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thanks for listening to this archive of teaching american history's last documents in detail webinar for calendar year 2020. in this december 16th program dr john moser of ashland university discussed with dr john dynan of wake forest university and dr lauren hall of the rochester institute of technology john c calhoun's 1831 fort hill address which can be seen as something of the intellectual foundation of what would eventually become the state's rights argument for secession and the protection of slavery thanks for listening good evening ladies and gentlemen my name is john moser professor of history and chair of the master of arts in american history and government program at ashland university welcome to another edition of documents in detail teaching american history's webinar series in which we bring together thoughtful scholars to have a conversation about historically important documents we encourage all of you joining us today to participate in that conversation by submitting questions via the q a box please use the q a box and not the chat box we will try to get to as many of those questions as possible within the next week you will receive an email with a link to request a certificate of participation if you wish to have one as well as a link to the archived video and audio from today's program the speeches letters and other writings that we're using for this year's webinars are all drawn from our book 50 core american documents they are also available at the ashbrook center's voluminous document database located at tah.org the subject of tonight's program is john c calhoun's 1831 fort hill address and to help discuss that document are dr lauren hall associate professor of political science at the rochester institute of technology and dr john dynan professor of politics and international affairs at wake forest university lauren john thank you for uh for being with us tonight thank you for having me thank you good to be here so my uh the the question i generally start off with here is to uh is to ask why is this document important enough to be included in 50 core american documents why is it worth paying attention to today i'll be glad to start off that and that way there's there's so many things to be said about that let me let me say a few things that could be said first of all calhoun was just a monumental figure in american history and a pretty significant figure in american political thought and so if we want to have an understanding of key developments in the antebellum era if we want to understand some of the more significant thinkers in american political thought we turn to calhoun and and why this particular address the fort hill address is because one of the key issues in american politics up until the civil war was the question of what is the role of states in resisting or expressing disagreement with federal government policies does that level of resistance rise to the possibility that a state could nullify an act of the federal government could it go further than that and no one thought more systematically about that question and put his ideas down in writing on that question more so than calhoun so if we want to understand one of the just the the dominant questions in american politics in the first 60 years of the 19th century and that is the question of the relationship between the states and the federal government and the possibility of the extent to which states can resist the federal government this fort hill address is an excellent place to go to start off that discussion yeah and i'll just add in um i think uh i agree with everything that that um that john just mentioned uh i mean one thing that i think is also really important here to to sort of mention is the way in which um calhoun sort of adds to our in the 1830s are this kind of crucial point in between the founding era and the and the civil war and so you can see this as a kind of as a turning point um or kind of apex in this this the way in which the founding was understood um and you start to see obviously founding figures are dying off you're starting to lose that connection to those those crucial figures um and i think we'll talk much more about madison's role in this as we as we move forward but this becomes really crucial because of the way that calhoun uses a lot of these founding documents and in particular of course the kentucky and virginia resolutions and that's a crucial concern of course of madison in terms of how calhoun is interpreting that um but then there's this broader question which which john just um alluded to which is this question that that is not fully resolved at the time of the founding which is what do you do when there are disagreements about the nature of uh various kinds of constitutional powers whether those are constitutional powers of the federal government or those of the states let's spend a moment on uh on context who is john c calhoun how has he gotten to where he is at this point in his uh in his career uh what has what has shaped his uh the views that we're seeing here i mean i'll i'll take the lead on on this one and just say a few things first of all calhoun held an amazing array of offices of public offices from serving in the house of representatives to serving as vice president in multiple presidential administrations to serving as a u.s senator to serving temporarily as a secretary of state to serving as a again as a u.s senator so if we just kind of start with some of the public officials the positions that calhoun held i mean it'd be tough to find someone today who held that range of positions in in in congressional office in in in executive office so a wide-ranging realm of position and he was someone who whenever it came time to who could be possibly a presidential candidate even you know calhoun's name is is right up there with others so much to be said about about calhoun and that's just a few things about just putting this in context who he was obviously to say he's rooted in south carolina political history as much as anything i didn't mean that by leading off with the federal offices that he held i didn't mean to kind of lose sight of the fact he's very deeply rooted in south carolina political history and and saul is is his role for much of his political career is defending the interests of south carolina and south carolinians and i'll just add to um to that i mean one of the things that's that's so interesting from a political theorist perspective is looking at the way that calhoun's thought itself has evolved over over this period that he's um that he's in political office um and so thinking about the you know in the early days he was he was much more a nationalist he really was concerned about the role of um a federal power um and then of course you start to see there's a there's a shift um and i would welcome actually any of the uh historians to or or if um uh john has some things he wants to add but you start to see this shift and the tariffs are a sort of practical wedge point but there's a broader issue and i think this has a lot to do with uh calhoun's south carolinian identity but there's a sort of realization that demographics are not on the southerner side right so there's this there's a series of sort of changes over this period of