southern states felt secure against action hostile to slavery by the government. But the equilibrium of the sections in that body being overthrown, they would be subject to the will of a northern majority in both houses, limited only by its interpretation of its constitutional power over slavery. In 1835, Texas, peopled by emigrants from the union, but chiefly from the southern states, carrying their slaves with them, won its independence at San Jacinto, which was acknowledged by the United States in 1836. The territory had once been ours; its people were of our own flesh and blood; emigration pressed into its fields from the south; the government of Great Britain was threatening to keep Texas independent, and, by procuring the abolition of slavery there, to operate to stop slavery extension toward the southwest, and place an abolition frontier upon the borders of Louisiana and Arkansas. Mr. Calhoun was too sagacious not to see the hostile policy of England. In a series of papers he exposed the scheme, and negotiated a treaty with Texas for her incorporation into the union. The treaty failed, but the annexation of Texas became a pivotal question in the presidential election of 1844, and Mr. Polk was elected chiefly upon that issue. Many people looked upon it as an increase of the slave power in the union, but the admission of Texas was made subject, as to any new states to be formed out of it, to the provisions of the Missouri compromise. Mr. Calhoun was elected to the senate on retiring from the state department, and did all he could for the peaceable adjustment of the Oregon question, and also to prevent war with Mexico. He deprecated the war with Mexico, and in strong terms declared it was unnecessary. When it was finally determined on, he was greatly disturbed, and predicted evils, which even he could not see. He said: “It has dropped a curtain between the present and the future, which to me is impenetrable; and, for the first time since I have been in public life, I am unable to see the future. It has closed the first volume of our political history under the constitution, and opened the second, and no mortal can tell what will be written in it.” In his speech on the “three-million bill” (9 Feb., 1847) he explained that what constituted this “impenetrable curtain” was the acquisition of territory as the result of the war, and the slavery question, which would be involved in the legislation respecting it. The slavery question, during the administrations of Jackson and Van Buren, had been agitated in many forms. Abolition petitions had poured in upon congress, and the power of congress had been invoked to prevent the transmission through the mails of abolition documents. On this point Mr. Calhoun differed with President Jackson; the former maintaining in an able report (February, 1836) that the mail could not be the instrument for incendiary purposes against the laws of the states, but that congress had no power to decide what should be transmitted and what not, without state action.
Soon after the Mexican war began, the acquisition of territory from Mexico was strongly insisted on; and at once the anti-slavery party proposed what was known as the Wilmot proviso, by which it was declared that slavery should never be allowed in any Mexican territory acquired by treaty. The agitation convulsed the country. On 19 Feb., 1847, Mr. Calhoun set forth his views in certain resolutions, of which the substance is in the first two: “That the territories of the United States belong to the several states composing the union, and are held by them as their joint and common property; that congress, as the joint agent and representative of the states of the union, has no right to make any law or do any act whatever that shall, directly or by its effects, make any discrimination between the states of this union by which any of them shall be deprived of its full and equal right in any territory of the United States acquired or to be acquired.” Chief-Justice Taney, delivering the opinion of the court, held the same doctrine in the Dred Scott decision in 1857, in which six of the nine judges concurred. The agitation continued until the session of 1849-'50, when the compromise measures were proposed and passed. Mr. Calhoun made his last speech (read for him by Senator Mason, of Virginia) upon this subject, 4 March, 1850. With the exception of a few remarks made afterward in reply to Mr. Foote and to Mr. Webster, he never again addressed the senate.
In the last years of his life he prepared two works, the one “A Disquisition on Government,” and the other “A Discourse on the Constitution and Government of the United States,” both comprehended in a volume of 400 pages. These methodical treatises on the science of government and the federal constitution place him in the highest position among original thinkers upon political philosophy. In estimating Mr. Calhoun's position absolutely and relatively, he is liable to a less favorable verdict than his merits demand. He represented a southern state, defended her slave institutions, belonged to a minority section, and his views have been condemned by the majority section of the country. The newspaper and periodical press, therefore, will deny him the pre-eminence which we claim for him as a broad and philosophic statesman, as a constitutional lawyer, and as a leader of thought in the field of political philosophy. His fame results from the possession of an ardent, sincere, and intense soul which gave impulse and motive to a mind endowed with extraordinary analytic force, acute and subtile in its insight, fertile in suggestion, full of resources, careful, laborious, and profound in research and comprehensive in its deduction of general principles. He had a largo imagination, though he displayed little fancy. His vigorous, compact, and clean-cleaving logic put the objects of his creative power into sharply defined shapes, arranged in perspicuous order, with a severe, trenchant, and condensed rhetoric.
In his reply on 10 March, 1838, to Mr. Clay's personal attack he seems to have defined his own characteristics while he denied them to his great opponent. He said: “I cannot retort on the senator the charge of being metaphysical. I cannot accuse him of possessing the powers of analysis and generalization, those higher faculties of the mind (called metaphysical by those who do not possess them) which decompose and resolve into their elements the complex masses of ideas that exist in the world of mind, as chemistry does the bodies that surround us in the material world, and without which these deep and hidden causes which are in constant action and producing such mighty changes in the condition of society would operate unseen and undetected. . . . Throughout the whole of my service I have never followed events, but have taken my stand in advance, openly and freely avowing my opinions on all questions, and leaving it to time and experience to condemn or approve my course.” He believed the constitution to be a “beautiful and profound system,” and the union under it an inestimable blessing. His “Disquisition” and “Discourse” were devoted to showing how the true philosophy of government was realized in that constitution. An epitome of his philosophy may be attempted, though it will fail
