Assignment 5: John C. Calhoun

                           John C. Calhoun


"To understand the mind of the Old South it is necessary to realize that emancipation meant not merely the replacement of slave labor by hired labor, but the loss of white supremacy, the overthrow of the caste system in brief, the end of civilization. Although Calhoun once condemned the slave trade as an "odious traffic," there is no evidence that he ever shared the Jeffersonian view of slavery, wide-spread in the South during his youth, that slavery was a necessary but temporary evil. During a conversation with John Quincy Adams in 1820 he revealed how implicitly he accepted the caste premises of slavery. Adams spoke of equality, of the dignity and worth of human life. Calhoun granted that Adams's beliefs were "just and noble," but added in a matter-of-fact way that in the South they were applied only to white men. Slavery, he said, was "the best guarantee to equality among the whites. It produced an unvarying level among them . . . did not even admit of in- equalities,by which one white man could domineer over another.""


This paragraph explains that the Old South believe that if the emancipated the slaves white supremacy would vanish. Calhoun agreed with Adams in that slavery was wrong. But while Adams believed it in equality and dignity of the human life, Calhoun believe that slavery was a necessary evil. The only equality Calhoun believed in was the equality amongst white man.

Reading this almost sounds like the same struggles Black people face today-a world where there is no equality although we may want to be led to believe it does exist. In the United States of today, Blacks are still fighting for their simple human rights. Equality amongst all men has not been established when a particular group is treated with respect, while Blacks are treated poorly.