time in the early 1800s into the 1820s and 1830s um where the the south carolinian position the domestic position of south carolina in particular but the south sort of more broadly um is much much more precarious and so calhoun's political thought is really i think a reflection or the changes in his political thought our reflection of these broader demographic changes where we start to see um increasing power in the north um in uh in south carolina in particular you have um in the in the late 1820s you have a um or maybe it was all of the 1820s um you have a recession you have the the um the sort of ability to keep the status quo and the kinds of uh economic and just political power that they had had was rapidly fading and then of course obviously the question of slavery and whether that institution had a future or not is really i think central to calhoun's changing understanding of the nature of the compact in the place that states the role of the states in interpreting that compact so what is the uh what is the occasion for this speech is this in response to uh uh to a tariff yeah the tariff of abominations so to speak yes so so so so just to to start off on this is is that we've had there have been various tariffs that have been passed and then we have a tariff that's passed in 1828 and it's seen as a tariff that in the views of south carolinians is different from tariffs that have come before it's very much it's not just trying to raise revenue they say it's one thing to raise to have a tariff we need to raise some revenue for the federal government that was a dominant way that you'd raise revenue at the time we don't have an income tax at that time so we've got to take it back how are you going to raise raise revenue this is one of the leading ways and for the views of calhoun and folks in south carolina and other folks in the south they say well it's one thing to be having a tariff when your goal is to kind of just raise some money it's another thing when you're having a tariff that is a tax on goods coming in the country when it's seeming to kind of protect manufacturers and perhaps in the views of south koreans to advantage one region over another and so south carolina and others in the south say this tariff that you've passed in 1828 is just a very different kind of situation we've seen before it's not just raising some revenue it's raising revenue but it's also trying to achieve other goals and so south carolina had actually come out in the aftermath of that initial tariff and said you know here's our issues with it here's our problems with it and they've gone so far as to say you know here's what we could do about it as a state to kind of really resist so think of this as calhoun in the fort hill address actually is here's a sustained explanation of the kinds of arguments that we've been setting out in recent years about what role a state can do when it sees the federal government pass a tariff that is seeming to go extend beyond constitutional barriers that's the thing calhoun says this isn't just a difference of policy it's not just that we disagree with this you have actually exceeded your legitimate powers in the federal government and here's my sustained argument for why south carolina has a right to resist that and why and why other states could take similar actions okay lauren yeah and it's worth pointing out too that um you know there was actually disagreement even at the founding about the sort of the nature of these kinds of tariffs and whether whether tariffs to to um uh protectionist tariffs as opposed to these tariffs that um to raise revenue uh you know whether those are constitutional and and jefferson was was much more hesitant about them whereas madison seemed to see them as clearly coming from the the ability to regulate commerce under the commerce clause so from the very beginning there's already some sort of questions here um the other thing that that i think is interesting is to look back at um you know sort of the question of how much the tariff and broader questions about sort of southern the the existential nature of southern sort of economics um sort of played into this because the first attempt or one of the first attempts to actually sort of put nullification into um or uh yeah nullification um is the uh the negro semen act of uh 1822 and that's where south carolina was was because you'd had a a series of slave rebellions um and so there was very serious concerns about growing unrest among slave populations particularly in parts of south carolina where uh slave populations were were bigger than the white population so there's a lot of fear and a lot of concern about rising slave power at this time um and i think you see this later jackson says you know yeah this was about tariffs in this particular case right you know the fort hill address but but really it's it's just about the the sort of broader role of of the south and he says explicitly slavery is next right so so even though the tariff of abominations is sort of the central point in this particular speech there's about a decade of previous issues all relating to this question of sort of the economic viability of the south and of south carolina in particular um david weidenhofer asks a question that well we've already mentioned the mentioned slavery but but this may be the occasion to say a little more about it uh calhoun had a reputation earlier in his career as a nationalist he he strongly supported the second bank of the united states he was a supporter of the tariff of 1816 he supported internal improvements how important was this the question of slavery in moving him away from uh being a nationalist to a uh to a state's rights advocate i'll take a brief stab at this but then i want to hear what what um john has to say i i personally think it was crucial i mean because you see two really crucial shifts in his thinking starting to happen around this time there's the move toward states rights broadly but then there's the move toward making these positive arguments for slavery right so there's a sort of assumption that unless we can start tackling the the moral strength of the abolitionist argument right for a long time there was no there was no positive moral argument for slavery it was this is really bad but we're sort of stuck with it it's the foundation of our economic system but now with the with these an increasing number of of uh slave uprisings um it's worth noting that the nat turner rebellion is in is in 1831 the same year um of of the fort hill address if i'm remembering correctly uh and so these all of these things are sort of working at the same time and so i think you see in calhoun's thought this gradual increase at the same time that he's becoming a states rights person um he's also starting to develop these positive arguments for the the moral foundations of slavery uh which of course then become really foundational in the cornerstone speech and these other later kinds of documents mean i'll just pick up one of the classic questions whenever we approach calhoun in his writings is to what extent just uh the question of slavery should it be a need to be at the forefront of any discussion of an address such as the one that we're looking at today and to what extent can we separate out the ideas and arguments that calhoun is making