The Pete Quiñones Show - The Road to Civil War Episodes 8-15 w/ George Bagby

Episode Date: July 22, 2026

9 Hours and 2 MinutesSafe for WorkGeorge Bagby is a content creator and publisher of long-forgotten books. This is episodes 8-15 of the series detailing the long lead up to America's Civil War.George's "Buy Me a Coffee"George's Twitter AccountGeorge's Pinned Tweet w/ Links George's YouTube ChannelPete and Thomas777 'At the Movies'Support Pete on His WebsitePete's PatreonPete's Substack Pete's SubscribestarPete's GUMROADPete's VenmoPete's Buy Me a CoffeePete on FacebookPete on TwitterBecome a supporter of this podcast: https://www.spreaker.com/podcast/the-pete-quinones-show--6071361/support.

I want to welcome everyone back to the Piquino show. George Bagby is back. How are you doing tonight, Mr. Bagby? I am doing great. I had dinner with a CIA agent and a Mexican senior. And they were lots of fun. The CIA agent had never heard of the Iran-Contra affair and gave me personal assurance that the CIA conducted no activities on American soil.

on American citizens. And I said, well, I'm here. I said, I'm here. I think we talked about that last episode. Oh, did we talk about that last episode? I think so, yeah. I forget who I'm talking to. Much apologies.

No problem. No problem. I mean, it's, it is something to bring up. This may be an episode. Somebody may skip over the last one. And hearing that a CIA agent had no idea what Iran-Contra was, And then it's like, oh, the CIA would never operate on America. Uh-huh.

Uh-huh. Yeah, I was talking to her about Mina, Arkansas and the cocaine running that was going through there back in the late 80s. And I said, you know, there's a movie about this. Maybe you should look it up. You know, it's a Tom Cruise blockbuster. And she's like, what? And I said, yeah, it's about the CIA running cocaine and Arkansas. Arkansas, like to finance weapons sales.

And she had never heard of any of this stuff. She claimed to be, well, that's beside the point, but she was a very interesting person to talk to. It's rather. It's kind of hard to make these things. You know, if they're being honest, she seemed totally sincere. She seemed like a very mild-mannered, straight-up kind of person. but I didn't want to disagree with her about things. You know, I wanted to keep everything pleasant,

but I have dinner with strange people sometimes. Well, I'm sure the CIA doesn't do anything bad anymore. So, you know, she's in the, I'm being facetious, obviously. You know, the one job in the CIA that's always intrigued me is they have in-house historians that write historians for internal use only. They write accounts of their own experiences and they try to figure out what they did and why. And books about the CIA will reference some of this material, but most of it is not available to the public. And that's a very interesting CIA job, you know, to look through the archives that are not available.

to regular people at all. And it's just for internal analysis. Like, what did we just do? And why? And what did it accomplish? And so on. And so they have a level of introspection that I think is higher than anything else I could compare it to, considering they're basically running themselves.

But that's not our topic tonight. I have, I'm going back to narrative. In our last recording, we were talking about the cultural differences between the North and the South. So we kind of zoomed out for a minute and gave an overview of the origins of cultural conflict based on the demographics of the two sections. And today we're going to go back into historical narrative. So we're going to jump into the period following the War of 1812. So the War of 1812 wraps up in the winter of 1814, 1815.

Andrew Jackson, of course, wins his great victory at New Orleans. There's no question, though, there is a peculiarity about the victory in New Orleans. technically peace was negotiated in Ghent before the victory in New Orleans. But no one in America knew. It took a long time for the news to travel. It took over a week for the news to get back to America that the war was actually over. And it took some more time before that was well known in the Mississippi Valley. So the victory at New Orleans was still very important.

It's only a technicality that it took place technically after the piece, but there is no question at all that the British would have seized the Mississippi Valley and they would not have returned it in spite of Ghent. So that's the city in Belgium where the peace was negotiated. Notably, John Quincy Adams was the principal diplomat there. He and Henry Clay of Kentucky both went over to Belgium to negotiate. basically status quo antebellum. Neither side had major concessions, but one of the major instigations of the war, the interference with American commerce and the impressment of American sailors was no longer a point of dispute because the Napoleonic wars were over at that point.

So the British Navy had totally defeated the French and had imprisoned Napoleon, and that was no longer a going concern for the Americans. So status quo antebellum was a very advantageous piece from our perspective. They had ravaged the East Coast, but they certainly would have held on to the Mississippi Valley. They actually wanted to make territorial acquisition there. And had they won at New Orleans, the union would likely have failed. New England would have split off into a separate confederacy, and that would have been a very different sort of development for American history. So Jackson's victory was very important because in context with the Hartford Convention, Jackson saved the Union.

If they had received word in Hartford that Jackson had failed and that New Orleans had failed, fallen, then that would have been the absorption of a great deal of Western territory, the Louisiana purchase, in fact. And no one really knows where in the Ohio Valley the British would have drawn some line to demarcate territory. It would have been a crushing defeat. A tremendous amount of territory was at stake, though there weren't very many Americans there. the failure of Madison to defend it would have been a catastrophic loss of legitimacy and may have

powered the convention in Hartford towards their planned secession. And they had very fierce rhetoric at Hartford before they got all of this bad news from their perspective. So what follows this is in 1815, Madison, who is really all over the map. He is the author of the Virginia Resolution in 98. He is the opponent of the First Bank of the United States. But rather like Jefferson, when he is in office, Madison is inclined towards the centralization of power. and in 1815 he has yet other reasons to bring back the Bank of the United States.

So he actually recharters the Bank of the United States in 1815. We get the second Bank of the United States. And this is partly because of his gargantuan financial problems during the war. We have a alarming national debt after the war. We financed our warmaking, as is the typical case, the British, the French, all the great powers do this when they go to war. We had a debt of $127 million, which was very alarming to people at that time. That was a tremendous amount of money. And so he recharters the bank of the United States.

What's really interesting about that is we see senators in Congress who take unusual sides in 1815. Daniel Webster has a more partisan regional kind of priority in 1815. The New Englanders still feel alienated from the national interest, given that they were sidelined during the Jefferson and Madison administrations. Their concerns, their legitimate political priorities were ignored. They suffered greatly for that. 50,000 sailors in New England could not return home during the Jeffersonian embargo and the War of 1812.

And this was a way for the population there to grow very resentful of the federal authority and to see it as a faction of regionally dominated force of the general government. They saw this as malicious and this results in the federalist, of factionalism and schism during the war of 1812. But Webster is taking the side of merchants and middlemen in New England in 1815. He is an opponent of a revenue protective tariff meant specifically to retire the war debt. this is a temporary tariff, but it has protective aspects. This is to protect the American manufacturers from the presence, the huge amount of cheap British

industrially produced goods that is flowing into America immediately following the piece. And the federal government and James Madison sees an opportunity here. They want to take the protective tariff of 1815 and use it to build fortresses and to refit the Navy and to retire the federal debt, the war debt. They also want to recharter the bank of the United States. Webster is against both. And this is due to New England regionalism, which is evident in Congress still, even. even after the war ends. So Webster is favoring the regional New England banks,

which, as you remember, were far more conservative, unwilling to invest in government bonds actually during wartime. He also is arguing in favor of free trade. So he is not advocating for New England native industry. he's far more invested with the ship owners and the middlemen of New England who know that their commerce bringing over these cheap goods from England is going to suffer with that protective tariff. And they are also talking about increased consumer prices in relation to that tariff. Nevertheless, the tariff of 1815 and the rechartered Second Bank of the United States are both established. And John C. Calhoun of South Carolina advocates for both.

Now, in Calhoun's defense, he made a special point say this is a temporary protective tariff. And this is in the national interest, given our circumstances. We have a large national debt. We've got a lot of wartime expenses. Let's retire that. And so there is enthusiasm in the South for both of those things. Now, the outstanding party that's against these things, vocally against them in Congress, is the old Republicans,

who, as you remember, they are critics of Jefferson's various policies. They say that Jefferson is not strict enough in his construction. They were the original opponents of the bank and Hamiltonian protective tariffs and internal improvements. They were also opponents of the War of 1812. So John Randolph

and John Taylor are both outspoken on these points in 1815. But what follows, Madison, is James Monroe, yet another Virginian. Monroe has, has a more political and you might even say nationalist disposition. We see the demise of the Federalist Party during the Monroe administration.

The Federalists no longer are an organized group, not even a regional group. Eventually they leave even local governments and the New England state governments during Madison's second term. Madison is our second president to be unanimously elected in his re-election bid for his second term. And we call this the era of good feelings because it's an era at the end of our first party system. Everyone at this point is calling themselves after Jefferson's party. they call themselves national Republicans. And we see a conflict of personalities rather than political organizations

that follow 1812. We see in Monroe's administration, he has a mandate to buttress national defense, and he is very busy on that front. he sends out the West Point engineers to survey for coastal fortifications, and he also greatly strengthens the United States Navy. But while he is in office, we see other kinds of regional tensions manifesting. The state of Missouri has applied for statehood, and this results in a conflict about the growth of slavery. The Missouri compromise is one of the key sectional agreements between the

north and the south in relation to the expansion of slavery into the Western territories. So we see increased tension following the period of unity, immediately following the the peace of 1814, we see increased economic and cultural tensions between the North and the South. And this is because of the growth of slavery westward. In the 1790s, the general opinion was that slavery was a rapidly dying institution. The reason for that is because slavery was mostly confined to the eastern seaboard and completely reliant on certain cash crops like tobacco and cotton that were very hard on the soil. This was a long-term concern in the South.

soil exhaustion and the derelict status of long-settled estates on the eastern seaboard. Another key element is in the 1790s, almost all cotton cultivation took place in the coastal regions of South Carolina and Georgia. It was extremely labor intensive. The slaves had to pick out the cotton seeds from the cotton bowls. And this is the origination of all of the fibers in the cotton plant. They all stem out from the seeds in the cotton bowls. So you have to separate those fibers by hand initially. They also only had one commercial cotton crop that was fit for export, and that was the sea island cotton.

This was a long fiber cotton that was cultivated on the sea islands of South Carolina, places like Seabrook Island and Hilton Head Island and Tybee Island off of Georgia, and Jekyll Island. off of Georgia, that's where virtually all of that long fiber cotton cultivation took place. So this was a very exclusive crop in a geographical region. Inland, they grew different varieties of cotton. They grew short fiber cottons. And these were useful crops. They were marketable. They weren't really for export because it was a much lower quality woven cloth with the very characteristic short fibers. If you make socks out of short fiber cotton, they are going to come unwovem very easily. They are not long-lived textiles.

So it had a much lower value. Now, in 1790, there were only 6,000 bales of cotton exported. So it was very lucrative in the sea islands. It was enough to establish a great many fortunes. But in 1793, one Eli Whitney, a northern inventor and academic tutor, was working in the South, and invented the cotton engine, which is colloquially known as the cotton gin. for short. The cotton gin was a simple clockwork gear mounted to a box and it forced the cotton bowls

through a dense comb and mechanically separated the fibers from the cotton seeds. This was a revolution in cotton cultivation. At the same time, long fiber, cotton, hybrids are developed that will grow in the inland areas of the south.

So this leads to a gigantic boom in cotton cultivation. Now previously, there was pessimism about the future of slavery in America. It was not seen as a profitable venture back before the creation of these innovations in cotton, the long fiber hybrids and the cotton gin, the slaves were mostly confined to profitable areas where the soil was being exhausted by these very intensive plantings of these cash crops, which are notoriously hard on the soil. So you had these anomalies in the tidewater of Virginia of vast to tobacco plantations where the soil had played out long ago through repeated intensive cultivation of the same plot of land without modern fertilizers, without crop rotation.

It was a very wasteful use of the land and that it made the land barren and unfit for cash crop cultivation. And then you have the ruination of ancient estates in the region. So you would have, say, a very large estate with a hundred slaves on it or so. The slaves naturally are reproducing themselves. So the slave population is growing. At the same time, the profitability of the estate is declining rapidly. And so this leads to a quandary for a period where there are these large populations of slaves with nothing productive to do. Now, the institution of slavery, and we'll have much more to say of this in the future, the laws concerning slavery and the customs concerning slavery,

social status is partly determined by the well-being of the estate and all of the chattels on it. So a man who cannot afford to feed his slaves is socially obligated, if not personally and ethnically obligated, to send them away, to sell them off. But in this situation where there aren't profitable cash crops in the tidewater regions of Virginia, North Carolina, and the sea islands themselves are getting played out for their soil, then there's nothing for them to do. And you have more eccentric instances of this. you have very wealthy old families like the Custis family, which serves as a good example. George Washington Custis was the descendant of Martha Washington, Custis, or Martha Custis, Washington's wife, who was previously married.

So she had children from her first marriage. George Washington himself had no natural children. George Washington Custis was the third or fourth generation descended from Martha Custis, Washington, and was the master of Arlington in northern Virginia. Arlington is the property that became the Arlington National Cemetery, which it remains today. The plantation home is Arlington House, which is the great architectural monument in the middle of that the National Cemetery.

That was the house of George Washington Custis. His daughter married Robert E. Lee of Civil War fame. So at the time of Lee's marriage to the Lady Custis, then George Washington Custis had a fortune that he inherited from his estate. He also had a lot of slaves. These were all inherited. And this was the kind of problem that people were facing at this earlier stage back in the 1790s. Custis was an eccentric. He was a collector of memorabilia related to George Washington, the first president. He filled Arlington

House with that memorabilia, and he also obstinately refused to sell his slaves westward, where there was a lot for them to do back in the 1850s. The slaves on the Custis plantation

had no crops to raise save their own vegetable patches and their own livestock. Custus expended his family fortune. He died bankrupt and Robert E. Lee was left to deal with the family debts. He was the executor of the Custis Will at the passing of his father-in-law. Lee then gets busy to retire those debts. Arlington is barren. It was played out for tobacco long before.

No cash crops are profitable there. And so he hires out his slaves for labor. These are the slaves he inherited from his father-in-law. And he apprentices them with artisans in Washington, D.C. George Washington Custis provided that all of the slaves were to be manumitted. However, he had extensive debts. And so Robert Lee gradually manumets all of Custis's slaves by apprenticing them out for labor elsewhere, agricultural labor, urban specialized labor in Washington City, and so on. The last of the Custis slaves are manumitted in the course of the Civil War itself. So he does manumet Lee manumets, all of his father-in-law's slaves, gives them their freedom while the Civil War is actually being fought. But that is a, a little picture of the ruination of estate slavery in the older areas of the eastern seaboard.

This was what was going on in the 1790s. And at that time, there were no places where slavery would be profitable or a potential. Those places were very narrow and confined geographically. The development of hybridism cotton and the cotton gin make cotton extremely profitable. And entrepreneurs take these new varieties of cotton inland. They grow them in the river valleys of Georgia and Alabama and South Carolina.

