cribed him as
"embodied intellect." He had undoubtedly in full measure those negative
tides to respect which have gone far in America to ensure praise from the
public and the historians; for he was correct and austere, and, which is
more, kindly among his family and his slaves. He is credited, too, with
an observance of high principle in public life, which it might be
difficult to illustrate from his recorded actions. But the
warmer-blooded Andrew Jackson set him down as "heartless, selfish, and a
physical coward," and Jackson could speak generously of an opponent whom
he really knew. His intellect must have been powerful enough, but it was
that of a man who delights in arguing, and delights in elaborate
deductions from principles which he is too proud to revise; a man, too,
who is fearless in accepting conclusions which startle or repel the
vulgar mind; who is undisturbed in his logical processes by good sense,
healthy sentiment, or any vigorous appetite for truth. Such men have
disciples who reap the disgrace which their masters are apt somehow to
avoid; they give the prestige of wisdom and high thought to causes which
could not otherwise earn them. A Northern soldier came back wounded in
1865 and described to the next soldier in the hospital Calhoun's monument
at Charleston. The other said: "What you saw is not the real monument,
but I have seen it. It is the desolated, ruined South. . . . That is
Calhoun's real monument."

This man was a Radical, and known as the successor of Jefferson, but his
Radicalism showed itself in drawing inspiration solely from the popular
catchwords of his own locality. He adored the Union, but it was to be a
Union directed by distinguished politicians from the South in a sectional
Southern interest. He did not originate, but he secured the strength of
orthodoxy and fashion to a tone of sentiment and opinion which for a
generation held undisputed supremacy in the heart of the South.
Americans might have seemed at this time to be united in a curiously
exultant national self-consciousness, but though there was no sharp
division of sections, the boasted glory of the one America meant to many
planters in the South the glory of their own settled and free life with
their dignified equals round them and their often contented dependents
under them. Plain men among them doubtless took things as they were,
and, without any particular wish to change them, did not pretend they
were perfect