about the relationship of states to the federal government are those separable in any way from the slavery uh concerns that were just dominating there and and it would it would be very difficult to separate them out entirely certainly because slavery was a key issue as we said as as learned just said um you know it would be a half dozen years later that calhoun would be speaking in the senate in which he would actually go forward so far as to make the argument of a positive good argument for slavery famously when questions come up in the senate about whether to receive certain petitions that would be certain anti-slavery petitions and it's at that point that calhoun comes right out in the speech and actually makes that that makes that makes that claim that we just heard so slavery is clearly going on here some folks have have raised the argument though and ever make the claim and it's and it's a very reasonable claim is can we also though look at calhoun's arguments about nullification and about the ability of states to interpose in response to federal arguments could those be um could those be made on grounds other than in regard to uh slavery could those be made in grounds other than on a pro-slavery position and certainly one could read the document that we're addressing here as in regard to the tariff in regard to other issues that's different from saying was slavery very much in in the forefront of calhoun's mind though uh joe rooney asks calhoun's views on states rights were not new uh st george tucker john taylor of caroline and members of the richmond junto uh all advanced these ideas earlier to what extent was calhoun influenced y these virginians and were there south carolinians who who influenced calhoun's views on states rights well let me just take a a an early crack at that and calhoun would say oh i'm very much influenced by virginians i'm influenced by madison and jefferson and the virginia kentucky resolutions of 1798. so that that would be calhoun and that comes up in the speech calhoun says when i'm making these arguments and this is always classic in the american political tradition you always root yourself in the founders or those come before you and and you try as much as possible and calhoun is no exception to that so calhoun wants to make an argument here about the possibility of a state resisting essentially vetoing nullifying an act of the federal government and he's trying to make a claim for the legitimacy of that and so where's his best claim if he's going to reach for that well in his view his best claim is he says why just look at what madison and jefferson wrote in the virginia and kentucky resolution didn't they say there that states have the right to interpose themselves in that case it was in the context of the alien sedition acts but isn't isn't it well within the realm of kind of of continuation of their arguments you would say to actually say that i am arguing in the fort hill address as a continuation not a repudiation not a departure from from from some of our classic founders i'm continuing that now that's highly disputable of course and some of those same virginians in madison brigade who did dispute that in that sense and say hold on a second um let's look at what we said here and let's look what you're saying now but i'll just start off by saying in calhoun's view and certainly his writings he says oh yes i'm very influenced by some of some some of the founders and some of the virginians here's how i'm continuing their argument for interposition yeah i'll just add you know that i think it's it's it's always interesting to look at the um you know again the sort of evolution of the thought over this over this time period um but just following on john's point i think you absolutely do see him at least trying to make the argument that this is a a continuation or a defense of the principles of the founding right a defense of the principles of the declaration and he's explicit about that in the the it's the third paragraph the end of that third paragraph right he he quotes jefferson directly and he and he discusses um he says in all cases of compact this is the last second to last sentence of my third paragraph um uh in all cases of compact between parties having no common judge each party has an equal right to judge for itself as well of the infraction as of the mode and measure of redress right so he's he's absolutely appealing to these founding documents he's appealing to jeffersonian interpretations of the declaration and and i'll just mention how different that becomes in the 1860s where you get a i mean if you look at the cornerstone speech that is a clear separation from the declaration right that's a breaking with this older tradition so i think kelvin's still trying to see himself in that um whether we whether we say that he you know i think we can madison had lots of concerns about his interpretation of these founding documents and we can talk i think we'll probably get into some of those um but at least i think john's right that he sees himself as as trying to continue this broader tradition of the sort of principles of the declaration so now that we're kind of getting into the substance of his argument in the in the document um john talley asks what's the role of the individual in calhoun's america he seems to be only concerned with the question of the states versus the federal government what is his view of the individual well i'll take a quick stab at that because i i i tend to um i tend to follow to a certain degree um uh harry jaffa's position on this which i don't think this is where i think he this is where i think calhoun breaks from the founders um which is that i think he really struggles to understand individual rights because individual rights are so are such a complicating principle um in a state that that's economic foundation rests on on slavery and so the question then becomes well how do we protect these established political communities and that becomes sort of the foundation for the state's rights argument um but the status of the individual is much less clear and i think it's much less clear because he can't be more clear about it because there's this fundamental sort of danger involved and so that's one reason why i think you know there's a sort of historicism in calhoun's understanding of where for example states rights come from right they come from these established political communities people come together and it's sort of as history plays itself out right those rights develop and then can be protected um but you know because and i guess part of the reason i emphasize that is that you know he he's talking in this speech and elsewhere about defending minority rights um but the question is always looming in the background of what to do about the minority of i mean the slave population is this obvious population whose rights are not protected um and it seems that seems to me a really clear example of the the fact that he's he has to hedge or move around individual rights in this complicated and sort of contradictory way um because he needs to make this broader sort of community or communal argument in order to to protect this peculiar institution that is that is so difficult for him to defend john i would just say that i i would agree with all that and and it doesn't