t.

Accordingly he declared, as the leader of Southern opinions and
interests, that slavery was neither an evil nor a sin, but a positive
good and blessing, supported even by the Bible as well as by the
Constitution, In assuming these premises he may have argued logically,
but he lost the admiration he had gained by twenty years' services in
the national legislature. His premises were wrong, and his arguments
would necessarily be sophistical and fall to the ground. He stepped down
from the lofty pedestal he had hitherto occupied, to become not merely a
partisan, but an unscrupulous politician. He had a right to defend his
beloved institutions as the leader of interests intrusted to him to
guard. His fault was not in being a partisan, for most politicians are
party men; it was in advancing a falsehood as the basis of his
arguments. But, if he had stultified his own magnificent intellect, he
could not impose on the convictions of mankind. From the time he assumed
a ground utterly untenable, whatever were his motives or real
convictions, his general influence waned. His arguments did not
convince, since they were deductions from wrong premises, and premises
which shocked and insulted the reason.

Calhoun now became a man of one idea, and that a false one. He was a
gigantic crank,--an arch-Jesuit, indifferent to means so long as he
could bring about his end; and he became not merely a casuist, but a
dictatorial and arrogant politician. He defied that patriotic burst of
public opinion which had compelled him to change his ground, that
mighty wave of thought, no more to be resisted than a storm upon the
ocean, and which he saw would gradually sweep away his cherished
institution unless his constituents and the whole South should be made
to feel that their cause was right and just; that slavery had not only
materially enriched the Southern States, but had converted fetich
idolaters to the true worship of God, and widened the domain of
civilization. The planters, one and all, responded to this sophistical
and seductive plea, and said to one another, "Now we can defy the
universe on moral grounds. We stand united,--what care we for the
ravings of fanatics outside our borders, so long as our institution is a
blessing to us, planted on the rock of Christianity, and endorsed by the
best men among us!" The theologians took up the cause, both North and
South, and made their pulpits ring with appeals to Scripture. "Were
not," they s