, declaring the state of Massachusetts to be an abomination and a blight on the United States, and urging federal sanctions against them. Yet this is the language used in the anti-slavery petitions. It was invective later adopted by the Massachusetts Radical, Charles Sumner, in his speeches on “the barbarism of slavery.”

To understand the “subject requiring decision” from Calhoun’s perspective, it is significant to note that, in his time, slavery still persisted in Northern states under “gradual emancipation” laws. These laws did not immediately emancipate existing slaves, but gradually emancipated children born after the law was enacted. The usual approach was to provide for eventual emancipation of those children after serving a term of years, typically 25 years of servitude.

Under gradual emancipation, the number of slaves would dwindle over time. For example, slavery continued in Connecticut until finally abolished in 1848. Slavery in New Jersey was only finally abolished by the thirteenth amendment in 1865. In Massachusetts, although slavery was abolished by the courts in 1783, legislation still limited the ability of free blacks to enjoy rights as full citizens. For example, legislation prohibiting interracial marriage remained in force in Massachusetts until 1843.

This means that, at the time of the abolition petitions, there was no all-out sectional strife between North and South—indeed, Calhoun was attempting to prevent disunion breaking out. Professor Wilson notes that “the slavery controversy did not become a predominant issue for Calhoun or for American politics until the Wilmot Proviso was brought forward in 1846.”

The fact that there were still slaves in the Northern states in the 1830s meant that Calhoun’s views in 1837 on the abolition petitions were of relevance to the Union, not just to South Carolina. The antipathy of both North and South to the petitions is illustrated by Leon Litwack in his book North of Slavery. He describes the hostile reaction of the House of Representatives to an abolition petition presented by “a group of Philadelphia free Negroes” in 1800.

Representative Harrison Gray Otis of Massachusetts immediately opposed referring the petition to committee, as was the normal practice, because to encourage such a measure “would have an irritating tendency, and must be mischievous to America very soon. It would teach them [free blacks] the art of assembling together, debating, and the like, and would soon. . .extend from one end of the Union to the other.”

This view was shared by other representatives. “After a two-day debate, the House voted 85 to 1” to reject the petition on grounds that it “had a tendency to create disquiet and jealousy, and ought therefore to receive no encouragement or countenance.” Slavery was already abolished in Massachusetts, so Mr. Otis’s objection was not to the idea of abolition itself, but to the notion that free blacks should be able to petition Congress with their demands.

By the 1830s, as Wilson observes, such petitions had increased in volume and become increasingly strident:

. . .in the 1830s [Calhoun] was alarmed and provoked by a new and intransigent abolitionist movement; by the 1840s he was convinced that only an unshakeable unity of the South could save the South – and the Union.

Calhoun deemed it necessary to reject the very premise of the abolition petitions. Carolinians did not (in Calhoun’s time) see the institution of slavery as a “necessary evil.” Calhoun defended his state by his choice to “take a higher ground”—namely, to argue that there was some good in it that served as the justification for why the South was not, in fact, proposing immediately to abolish it. Nor was there power under the Constitution for petitioners, or states sympathetic to the petitioners, to force such a measure on the South.

Mr. Rives, a Senator from Virginia, thought the matter could be resolved by receiving the abolition petitions and then just saying no on grounds that although slavery was “an evil,” it was a “necessary evil.” Why not just accept the premise of perpetuating evil and hide behind practicalities?

Calhoun did not agree. He took a principled view, arguing that if Congress truly considered the petitions to be well founded then the only honorable response would be to abolish slavery immediately. But this premise was not correct, in his view.

Mr. CALHOUN explained, and denied having expressed any opinion in regard to slavery in the abstract. He had merely stated what was a matter of fact, that it was an inevitable law of society that one portion of the community depended on the labor of another portion, over which it must unavoidably exercise control. He had not spoken of slavery in the abstract, but of slavery [as it then existed]. Here the existence of slavery was a good to both. Did not the Senator from Virginia consider it as a good?

Mr. RIVES said, no. He viewed it as a misfortune and an evil in all circumstances, though, in some, it might be the lesser evil.

Mr. CALHOUN insisted on the opposite opinion, and declared it as his conviction that, in point of fact, the Central African race (he did not speak of the north or the east of Africa, but of its central regions) had never existed in so comfortable, so respectable, or so civilized a condition as that which it now enjoyed in the southern States.

This is central to understanding Calhoun’s constitutional argument—the issue was not whether slavery was justified in the abstract, as a moral or philosophical question, but whether Congress could refuse to table the abolition petitions. Calhoun argued that Congress ought to be guided by the Constitution and insisted that he did not consider the petitions to be well-founded in the first place. He rejected the “necessary evil” excuse for keeping slavery that was suggested by Virginia. In a passage which is now well-known, he said:

But I take a higher ground. I hold that in the present state of civilization, where two races of different origin. . .are brought together, the relation now existing in the slave-holding States between the two, is, instead of an evil, a good – a positive good. I feel myself called upon to speak freely upon the subject where the honor and interests of those I represent are involved.

The same reasoning would apply if, to give a contemporary example, a group of anti-abortion activists were to flood Congress with petitions urging them to ban abortion and send federal troops to Massachusetts to shut down their abortion clinics and stop them killing unborn babies. After all, pro-life philosophers such as John Finnis and Robert George argue that the unborn child has a right to life under the Constitution. To anyone who holds that view, to defend abortion is to defend murder.

Massachusetts does not agree. They have a different philosophical view. They define abortion as “reproductive health care,” just as they regard gender transition surgery as “gender-affirming care.” In fact, they believe so much in this “care” that they offer it to all Americans, not just citizens of Massachusetts:

Whether you live in Massachusetts or are traveling from another state, you can access abortion care in Massachusetts.

They even offer their “gender-affirming care” to minors:

Federal law does not prohibit gender-affirming care for minors, and Massachusetts law continues to protect access to this care.

The Constitution does not give Congress or the federal government power to force Massachusetts to conform to “American values” on these issues, even though the values of Massachusetts on what they euphemistically call “care” are abhorrent to many Americans.

Neither did the anti-slavery activists have a constitutional platform in 1837 to force South Carolina to comply with their values. As Calhoun repeatedly explained, the whole point of the Constitution is its role as a compact by which states with different values can co-exist peacefully in the same Union. The Constitution defends the rights of citizens by minimizing the power of the federal government and maximizing the sovereignty of the states.