"Whereas, I Love You"

William Lee Miller's Arguing About Slavery: John Quincy Adams and the Great Battle in the United States Congress includes a nice collection of quotes about John Caldwell Calhoun. The Harriet Martineau quote is well known - in fact I've cited it before - but the others may be less familiar:

Calhoun was a major figure not only in South Carolina but in national politics as well. The modern historian David Potter has called him "the most majestic champion of error since Milton's Satan." The English reformer Harriet Martineau, who became acquainted with him on her visit to the United States in 1835, wrote - a famous quotation - that Calhoun was "a cast-iron man, who looks as if he had never been born and could be extinguished." James Henry Hammond, who hoped to be the Calhoun of his generation, said in Charleston on the occasion of Calhoun's death in 1850 that "Mr. Calhoun had no youth, to our knowledge. He sprang into the arena like Minerva from the head of Jove, fully grown and clothed in armor: a man every inch himself, and able to contend with any other man."

Hammond's eulogy, claiming almost every virtue for his subject, did twice concede that Calhoun had no wit or humor. The historian Merrill Peterson, writing in the late twentieth century, said of Calhoun: "Intensely serious and severe, he could never write a love poem, though he often tried, it was later said, because every line began with 'whereas.'"

"If the 25th section did not exist . . each government would have a negative on the other"

Well, in my last post I was right on both counts.

First, the Report issued by the House Judiciary Committee on January 24, 1831 recommending repeal of Section 25 of the Judiciary Act of 1789 was delivered by Rep. Warren Ransom Davis of South Carolina.

Second, David P. Currie makes clear that the attempt to repeal Section 25 had everything to do with nullification. As early as 1827, John C. Calhoun had observed that repeal of Section 25 would effectively provide the states with the ability to "negative" federal law:

If the appellate power from the State courts to the U[nited] States court provided for by the 25th sec[tio]n [of the Judiciary Act] did not exist, the practical consequence would be, that each government would have a negative on the other, and thus possess the most effectual remedy, that can be conceived against encroachment.

Rep. Davis was a Nullifier. Moreover, Prof. Currie cites to this January 15, 1831 letter from Calhoun to James Henry Hammond as evidence of "Calhoun's complicity in the project" to repeal Section 25:

In the mean time, much can, and, I hope, will be done here by our members to bring out, in bold relief, all of the circumstances calculated to demonstrate our hopeless condition. With this view among other subjects, I trust, there will be a full discussion of the true nature and character of that most oppressive, most unjust, unconstitutional and dangerous of all projects, the distribution of the surplus revenue. The resolution of Mr Davis will also lead to a very interesting discussion. The Committee will report in favour of a repeal of the 25th Section of the Judiciary act, and, it is thought by many, the report will pass the House. However strange it may seem, there are many Zealously in favour of the repeal, who are violently opposed to what they call Nullification, as if the repeal did not comprehend, and go beyond Nullification. The discussion of the report on the repeal will doubtless strengthen our doctrines, as the occurence in Georgia has done.