The Birthday of Eternity

John Calhoun, died March 31, 1850

Calhoun achieved his greatest influence and most lasting fame as a Senator. In his fifties when he began his Senate career, Calhoun led the pro-slavery faction in the Senate in the 1830s and 1840s, opposing both abolitionism and attempts to limit the expansion of slavery into the western territories. He was a major advocate of the 1850 Fugitive Slave Law, which required the co-operation of local law enforcement officials and citizens in free states to return escaped slaves.

 

Whereas other Southern politicians had excused slavery as a necessary evil, in a famous speech on the Senate floor, Calhoun asserted that slavery was a "positive good." He rooted this claim on two grounds: white supremacy and paternalism. All societies, Calhoun claimed, are ruled by an elite group which enjoys the fruits of the labor of a less-privileged group. Senator William Rives of Virginia earlier had referred to slavery as an evil that might become a "lesser evil" in some circumstances. Calhoun believed that conceded too much to the abolitionists: "I take higher ground. I hold that in the present state of civilization, where two races of different origin, and distinguished by color, and other physical differences, as well as intellectual, are brought together, the relation now existing in the slaveholding States between the two, is, instead of an evil, a good—a positive good... I may say with truth, that in few countries so much is left to the share of the laborer, and so little exacted from him, or where there is more kind attention paid to him in sickness or infirmities of age. Compare his condition with the tenants of the poor houses in the more civilized portions of Europe—look at the sick, and the old and infirm slave, on one hand, in the midst of his family and friends, under the kind superintending care of his master and mistress, and compare it with the forlorn and wretched condition of the pauper in the poorhouse... I hold then, that there never has yet existed a wealthy and civilized society in which one portion of the community did not, in point of fact, live on the labor of the other."

James Mason of Virginia

Calhoun’s last Senate speech was delivered on March 4, 1850, by Senator James Mason of Virginia. Calhoun, dying of tuberculosis, was too ill to read his own speech. He had to be helped into the Senate chamber to listen to his friend Mason. At that time, Congress was involved in a long debate over the admission to statehood of California and several issues relating to slavery.

Even senators who had long considered Calhoun a disunionist were shocked when Mason pronounced his ultimatum: if the northern states were unwilling to reconcile their differences with the South "on the broad principle of justice and duty, say so; and let the States we both represent agree to separate and part in peace." 

Webster marking 1850 Speech in Senate

Three days later, Senator Webster delivered his famous "Seventh of March" speech, a ringing plea for compromise and Union that Calhoun interrupted with a resolute, "No sir! the Union can be broken"—one of his last utterances in the Senate.

Calhoun died of tuberculosis at a boarding house in Washington, D.C. on  the morning of March 31, 1850. He was sixty-eight years old. 

Calhoun's Death Mask

Senator Thomas Hart Benton refused to speak at the April memorial service in the Senate chamber; Calhoun was "not dead," he maintained. "There may be no vitality in his body, but there is in his doctrines." 

The funeral in Washington, D.C. was held on April 3, 1850.  Calhoun's body, enclosed in a metallic coffin, was placed on a bier in the center area, around which were grouped relatives and friends, among whom were a son of the deceased, the surviving Senator and the Representatives in Congress from South Carolina, and veteran statesman as pall-bearers.   The other members of the Senate, in two semi-circular rows of seats, enclosed the  group.The President was present, seated on the right of the Vice President, and the Speaker of the House of Representatives occupied a chair on his left.  The circular gallery was exclusively appropriated to ladies.

Senator Daniel Webster, one of the official mourners chosen by the Senate to accompany Calhoun's body to South Carolina, could not bring himself to perform this awkward and painful task. He took his leave from Calhoun at the Virginia landing as the funeral party departed for the South.

The event was significant enough that both major newspapers in Charleston, the Charleston Mercury and the Charleston News and Courier, took the day of his funeral off from publishing, but not without first spending considerable attention on the Arrangements For the Funeral of Mr. Calhoun. The papers provided detail for the march to the Citadel, for the march from the Citadel to City Hall, on the funeral services the next day, on the firing of minute guns during certain points in the procession-and several diagrams in case readers were confused. T. Leger Hutchinson, the mayor of Charleston, declared April 25 a day of mourning.

Calhoun was interred on April 26, 1850 at the St. Philip's Churchyard in Charleston, South Carolina.

Calhoun's Grave

$100 bill issued by Confederate States of America, bearing image of Calhoun, November 1862

The Clemson University campus in South Carolina occupies the site of Calhoun's Fort Hill plantation. 

Fort Hill Plantation House

Thomas Green Clemson, who was married to Calhoun's daughter Anna Maria, bequeathed the property to the state for use as an agricultural college to be named after him. The Fort Hill house still stands at the center of Clemson University’s campus.