And by 1800, the cotton crop has exploded to 73,000 bales. So in 1790 it was 6,000 bales. In 1800, it's 73,000 bales. There is still widespread conviction that slavery is a dying institution. And this is something shared in the South and in the North. And this is in the South, much prompted by the, it's much prompted by, it's much prompted by the exhaustion of the eastern estates and this large accumulation of slaves

who are naturally reproducing there, forming families, having children, reproducing at a rate comparable to the white population, which is a very unusual feature in any institution of slavery that we might study around the world. Slaves typically did not do that. but they did that in America. It was something that made American slavery unique,

that family formation was a typical aspect of the institution. In 1822, during the Monroe administration, the colony of Liberia is founded. And this is supported by allocations of funding from Congress and especially instrumental in this is the United States Navy. The United States Navy actually secures the coastline of Liberia and patrols it while volunteered freed slaves in America are sent there with a great deal of supplies from colonization societies, which are private philanthropic organizations. that are trying to get the colony off the ground. Something interesting about Liberia,

which is a modern state in West Africa, which is connected to this operation back in 1822, right beside Liberia, the British Empire were invested in a similar operation, which was the country of Sierra Leone. This was also a slave, colony project in the west of Africa and supported by the British Empire in an analogous way to what the Americans were doing in Liberia. President Monroe's involvement in the establishment

of the Colony, the Friedman's Colony of Liberia was his, the title of the capital city. It's named after him. It's called Monrovia, which is the modern, capital of Liberia. We see the starting of that operation in 1819. We see the very first settlement of freed slaves in Liberia with funds from these philanthropic institutions and the explicit support of the federal government. They don't recognize the independence of Liberia until sometime later, but this is a very instrumental part. So we see the political opinion of the time is for colonization and for voluntary manumission and philanthropic enterprise to affect the national organization of the Americanized Africans.

but they're doing this in Africa. Now, the settlers of Liberia are a very interesting bunch. They, a great number of them are Freemasons. Many of them are Methodist Protestant. There are some Quakers. The Quakers are always involved with these efforts. but the Quakers get the Quaker colonists in the in the project they landed on the coast of Liberia and they are wiped out by hostile native tribes because they will not defend themselves

they believe there is no such thing as legitimate violence so they are wiped out it is only the slaves that believe in arming and defending themselves that do survive those early years in Liberia, which is an interesting aspect. But they have a long history there, and they get almost completely exterminated in modern times. The native African population in Liberia loathes their elite status and their advantages historically in Liberia, and they wipe them out in the Liberian Civil Wars in the 1980s, I believe. They're massive genocides that take place in Liberia then, and it's a very sad end for that particular peculiar American diaspora in Africa.

But back to our story. So there is political initiative for grader. Emancipation and colonization, which was a very long-lived idea. It actually survives the Civil War, which itself is an interesting story. President Grant is still interested in colonization. We have an abundance of evidence that Lincoln never abandoned the idea of colonization for the freedmen, even at the very end of the war. we have conversations with Lincoln and congressman in April of 1865, the same month where he is assassinated. He's still talking about it right up to the moment of his death. But the explosion

of cotton production in the deep south is a agricultural revolution in the early 1800s. So in 1820, this is after the conquest of Alabama and disputed areas in the Mississippi Valley. We see the territories developing in the southeast over to the Mississippi River. Cotton production explodes. So we see 6,000 bales in 1790. We see 73,000 bales in 1800. By 1820, the crop is 334,000 bales. And by 1860, the crop is 5 million bales.

So this is a tremendous growth. By 1860, cotton is 60% of U.S. exports. So the played out land in the east means, a massive migration of slavery to the west. And we see the population of the Mississippi Valley, the river bottom land from New Orleans all the way up past Memphis, becomes one of the most heavily settled, developed agricultural areas in the country, and of the most productive as well. producing a large proportion of that export of cotton by 1860.

So the westward movement prompted by land exhaustion in the east, it means that a great many of those eastern settled families start migrating westward. They go to the Alabama Valley in Alabama, the famous black belt of Alabama called so because of the soil, the richness of the soil, and also it's extremely valuable for cotton cultivation. This is the area from Montgomery to Selma to Demopolis in Alabama and then point south towards Mobile. We see in just reverting back to Missouri, we see a, just reverting back to Missouri, we see a

a growth of slavery into Kentucky and into Missouri for other reasons. Slavery is never particularly prominent in Kentucky, but they do have an interesting cash crop in the area. They are growing hemp for rough rope for rough textiles like burlap. This is a natural product. And it's particularly well suited to the area and also profitable in in conjunction with slavery. So we see a minor cash crop develop in that region in Kentucky and Missouri. And in 1819, when Missouri is pitching itself for admission into the union,

there is a outspoken faction in Congress. during Monroe's administration, a northern faction that proposes regulating the territory of Missouri to affect the gradual abolition of slavery in Missouri. They want a territorial regulation or a proposed state constitution to gradually abolish slavery in Missouri. This sets off a firestorm of protest from the southern congressman. So Howell Cobb of Georgia, who is the namesake of Cobb County, Georgia, by the way. He responds to the northern proposal to gradually abolish slavery in Missouri. He says, you have kindled a fire which all the waters of the ocean cannot put

out, which seas of blood only can extinguish, which has a certain resonance, I think of Enoch Powell when I read this statement. Cobb is saying here, in effect, that the integration of races in the South is not imaginable. It's not something that could be affected without a fundamental change in southern conceptions of society. That this is a conflict of different blood, and this is going to result in massive cultural conflict. So Cobb suggests, and this is coincident, because in the very same year we see the foundation of Liberia. That's when the very first freedmen are settled in Liberia. Cobb is making an illusion here partly to the proposal of gradual emancipation with colonization, that these things are essentially tied to one another,

and without them there is going to be ocean or seas of blood, as he says, that this is a blood conflict. The result of this outburst of emotion from the Southern congressman in relation to Missouri leaves John Quincy Adams and Senator James Barber of Virginia openly talking about dividing the union on grounds of legal slavery. This is 1819. So this is a very early stage. and we we recall that virtually all African Americans live in the South. And the majority of the freed men, these are free people of color in the parlance of the time,

that they live in the South as well. This is where they originate. They mostly win their freedom by skilled labor in Southern City. which is where they can accumulate wages. This itself is a very interesting point. We're talking a lot about slavery here, so I should illustrate this at this juncture. In places like New Orleans,

if you have a slave on your estate and he is particularly skilled in carpentry, in barbering, let's say he is a skilled musician you could send that slave into New Orleans and New Orleans was quite a hotbed of this it was such an unusual place culturally but also it was

the largest city in the south by far and so there is far more opportunity for that sort of occupation what what happened was the owner of the skilled slave would set him up in employment in New Orleans or in some other southern city Charleston, Richmond, and he would set him up with lodging, he would set him up with employment, and he would have a certain portion of the slave's wages. But the slave has money

accumulating due to the occupation, and so he could save up enough money to buy his freedom. And this was the source of slaves, manumitting themselves, in effect, and they also had a means of support because they were skilled labor then. We see that in relation to the previous story of Lee sending out Custis' slaves to Washington City, for skilled labor. And of course, this is a minority. This is not something that every slave is eligible for, for a number of reasons, not just skill.

This is obviously a trusted and independent sort of arrangement, because the owner of the slave is not on the scene. He's back at his estate. He's a farmer. That's where most of the slaves are. So this is a very independent sort of thing where he sets up the slave in the city. The slave just lives in the city and works a job and has an apartment of some kind, some living arrangement, maybe in a larger house, maybe with other duties involved.

These things widely vary. But this is the source of the freed population in the South, which is the largest in America. America. So the debate about the Missouri compromise, you have people in Congress, a Virginia Senator, the Massachusetts Congressman John Quincy Adams, they are writing and speaking and saying this is a very serious division in the Union. Slaves or slave states versus non-slave states, the economic differences, the political ideas in the states. And Henry Clay emerges from this with a brilliant compromise. We now look back at this, and the typical opinion is that it should have all come to a head back then.

Of course, the modern opinion is they should have had abolition then, or they should have invaded the South. then and forced them or something, which is not actually a political expedient. But Henry Clay of Kentucky rises in Congress and he gives a tribute to the idea of compromise. And this is why Henry Clay is called the Great Compromiser, because he can bring these disparate groups together with a deal. that they can both agree to. And this is one of the brilliant aspects of statesmanship in the period. It's Clay's ability to calm the impassioned statesmen in the different sections. And Clay comes from that most extraordinary American state, which has a very long history of this. Kentucky has produced some of our most remarkable politicians from

Jefferson Davis and Abraham Lincoln, both born in Kentucky, and also people like Henry Clay, and we may think of other examples in modern times who are really extraordinary statesmen. In 1820, Clay gives this speech to Congress. He says, all legislation, all government, all society is founded upon the principle of mutual consent. Pelliteness, comity, courtesy. Upon these, everything is based. Let him who elevates himself above humanity, above its weaknesses, its infirmities, its wants, its necessities.

Say, if he pleases, I will never compromise. But let no one who is not above the frailties of our common nature disdain compromise. And so Clay proposes a long-lived solution, at least it lasted for a generation, to admit Missouri as a slave state, according to their submitted constitution to Congress, and also to draw a line at the parallel of the southern border of Missouri, Westward. To admit no slave states above that line, which would be Kansas, Nebraska, Colorado, Wyoming,

none of which are likely prospects for cash crop profitable slavery. Anyway, Missouri just happens to be, because it is a more fertile area, for an unusual crop, for hemp, not for cotton. Clay proposes the Missouri compromise, and he receives a very narrow vote in the House, 90 to 87. So it narrowly passes. The detractors are mostly those who are saying, we want we're not we're not sure that the union can survive with the division between

slave states and free states so we need a deeper compromise than just a demarcation line nevertheless Clay gets this into law and it is signed into law by President Monroe John Quincy Adams as you remember

he was not a partisan of the federalists in the controversy about 1812. He actually denounces them as provincial and short-sighted. He identifies himself as a national Republican. And he is a skeptic of the Missouri compromise. He eventually votes for it. he does justify his vote saying that he values the union more ultimately than he cares about the slavery question and does not want to risk the division of the union over that question. But he writes in his private diary a number of reflections on the point.

So this is John Quincy Adams in his private diary. He says the bargain between freedom and slavery contained in the Constitution of the United States is morally and politically vicious, inconsistent with the principles on which alone our revolution can be justified. So John Quincy Adams says the American Revolution was not affected to create a whole. homeland for the American people, the American Revolution is justified because of abstract principles of humanity and reform. This is a very important idea. And obviously it's very much alive and well. He says, I favored the Missouri compromise from extreme unwillingness to put the union at hazard.

perhaps it would have been wiser and bolder to have persisted in the restriction upon Missouri till it should have terminated in a convention of states to revise and amend the Constitution. Now Adams realizes if he had forced a constitutional convention, that would likely end in the division of the union between free states and, and slave states. And he was unwilling to risk that, though he submits maybe that would be the wiser course. He says, this would have produced a new union of 13 or 14 states

unpolluted with slavery, with a great deal and glorious object to effect, namely that of rallying to their standard the other states by the universal emancipation of their slaves. Now, you remember, this was something that followed independence. We see the gradual abolition of slavery in the original 13th, well, the original northern states, New York, Pennsylvania, New Jersey. Well, no, not due, New Jersey does have a gradual program, but slavery is not,

prominent there. New Jersey actually still has slaves during the Civil War. There are like 150 slaves in New Jersey during the Civil War. But this is a very minor point. They do not constitute a political interest at the time.

And they had already passed a gradual emancipation law. But I'm getting in the weeds with that. But the northern states had affected gradual emancipation after independence, but their slaves were sold south. They didn't have a sizable population of slaves before. They had a much reduced population of African Americans afterwards. And there was an incentive for that. Like if the law says you have to manumit your slave

by a certain year of the slave's age, is how it worked. And there is no impediment. Why not sell your slave to Mississippi? Which is what they did. So few slaves were actually emancipated in that way. Because there are other member states of the union that do have legal slavery and slaves are going to fetch a high price there. Of course, after gradual emancipation laws in New York, which did have some slave population at that time, you're not going to get good prices for your slaves in New York anymore

because no one's banking on a long career of labor for those slaves. So you sell them south, which is what they did. Adams says, if the union must be dissolved, slavery is precisely the point on which it ought to break. So that seems to me a good stopping point for us today. I see we're close to the hour now. I have more material, but that would be another hour in all likelihood, looking at it. John Quincy Adams, just as a note, he does succeed James Monroe in the White House.

So he is the next statesman in line. And we'll be talking about his administration and then the very remarkable administration of Andrew Jackson, which follows him in 1828, in our next session together. Awesome. Awesome. Thank you very much. Remind people where they can find your work and find your books. Yes, I republish old history books. I've got a very interesting one. I want to put a spotlight on. I have the memoirs of James Gibson, a resident of Vicksburg, Mississippi.

His memoirs are titled The Terror's of the Civil War and Reconstruction. So Mr. Gibson was an eyewitness to the, the lead up to the Civil War. He was living on his father's cotton plantation just outside of Vicksburg, Mississippi. He witnesses the siege of Vicksburg by Grant. He is there for the fall of the city and its occupation, and then he is there in the early years of reconstruction. And he describes the turmoil of the time. He has brilliant descriptions of life on the plantation and his interactions with his father's slaves. And he talks about the turmoil and ethnic violence, which follows immediately the fall of the city and the reconstruction period. And this is a delightful memoir. I found it at a

library in Mississippi. It never had a large circulation. It was privately printed, but I put it into production. So this is a remarkable primary source, and I'm sure that you would enjoy it. It does coincide with a lot of our material. But that's the memoirs of James Gibson, the Terror's of the Civil War and Reconstruction, Mississippi Civil War Memoir. And you can find that on my website, www. tallmenbooks.com. Gibson is also available as an e-book.

I'm wanting to expand my selection of those, but you can find it on Amazon as an e-book as well. Awesome. Awesome. Thank you. And until the next time, have a good evening. Thank you so much. I want to welcome everyone back to the Picanino show. George Bagby is back.

How are you doing this? evening, Mr. Bagby. I'm doing well. I'm trying to sell my house. It's been a long slog. It's been a bad time to sell a house. But I've been praying to St. Joseph for his intercessions. He's a good patron for such things.

Down here in Louisiana, there's a tradition. You bury a statue of St. Joseph at the house you're trying to sell. And this is a... ritual that helps the sale of your house. So I'm planning to go by my house and bury a little statue of St. Joseph I've picked up. Interesting. I have not heard that before. Have you not? Really? That's something down in Louisiana. People know about this. But South Louisiana is a good Catholic place. I pick up these things. I'm Eastern Orthodox, but I pray for St. Joseph's intercessions as well.

The patron of fathers and providers. Oh, amazing. Well, I will pray for your, I will pray for the sale as well. Thank you for that. Of course. All right, sir. We're going to, you're going to talk about the election of one of my favorite Americans tonight.

