The Lafayette gazette., 1902-06-21
John e.. CALHOUN
Henry WattersOn's Estimate of
South C.arOiina's Great Sen
ntOr Of Antebelilim Days.

Louisville Courier JournaI.
OF the triumvirs, Clay, Webster and Cal
houn, who, during the critical period "f sec
tional agitation lying between the Missouri
promise of 1890 and the compromise
measures of 1850, varously divided the ad-
mira,ion of the people, Calhoun easily led
in the perfection of his intellectual and
ethical structure. lie possessed not the
imagination of Webster nor the magnetism
of Clay; but to a mind richly stored and
rightly trained and a logical power never
surpassed he united a commanding person
ality; Dorrc in its simplicity, supported by
private virtues to which neither MIR. Clay
nor MIR. Webster could hold candle. He
was undoubtedly the chastest public man
America has yet produced, not excepting
Washington, nor forgetting Lincoln: the
very incarnation of pure and pure
morals.
Mir. Calhoun was a leader of men, not
follower. He was publicist of original
ideas. a constructive statesman. Although
a doctrinare, he was man of affairs; and,
whether in the war office or upon the floor
of the senate, he showed himself equal
alike to the work of administration and to
undaunted. but restrained by elf-posses-
sion which never for moment lost its dig
nifty. Among his colleagues he respected
as none other was. He stood in his time,
and he stands in history, the embodi-
ment of the rarest type known TO our frail
humanity, superb manhood, uniting in it
self the too often conflicting elements Of
genius and character. Yet was it Mr.. Cal
houn's strange destiny to become the CEN
trail figure, if not the author, of series of
errors Of Judgment and intellectual miscon-
ceptlons, ultimately visiting upon the south
an Iiiiad of woes.
That negro labor was indispe ensable 10 the
profitable cultivation of cotton, sugar and
rice, and that, therefore, the institution of
African slavery essential to the we'll
being of the southern States of the union.
That the government was compact of
independent sovercignties, each having the
right nulIfy the laws of congress and TO
withdraw from the union at its will, in
voving the idea and doctrine of peaceful
secession.
These wr1c the two cardinal mistakes to
which this noble and great mind dedicated
all its extraordinary forces: deeply laying
the foundations for a war of sections disas-
trous in its consequences of the interests
dear to his heart; though MIR. Calhoun loved
his country, valued the union, hated bar
barism and cruelty, and, in his own life, re-
allied the most ascetic ideals and exalted
Furitanism. With all his gifts of intellect
and culture, he was provincial Educated
at Yale, he detected. perhaps he exaSGer-
ated the commerc!alism which even then
was beginning to corrode the public life and
conscience of that wide-awake and so-ahead
section. He dislked travel. He enjoyed
the repose, the seignory, of the plantation.
His migra ations from the day of his entrance
to congress to his mortal exit from the
scene, had lain between his home in South
Carolina and Washington city. If he had
gone abroad ne would have seen that the
trend of enlightened thought was set against
slavery, and he would have known that it
could not be maintain for long in few
States lying upon the south Atlantic sea
board of the United States. He would have
given his great intellect to the finding of
some way to adj just the institution of slavery
to the advancing movement of the modern
world. His failure to sec, to know, and to
do cost the south dearly, unless 10
consider all that happens preordained
and from the beginning Of time inevitabie.
South Carolina justly reveres the memory
of Calhoun, holds him answerable for
that which only seer, inspired by God,
could have forecast and averted. The
archaic pile he reared out of his high
consciousness proved but the fabric of
vision. 1t was the republic of Plato.
The beautiful mind, the noble purpose,
that, while he lived. gave it life and light,
remain: and, even as the stranger wanders
aimlessly among the d-solate shrines of
ghostly past-the crumbling walls, the
shpless wharves, the empty marts, the very
familiar household flowers of chivary torn
from the lintei-the spirit of honor and
duty and the love brood in the air about
him, while from the rice field and the cot
ton patch, that no more echo the song of a
blissful if ignorant content, comes a voice
saying, ssthe story is yet told to the
end.''
Picture making is an art and it
is the man who knows his DuSi-