that the question of individuals it doesn't seem to be the prominent kind of guide to to calhoun's thinking he when we look at what calhoun writes and he has these other writings as well the discourses the disquisition um various other addresses in addition to the one that we're that we're reading here one sees calhoun speak of interests to speak about interests rather than kind of individuals speaks about a multiplicity of interest how are various interests whether it be regional interests or other interests um kind of it speaks about the ability of of of certain interests that might be in the minority to ensure that they're not being kind of um uh not taken account of in that way it went once when one one sees a kind of role of states and he speaks about states and regular federal government it's it's we're probably not looking to calhoun for for with a prominent kind of idea of individual rights and a focus on individuals it's these other concepts that are really guiding us and attracting us to at least that's the reason why we focus on calhoun all right so um we talked about the influence of uh of of the need to defend slavery on calhoun's thought uh nicole shin notes that this speech does not mention slavery at all is what how are we to interpret that well i'll take a quick stab at it i think there's a clear i mean i think part of what the southern sort of strategy is is to demonstrate a kind of overarching aggression on the part of both the federal government but also the north right so it's not simply slavery right they don't want to make this simply an issue of of slavery um and in large part because i actually don't think i mean slavery is the huge elephant in the room but there's also these other questions right these other problems of uh what to do in a again when you're when your political power is clearly shrinking you're not just gonna lose on the slavery issue you're gonna lose on all these other issues coming down um the pipeline so uh so i think it's really it it makes a lot of sense that he doesn't mention slavery right he talks about these you know the peculiar domestic institutions right the peculiar and local interests that are left to the control of the states um and and so slavery's sort of there but i think what he's trying to demonstrate is that there's an overwhelming kind of goal on the part of the national government uh to um to subsume the states into being merely um i can't remember the specific phrase that he uses but simply corporate actors right just sort of basic sort of cogs in a machine um as opposed to sovereign um political communities of their own yeah and i would just kind of pick up on that and say well there's various ways to kind of approach calhoun and one is this particular address what is he arguing against he's clearly the particular occasion for this address is the tariff and so that's why he's addressing the tariff and talking about how to respond to the tariff are there are there other issues that are that are in the background in the foreground slavery national bank these kinds of issues are there but i guess the other way to approach calhoun and this is the way that he he certainly crafts this address is on a more theoretical plane abstracting from particular whatever it might be the tariff this decade it might be another issue a federal government expansion 10 years from now by another he and his his efforts is to think through theoretically he says do we have enough protection against federal government efforts to expand beyond the limited scope and the constitution and i think that's a that we we can we can it's certainly right to place this document in the context in which it was give which was it was crafted specifically in response to the tariff but it's also helpful and this is one of the reasons why we continue to read calhoun in political thought classes and others is is as an entry into long-running discussion in american political thought and in political thought more generally not just in in america about how you protect minority interests in in in um against uh against the majority in which the minority is losing on a regular basis and and i think that's a that's a reasonable place to to for us to take the conversation to continue the conversation in that way and and he really does work through i mean here we start to get into kind of the nuts and bolts of his argument he says let's think about this what are the various ways in which the federal government can be constrained and here i'm going to piece together some what he says in this address from what he says in other addresses he says well there's people say always the right of suffrage if the federal government is going too far the people can always vote out the federal officials are doing that well he says perhaps but what if the majority is the one that's voting and who's going to protect the minority and we even in another address he goes say well madison says in federalist 10 that the the multiplicity that as we expand the sphere that will make it more difficult for the majority to encroach he says well maybe it has the opposite effect though maybe the diversity and multiplicity of interest leaves the minority even more at risk and so he works through in a very systematic way engaging with these arguments that have been brought out from the founders to others and then he says and i want to take the conversation this way he says some say well that's the job of the supreme court he said just rely on the supreme court some people say to kind of they'll aren't they the ones to adjudicate disputes between the states and the federal government and aren't they the ones to decide when the federal government has gone too far he says no i don't think that's a reasonable enough protection i'm not willing to stake my claim there and so he's eventually led after working through all these kind of possible arguments he says i think we're led to the argument that the only solid protection is for a state as a member of the compact in his view of states compacting with others and the states to decide the federal government has gone too far we have now interpreted the constitution this is the standard argument in that system here but i just want to place that in the context of how he wants to work through abstractly and theoretically the various arguments that others have raised for why the federal government can be restrained he says i'm not persuaded yeah and i'll just add to that because i think i think it's really important that we don't i think sometimes people dismiss calhoun um as simply a defender of slavery and don't pay attention to the broader sort of political thought and so i want to make sure that i move away from slavery too to exactly some of the points that that john has brought up because one of the things that i think makes calhoun such an important author to uh to wrestle with is that he's bringing back some of these controversies from the early part of both the founding period but just the the period right after the founding um that are still unresolved so the idea that um and as john correctly points out i mean you have all these folks who are saying well you know the judiciary is obviously the the person who or the institution that handles you know uh or decides when the constitution has been violated and who