So go, go right ahead. We're, we're going to approach. Andrew Jackson tonight and the circumstances of his election. So Andrew Jackson really came through for America in the War of 1812. I'm not here to talk about his military career, but it is important in relation to his political rise. So he really, he was really the breakthrough success in the war of 1812, which was mostly a humiliation over on the East Coast. The British were able to go anywhere they wanted to and wreak havoc. They occupy parts of Long Island. They occupy what is now Maine. They raid the Connecticut Valley. They burn some towns in the Connecticut Valley, destroy some shipyards there. Famously, they come up the Chesapeake Bay and

burn Washington, D.C. and make President Madison a refugee. So Madison doesn't have a seat of government in his last years in office. And this is all important in relation to our former material about the Hartford Convention and such. But out west, Andrew Jackson is really doing incredible work when the Creek Nation rises to support of the British designs on America. They massacre the settlers down in South Alabama at Fort Mims. This is the largest Indian massacre in American history. And Jackson has been wounded in a street fight, almost killed by Thomas Hart Benton, of all people. Thomas Hart Benton later becomes a long-lived senator from Missouri, and one of Jackson's principal supporters in Congress during his presidential administration. But at that point, Benton had shot Jackson in the back,

and his brother had shot Jackson in the arm, and Jackson was on a bed in Nashville, Tennessee, expected to die. They had anticipated amputating his arm, but he gritted through his gauze gag, and said that he'd keep his arm. And so the doctors did not amputate his arm, though they expected that to kill him from infection. He actually recovered the use of his arm eventually. But after the Fort Mims massacre, Jackson got the news on his sickbed in Nashville,

and he came up off his sickbed for the first time since his wounding and said, by the eternal, they shall. be avenged. And it's like a line from William Shatner or something. It's a really epic American line. And he marches down into Alabama and makes war on the creeks, the red stick creeks in Alabama, who had sided with Britain and the war. He conquers Alabama. He takes Pensacola, Florida, where the creeks had their base of arms supply. and such. He beats the British at New Orleans, which is the only land battle where the Americans really face off against the British and win, and he becomes the hero of New Orleans. So he rises to national prominence and kind of redeems the military honor of the United States

after several years of humiliation with the British on the East Coast and that sea. And he's conscripted into the democratic, well, the effort to elect him as president, what eventually becomes the Democratic Party. It's kind of forming at this time. Just to give the background to the 1824 election, we talked previously about the growth of tariff policy immediately following 1812. In 1816, Monroe signs into law a temporary protective tariff, which has unusual support in southern congressmen. We also have additional funding for the National Road, which is a major internal improvement. It goes from Washington D.C., eventually all the way to Illinois. So it goes through what is now Wheeling, West Virginia.

Eventually a bridge is built there. It's the very first bridge across the Ohio River before going through Southern Ohio and off to Illinois. So we have some interesting funding from those protective tariffs for internal improvements with a plurality of support. And it's important to mention that, that the Southerners were not always so sectional in their associations. They were willing to make some concessions for these projects at this period, even though the old Republicans with John Taylor and John Randolph of Roanoke kind of holding the line on the strict construction. The Southerners, even John C. Calhoun, was willing to make those special appropriations.

In 1817, there is an even more expansive and permanent protective tariff regime proposed by Henry Clay of Kentucky. It gets vetoed by James Madison. And then in the pivotal year of 1824, we see more efforts to use the proceeds from those protective tariffs, which are very sectional in their economic relations. Henry Clay has been pitching what he calls the American system, where he wants to see the federal government, building internal improvements, even on credit, using the new Second Bank of the United States, and also implementing a permanent protective tariff regime to fund those internal improvements. In 1824, we see a bill out of Congress that has the support of Clay and his more Hamiltonian faction.

of the time, a general survey bill for canals and roads. We also see a rise in debate in Congress about the constitutional question of internal improvements. The Constitution does say that Congress may build postal roads, and this is one of those elastic sort of clauses in the Constitution that Clay and other Hamiltonians say is licensed to build internal improvements generally. But we do see funding for a general survey for such improvements in 24. We also see the election, the presidential election in 24. So this is the end of the James Monroe period where we've seen a relative expansion of federal power, James Monroe has increased the civil service to some degree. We have these limited protective

tariff regime. So he's hired a lot of new bureaucrats and the customs houses and the port cities. He has also started a massive coastal fortifications construction program. And we've seen an increase in the Federal Civil Service up to this point. But we've also seen the demise of our first party system. So with James Monroe, we have the only other president in our history besides George Washington, who was elected without opposition for his second term. In Monroe's case, it was his second term. And in 24, we see all of the potential candidates for the presidency proclaiming themselves what they call national Republicans,

kind of representing the solidarity that Americans felt after the victory in 1814 over the British. We see four candidates that all call themselves national Republicans. There really is no party apparatus at this time. We see Henry Clay of Kentucky, who is the great proponent of his Hamiltonian sort of system. We see John Quincy Adams of Massachusetts. who has proven himself in executive roles.

He was James Monroe's Secretary of State. And the Secretary of State office kind of became a jump-off point into the executive for a time. Madison, for instance, he was in Washington's cabinet. Jefferson was Washington's Secretary of State. both of these cabinet officials later launched successful careers into the White House. John Quincy Adams is a very important Secretary of State. He acquires Florida from Spain, the Adams-Oniece Treaty of 1819. And he's also the son of a former president.

A very remarkable figure, I've mentioned some of his special qualities previous. we also see one William Crawford of Georgia, a really remarkable figure, a war hawk back in 1812 days, advocacy for war with Britain, had fought a couple of duels in relation to internal squabbles and Georgia politics. a really interesting statesman of his period, who showed a lot of promise. He's kind of a favorite son candidate in 1824. We see some of these characters nominated or backed by enthusiastic supporters in their home states. And Crawford is an example of that. He ends up winning Virginia and his own native Georgia.

in 24. He's kind of an unusual presidential candidate because he suffers a massive stroke, which eventually takes his life before the vote is called for the election. So he is never would have been president, even if he had been elected that year. It's kind of an accident of history that he actually won electoral votes that year. And then we also see Andrew Jackson, who is a popular candidate, mostly in the West in 24. He wins South Carolina, North Carolina, Pennsylvania, but he wins several Western states, Mississippi, Alabama, Tennessee, Indiana. Clay wins his middle states. He wins the new state of Missouri, which he had helped bring into the union through the Missouri compromise. He wins his native Kentucky. He wins Ohio.

And John Quincy Adams carries New England and parts of New York. New York is splitting its electoral vote for a portion of its history, and it's split between all of the candidates in that election. But he wins the predominance of votes from New York. It is a very split election in 24. None of the candidates has the majority of electoral votes necessary to actually win the White House. And we see two of the candidates, Adams and Clay, convene with their aides in Washington, D.C. after the electoral vote. What comes out of that meeting, which takes place at a pub in Washington is an agreement. Clay is the speaker of the House at that time. And the electoral vote is referred to the House. So when the electoral vote is too close to

to affect the outright election of a candidate, the vote is then taken in the House of Representatives. for the president. And that's what happens in 24. We have a vote split four ways. We have two minor candidates, Crawford and Clay. Crawford is incapacitated. Clay throws his support behind Adams. So he gets his supporters to back John Quincy Adams for the presidency. And in return, once Adams is inaugurated, Clay takes the Secretary of State position, which we've seen is the typical jumping off point for a future president. This is called the corrupt bargain. So John Randolph of Roanoke makes speeches in the house against Clay and his bargaining to sway the house for Adams candidacy, though Adams actually got less electoral votes than did Andrew Jackson in 24.

So Jackson really did come very close to winning in 24. But Randolph calls out Clay's bargaining behind the scenes. Andrew Jackson himself, in private correspondence, accuses Clay, saying, Mr. Clay, like Judas of old, sold himself to Mr. Adams for which he was to receive appointment as secretary. So this was a believable charge, though Clay denied that there was bargain making. It does seem very probable that, in fact, that's what happened. Adams is inaugurated and Adams announces a very expansive kind of view of federal power. Adams represents his base in New England. Adams actually survives the collapse of the Federalist Party because of his more nationalist

sort of conviction. He is very Hamiltonian in his convictions. He is a supporter of Clay's permanent protective tariffs, which are becoming a much more divisive, sectional issue. And Adams proposes even more ambitious projects based on Hamilton's interpretation of the Constitution. to allow the government to do whatever they find to be convenient. So Adams proposes a national university to be based in Washington, D.C. He imagines it will be a research institution, certainly making use of the brain trust of New England to hire all the clever professors from Harvard and Yale

to come down to the national university. Adams hopes that they will be innovators and create a kind of national laboratory there to create inventions for the good of all humanity, Adams says. This does not come off the ground. Adams does not have a real mandate for this. So though he has really interesting ideas, about where to take American politics.

Nothing comes of that. He's not able to organize that while he is in office, though he does pitch it. Adams wants to set up a national observatory. This eventually comes to fruition. We have a naval observatory in Georgetown in the district of Washington. That's now where the vice president lives. he actually lives on the grounds of the Naval Observatory that eventually comes off the ground,

not in Adams administration, but later. But Adams comes up with the idea and says, well, we need to put national resources into mapping the stars and such. And of course, this has a special military application. The ships of the Navy need to be able to identify just where in the world they are. and that's part of the justification for the eventual naval observatory. But Adams has these very abstract notions of the public good, we might say, thinking that knowledge is a good in and of itself that should be supported by public policy. In 1828, during the Adams administration, we see the regular,

contentions among Clay's leadership in Congress to affect permanent protective tariffs and internal improvements. So in 1828, we see a very interesting bill come out of Congress. When the Southern congressman realized that they may not have the numbers to block this bill, They deliberately add very onerous amendments to the bill. Among other things, they eliminate wool protective tariffs, which disproportionately impacts New England. New England has a sizable wool industry, especially in the mountains, in Vermont and such. Vermont is always very interested in wool protective tariffs. So they eliminate those protective tariffs, which is a very interesting move.

John C. Calhoun is involved here, adding amendments to the 28 tariff bill in an attempt to sabotage the passage of the bill. What Calhoun is trying to do here is he's trying to, he's trying to to bring over a portion of the New England congressman to go against the 28 tariff bill when the vote is finally called. They also raise protective tariffs, which would disproportionately impact the merchant centers in Boston and elsewhere in New England, in New York, just outside of New England. So this is a very interesting thing. The people in Congress at the time, they call this the tariff of abominations because it has these damaging aspects that have been added to it. in an attempt to sabotage the passage of the bill. Henry Clay and John Quincy Adams,

nevertheless, call for the passage of this bill to foster American industry in the growth of American manufacturers because it's going to guard through protective tariffs a number of manufacturers that are growing in the American. American industrial base at the time. Things like lead, glass, textiles, big one. Those industries are just getting off the ground at the time. Calhoun is hoping that the increased duties on major imports into Boston

and into New York are going to throw the passage of the bill because it's going to turn the merchant class. in New England against this bill, even though the manufacturers in New England are going to really like the bill. And it is a really close vote. In addition to Calhoun doing his mechanations behind the scenes, Martin Van Buren of New York, future president and ally of Andrew Jackson, he is also working with Calhoun behind the scenes. Van Buren is trying to sway the merchant classes in New York against the bill. Nevertheless, the Mid-Atlantic states, New Jersey, Pennsylvania, Delaware, portions of New York,

they're very much in favor of this. They are developing their industries. They see major advantages for the bill, and they go very heavily in favor of it. Although they split support in New England, and there's a pretty even split in New England about the tariff bill in 28, the West goes very much in favor of the tariff bill. So you see a lot of support for the tariff bill in Kentucky, in Ohio, in Missouri, and such. The South is overwhelmingly opposed to this bill because they import most of their manufactured goods. They don't have an industrial base. And indeed, they still have virtually no industrial base up until the time of the Civil War.

So for them, they've always been very outspoken in favor of free trade because they produce commodities and they import their manufactured goods. So for them, it just means increased prices. They're going to buy their manufactured goods, either from abroad where the price was cheaper before the bill, or from New England at inflated prices because of the protection of the bill. So for them, it only means increased prices and that they disproportionately pay the protective duties. For them, this is like a colonial relation with the North. Northern manufacturers and the merchant class. They do not like this, which is why they are so overwhelmingly opposed to it on this occasion. But we can also look to Calhoun in his misplaced confidence in trying to sabotage this bill by making it more unattractive than it needed to be.

It was a bad bet in his case. So the Mid-Atlantic and the West, they carry the vote on the 28 tariff. There's major opposition both in New England and in the South, which is an odd coincidence based on what ends up developing. So the merchant class, which is importing a lot of these goods in New England, ends up investing their funds in the manufacturers because that has been made more. advantageous because of the tax policy. In 1828, which is also the election year for the presidency, John C. Calhoun publishes anonymously the South Carolina Exposition and Protest. This is a major work

by Calhoun, where we see the southern leadership coming around to the old Republican position that we had previously talked about in relation to John Taylor of Caroline. So in 28, a portion of the southern statesmen come around to conviction along the same lines that John Randolph of Roanoke and John Taylor of Caroline had warned of previously. The South Carolina Exposition and Protest elevates the importance of the Kentucky and Virginia resolutions of 1798. And I'll read some portions here from Calhoun's work. This was a pamphlet. It was circulated mostly in South Carolina and has a major role in an upcoming event that we'll talk about in a later episode, the nullification crisis of South Carolina. So Calhoun says, the act of Congress imposed duties on imports not for revenue, but for protection of one branch of industry.

at the expense of others. It is unconstitutional, unequal, and oppressive, calculated to corrupt the public morals and to destroy the liberty of the country. Now, here he's saying, he's giving a familiar charge, that protection of certain kinds of industry is an opportunity for political corruption.

