Lost Cause

JOHN C. CALHOUN: AMERICAN PORTRAIT (593 pp.) -- Margaret Co/V --Houghton Mifflin ($5).

John Calhoun, born to the cotton rows and the linsey-woolsey of a South Carolina frontier farm, became the greatest spokesman the slave-owning aristocracy ever had. He loved the Union with a choked, subterranean passion, but his arguments led fatefully to secession and Fort Sumter. Desperately he yearned for the presidency, but he took such an uncompromising stand on so many unpopular and often sectional issues that he seemed consciously to be disqualifying himself for the big prize.

Many historians have been tempted to explore these puzzles in Calhoun's character, but none has gathered more personal facts about him or analyzed them with more spirit than Connecticut-born, North Carolina-educated Margaret Coit. In her determination to breathe life into the "steel engraving of a mummy so familiar in our schoolbooks," Biographer Coit occasionally falls into huffing & puffing prose; but she does manage to bring the steel engraving to life in a first-class biography.

Whoop for War. Young Calhoun was something of a prig. When" his admiring brothers persuaded him to give up farming and sent him to college at 20, he worked as hard at Yale as if he were plowing a rocky patch of land. To the frequent ridicule of his fellow students, he would reply that he studied hard "in order that he might acquit himself creditably when he should become a member of Congress."

Yale gave him confidence and sharpened his wits, but in his basic thinking the shaggy-haired, long-boned rustic was not deeply affected. He had been reading John Locke and Thomas Paine since 13. He had learned a lean, spare style of debate and he had developed an abiding conviction that the source of all power is the people--a notion that he was later to translate into his brilliant argument for states' rights against the growing power of the Federal Government.

Calhoun's undergraduate cockiness was not unwarranted; seven years after leaving Yale he was in Congress. In 1811 he became Henry Clay's lieutenant in the raucous young "War Hawk" faction which whooped for war against Britain. Afterward, when little "Jemmy" Monroe became President, he offered Calhoun the job of Secretary of War. The ambitious Calhoun grabbed it and did a bangup job. He reformed the Army diet, adding vegetables to the monotonous bread and salt pork, and began projects to extend the Union through exploratory expeditions and the building of a system of national highways. '

He could be irascible and harddriving. When U.S. Army Lieut. Sam Houston shepherded a delegation of Indians to his office--with himself togged out in loincloth and blanket--Calhoun gave him a tongue-lashing for looking "like a savage." Men felt in Calhoun a quality of excitement, of suppressed fire, of the dominating intellectual vitality that had been felt in Alexander Hamilton.

He became Vice President under both John Quincy Adams and Jackson, but farther he could not go. In part he failed because his personality was too dry and abstract, in part because he mortally antagonized Jackson; Old Hickory never forgave the South Carolinian for what he took as a threat of secession in 1832. Later Jackson was to tell friends that one of the regrets of his life was that he never hanged John Calhoun. But essentially Calhoun failed because he remained the unyielding and uncompromising spokesman of lost political causes. He clung to slavery and states' rights when those issues had begun to make him hated and feared in the North. He even had the temerity to stand almost alone in the Senate against war with Mexico, when his Southern colleagues were dreaming of the new states to be won for the slave system in the great Southwest. Calhoun had simply referred the matter to his conscience; he did not believe the U.S. had just cause for war.

Mistimed Hope. The last years of Calhoun's life were full of galling frustrations. His wife Floride, eleven years younger than he and a frothy Charleston belle when he married her, was jealous of the time he gave to his work and flew into rages that, according to local legends, often ended with the china flying at John Calhoun's head.

In his defense of the South, Calhoun argued that to allow the majority to rule without restraint would establish a tyranny in which "the minority is subject." These theoretical arguments Calhoun and his friends buttressed with attacks on Northern capitalism. Calhoun warned that "after we [the planters] are exhausted, the contest will be between the capitalists and operatives." "When gentlemen preach insurrection to slaves," cried another Southerner, "I will preach . . . insurrection to the laborers of the

North." But Calhoun's hopes that the North would turn to the South as a conservative bulwark was mistimed, for he wrongly expected the conflict between capital & labor in the North to erupt before the conflict between North & South. When he died, in March 1850, Charleston gave him a square of marble cut with the one word CALHOUN. Fifteen years later, a Yankee soldier standing in ruined Charleston uttered a sharper epitaph: "The whole South is the grave of Calhoun."

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