has violated it well there was an that wasn't actually right that was decided in marbury versus madison and there was enormous controversy about that being the solution right if you read brutus and some of these other founding folks um the anti-federalists in particular they didn't trust the federal judiciary to be the judge of when the federal government has overstepped its bounds right in what world does that make sense and there was a lot of concern that the federal judiciary would simply just eradicate the state judiciaries all together in the state legislatures so i think part of what's so important about calhoun is that he's bringing some of these issues that that were sort of it's like we sort of slapped band-aids over them and as in the case of marbury vs madison and said well you know this is the decision right we the supreme court handles that um but is is that correct is that how we want to understand the constitution is that how we want is that the best way to protect um minority rights given the fact that if you look backwards actually that the track record is not that great in terms of the supreme court actually siding with uh minority rights against federal power so i think those questions are really really crucial and then and then hopefully i'll stop here but i do want to think a little bit more about some of the importance of um the role that states play in terms of interposition and thinking about interposition as a as a a still important and useful concept today and that's another area that i think calhoun can help us think through um francis wong asks um well she brings up the fact that uh that calhoun wants to wants to insist that his doctrine of the supremacy of states that there's nothing uh anarchic about it there's nothing revolutionary about it lincoln would have a different view of that of course um but wasn't that disproven by the very fact that in uh not long after this address south carolina attempted to secede or at least threaten to well i mean one way is to take what is what does calhoun say when in in in this and actually in some other kind of speeches when people say look the the one of the main there's many critiques of of calhoun and and one of the critiques is look you're essentially saying that each state has a veto over other states yeah that's that's that's really kind of what you're what what you're saying here so if that's what you're saying aren't you essentially allowing one state to be obstructionist and to end to stand in the way to gum up the works and so calhoun's got to respond to that well we can we can consider whether calvin's response is persuasive but kind of let's see what some of things and again what he says here in this address and some of the things he says on the fuller kind of part of his thought he says look yes whenever it becomes clear that something really has to be done say a budget to be passed what people are going to come together when there's an emergency situation in that way and he even says this is an interesting kind of question the point that he brings up in other readings he says well don't we require unanimity for a jury trial he says don't we require unanimity in order to convict someone of an offense he says isn't it reasonable enough that f we require a unanimous verdict a single juror can stand in the way of that and yet we acknowledge it he said i can imagine the same thing happening and he says don't juries come to unanimous agreement at times and discuss amongst themselves so that's one of the arguments that's an interesting argument that he makes is he says couldn't you analogize that to to kind of the idea of the states in the united states presumably what would someone say about secession is at a certain point one ends up in a revolutionary situation in which the train of abuses would be so great that that that one state has to say no more so i think that would be the particular response that somebody would give to that but we could also just say on its merits is their plausibility to this idea and um and calhoun even says he says in another address he says you know if we look back to history he says poland had a situation for a while for part of their history where they actually had what was a veto where any any single kind of interest could actually stand in the way he said things worked out for a while now he also says that poland actually was overtaken by by neighboring countries at a point but he said for reasons unrelated to it wasn't because they actually had this system of of unanimity i'll stop there my point is to kind of set out some of some of calhoun's responses what he would say in response to a very reasonable critique is aren't you allowing states to sit there and be completely obstructionist how could you have a system that works in that way and i'll just i'll add to that um being a sort of calhoun advocate and this is actually an area that i critique calhoun on um when i when i teach him but you know there's in in the the piece the paragraph that i um that i read earlier where he's quoting he's quoting jefferson right and he's he's talking about you know where um where there's no common judge right each party has an equal right to judge for itself um and jefferson here is also appealing to locke and so there's this question of what do you do when there is no common judge um and in political theory we call that a state of anarchy and in calhoun's defense so one of the things that calhoun does of course is he he tries to make jefferson's appeal here which is a revolutionary appeal he tries to make this a constitutional appeal right so before we get to true revolution right we have this this ability um and so he tries to and this is the idea of the concurrent veto and sort of trying to create a system where um uh where you can sort of get everyone onto the same page and and so i think if you if you wanted to make the case for calhoun uh you could argue that looking at this all together especially looking at the divergence of the interest between the north and the south he could actually be trying to to make an um an argument that preserves the union in the sense that it forms a middle ground between the the either you're with the union or you are taking up arms against the union in the sort of revolutionary way which is what which is what jefferson right i mean jefferson says yeah you know whenever anything really bad happens you just revolt right we have we have the right to revolution and so i think you could look at calhoun part of what calhoun might be trying to do and say in trying to read the right to revolution as a sort of constitutional right held by states uh he could make the argument that he's actually providing a protective buffer let me just if i could just kind of pick up because i uh i think we've moved on helpfully to what are some of the critiques of calhoun's argument and thought here and how would how would calhoun respond to them who has the stronger of the argument i mean that's what when we get in the realm of political theory i mean calhoun in this document can be taught in multiple classes one can easily see this document being taught in a in a history class that's working through key debates and disputes in the early 1800s and if we're talking about the tariff this this this address could be read if we're talking