because the political interest of the manufacturers are now wrapped up in special sponsorship and legislation from the federal government. And that is how he is explaining the corruption of public morals in this case. Calhoun says, the sovereign power is divided between the states and the general government, and the former holds its reserved rights in the same high sovereign capacity, which the latter does its delegated rights. So here he's emphasizing the states formed the federal government, and that the state's retained rights, are far more expansive than the federal government's specific delegated rights, which calls to mind the old arguments between Hamilton and Jefferson way back in the Washington

administration, where Jefferson is emphasizing the specific delegated rights to the federal government, whereas Hamilton is emphasizing the expansive interpretive nature of the of those delegated powers. Calhoun is emphasizing, of course, the Tenth Amendment, which says anything not specifically delegated in the Constitution is reserved to the states. Calhoun goes on, it will be impossible to deny to the states the right of deciding on the infraction of their rights and the proper remedy. This is an almost direct allusion to the Kentucky and Virginia resolutions of 1798,

where James Madison and Thomas Jefferson both emphasize the large reserved rights of the states and also emphasize the state's role in interpreting, what the Constitution means on controversial points. Because the states are the parties to the contract, they are emphasizing that aspect of the state's powers, the reserve powers, in opposition to the interpretive power of the Supreme Court, which John Marshall has claimed has the final say in the powers of the federal government, more or less that the federal government through the Supreme Court is the final judge of its own powers. Calhoun is contradicting Marshall here and saying, actually, the states are the final judge of the powers of the federal

government. And the states will also be the judge of what is the best remedy in this circumstance. So South Carolina, particularly, but they end up speaking for a particular interest in the Deep South, they are looking at this colonial kind of relation that they see developing between the manufacturers of the North and the agricultural produce of the South. And they're saying, this does not work out for us. we end up paying a disproportional amount of taxes. Those taxes are going to be used to support internal improvements, which are mostly built in the North,

because that's what those improvements are for. It's there to encourage domestic industry primarily. And they would certainly look to the National Road, which is built in the middle of the states. It passes through the Mid-Atlantic states, through Maryland, through a very small sliver of what is now West Virginia, but what was then Virginia, and Ohio going out to the Ohio Valley towards the Midwest, that's a major element in those internal improvements of the day. The South Carolina, Georgia, Alabama, and such,

they they represent a particular position on this because the internal improvements are doing other things as well, which give them a measure of support in the West and in Louisiana. They are building out improvements in the river system in that area. They are clearing obstructions on the Ohio River. there are plans for a canal at Louisville, Kentucky to bypass the falls of the Ohio, which would greatly improve commerce in the Ohio Valley going down to New Orleans. Louisiana is a very unique southern state and that it has a large merchant political interest in New Orleans. New Orleans is a very unusual area in the south and that it has the large merchant political interest in New Orleans.

and that it has this very large merchant presence, and they were very interested in the trade on the Ohio in the Mississippi valleys. And this means that Louisiana, and to some extent Mississippi, Western Tennessee, the river counties of Arkansas, or what becomes Arkansas later, they are interested in the improvement of the waterways. so they are not so adverse to some of these internal improvements. They see themselves as beneficiaries. But South Carolina, Georgia, Alabama, they do not see any benefits from this. North Carolina,

they see no benefits from this. They get nothing out of those internal improvements. Yet they are paying higher prices for manufactured goods. They are paying a large proportion of the duties on on imported manufactured goods, or they're simply buying northern manufactured goods at higher prices. So they see this as a kind of colonial relationship, that they have trade restrictions and higher taxes from which they do not realize real benefits in their section. This is the origin of their dissatisfaction with these policies, and that is also why they favor free trade. They want cheaper manufactured goods. So from the very beginning, they are drawing parallels between their particular political circumstances with these protective tariffs and trade restrictions.

they're drawing a parallel between their situation in 1828 and their situation in 1776. When the British are trying to regulate trade in the colonies to require the purchase of manufactured goods, even with additional taxes, such as we see with the Stamp Act, and in return, the American colonies were not getting benefits out of that as far as improvements. Most of the taxes were supposed to go to service or debts back in Britain. So they see their situation as analogous to that, and that is obviously very dangerous. We can also draw some comparisons to the position of the federalists back in 18, which is why they became a sectional party. Calhoun continues.

South Carolina, from her climate, situation, and peculiar institutions, is and must ever be wholly dependent upon agriculture and commerce, not only for her prosperity, but for her very existence as a state, because the valuable crops of her soil are among the very few that can be cultivated with any profit from slave labor. So he comes out and says it directly. There are very few forms of industry that are economical with the institution of slavery. And that is why South Carolina is a commodity. producer. This is why they are very invested in cotton. It's because it's one of the few high-profit industries that is conducive with slave labor. Now, we might very well remember

Thomas Jefferson's image of having a tiger by the tail in relation to the institution of slavery. John C. Calhoun is saying we have to have some way of economic or economic organization in this particular region because what else will we do with the chattels here? Now, this is a bigger question than a modern humanitarian might initiate. think of. Let's say that the question on the table is abolition, which is what the modern encounter with this matter will certainly first think of. What will the Freeman do in South Carolina? John C. Calhoun says, we don't have manufacturing down here. What else are they going to do? what other economic system works for us. We would need a total change in our basic economy down here.

We would need a massive switchover in our capital investment and such. They don't have a labor economy. They have an agricultural economy. He mentions commerce, that is, imports and exports. the exports of the commodities of the state, the imports of manufactured goods they do not produce. So he frames it as an existential crisis. What will become of the African American population? What will the free population of South Carolina do if their mode of life is made uneconomical?

This has no easy answer, and there is certainly no proposal. being made to them at this point. Now, this is in connection with the industrial economy, the industrial way of life that existed at this point in history. Observers of mill towns in New England, in New York, in Pennsylvania, write about the condition of the laboring people. These are mostly Irish immigrants at that time. They live in very crowded conditions. They work very long hours. They don't have any labor regulations so far as age or infirmity.

Indeed, there is no provision for people who sicken in these mill towns or are injured at work. there is no provision for those people. Their living standards are extremely low. And this was occasion for Southern writers to contrast the industrial conditions of the time with Southern slavery. And their contrast is extremely interesting. In Southern slavery, the mainstream slavery, the major busy times of the year are planting and harvest, where they're working very long hours.

There is very little respite. You have to get the crop off the field before it spoils. You have to package it and send it to market. But there are long periods of the year, the winter, the summer, where there isn't very much to do. In addition, the regulations and laws concerning slavery are such that someone who sickens in service in slavery is provided for. Their lives are the responsibility of their owners, and their owners have a major investment in their recovery. That's not to say that everyone could afford medical attention for their slaves, but they had a major interest in the recovery of their slaves because they could not hire someone off the boat from Ireland to take the position of the slave for a dollar a day or whatever the wage was. A slave that was maimed on the job, permanently injured and disabled, lost his value as a slave. but was provided for because of the laws regulating slavery. You could not turn that slave out to fend on his own resources.

This wasn't tolerated in the South, and it was also against the rule of slavery. A slave that was too sick to work, a slave that had lost a limb in service or was otherwise debilitated, was provided for. There was no such provision in American industry or indeed anywhere where you saw industry developing. If you lost your arm in the machinery of the mill where you worked, then you would hope that your family cared enough about you that they wouldn't let you starve to death. There was no provision for you.

There was no workman's compensation. If you died on the job, there was no provision for you. It was a very different world. And this led some writers like George Fitzhue to talk about the relative humanity of slavery as opposed to industrial labor in northern cities. That's a very interesting aspect here. to refer to a previous lesson in our series, the lifestyle of slaves in the South was something that none of us can well imagine, but I'm not trying to conjure horrors in your imagination here.

Most slaves lived in close proximity with their owners. It was only a minority of slaves in the South. Typically, the slaves that lived in the largest estates, the special elite planters of the South that owned large numbers of slaves, they may not interact with their slaves so often, but most slave owners lived with smaller groups of slaves, and they lived in very close proximity with them. The norm in Southern slavery was these people ate together.

They lived under the same roof together. They worked side by side together. Now, this is not the case on the Gone with the Wind plantation of our imaginations, but we must remember that that is a special variety of slavery. These are some of the richest people in North America. and they have they form a special faction, a special leadership class in the South. They're very important for a number of reasons. They are also the people who can afford doctors when their slaves get sick and are most likely among all slave owners to procure doctors and obstetricians and whatever else.

But they are a minority. the institution of slavery. Most people who own slaves live in very close proximity with them for their entire lives. That is the norm. That is not at all the norm with factory owners, with mill owners in the north. And so this is an interesting contrast, and Calhoun does bring that up. So in 1828, we see the South Carolina exposition and protest where these particular states in the Deep South, which do not see any potential advantage from internal improvements, are making their statement. This becomes kind of the seat of what becomes later the Democratic Party. In 1828, we see the election of Andrew Jackson. Andrew Jackson runs against John Quincy Adams of

Massachusetts. Adams is running for a second term. Once again, Adams has electoral votes from New England and some of New York's electoral votes. And I also believe New Jersey voted for John Quincy Adams. Andrew Jackson sweeps the rest of the country. So it's a landslide in 28. The slogans at the time are the tariff of abominations and the corrupt bargain allegedly, between Henry Clay and Adams.

The corrupt bargain has its own interesting story. You remember John Randolph of Roanoke is calling out Clay in the house about his dealmaking with Adams. Clay challenges Randolph to a duel over those accusations of defending his honor that he's not a corrupt backroom dealer and such. They have a duel. John Randolph of Roanoke deliberately shoots into the air, does not aim at Clay. Clay does shoot to kill, but he misses John Randolph. And that's the inconclusive duel. But Clay does have some revenge on John Randolph. John Randolph is this very strange character. He never marries. He's very devoted to his dog.

He brings them to Washington, D.C. He takes them onto the floor of Congress. And Clay, as a parting shot against Randolph, passes a rule in the House prohibiting dogs from the House of Representatives. So kind of pointedly denying Randolph his canine companions. Just kind of funny. But in 28, we see the formation of the coalition that comes to be the Democratic Party. So we see the deterioration of the so-called national Republicans.

They don't really have a party organization. But it's kind of a one-party phase. It doesn't really represent clear ideas about. policy. It seems to be more animated by personalities in that phase. The historian Glendon Van Dusen, who wrote a very valuable book about the Jacksonian era, he says it was a coalition of entrepreneurs, mechanics, laborers, and small farmers against an eastern establishment, like a business establishment, bigger businesses, bigger merchant interests, the financial interests, especially the Bank of the United States, the second bank, and also an older landed class.

So Van Dusen says that the Jackson Coalition, it has a lot of support in cities, laboring people and the like, has support with small businessmen, has a lot of support with small farmers, the yeomen of the west, of the south, who carry their estates for Jackson. Adams and his coalition, they represent the establishment. They also represent what becomes the Whig Party, which is headed by Clay, advocating. for the protective tariffs, advocating for the National Bank, Internal Improvements, Policies. And Adams does fail in 28. And Jackson is brought in. So Jackson's sweep, it's outside of these establishment areas. There is a very bitter campaign in journalism. And this is the typical feature of

presidential campaigns of the time, a declared candidate for president did not openly campaign for office. Instead, he brought in surrogates in journalism to campaign in his stead. The surrogates that Adams and Jackson conscripted for their causes, they were extremely bitter in their attacks on the different candidates. Jackson's circumstances of his marriage, his several combats and duels, his lack of a formal education, all of these things are discussed in the establishment press, and Jackson's wife is attacked very bitterly in the press. This sends Jackson's wife certainly into a kind of depression during the campaign, and she does die. Jackson is very bitter about this, that Adams' supporters, presumably with his nod,

at least according to Jackson, he blames Adams personally for this. He says that this resulted in his wife's early death. So his wife does die just a couple of months before his inauguration. And Jackson attends the inauguration in mourning. He is dressed in black. There is a widespread expectation here that Jackson will use the executive role against the 1828. tariff. When Jackson shows up for his inauguration, there is a huge number of people that come from the back country to attend Jackson's inauguration. This is a very spirited showing of Jackson's supporters.

They pour into Washington, D.C. to celebrate his inauguration. And the establishment press, goes, they lose their cool over Jackson's supporters. They say, well, Jackson, he never went to college, you know, he, he never had even a high school education. He was self-educated for the most part and then tutored by a lawyer for the bar. He was a, he did pass the bar and does serve as a lawyer and also a federal judge before his political career. They point to Jackson's supporters, and they say, look at all these dirt farmers, look at all these pioneers, look at all these unsophisticated people who are going to come in here and they're going to rip down the sophisticated administrative apparatus from our highly educated former president, John Quincy Adams.

He has vision, he has education, he has experience, and so on. And now we have these country bumpkins who are coming in here to rip it all down. And so they make fun of Jackson's inauguration, especially his inauguration party, where his supporters come into the White House to celebrate. They are climbing up on the furniture and ripping the curtains off the windows and such, trying to get a view of their hero. They make a wreck of the White House. It's misbranded as a riot in the press. The Eastern Press, Jackson's Press, or Adams' press, I should say. They call it the reign of King Mob, and they mock Jackson and his less sophisticated supporters.

But Jackson is taking a very interesting line when he comes into the executive mansion. He is very subdued. He is in mourning for his wife. There's a curious episode of Jackson's journey towards his inauguration. Fanny Trollope, the mother of the novelist Anthony Trollope, she's traveling through America at the time that Jackson is elected. She's actually on a riverboat on the Ohio River. And she's stayed for a few weeks in Cincinnati. She writes a very interesting account of all of this.

It's a very delightful book. It's called The Domestic Manners of the Americans. And it's her travel log through America. Andrew Jackson comes aboard Fannie Trollope's Riverboat in Cincinnati, Ohio. And she meets him and watches his interoperable. interaction with others. She says that he is very sober, very gentlemanly. He looks very driven. She notes that he's dressed in black. And she records a funny encounter with a keelboat man on the Ohio, a deckhand, a rough fellow, a riverman. This young fellow, he meets Andrew Jackson. He doesn't

introduce himself, but he walks up and he shakes the president-elect's hand. And he says, are you, are you Andrew Jackson? And he says, yes, I am. And the deck hand, he says, I thought you was dead. And Jackson says, no, I am alive, thanks to God. And the deck hand says, well, is it your wife that was dead? And Jackson, of course, blanches and looks down and says, yes, she has just recently died. And the deck hand says, I, I thought it was one of you. But Fannie Trollope records that interaction, which I think is funny. Jackson takes his oath of office and he gives his inaugural address. I'll conclude with some quotes here from his inaugural address by way of wrapping up.

No one really knows what Jackson will propose for policy for his administration when he takes the oath of office. He is not campaigning. He's not traveling the country, giving speeches, making proposals. He has journalists that are doing that in his stead. They're his surrogates. But everyone is waiting for Jackson to make his statement about what he proposes to do in his administration. And he says several very interesting things at this juncture. He says, In administration of the laws of Congress, I shall keep steadily in view the limitations as well as the extent of the executive power,

trusting thereby to discharge the functions of my office without transcending its authority. And that's kind of interesting in retrospect, because he's known to be a very powerful and willful executive. But he begins his inaugural address by talking about the limitations of executive authority. He says, in such measures, or such measures as I may be called on to pursue in regard to the rights of the separate states, I hope to be animated by a proper respect for those sovereign members of the Union. taking care not to confound the powers they have reserved to themselves with those they have granted to the Confederation. Now, that's a very interesting choice of words. He refers to the general

government as a Confederation, emphasizing with the term the equal sovereign powers of the states, which is what confederation means. He makes mention of their reserve powers, which we have no way of knowing if this was any nod towards Calhoun's exposition. It's interesting to note, John C. Calhoun is Andrew Jackson's vice president in his first term. They're not running together. It's not really working that way at this stage, but he is his vice president. So Jackson may have taken some interest in Calhoun's statements up to this point. He does make allusion to the same principles Calhoun mentioned.

