turned to a neighbor and exclaimed: "That man
lives off of all traveled roads!" He had neither the arts nor the
magnetism of the popular politician; he won no such personal following
as Clay and Jackson; but the South more and more accepted him as the
most logical and far-seeing champion of its peculiar interests.

His personality had much in common with Jonathan Edwards. There was in
both the same inflexible logic and devotion to ideas, the same personal
purity and austerity. The place of the mystic's fire which burned in
Edwards was taken in Calhoun by a passionate devotion to the
commonwealth. In both there was a certain moral callousness which made
the one view with complacence a universe including a perpetual hell of
unspeakable torments; while the other accepted as the ideal society a
system in which the lowest class was permanently debased. Each was the
champion of a cause destined to defeat because condemned by the moral
sentiment of the world,--Edwards the advocate of Calvinism, and Calhoun
of slavery.

Calhoun is to be regarded as a typical slave-holder of the better class.
He owned and cultivated a plantation with several hundred slaves; spent
much time upon it; made it profitable, and dispensed a generous
hospitality. Such a plantation was a little community, organized and
administered with no small labor and skill; with house servants, often
holding a friendly and intimate relation with the family; with a few
trained mechanics and a multitude of field hands. As to physical comfort
the slaves were probably as well or better provided than the bulk of
European peasantry,--this on the testimony of witnesses as unfriendly to
slavery as Fanny Kemble and Dr. Channing. Order and some degree of
morality were enforced, and religion, largely of the emotional type,
prevailed widely. So much may be said, perhaps, for the average
plantation, certainly for the better class, and a very large class.
Joseph Le Conte, the eminent scientist, a writer of the highest credit,
in his pleasing autobiography describes his boyhood on a Georgia
plantation, and characterizes his father as a man of rare excellence to
whom he owed the best of his mental inheritance. He writes of him: "The
best qualities of character were constantly exercised in the just, wise,
and kindly management of his 200 slaves. The negroes were strongly
attached to him, and proud of calling him master.... There never was a
more orderly, nor apparently a happier wo