about uh state disputes between states and the federal government this document can be read but this document can also be read in in a political thought class in an american political thought class or even a political thought class more generally about the role of minority relations of minorities to to to majorities relationship of a national governance to a sub-national government and so this document there's various places that can be placed and when we move to that second kind of argument the political theory kind of classes we naturally end up in kind of arguments okay so here's calhoun's argument what's the response to it and in the particular nature of the when that discussion has taken place in the united states and i say that calhoun could be read and just debated in countries other than the united states where people would be having this question but in the united states and i just want to anticipate and respond to some of the questions that have come up in the chat room in the q a folks say well how would calhoun respond to the supremacy clause though i mean isn't it crystal clear that the supremacy clause says the constitution and and laws are supreme well yes but but here's how folks of of uh supporters of calhoun would respond to that say the constitution and laws made in pursuance thereof shall be supreme now some people say well that's just kind of let's let's just throw away language or that's not that's just boilerplate language it means the constitution and the laws of the united states shall be supreme but no folks who would be a supporting calhoun at the time would be saying are those laws made in pursuance of the constitution not just were they procedurally in pursuance were they passed by the house passed by the senate signed by the president but are they in keeping with are they consistent with the powers set out in the constitution and so someone who would be supporting calhoun would read this address and say that's entirely consistent with the constitutional system would say the supremacy clause makes it clear that only laws made in pursuance of the constitution are federal laws are supreme our whole debate is how do we decide and more particularly who decides when a law was properly made in pursuance of the constitution we dispute that we think that this tariff though properly passed by the house by the senate and signed is not consistent with and therefore is not made in pursuance of the powers of the federal government which are limited to in their view uh terrorists for revenue purpose not for protectionist purpose so i just wanted to engage that question that's come up in several q and a's about what role does supremacy cause is that the end of the argument once we look at the supreme court folks supporter of calhoun say that's just the start of the argument not the end of it thanks it's really interesting um john robinson asked a question uh something i'm curious about as well uh he's calhoun's argument here is is is essentially to say i'm i'm really just repeating the views of what of jefferson and madison the virginia and kentucky resolutions he brings up here is is that an accurate representation of jefferson's and madison's views well i'll take a quick stab i think it's closer to jefferson than it is to madison and madison madison himself says this in one of the one of his letters i mean he says um you know the kentucky language i can't remember exactly how he quotes it but it's it's less clear right um and so the kentucky resolutions kind of opens you up in a specific kind of way um but madison doesn't think the the virginia resolutions do that and and if you read the virginia resolutions right he's he's clear that the language of the of the virginia resolutions um is that the the constitution is a compact to which the states are parties right and so it's it's the states in their sort of unanimous the the unanimity of the states but then if you look at the virginia resolution in combination with the with fed 39 um it's clear that that madison is is and i talk about this with my students sometimes that the the sort of madison is i think more consistent than people often think he is um at the time of the founding when he's writing fed 39 um the the real fear is giving the national government enough power right um but then later of course with the alien and sedition acts the fear is well now the national government's got too much power and so we need to give some back to right the both the people in the states um and so i think you you see him using the ambiguous nature of the compact which is exactly what he lays out in federalist 39 that it's both national and federal right the the parties are both the states and the people themselves the constituent act is via states um but via the votes of the people in their states so he's i think he's he's very much i think he's more clear again than than jefferson in this particular area you know i'm glad to because this is just a it's a particularly interesting question about madison and his relation to the doctrine of nullification in that way and his doc his relationship to some of these arguments that are coming up in the 1830s and and various things have been said about that and just kind of picking up on a few things that lauren offered the first thing to be said is the virginia and kentucky resolutions are themselves unclear about what exactly is being claimed and there's some distance between the virginia resolution and and the kentucky resolution themselves the kentucky resolution the somewhat kind of kind of kind of more uh more stringent or stronger version than the virginia one but at the least what they're claiming in there is the right of states to engage in constitutional interpretation state officials and at the least two and this is what matters was to say at least to rally the cause of other states for one state to put out there this is what madison later said he said we were reading the alien sedition acts we were reading the us constitution and we as all citizens and all state officials are entitled to we said in our judgment the alien sedition acts are not consistent with the constitution here's our reasoning for that states we ask what do you think about this now that's what madison later said that what was the main thing that was being claimed in the virginia resolutions particularly and so madison makes a big difference between saying that state officials saying we're reading the constitution we're interpreting the constitution we're putting this out there to see if other states agree with ours madison's that's very different from saying states can interpret the constitution states can put out in writing their version states can ask other states of the degree and here's the key point and no matter what other states say in response one state can they say we will act on our interpretation the constitution and we will seek to nullify that's the crucial claim madison never said that in any clear fashion and madison disavowed saying that in any clear fashion and so when madison comes and hears and sees people such as calhoun and others saying in the 1830s why we're just continuing with madison madison feels that necessary to say no let me draw a stark division between what you think i was saying and what i'm pretty sure i did say and what you're