He says, The management of the public revenue is among the most delicate and important trusts in ours, and it will, of course, demand no inconsiderable share of my official solicitude. advantage must result from strict economy. He goes on to say his goal is to extinguish the national debt, which he says is incompatible with real independence. This is one of Jackson's most notable achievements as president. He is the only executive to retire the national debt.

So this is something he makes point. mentioning in his initial inaugural speech, and he does fulfill that promise. He says that he intends to curtail public and private profligacy and corruption. He says that there should be specific appropriations of public money and accountability for public officers. This is in response to a made. outcry of concern among Jackson's faction in the lead-up to his election about widespread corruption in the Adams administration. In the post office, in the treasury, there have been an awful lot of

federal patronage up to this point, a major expansion in federal offices, and Jackson's supporters were quite taken with reports. courts of sinecure sorts of positions where jobs would be handed out to political

functionaries who were not expected to do very much in their capacities in the government. They read novels while

they're supposed to be on duty embezzle funds or otherwise corrupted by private interests. These kinds

of stories are circulating widely in the press that supports Andrew Jackson. Jackson promises investigations and accountability on these grounds. And indeed, he begins a major audit of the civil service, which he puts his postmaster general in charge of, among other things. The postmaster general has a very important office in that he presides over the largest, of the Civil Service at the time. About tariffs, which no doubt everyone was waiting to hear word about, Jackson promises compromise between the sections in the union.

He doesn't say much beyond that, and there were those that expected him to condemn the 28 tariff of abominations. They proved to be disappointed. and we will return to that in a later episode. Jackson says standing armies are dangerous to free governments in time of peace, and he promises to keep the military subordinate to the civil power. Indeed, Andrew Jackson was always an advocate of the volunteer militia over the professional, army, though he had reasons not to be in the Creek War where his volunteer militia were

frequently mutinous and he was unable to adequately provide for them for vittals and everything. He faced down several mutinies in Alabama during the Creek War until the regular army actually arrives. And that's how he wins his great victory at Horseshoe Bend. But he was still always a major outspoken advocate over the volunteer force raised in time of war, the militia, over the standing army. So in that respect, he has a lot in common with anti-federalist concerns back at the founding era. He says also his sincere and constant desire is to observe towards the Indian tribes a just and liberal policy and to give that humane and considerate attention to their rights and wants, which is consistent with the habits of our government and the feelings of our people.

A very interesting reference, even at this very early stage, to the widespread humanitarian concerns of American citizens towards the Indian nations. No doubt we have many in the audience who would immediately think of Andrew Jackson in relation to the military expulsion of several Eastern tribes at a later date. the famous Indian Removal Act and so on. We will talk of that, though it's not our main focus here, I'll mention it later on in the career of Andrew Jackson. That is my overview of Jackson's election and inauguration. We have lots of, lots more very exciting elements to cover in the Jackson administration. It is such a pivotal time in the history of sectional conflict that I'll be devoting several more episodes to this.

We have a number of incredible statesmen in Congress at this time. There is a major debate in Congress about the nature of the Union during the Jackson administration. And, of course, there's also the nullification crisis to cover, which, greatly concerns the nature of reserve powers of the states and also the national authority assertions that Andrew Jackson later makes in his career. So Jackson is a really extraordinary time in our presidential politics and we'll have much more to save him in future episodes. But that's what I have for you all tonight. Thanks a lot for having me. Excellent. Excellent. Thank you so much. I can't wait to hear more about the Jackson administration.

Probably, what would you say? Before FDR, the closest thing we had to a true executive borderline king. Yeah, a very willful executive, a man with a vision for the country. it remains a very influential vision, even though most of what he contended for is kind of off the table these days. It's a really remarkable achievement, and he remains one of my favorite figures. Well, remind everybody how they can support your work and buy your books. Indeed. You can find my work at www. tollmenbooks.com. I've mentioned a couple of episodes that I do have books about. If you want to learn more about Jackson's early career, I have a biography of Chief Red Eagle and the Creek War of Alabama that you can find on my website that outlines Jackson's success in the Creek War.

much concerns Jackson and his Creek opponents in Alabama. I also have the reign of Andrew Jackson by Frederick Aug, part of the Chronicles of America series, which you can also find at Tallmanbooks.com. Thank you very much, Mr. Bagby. Until we talk again. My pleasure. Thank you. I want to welcome everyone back to the Pekingona show.

George Bagby returns, and we are going to continue talking about. America's lead up to its civil war. How are you doing tonight, Mr. Bagby? I'm a bit allergy afflicted, and that's made my head kind of fuzzy today. But other than that, I'm all right. Awesome. Awesome. Well, we are in the, we are in the late 1820s and early 1830s, and And why don't you lead us away? Yes, indeed. I've got really good material for us tonight. This is a favorite subject of mine.

I've been emphasizing this in my history classes for a long time, and it's been very rewarding to do a deep dive onto this. I've been reading the best speeches, just the best rhetoric that has ever been presented in the United States Senate. And we had a whole troop of great statesmen in the Andrew Jackson presidency. It was the peak of our political powers. And these speeches have been republished many times. Most recently, by Liberty Fund.

You can actually find a big, hefty volume from Liberty Fund with the, Hane-Webster debate of 1830, because they are among the most important speeches in the context of the sectional struggle and the constitutional question about state sovereignty and such, but they're also among the most eloquent speeches ever delivered in Congress. and we had really extraordinary men in that generation. We have a great book. I don't have it in front of me, unfortunately. Merrill Patterson, I think, is the name of the author.

It's called The Great Triumvirate Clay, Webster, and Calhoun. Now, ironically, we don't have Calhoun in this debate. He was actually vice president at the time. time. So he was the man the speeches were addressed to the president of the Senate. So he stood silent there and was witness to all of this. Later on, he actually participates and debates Webster when he becomes the senator from South Carolina after he resigns the vice presidency. One of the very a few examples of resignation from the vice presidency. Something we'll get into later.

But we have Robert Hayne of South Carolina, Colonel Hayne, as he was known. He was a veteran of 1812. And he goes head to head with Daniel Webster. The question of the day, according to Richard Weaver, who is one of my best teachers, on this period, a marvelous essayist. If you haven't read Weaver, you're really missing out. Go and pick up his great work, ideas have consequences for the Southern tradition at Bay. The Southern Tradition at Bay, I should be drawing on more often for this series, because it's covering the same subject. the political and cultural tradition of the Annabellum South and also the post-war South.

That's the subject of that particular book. But Ideas Have Consequences is a great work about the modern quandary more generally, kind of a work of philosophy. But Weaver has an essay called Two Orators. It is a contribution to a book that he never ended up. publishing where he was contrasting the culture of the North and the South, a very valuable a bunch of essays that were later collected and edited by some of his students. Weaver says the question of the debate between Hain and Webster was democracy in an American

context versus nationalism, which was a new idea on the scene. Jean-Jacques Rousseau, one of the great instigators of the French Revolution, major enlightenment figure, had written a important and very brief little book called The Social Contract back in the mid-1700s, just in the lead up to the French Revolution. and it was very instrumental in the thought of the Jacobins of the time. Rousseau was a kind of a liberal in several important senses. He gives us a different sort of approach to political problems.

So we should zoom out for a moment and consider what he was arguing against. the position that was more or less taken for granted through most of history is that political relations in human communities were natural things. Aristotle in his politics is the great example of this. Aristotle memorably says man is a political animal. Some are very offended by that, that attribution that man is an animal. It does not mean that man is a brute beast. It means that man is an animated spirit, you know, an incorporate creature with a spiritual component. That's literally what animal means.

But he says he's political, that he's social, that he's designed to live, in community with his fellow human beings. That man, wherever you find him, has language. It's not always written, but it is a consistent fact about human beings. That man has marriage, an exclusive relationship for the propagation of the species and also for his own society. That man has religion. a natural institution. We do not find any instance of human beings living without religious

belief. That man has law. That man has a system of ownership and property. Aristotle is interacting with Plato, who has kind of an idealist bent. You can find an awful lot of value in Plato. So I'm not here to dis Plato, but the Republic does go into flights of fancy, at least, if not serious proposals, to do things like abolishing the family, abolishing property and such in the name of justice. So the Republic can be read in a very revolutionary and radical way. Aristotle is combating these ideas, insisting that these institutions are natural or organic, even connected essentially with the nature of human beings. Rousseau goes in a very different direction. Rousseau is emphasizing the, he's emphasizing the changeable nature of those institutions, property, marriage, religion, language and such. And Rousseau posits that man is properly understood as an individual.

This is a very interesting idea. It's obviously very influential. We talk about this all the time these days. Aristotle is emphasizing man in man gets his identity in relation to his natural institutions, which he posits from experience as organic qualities of humanity. So man understands who he is in relation to other people and in relation to these natural institutions. Man is a farmer in relation to his property or a businessman in relation to his craft. He is a father, a husband, a friend, a comrade, a fellow citizen. All of these are the natural elements of identity.

Rousseau imagines that these are things that we create according to our own desires and that we could do without them. He proposes a revolutionary kind of approach to those natural. institutions, framing them as oppressive, framing them as the product of nurture rather than nature, and has a very radical approach to them. Because he sees man as essentially an independent agent who can make or join these institutions at will, he, he, he, he, posits what he calls the state of nature, which other thinkers like Hobbes and John Stuart Mill later developed. Well, Hobbs actually predates Rousseau, but they are part of the same school, you might say, of revolutionary liberalism.

Rousseau says that the ideal form of society is the nation-state in which people, people, people of the same language group anyway will form a democratic society and proclaim by popular acclamation or a popular vote, the general will. So Rousseau says norms and institutions themselves are created by the social contract, which is an event. which predates all known history, even according to Rousseau, where everyone got together and acclaimed social norms. So these things are radically changeable, according to Rousseau. The social contract creates the general will, and this is the will of the people at large.

the minority in this national action or general will is outside the bounds of what is permissible. So Rousseau says that when the general will is proclaimed by the body of individuals who are all acting according to what they think is best, that should bind all the minorities totally because the mass, the majority in this mass determines ultimately what is true, what is just, that these things do not have some transcendent reality. And so the minority will be forced to be free. And this is a very important element

in what Weaver calls the nationalist ideology. And we'll see this come up here in the debate between Hain and Webster. So in 1830, a Connecticut congressman named Foote, the senator from Connecticut, is proposing to the Senate a pause in the sale of Western law. lands in the territories around the Mississippi Valley. So he proposes this pause, and this gives rise to a debate. The matter at hand is more technical, not so important in our matter this evening, but the issue on the table is whether or not to sell Western lands to investors.

and farmers to pay off the national debt or to hold the land and actually pause land sales in order to better organize the territories. This would create what the proponents called greater bonds of union. And they skirted the issue of the national debt. They said they were in favor of paying off the national debt. but they didn't want to sell the lands in the West in order to accomplish this. So there is a rivalry between the West, which wants to see the territories sold off to investors. They want to see this vast land settled and their own states populated.

And the East, which has a division of opinion, it's mostly in the North, against selling off the Western lands and better organizing the territories. They're more interested in planning the destiny of these Western territories than they are selling off the land to anyone that might want to buy them. So that is connected to other issues in the Jackson administration, the first Jackson administration, retiring the national debt and also the question of the Bank of the United States. The opponents of the land sales are in favor of preserving the Bank of the United States. They're very interested in preserving the economic ties and even the dependency of the states

on the federal government and its institutions, including the Bank of the United States. So though they like to hedge and say, well, we're actually in favor of paying off the national debt, we believe in preserving American credit and everything. We will pay that off, but we want to use the resources the federal government to create the protective tariff regime and internal improvements in the West. And we are actually interested in accumulating debts for that end. So that's more or less their position. Webster gets up in front of the Senate and makes an interesting speech. This isn't one of the famous ones that later follow, but he says that land organized by the federal government is what he calls a sacred trust

and that it should not be considered just movable resources. resources that should be sold off for short-term gains. He makes reference to the Northwest Territory. Now, this is an important ordinance, the Northwest Ordinance, which was actually organized by the Continental Congress under the Articles of Confederation. It was one of their major accomplishments. They did not have very many, but it's one of them. Among other things, they organize the states that later become Michigan, Illinois, Ohio, and such,

and they also limit the territorial spread of slavery in the area. They ban slavery in those territories in the Northwest Ordinance. Webster makes special reference to that at the expense of Kentucky. He says it would have been better if Kentucky had been organized in the Northwest Ordinance and never had legal slavery. So he makes a kind of sectional slight there. And then he goes on and accuses the South, which are opposed to this long-sided view, to give them their point for the organization of the territories, the federal prerogative to organize these territories.

And he says, the South is the enemy of the West. Actually, the Southern preference to sell off those lands hides their antipathy towards the West because the South is the outspoken opponent of the internal improvements. So he attacks the section. He links slavery as a degenerate factor in the section. And he appeals for internal improvements.

And the connection, obviously, with financing those improvements, an ambitious scheme to develop routes into the West, things like the National Road, and the canal at Louisville, Kentucky to bypass the rapids of the Ohio. So this is an interesting speech, and it kind of forms the background information of the sectional conflict in the debate. Hane responds with a very interesting speech. So Hane gets up not because he was a party to this debate before, but specifically because the South's convictions, the South's stance on the matter is brought up,

and the South has been maligned. So, pain gets up and gives a very interesting speech. He says, the South repudiates the idea that a pecuniary dependence on the federal government is one of the legitimate means of holding the states together. Now, this is a very old idea. This obviously goes back to the Washington administration and the original debate between Jefferson and Hamilton. We remember Hamilton's reports on the credit, the public credit, specifically advocated the pecuniary dependence of the states. He consolidates the war debts of the states into the national debt.

this puts the states in a subservient relation both to the federal government and also to the federal bank, the bank of the United States, because they have been relieved of a tremendous burden. Hain here is saying, well, we have got the ability to pay off the national debt now. This pecuniary interest is not what should hold us together going forward. that's actually a very low stratagem, a subversive stratagem, if you will, a bad foundation for patriotism and liberty, which are his major themes. He goes back to liberty as his theme many times, and he has a different view of it than does Webster. Hayne then turns to the question of slavery. He says that slavery is for the South not an abstract concern about justice. Here we might make reference to Plato versus Aristotle.

It doesn't figure here, they're not referencing them. Plato, as you recall in the Republic, is interested in abstract goods that no one has ever seen. This is the subject of the Republic, where Socrates goes on many flights of fancy about the abstractly just society. He goes at some length about how to make men and women equal. He says that in order to make them equal, we must abolish the strict monogamy of marriage, liberalize sexual norms, and also disconnect the raising of families from the family unit and make this a corporate effort. The state should raise all the children. And this would have the effect of equalizing the differences between men and women,

among other things. Just as an example of his abstract approach to what is theoretically just. Aristotle does the exact opposite. He says, well, what do we have in our experience? What is the human experience? And he's making reference to how people have always lived, not to abstract goods no one has ever noticed, no one has ever experienced, no one's ever seen or heard of. So we see they have different approaches to the question.

Aristotle, we might say, is making his appeal to experience for the basis of his argument. He's saying what is possible, what is in the record. Plato is making an abstract appeal to an ideal. Hain, in relation to slavery, is making a similar. appeal to that of Aristotle. Aristotle, like Hayne, says, but we've had slavery since before the first written laws. This has been a universal practice of mankind. Hain says slavery is a practical, not a theoretical problem. He condemns Webster for his slight on the institution of slavery in the South. He says the blame of different

sections is not at all productive in the argument. He points out, among other things, and these are very telling points, that the Southerners were never a maritime or merchant people. They did not go abroad to bring slaves to the South. This was actually the function of the North in American history, and before them, other countries, the Spanish, the British, that were most instrumental in bringing the slaves to the South. So he said, we don't want to get into who's responsible for the institution of slavery. We both have responsibilities here.

Both sections have responsibility for this. We just happen to have all of them now. He says the conditions of the freed blacks in the north are intolerable, utterly miserable. He speaks of his own travels in the north, where he's seen homelessness, exclusion from society. He talks of encampments in northern cities of African Americans who are outside of employment, outside of any ability to support themselves. And he even describes how they maintain their living through begging, through public charities, and through theft.

That this is how they survive. in these northern states that are free in an abstract way. And he identifies this a practical problem. These people have not been integrated anywhere in America. And in the states where they have no legal slavery, their position is most deplorable. So this is not an instance, he says, to debate what,

is desirable or what could be done here. But we're not talking, he says, about what to do about slavery. He calls this false philanthropy, something that the northern statesmen talk about to inflate their own egos and to promote themselves socially, that they will discuss abstractions like the abolition movement or colonization as was most popular then and up until after the time of Lincoln and the Emancipation Proclamation, still the most popular American position on the subject. He says this is something they do to inflate their own egos and it's not a profitable point to use against us, use against the South in this case.

He points out the cultural slight that Webster made against Kentucky, that Kentucky is culturally corrupted by the institution of slavery. It's curious to note here in passing, one of the major charges that was made by these northern writers against slavery, more often was the cultural depravity of the African Americans, and that the proximity southern white freedmen had to those people was degrading to their character, that they lived in close proximity to them,

therefore they become degraded. Now, this has taken on, curious modern tone in an unlikely fashion. We have characters like Thomas Sol, the economist, who is in many respects a very worthy teacher, and I've learned an awful lot from him. I recommend him. Moreover, his book, Race and Culture, is, I think, especially valuable, but he's prolific. He's written so much and he has many wonderful things to say. He has another book which I am not as fond of called, um, what is it? Southern rednecks and northern liberals. Black rednecks white liberals. There we go. Black rednecks white liberals. Where he says the origin of the, um, the cultural

deficiencies of African Americans in the United States is because of their proximity to depraved Southern whites. So he kind of turns that thesis completely on its head and says, oh, it's those terrible Scotch-Irish people that the African-Americans had to live with for so long. That is the source of all of their cultural problems today. That is part of his thesis in that book. Otherwise, very interesting book, and we can learn things from it, but that's a really ironic thesis that you encounter from Thomas Seoul, the exact opposite, if you will, of what people were talking about the 1830s. But Hayne says this cultural slight against the South, generally, he says, no one actually believes that. Who do we have in our history to look to?

Again, we see Hain makes his reference to experience, like Aristotle does. Hayne says the leadership of the union are predominantly Southerners. Now, he's speaking in the age of Jackson, where this leadership has reached in some ways its summit, its apogee. Hayne mentions Washington, Jefferson, Madison, and of course we can extend the list quite a bit. John Tyler, William Henry Harrison, Zachary Taylor, James Polk, Andrew Jackson himself. These were all southern estates executives. They were all slave masters and at a large scale. Hayne rhetorically asks here, will you say that they were all depraved because of their connection with slavery?

Now, what was a rhetorical question to them is all too common a conclusion among our people today, where the answer from the academy is a resounding, yes, yes, they were sick people, they were nasty people and so on. They deserve to have their memory blotted out from the face of the earth. Haynes' rhetorical question actually tends the opposite direction, because his audience does not believe that. So this is a winning point for him. Hayne goes on, and he says, the great enemy is the consolidation of government at the expense of the states. again, he goes into the history of the union. He emphasizes the conflict between parties in the union. And of course, by 1830, we're seeing the emergence of the second party system.

The national Republicans who kind of turn into the Whig party headed by Henry Clay, the Hamiltonian Party, that is backing this expansionist vision of the federal government. the broad construction and the economic consolidation. And what Hayne recognizes as the anti-federalist concerns, which he relates himself to here. So we're seeing something very interesting here. We see the triumph in thought of the old Republicans, of John Taylor of Caroline, of John Randolph of Roanoke. Randolph is actually a witness to this. He's actually still in Congress at this time and has an interesting role to play. He's right at the end of his career,

but we'll visit him again later in our discussion or later in our series. Hain says this controversy about the consolidation of federal power was there from the very start. He says, it points now, the point now in the dispute between the Senator of Massachusetts and myself have divided the great parties from the beginning. This says from the start, from the Washington administration, and even before with the debates about the ratification of the Constitution. This has been our quandary. How many powers did the state? How many powers did the states reserved to themselves. What are they? Who has the prerogative? What are the extent of the implied powers, if indeed there are any, in the federal government? It goes back to the

debate between Hamilton and Jefferson and Washington's administration. Hain then goes to recent history, and he says, sectional concerns are not unknown to the very members of this body in 1830. And daringly, he calls

out Webster. He points out that Webster opposed the Second Bank of the United States in the Madison administration. And he did that for sectional reasons. He points out that Webster

opposed the original protective tariff regime, that limited regime, again during the Madison administration, again for sectional reasons because of the merchant class in Massachusetts that he represented. He then points to Webster's own change of position on both subjects. Now Webster is an advocate of the second bank and wants to preserve it. Now Webster is an advocate of the protective tariff regime, the American system, because he has a different constituency. He has the manufacturers of New England. So he points this out. Then he goes into the Federalist Party in New England, saying they had sectional interests in 1812 and indeed became a sectional party for their advocacy for their own region.

He points out the legacy of the Hartford Convention, which he says is an American event. Now, he doesn't have high opinions of it. He's actually very antagonistic towards it. But he points out, hey, your section had these ideas, too. This is part of our collective heritage. These questions about what powers the, what powers? the states preserved is something New England was talking about in our own living memory. This is not something novel.

Now, what both of them are thinking about, what Webster and Hain are both thinking about and not clearly stating at this stage is Calhoun's South Carolina exposition and protest of 1828, where he is attacking the sectional protective tariff regime of 1828, the protective tariff from the Adams administration. Haynes says, in our history, the worst enemies of the union were promoters of consolidation. And what the Congress is terming the Carolina doctrine, proposed by Calhoun anonymously. No one knows at this stage the author of the South Carolina exposition in protest,

but it happens to be the president of the Senate and the sitting vice president of the Jackson administration, John C. Calhoun. He had written it anonymously. Haynes says, what you malign as a sectional doctrine the Carolina doctrine, so-called, is something New England espoused only a few years ago in the Hartford Convention and the sectional controversy during the War of 1812. Haynes says it actually did not originate there. What we first see is the 1798 Virginia and Kentucky resolutions. during the John Adams administration, very early, where Thomas Jefferson was pitching this idea of state interposition or nullification of controversial federal law on the grounds that the states

have authority to interpret these touchy points of the Constitution and the broad interpretation of federal power because the states are party to the contract. They actually created it. Now, this is the key point in the whole matter. Who has the authority to decide on those questions? And Payne says, well, we have a tradition here. His reference is the history, the political history of the United States. Kane says, and in conclusion of this particular speech, he says, sir, and he is addressing Calhoun, the president of the Senate, where all the speakers address their arguments in this format, sir, as to the doctrine that the federal government is the exclusive judge of the

extent as well as the limitations of its power. It seems to me to be utterly subversive of the sovereignty and independence of the states. It makes little difference in my estimation whether Congress or the Supreme Court is the ultimate arbiter. The Carolina doctrine, so-called, is merely the doctrine of 1798, that the states are parties to the contract, therefore the states can determine the limit of the federal government's powers and stop legislation or block Supreme Court decisions on the nature of the matter, because they are actual sovereign parties to this compact. Again, they would emphasize the confederative nature of the union, that the states are actually equal parties.

Now, Webster responds in one of the most famous speeches in the whole of American statesmanship, what's called his second reply to Hain, the common name for this speech. He begins with a long discourse saying that Hain, pain has gone very far afield. He says that we're quite far from the nature of the debate, like the origins of the debate about the federal land and its sale. He says he compares himself to a mariner who is lost at sea and is trying to get his bearings. He then states, I go for the Constitution as it is and the Union as it is. So making a normative sort of overture, he's not claiming to be saying anything radical.

He's presenting what he believes the Union to be. He says the North has no disposition to violate the compact of the Constitution. So he even cedes the point that this is an agreement between parties, interested parties. He then turns to rebuttal of some of Haynes' points. What's most interesting here is Haynes' resource of the Hartford Convention, which obviously greatly concerns Massachusetts. That's where the creators of that event originated. That's where they were most popular, the Essex Honto and the rest of them. Webster's response to the Hartford Convention is rather fascinating, and it is, in my opinion,

one of the weakest parts of his entire response. He says first, the Hartford Convention was without influence or precedent. kind of glossing the significance of the Kentucky and Virginia resolutions, even glossing the nature of the constitutional conventions and debates. He just kind of ignores the point. Again, he says, the South studies the Hartford Convention, they are very interested in it, kind of linking them to the alleged. treason of the Hartford conventioners. He says, the North has not ever been interested in it.

They've written it off as an anomaly because there's nothing comparable to this at all. And those that took part in this had no political futures. We repudiated them. So he's kind of disavowing this, but also not recognizing the significance of that in the American political experience. And thirdly, Webster says, I've never studied the Hartford Convention. I've never read the journal of the convention. I'm really in no position to talk about it. That's a very weak response to Haynes' important point.

Webster then turns to the question of internal improvements. You remember, this is the main issue in controversy. What will the protective terrorists be used for? Not only will the protective tariffs foster domestic industry, but those internal improvements are meant to be built to further amplify the economic power of the industry, building connections for exports to make American industry more competitive in global trade. And also domestic trade. Really, domestic trade is the number one priority.

But ultimately, the, the, the global trade. goal is to make the United States an industrial exporting power. But he says, the localism of these sections averse to internal improvements is narrow-minded. He says, very importantly, in our contemplation, Carolina and Ohio are parts of the same country. His vision of the union minimizes local and regional differences and says those that are against this kind of development are in fact bigoted. They do not have this broad and inclusive view of the union and its member communities. He says consolidation, not enlargement of the union, not enlargement of the union.

power is his concern. He faults Hane for identifying consolidation as a danger, consolidation, centralization of power in the federal government. He says, how could this be a danger when all these things they are doing are for the general good? Let's remember Rousseau's contention about the general will, that a political community, it is not the or organization of various interests of geographical regions, but it's best understood, according to Rousseau, as a union of individuals. And this is a connection here. Webster then turns to the doctrine of nullification or interposition, what Hayne has referenced in relation to the Kentucky and Virginia resolutions in connection to the South Carolina exposition and protest, which actually

proposes nullification. He says that interposition would mean state authority would divide the union into its constituent states, that the assertion of state sovereignty, in fact, would mean a fundamental division of the union at a state level. Now, this is a very important point, and it certainly does not deserve scoffing. Where do the state powers end? If the states will determine federal laws, given their own prerogatives, their own interests, Webster says, this will divide our policy among the constituent States and who knows where that division will end. This has an anarchic implication to it. Now, in my reading, this is Abraham Lincoln's most compelling argument later.

In Lincoln's first inaugural address, he says, secession is the essence of anarchy. in my view, this is the most compelling point that Lincoln makes in that crisis of the union. That if a minority were always to take exception from centers of authority and divide the political community based on their exception, then there is no place where that division would end. Now, Hain and the other southern statesmen would point out the states are political communities. And this is ultimately where Hain rests his argument. And this is a very interesting point. In Hain's view, the states in America are pre-year.

preliminaries to nationality. They are the origins of American nations, which will be established. And in Haynes' view, it's important to note, not only Hayne, but also more important lights like John C. Calhoun, they were unionists. They believed in the union of these various states, though under a more strictly limited general government. A government, as the Kentucky Resolution sets out, founded for specific defined purposes. And not for the special advocacy of any one region or any one state or any one faction. any one political faction over the interests of others.

So the state interest then becomes the key to limiting the powers of the federal government. That is a balancing act. And in our political experience, we might look at that and say that was perhaps overly optimistic. It is still a fascinating American idea. the idea of limited federal government and state prerogatives, the balance of what we call federalism. Obviously, we know how it all turns out, but this is the matter at hand at the time. Webster then goes on to say, and this is one of the most important lines in his speech, It is, sir, the people's constitution, the people's government made for the people and answerable to the people.

Webster emphasizes the political authority of the individual in the general government. This goes back to Hamilton's interpretation, the broad powers. Hamilton says the authority of the federal government comes from the people at large, the mass. And Hamilton also justifies his broad interpretation at the expense of state authority on the element of the Constitution. The Constitution says, we the people of the United States, in order to form a more perfect union, etc. This was identified, you remember, by Patrick Henry, as a sticking point. Patrick Henry said, why did they not say, sir, the states. We the states.

The states actually ratify this compact. Nowhere in the union did a popular vote ratify. ratify the Constitution, a technical point perhaps. But the state authorities convened the constitutional conventions through an indirect means they ratify the Constitution. It does not go to the general vote. But here Webster makes the same appeal that Hamilton did, that this is a popular government based on the authority of individual citizens, not the states. This is why Webster says the state authority must not be the final appeal. It must be the popular authority. This is also Abraham Lincoln's position. And Lincoln actually

rephrases Webster's appeal in his second reply to Hayne. in the Gettysburg Address. And this is the most famous formulation of it. The Gettysburg Address, which is government of the people by the people for the people. That's Lincoln's line. But it is adapted from this speech. And that is a nationalist formulation at the expense of state authorities and their own particular heritages and identity. So Webster says there is no middle ground on this issue. Of course, that's precisely what Calhoun and Thomas Jefferson before him were trying to establish a middle ground of state interposition to take that interpretive power of federal powers away from the federal government itself. And to put it with another

interested party in the contract, that of the state governments, which will obviously be more accountable to the people of their localities. He says there's no middle ground between submission and treason. Let's return again to the point that Rousseau made, that the general will determines what is true, politically true. and the minority must be, in Rousseau's words, forced to be free. Webster is making the same frame here, saying that you either submit to the federal power or you will be condemned as a traitor. Now, we have genius responses to this, especially in John C. Calhoun, who takes this

very seriously and tries to plausibly map out that middle ground that Webster is condemning here, the ground of state interposition or nullification. Again, designed not to divide the union, but to preserve it. Hain emphasizes the advocates of consolidation are the true enemies of the union. Webster says interposition is incompatible with any administration of government and will certainly mean revolution. Curiously, he does not deny a right to revolution. He could only do so by reputing the Declaration of Independence, which he does not do.