saying now i do not see what you're saying is a continuation i see a very big difference i i'll close here given the that the ma that the virginia resolutions and certainly the kentucky resolutions were not written in the clearest fashion or at least left open their um how far they were the scope they were willing to go it's not out of line for calhoun to make this argument madison says let me let me clear things up now and let me make very clear i'm not on the side of what you're claiming here and i'll just add in really quickly i mean you know one of the reasons i like looking at this this address with students is that you have very clearly that the use of of source material and how it can be sort of manipulated and shifted over time right so he's quoting the virginia resolution right here right to interpose for arresting the progress of the evil and then he goes on to define the right of interposition as state right veto nullification or any other name right so he's adding that content in and that's what madison is is obviously irritated about because that content was not there okay anna yokom asks calhoun and andrew jackson obviously had some very different political ideas why did jackson choose calhoun as his vice president you know i i i don't have a particular response to that and i'll leave leave to others i'd have to kind of go back to that again to that particular kind of moment in time the one thing i would say is and this is just stepping back from 2020 where we assumed today oh there's the president and then the president is going to select um the vice president and nominee you know it's actually only really in the last 50 60 years that the that the selection of a vice presidential nominee is the job of the presidential candidate for a long time this was not so so we assumed today oh how could a presidential candidate end up with a vice president who would be so at odds with them that to us is unfathomable in an era where where joe biden would say who do i want to be here it's kamala harris in that sense or or donald trump says oh i'm choosing kind of mike pence so for many years this was a um that the vice presidential selection was the job of the party it was a party selection the party would foist the vice presidential candidate a nominee on to on on to on to the president and so all kinds of of of strategies were worked out all kinds of compromises were made all kinds of tickets were brought together not of kind of of of of unified views but of of of disparate views so as to bring together different states and supporters of different states and so it's it's it's we look at today is how can you have such kind of dissonant views on the same ticket not at all all that unusual if we go back i'll just add two um and i also don't have enough sort of uh intimate knowledge of that um particular sort of the politics of that particular era to speak decisively on this but one of the um just following up on on john's points i think this is another reason that i think calhoun is such an important thinker to grapple with because one of the things that he demonstrates is um a certain kind of weakness in the in the madisonian constitution which relies on separation of powers and these these different institutions sort of keeping themselves in line and what what madison either didn't foresee or maybe couldn't foresee or didn't see adequately enough um is the power that political parties were going to play in driving interests across those um those uh those institutional lines and so now all of a sudden the president who's head of a party can bring congress across in a way that maybe he couldn't in the in the madisonian interpretation right where you have different ambition and the ambition is countering ambition and so again from this perspective of how do you protect minority rights well how do you protect minority rights from a very nationalist president like jackson who's also the head of a party he that the government itself now has a really powerful interest to play here um and so again i think calhoun can can show some of the uh the dangers of of assuming that the madisonian system works exactly as madison intended when in fact you you're already seeing cracks in that edifice you're seeing very strong executives um like jackson rising and then of course what do you do how do you protect minority rights in that kind of system uh angel robles uh brings up an interesting irony that here is the south carolinian john c calhoun uh complaining about potential tyranny on the part of the federal government but for the most part the federal government did what did what the south wanted it to right she mentions uh the compromise of 1850 scott decision i might add kansas-nebraska act the mexican-american war uh et cetera et cetera the gag rules et cetera et cetera could either of you or both of you care to comment on that irony well i guess it all depends on on from some of the folks in the south they were not getting all that they wanted to and item number one on that would be the the occasion for the document that we're rooting today the tariff and so certainly folks in the south and south carolina and and others in the south to look took a look at the tariffs they saw 1828 1832 and said this does not seem to be a federal government that's working in our interests at least on this issue this looks to be a federal government that's passing laws in this case tariffs in this case taxes on goods that are being imported that's very heavily weighted towards protecting northeastern manufacturers and northeastern kind of uh commercial interests and not representing kind of the agrarian interests of south carolina so is is it true that that that southern interests were in many ways uh advanced through federal policy or more to the point where there were there are areas where the federal government could have taken more aggressive action and was stayed from taking that action because of the power of of southern nations certainly but um it would at least be um it would at least be the other side of the of the story and the other side of the coin that is of southerners actually feeling you know we're not only losing on the tariff but we see what's coming and we also see this is a sign of other areas which we're destined to lose and perhaps more importantly we just take a look at the numbers and we see the numbers of what states are coming into the union where the growth is coming and we see that that were an endangered minority in this particular political system that was my point here is to take us in the mind of those who would hear what our questioner just kind of rightly said is look at all these areas which the south seems to be getting its ways that would be the flip side of that from the southern point people yeah there's a lot of other areas which we don't feel that we're getting our way and i'll just add to that briefly i mean i think the the two examples that that um the questioner brought up um i mean it's important to look at the dates on those right we have 1850 and then and then 1857. um the i mean this is a crisis point right and so there's there's serious fear that we're going to have an actual like that that there's going to be a civil war and so to use those two examples as sort of reasons that like as examples of how the south is getting what they want um they're only getting what they want at that point because they've pushed things to this crisis point and that i think and of course by 1850 uh calhoun dies in 1850 and so the the later um the later issues he doesn't see at all um but i also think that this is an important example of of how powerful his thought was and how how influential he was um both as a rhetorician but also as a politician in bringing these ideas to the fore that they were successful enough by the 1850s that then that the the north and the federal government broadly is is terrified right there's a lot of fear that this is going to um to end the union john can i can i just jump in real quick because i see i see a question that's come up and it's a question that i think we ought to engage and that is this question if we've been maybe dancing around or i haven't we haven't been as just crystal clear about this as we could have been what is exactly calhoun's constitutional argument against the tariff of 1828 that question comes up in the q a after all a questioner says isn't that pretty clear in the constitution that the federal government has the power to tax imports and so it doesn't that end the argument what isn't isn't just a isn't this just a policy dispute of calhoun saying i dislike the particular tariff they brought up let us again take us into the mindset and the worldview of calhoun and how he would respond to that argus claim and this gets to a claimant and lauren was uh was bringing this up earlier and could probably talk to this in more detail the question is what is the purpose of passing a tariff and calhoun and others say look there's two different types of tariffs you can have there's one tariff that you say well our sole goal is we need to raise an extra million dollars of revenue this year how are we going to do it let's actually increase the tariff amount by a certain amount that would be a revenue raising tariff calhoun believes it's possible to distinguish that type of residue revenue-raising tariff which would be entirely consistent with the federal government's powers in the constitution from to distinguish that from another case would be a protectionist tariff as we heard a tariff that is not designed just to raise the extra million dollars that needs to be run to be raised to run the federal government but it's designed to say well you know why are we passing this tariff well it'd be good to actually encourage american industry and one way to get that would be to tax goods that are coming in from that are produced from other countries why that would be really be helping to kind of for american grown industry calhoun's argument is that is illegitimate not because i disagree with it on policy grounds but because that extends beyond the power of the federal government to do more than just raise revenue but to pursue those purposes i'll stop here but that's very important to raise is what is the constitutional argument that calhoun is raising is because we don't see calhoun's constitutional argument here we're missing out on the kind of story that he wants to engage in he's saying i don't just disagree with this tariff it's not that since we lost out and and i i disagree with you that this is unconstitutional because it's a different type of terror all right well we're coming to the end of our time together i i'd like to turn now toward the fallout from this speech uh how was it received what were the after effects etc well i mean the fallout could be judged on different ways one is what happens with a tariff and again we can talk about this in a very particular case in the immediate sense it didn't have a huge amount of of success but eventually when things really came to a head in 1832 there was a modification and moderation of the tariff in that way that went some degree some degree towards kind of moderating some of the some of the schedules and tables in such a way that was slightly more palatable to uh folks in the south who were critiquing it so one way of seeing this is how did this play out with god to the tariff let me turn though to the second uh point though the broader fallout i would say would be that folks lined up in sides and a lot of folks responded to this and said you have your constitutional arguments wrong you have misinterpreted the founding you say that you're arguing as a continuation of founding error arguments but you are not a lot of figures said you are repudiating you are taking it beyond the arguments when you say that a state has a right to exercise a veto that cannot have been countenanced by the founding documents and so there's a lot of folks who took this argument okay you've you've set out your best arguments for this now let's set out our best arguments which we think are stronger arguments all right yeah i'll just follow up on that i think you know i think again looking at the the actual sort of impact in the immediate term it's maybe not not um you know dramatic but by setting forth a kind of political theory of nullification and then later on secession i mean i think you can't underestimate the effects of calhoun as a thinker in this area um and i want to i want to address one quick comment because it sort of follows um john talley in the q a says you know it seems like calhoun is driven purely by self-interest as the south was losing political power um i get i do want to come back to this question of what sort of what we can learn from calhoun rather than simply dismissing him as a purely self-interested actor right what are what are his principled positions and i think this concept of both nullification but the broader use of interposition right the role of states in interposing between the federal government and their citizens um is actually something that we see all the time now and it's something that we think is actually pretty important um friends of mine for example who are in favor of sanctuary cities often don't realize that they're seeing an example of interposition in action right they're seeing in this case a municipal government putting itself between its residents and a an overreaching federal government um and so you know you i suppose you could say that calhoun is simply driven by by self-interest in in one sense but of course the kinds of the way of life that he's trying to defend and the way that he sees this overreaching and i think he's i think he's principled on the issue of the tariff i don't see that as being purely an issue of self-interest i think he has principled constitutional reasons for saying a protectionist tariff is not within the scope of the constitution so that doesn't seem to me purely self now does it help the south if the tariff is rescinded of course so again i think that it would be dangerous for us to simply reduce him to a kind of you know self-interested defender of southern interest or something like that he has important principled positions for us to grapple with well i am afraid that is all the time we have i apologize to those whose excellent questions we couldn't get to i want to thank both of our panelists lauren and john as well as our participants for uh for their questions as a reminder you'll be receiving an email within the next week that will include a certificate link for a 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