He actually pays some lip service to the right of revolution in the abstract. But he is much more interested in preserving the union, according to his own formulation. So he says, this, sir, is General Washington's consolidation. That's a very important point because, as we remember, Washington did back Hamilton. He says, this is the true constitutional consolidation. I wish to see no new powers drawn to the general government, but I confess, I rejoice in whatever tends to strengthen the bond that unites us and encourages the hope that the union will be perpetual.

And this is one of Webster's great contributions in this speech. he pitches the union as a perpetual bond. This is extremely important later on for Lincoln, who assumes the same, and then goes to really extraordinary lengths to try to justify it historically. Links that do not hold water at all, in my opinion. Lincoln claims that the

Union is older than the Constitution in his speeches later. Webster does not go that far because Webster, I think, is far more grounded in history and also more reasonable. Webster says the enemies of the union calculate the value of the union and magnify the evils of the union, which he condemns. Webster then ends with his peroration. And this is a fascinating aspect. This is the most memorable part of his speech. And I will quote it at length here because it deserves to resound in our memories. This is Daniel Webster's single greatest contribution to American letters.

And this is at the end of his reply. He says, when my eyes shall be turned to behold for the last time the sun in heaven. May I not see him shining on the broken and dishonored fragments of a once glorious union, on states, dissevered, discordant, belligerent, on land rent with civil feuds, or drenched in fraternal blood? let their last feeble and lingering glance rather behold the glorious ensign of the Republic, bearing the motto no such miserable interrogatory as what is all this worth,

nor those other words of delusion and folly, liberty first and union afterwards, But everywhere in every wind under heaven, that other sentiment dear to every American heart, liberty and union, now and forever, one and inseparable. That final line, liberty and union, now and forever, one and inseparable, the perpetual national union. Webster's great vision of what binds us together ultimately, that we are all the same, that anyone that contends for regional characteristics, distinctiveness, political sovereignty, those are the enemies. It's quite remarkable this is said in 1830, and at a pivotal point of sectional conflict,

and the union survived it. And the southerners who are increasingly of a Jeffersonian or old Republican frame in their thought of the union believed it could survive when they have seen the really beautiful statement of American nationalism. I think Webster is the best example of this. They've seen what they would be called if they said no. They'd be called traitors. Webster has made that very clear. Hayne has appealed to history and experience. He is in this instance comparable to Aristotle,

assuming the natural characteristics of these political communities. Webster has made his appeal to abstract ideals, to union, even to empire. Curiously, he never uses the word empire, but Hain often does and always condemns it, being at the expense of those local political communities. Hayne explains his position, saying, Sir, there have existed in every age two distinct orders of men, the lovers of freedom and the devoted advocates of power. Websber, Weaver, in his essay on these speeches,

he says, Webster was walking a fence, endeavoring on the one hand to accept certain facts and on the other to put forward propositions which could but doubtfully be reconciled with the historical facts. And we see that is the weakest part of Webster's argument. He's arguing about abstract ideals, about national glory, that he does not see the differences between the regions of America. If it helps Ohio, it's helping Carolina, too, he says. Don't be such a bigot.

It's helping you, too. Webster has an imperial vision, an imperial vision of the union. Authority over the horizon. Continental, expansive, commercial. He's thinking of national glory. He's thinking of the international reputation of the union, of the flag. the symbol of what we have all in common as Americans. Hain is local.

He is particular. Hayne sees South Carolina as a distinct people, or a nation, if you will. This is a subject that's really very broad in American history. people made reference to their home states. This was not something particular to the South at this time, when people were not so well-connected and spent their lives closer to home than any of us do now.

Those local peculiar distinctive traits were far more important with them. And that's why they would identify themselves by their home states. the historical facts that formed a group of people in one place, the geography, the ethnic makeup, the language, the dialect, the political concerns, the religious distinctiveness, all of those things are the elements of nationality, of identification as a distinct group, a political community. Those are Haynes' emphases. And Hayne, several times in his speeches, condemns the ambition of empire. Now, the reputation of this debate is an interesting one. certainly after the Civil War, it is recognized broadly for its pivotal importance in the sectional conflict. After the Civil War, with the victory of the Union, Webster is hailed as a prophet and one of

the most eloquent, it's not the most eloquent advocate of this national vision. and so Webster is amplified. One of the results of this, and this is actually an early result, there is a massive and very beautiful painting, very, very intricate in Fanual Hall, which is the great auditorium of old Boston. in Massachusetts. In Fanual Hall, when you ascend the grand staircase and enter into the lecture

hall, you see the huge painting on the wall. It takes up the whole width of the auditorium. You should look this up. I don't remember who painted this piece, but it stands in Fanual Hall in Boston, and it's titled Webster's second reply to Hain. And we see Webster standing in the old Senate chambers in front of Vice President John C. Calhoun, who sits in the president's chair, the president of the Senate. In the crowd, we see Robert Payne or Robert Hain. We see James Polk, future president. We see other members of the Senate, Thomas Hart Benton of Missouri.

We see all the grates of the day. Henry Clay is sitting in attendance. And they're all depicted. They actually, if you look at the painting, you can recognize them there. And this is an incredible event in our history. and it's celebrated, commemorated. But it's also a debate between statesmen. Both sides walk away looking at the achievement of their own champion and saying,

we made our point. We made our point exceptionally well. But a debate is not a war. There is no winner carrying laurels from the, the field. Both sides looked at this event and said, we stated our case exceptionally well. We identify the problems with the other fellow's position. And though it's a statement of belief, a statement of position, it does not resolve the issue. So in the north, Webster is celebrated as the victor in the south, Hain is celebrated for his exposition of their position.

And that is the story of the debate between Webster and Hain taking place during Jackson's first administration. When we return, we will talk about the nullification crisis, where these points that we've gone over in some length here, they emerge in political drama. You would certainly expect them to. Yes. All right, Mr. Bagby. Tell people where they can find your work

and where they can find your books. Indeed. You can find my books at www. tall menbooks.com. I'm doing other work concurrently with you, Pete. I'm appearing on American Spirits with the Old Glory Club every Monday night. Last night, unfortunately, I had bad connection problems, so I couldn't participate. But we will be doing that again this next Monday night. We're talking about the Southwest. We're starting a series on the history of the Southwest.

And we're starting with the Spanish settlement in Arizona, California, and Texas and such. And we'll go up through the Mexican War and the Mexican session of the territory. It's going to be a very fun series. I've really been enjoying working on it. All righty. Well, I will link up to Tallman Books. And until the next time, thank you so much. I appreciate it.

Everything. My pleasure. Thank you for having me. I want to welcome everyone back to the Pekinelli Show. George Bagby is back. And we jump right back into America's lead-up to its Civil War. How are you doing this evening, Mr. Bagby? I'm doing well.

I've had another day to hit the books with our material. and I enjoy doing it every time. I learn more detail and fill out more of my own knowledge of the subject. So I've been really enjoying the process. Awesome. Awesome. Well, jump right in, please. Well, we've got a unit this evening about the first thing that most people call to mind in regards to Andrew Jackson.

And that is the totally unfair characterization, laying the blame on Jackson for the military removal of the southeastern Indian nations, which he bears some responsibility for, but is certainly not responsible for. He never pulled the trigger on that, and that was averse to his own thoughts on the subject, as we will see, but also was not actually the reform he accomplished. The reform that he accomplished was one of the more enlightened kinds of solutions to these problems. And it is a particularly modern and Western solution that we still have to this day. Andrew Jackson invented the Indian Reservation. And even the most radical, I don't believe would propose the abolition of these things.

The population or large portions of the population that depend on these Indian reservations are domestic dependent nations today as they were then. And they are of less consequence to the integrated. And I suppose there are many more that fit that category today. But nevertheless, this institution is something that we see around the world. I was just trying to learn a bit more about it. The most interesting example are the Russian autonomous regions, which are ultimately due to Bolshevik reforms after the Russian Civil War,

but are elements of the Russian Federation today. The most famous of those regions that were organized around national minorities in the Russian Empire, became independent countries after the collapse of the Soviet Union. And we all know their names. Ukraine, Belarusia, Latvia, Estonia, Lithuania, Kazakhstan, and places like that. They all peeled away. And it reveals something of the danger in that kind of organization, something that the Americans did not go so far as to create.

themselves, but the Russians actually copied us in a way. And there are autonomous ethnic zones in Russia today built on the same kind of justification. And we could trace the origins of those political reforms back to Jackson's reforms. It's not something that's been given up. So we'll get into the matter here. The state of Georgia figures very prominently in the lead up to this and there are special reasons for that. Georgia was a particularly exposed and unpopulated, undeveloped, frontier area. It was the last of the states to be organized as a colony by the British in the early 18th century.

It was the least populous of the original 13 states. And it was exposed on the north, on the south and in the west by hostile Indian nations. And so they had a particular interest here. They had a very long and violent history with these nations. The Cherokee, the creek, and the Seminole nations that bordered it to the north, to the west, and to the south had all been at times at war with the colony and later state of Georgia or just subjecting the area to violent raids and pillage attacks, basically

for cattle rustling and the provision of tribes that were frequently suffering from famine. So we can understand why they would go on a cattle rustling operation in Georgia, because if they didn't, they would likely starve. And that was one of the typical justifications or explanations given for these rates. But the people in Georgia had been subject to Indian invasion and pillage in the French and Indian War, which started in 1754, all the way up to the physical removal of these nations, which begins in the 1830s. So this is a particular concern of theirs, and that's one of the reasons why our story begins with them. So because Georgia has such a long history of these violent attacks with these hostile nations, mostly the creeks. The creeks bear most of the blame for this.

In 1802, Georgia entered into a compact with the federal government to cede all of the, of its westward claims in areas that are now Alabama and Mississippi in exchange for the federal government to ensure Georgia's legal sovereignty inside her own territory. And this was specifically in relation to Indian nations, the creeks and Cherokee who claimed portions of Georgia. the Cherokee having the largest and most important area, most of North Georgia. The federal government was very slow to enforce this compact, and this is a element in the talks about these Indian matters for generations to come. So the dispute was about title to hunting lands, primarily in the north of Georgia. And this is a particular concern of the Indian nations because of their hunter-gatherer mode of life.

They require very large frontier areas around their bases of settlement for hunting, for for for for for for for for foraging and such. And this is a supplement to them, especially in times of famine. which they frequently experience. They have a very low and inefficient level of agricultural production. They are growing vegetables and such, but they're very slow in developing domestic livestock. None of them have traditions of keeping livestock at the time of European encounter. Yet they have a hunger for them. They want to eat beef.

They want to eat bacon. They want to have eggs and everything. But they don't cultivate these animals or they cultivate them very inefficiently and remain dependent on the Anglo-American settlers. And that's an important thing to consider. You know, it's one thing for them to claim to be an independent people. But when they're economically dependent on the largesse of the Anglo-Americans, on their ability to settle debts with merchants and farmers with land sessions, when they are dependent on the federal government,

to come in and pay their outstanding debts to merchants, something that threatens a much more serious intervention, or with the Anglo-American community, the federal government would step in and arrange a new treaty, settle all the debts with the merchants and claim some more of these hunting grounds. This was the process by which most of these nations lose their claims to their frontier lands. There is a major cultural conflict here because the tribes in Georgia and elsewhere, they claim a political status inside the territory of Georgia.

So they have this tribal organization. There's no central government at this point in any of the native peoples. They all have personal authority vested in a local chieftain, who is the head man for somewhere between one and 200 individual Indians. And at no point in their history is there a thorough record of just a how many chiefs there are or where they are in a region. So they grow in their dependency on the Anglo-Americans, and this is a cause for serious conflict. It's also a cause of legitimate worry among those with humanitarian concerns, which kind of typifies the Anglo-American mindset

then as it does now, Anglo-American elites then were very concerned about the fate of the Indian nations. Our educated people today share the same concerns. They don't want to see these people oppressed or put upon. They don't want to see them go extinct. They hate to see them suffering. They don't like to see them dependent. They want them to be more independent. This description, it describes the sentiments of Andrew Jackson as well as us.

Just by and large, this is the way most people feel then and now. And President James Monroe gives speeches to Congress, beginning in 1824, on the question. Monroe says that the tribes are in danger of extinction. He says their populations are declining. They've become entirely dependent on manufactured goods that they have no ability to produce for themselves. They are not feeding themselves adequately. They're chronically indebted to us. He says the government policy has been to promote the civilization of these tribes,

especially the permanent practice of agriculture, and to reduce the need for forage and consequently the need for hunting frontiers that they depend on in times of stress. Monroe says the forceful ejection of these tribes is, quote, revolting to humanity and utterly unjustifiable. Now, this is 1824. This is six years before the Indian Removal Act. And we see this is a presidential concern. And indeed, in Washington's administration, back at the beginning of the federal period, Washington establishes the Indian Bureau, or he asks Congress to grant this. He wants to start this as an executive department, and they oblige.

And the goal is to monopolize trade with the native tribes so that private individuals would not prey on their needs and also that the federal government would be able to settle its own debts with the nations and not have to go through third parties. The states wouldn't get involved. Private interests wouldn't get involved. This was an interesting idea. It did not work practically, and there never was a means to enforce it. But it does set up the Indian agencies. And this is a major civil service arm of the executive where the official policy of the federal government is conducted through these men who are on the ground who typically marry in the tribes where they serve, live most of their lives and spend their careers among these people.

They know several of the native languages, and they're the ambassadors with the federal government or from the federal government to those nations. They also are supposed to conduct all the trade with those nations. So this is actually a mercantile role. They're unable, interestingly, by law, unable to sell whiskey to the tribes. The tribes always find another way to get it or private individuals in those tribes. They find other ways to get the whiskey from private sources. And also, they're not supposed to be able to take land

as security for any of the trades. And so the goal there is that the tribes will not lose any more of their land because of indebtedness to merchants. And that was George Washington's initiative. So it shows the incentives of the leadership in regards to relations with the nations. So Monroe, he says that Congress must develop a plan to settle the nations on federal territory across the Mississippi somewhere. And, pardon me, Monroe, he says that the competition of the Indians with the Americans, the economic competition, the competition for land is degrading to the Indians. Over time, the Indians lose everything they lay claim to. They are so dependent on these articles of trade.

They have lost the ability to fend for themselves. They no longer make their own clothes. They no longer make their own tools. They are incapable of making their own clothes. They're incapable now of making their own tools. they're incapable of surviving without the beneficence of the federal government, which is their paternalistic protector at this point. And increasingly we see the relationship spoken of in those terms. Interestingly, during the Monroe administration, we see the very first effort

I am aware of, the first effort I have found in my reason. search on this, to establish an Indian reservation. This takes place in the territory of Florida, just recently acquired from Spain. It's still a territory in this stage. It is not a state, which is a very important note. It's federal territory. So the federal agents, the Indian agents, sign a treaty with the Seminoles and Muskogee or Creek of Florida to establish a reservation. This is the Treaty of Moultrie Creek, and it delineates most of central Florida. So from the inland by Jacksonville, Florida, down south towards Fort Lauderdale and the interior over towards Tampa, it would have encompassed Gainesville and modern-day Orlando.

and Point South. So it was a very large territory. And the idea was that the natives in Florida would remove themselves to that area. And in exchange, they would get provisioned by the federal government and a kind of sovereign autonomy in the region. So they would be subsidized to remove themselves there. They would have provision there. And there would be enough territory, in theory, for them to rest on for hunting and gathering. There really are very few Indians in Florida at this stage. This does not work. The Treaty of Maltry Creek is a bust because those that agree to the treaty don't remove themselves to the agreed area.

So there isn't any settlement there ultimately, and the whole thing is a bust. but it's an interesting example of what American authorities have in mind at this stage. So there are several failed bills in Congress during the Monroe and Adams administrations. In 1827, the Cherokee surprised everyone by organizing a central government and proclaiming a constitutional union of the Cherokee Nation. So they establish a president, a legislature, and a Supreme Court in imitation of the Philadelphia Constitution. This is quite alarming to the Georgians. Once again, the Georgians, they have had decades of invasion, murder, arson, rape on their frontiers,

mostly with the creeks and the Seminoles in the South on the border with Spanish Florida. They've been deeply invaded by these raids coming out of Florida. This was actually the impetus for Andrew Jackson's invasion of Florida. Following the War of 1812, Jackson goes into Florida in 1818. it's called the first seminal war, even though no seminals were ultimately involved in the conflict. Jackson just goes down there and executes the British arms dealers who are selling the natives' weapons for their raids and then removes. John Quincy Adams then makes an ultimatum to Spain, and this results in the acquisition of Florida in 1819. So the United States actually buys Florida.

Interestingly, the United States buys the whole of Florida for $5 million. Remember that figure because it's going to come up a bit later. So the Cherokees, they proclaim a constitution. This is part of the Cherokee gambit for sovereignty. They want to be recognized as a people separate from the American people. They don't want to be considered a domestic people, like inside the authority of the American government. They are not counted in the census. They are not taxed.

They fall into this curious category that's very difficult to define at this point in time. The state of Georgia is very upset about this, and so are the, the, the, uh, original Democrats, the people that come to back, Andrew Jackson, they are outspoken that this is Imperium in Imperio. This is a foreign country inside of one's own country, and it cannot be tolerated. This is a fundamental conflict of political authority. There has to be a single sovereignty. It's not something that can be divided. It's not something can be shared, especially with a foreign power. John Quincy Adams, in his farewell address to Congress in December 1828, so Jackson's already been elected. He says to Congress about the natives, the Indians had been

considered as children to be governed, as tenants at discretion, to be dispossessed as occasion might require as hunters to be indemnified by trifling concessions for removal from the grounds from which their game was extirpated. In changing the system, it would seem as if a full contemplation of the consequences of the change had not been taken. We have been far more successful in the acquisition of their lands, then in imparting to them the principles or inspiring them with the spirit of civilization. But in appropriating to ourselves, their hunting grounds, we have brought on ourselves the obligation of providing them with subsistence. Then he goes on to say, they are now claiming, though they cannot support themselves, though they remain dependent on us, for goods they cannot

produce, to settle their debts they cannot pay, they are proclaiming their sovereignty inside of our own territory. And this is Adam's reference to the Cherokee Constitution in particular. He commands Congress, some remedy is needed for this problem. And moreover, he says, our chief question is, how are the Indians to be preserved? And this is most certainly the the consensus. There are those, maybe particularly in Georgia. We see a lot of very outraged people in Georgia at this stage, but we must remember these people do have an excuse that we should be able to sympathize with on some level. The people of Georgia are very outspoken. They do not want to be around these native tribes any longer. And this becomes an occasional

of a test of the rights of the state, which is of particularly importance for our series. And that's one of the reasons why I've zoomed in on this issue. The Georgians have for decades, you've got to remember going back to the 1850s, they have had multiple wars in every generation with the tribes that surround them. These are people in a state with a particularly small population, a particular, rural population that have friends, have family members who were the victims of Indian violence, were victimized by having their homes burned, by having their cattle stolen. They are embittered by this.

And normally, this is not something that people get over. Your children are stolen away from you and carried into slavery in Florida. Your women have been brutalized and scalped, and you've seen it happen, and you were unable to stop it. Or perhaps you, you know, you're a family member. You come across your family homestead, and you see it's all been burned, and everyone that you loved is dead. This is not something that people normally get over, and it's not something even with a Christian ethic that we can really expect. people to get over. This is something that makes people very vindictive typically. And this is one of the reasons why Georgia was so very outspoken about these issues. They did not want these nations

living in a tribal mode of life and maintaining their own laws and authorities inside the territory of Georgia. This is, this was their outspoken point. No doubt there were many of them that wanted them forcibly expelled at an earlier date. And we can hardly, we need not imagine very much to know why. So there's reason to understand. In 1828, so the same year Jackson is elected, the same year Adams makes the speech, the state of Georgia passes a law adding Cherokee hunting lands to existing counties. So they're bypassing the tradition of respecting tribal title to those frontier hunting and foraging areas.

This is preliminary to applying Georgia law to all Cherokee held areas, even though tribal law and the rights of tribal chiefs in their Tribal bands has not been surpassed here. This is a preliminary to that. So Georgia is really pushing the envelope on the issue. And this puts them in conflict with federal enforcement to a degree. It's important to note this all takes place before the discovery of gold in tribal lands in North Georgia. Georgia actually adds the hunting frontier. lands to their counties before gold is discovered. That is frequently used as an excuse when people

investigate this period and they say, oh, well, Georgia just wanted the gold. They were all greedy, willing to steal tribal lands to get rich and such. That is no explanation for the lead up to this point. And Georgia also justifies the 28 law by the 1802 compact with the federal government. They are contending that the federal government never did what they said they were going to do in relation to the Cherokees in particular. Now, the federal government has its hands tied when it comes to the tribal lands. There are those in the federal government, particularly related to mission societies devoted to the Native Americans who have been lobbied by them, and they are a powerful lobby at this point in history.

They want to see a sovereign state carved out of Georgia for the Cherokees, perhaps as a member state of the Union. Now, this is forbidden explicitly in the Constitution. This is not viable. In Article 4, Section 3 of the Constitution, the Constitution says that the federal government may not divide a state. There's a means to do it. They have to do it with the state's consent and with the ratification of the measure by Congress. So it's a high bar. And Georgia certainly is in no position here to or that they have a position, but they have no will at all. That idea would be extremely unpopular in Georgia. So there's just no way to go forward with that. Now, Jackson takes office in 29, and he mentions the problem with the tribes in his inaugural address. And I have an extended quote here.

He says, our conduct toward these people is deeply interesting to our national character. Their present condition, contrasted with what they once were, makes a most powerful appeal to our sympathies. Our ancestors found them the uncontrolled possessors of these vast regions. By persuasion and force, they have been made to retire from river to river and from mountain to mountain, until some of the tribes have become extinct and others have left but remnants to preserve. For a while, their once terrible names, surrounded by the tribes. by the whites with their arts of civilization, which, by destroying the resources of the savage, doom him to weakness and decay. The fate of the Mohegan, the Narragansett, and the Delaware,

is fast overtaking the Choctaw, the Cherokee, and the Creek. That this fate surely awaits them if they remain within the limits of the states, does not admit of a doubt. Humanity and national honor demand that every effort should be made to avert so great a calamity. It is too late to inquire whether it was just in the United States to include them in their territory within the bounds of the new states whose limits they could control. That step cannot be retraced. So note here, Jackson says, the states are already there. We cannot redraw the territorial. We cannot redraw the territorial boundaries of the existing states. The Constitution forbids it. We can look back and ask the historical question, should we have drawn the boundaries around the nations where they would exist

inside the state's territory? But that bridge has been burned. There is no going back to that. He says, a state cannot be dismembered by Congress or restricted in the exercise of a constitutional power. But the people of those states, and of every state, actuated by feelings of justice and regard for our national honor, submit to you the interesting question whether something cannot be done consistently within the rights of the states to preserve this much injured race. Now, coming from Andrew Jackson, of all people, this is very extraordinary. This is a man who has seen the brutalities of frontier warfare with the nation's firsthand.

He has seen the massacre of civilians. Memorably, he's spurred into action in the Creek War in Alabama by the largest massacre in American history at 4.4. Mims, over 500 soldiers and civilians killed by surprise by the creeks in the middle of the day. A man who has witnessed what Andrew Jackson witnessed has sincerely, and we have every reason to believe this, we have a tremendous amount of private correspondence where he's offering the exact same sentiments. He wants federal policy and tax dollars to conserve not just these nations. but their traditional laws and customs, their tribal mode of government, even, by extension,

the culture that bred that brutality because he finds it in some sense valuable. He doesn't want to see it go extinct. This is quite a testimony to the power of liberal ideas, even at this stage in American history. So Jackson insists, no far. and independent government is allowed in American territory. That is not surprising at all. So he puts the cabash on the Cherokee constitution and their claim of sovereignty. He proposes to Congress that they be allowed to immigrate to federal territory or submit to the laws of the states where they now reside. This is an interesting choice. They can stay where they are currently

so long as they give up their traditional laws and their tribal form of government. No longer can the Indian chiefs be appealed to whenever there is a dispute, whenever there is a crime, whenever there is an Indian suspect of a crime. Formally, the chiefs were the intermediaries for all of this, and it was extremely cumbersome. So the federal government had to go through the Indian agent. The Indian agent would contact the chief. then the chief would decide about identifying the perpetrator, submitting him to tribal courts for justice. And then there's this aggrieved party outside the nation who says, well, this Indian stole from me or has committed a felony.

And this is all very dissatisfying. And this is a really serious problem. It's extremely upsetting, especially in Georgia, that the laws of Georgia are not applied equally to all of the people in Georgia. And it seems to give the citizens of Georgia a disadvantage where they are parties. There's, let's see, there's constant conflict between the tribes and American authorities. he says, Andrew Jackson says, about his proposed legislation for the Indian question, that, quote, the immigration should be voluntary, for it would be as cruel and unjust to compel the Aborigines to abandon the graves of their fathers and seek a home in a distant land. So he says to Congress, there should not be a mechanism in the legislation to, force them to leave. They should be able to stay, but if they stay, they have to submit to the

laws of the states where they reside. Interestingly, after the passage of the Indian Removal Act in 1830, Andrew Jackson is the only president in American history to assemble a tribal council and to attend in person. He goes to Tennessee. He assembles a council of Choctaws and Chickasaws. Interestingly, these are his very same allies in the Creek War in 1814. These are some of the exact same people that marched all the way to New Orleans and fought at his side against the British in New Orleans. He is the only president to actually go and attend a tribal council. And he makes this appeal to them.

He says, preserve your people and your nation. That's his quote. He says, old men lead your young men to a land of promise, preserve your people and your nation. Alternatively, he does say, to the laws in the state where you now reside, you must submit there is no alternative if you stay. So he makes the choice very clear. And at the end of the council, the chiefs that attend from the Choctaws and Chickasaws elect to go to the territory. They like to follow the leadership of Jackson, their old comrade.

Now, the state of the nations at this juncture deserves a bit of investigation. We have an interesting fellow. His name is Thomas McKinney. He is a Protestant missionary who has traveled across the country on a mission of religious enlightenment and also encouragement to adapt the arts of society. civilization. So he's he's an educator as well as a missionary and has served in the north and in the south. He is widely traveled and he writes a lot about the state of the nations in the 1820s. So McKinney, he says of the nations in the northwest, this is just a picture of the situation.

He says, the Northwest Indians pretend to nothing more than to maintain all the characteristics, traits of their race. They catch fish, they plant patches of corn, they dance, paint, hunt, get drunk when they can get liquor, fight, and often starve. He says of the

Seminoles of Florida, he says they're in a truly deplorable state in all respects. It is not known that they have advanced a single step in any sort of improvement. And as to the means of education, when offered to them, they refuse.

So he's quite frustrated. And he makes the rounds because the missionary societies devoted to the Native Americans, in particular, the Dutch Reformed Church of New York. They seem to be very involved with this. I'm not quite sure why that is. But they're one of the more outspoken groups. McKinney speaks to their conferences and offers his opinions in their newspapers. McKinney is a very unlikely supporter of the Indian Removal Act.

He speaks publicly about this. He said that if all power was given to him to make a decision on the matter, he would kindly but firmly demand the removal of the nations. from the estates where they then resided and the removal to federal territory. His reasoning for that was because they are in conflict with a fundamentally different culture that puts them at a disadvantage in every respect. Therefore, it degrades them. It causes unnecessary suffering with them. And this corresponds to federal policy. Also, it corresponds to the constant pleas of the chieftains themselves that the access their people have to whiskey is incredibly

detrimental to them as a people. This is one of the reasons why McKinney says if we remove them far enough from our centers of population, they'll have a chance. Jackson, after he is president in 1929, or 1829, forgive me, he writes in a letter, if the nation, go west, there is every probability. They will always be free from the mercenary influence of white men. Here, his references to their chronic indebtedness to American merchants, and they will be undisturbed by the local authority of the states. Under such circumstances, the general government can exercise a parental control over their interests. So what we get on May 28, 1830 is the Indian Removal Act from Congress.

There is, it's contested, it's a very passionate contest. It does pass with minorities or minority in excess of what's required. I should say majority, of course. It passes with majorities in both houses. Interestingly, there are a couple of dissenters. Davy Crockett of Tennessee dissents says there's going to be force involved inevitably, even though there's nothing about force in the bill itself. Another dissenter is Sam Houston, who is himself an Indian agent at this stage,

living out in what is now Oklahoma. Sam Houston dissents and says that there's going to be incredible insensitive. incentives for fraud, therefore it shouldn't happen. And that is maybe a better, a better sort of prophecy about where it all eventually goes, but curious that two of Jackson's former colleagues back in Tennessee dissented from him on this. Now, we get to the Supreme Court cases, and this is a really interesting matter. This is touching more directly on our our theme for our whole series here. In 1831, the Supreme Court hears a case, the Cherokee Nation versus the state of Georgia. So this is the Cherokee contesting Georgia's 1828 annexation of

tribal land and a proclamation of legal authority over the Cherokees in the territory of Georgia. the Supreme Court hears the case and then Chief Justice John Marshall rules that the court does not have jurisdiction to hear it because it does not originate properly. So it's kind of a technical reason to dismiss the case. But nevertheless, in Marshall's opinion, he says he memorably calls the nations, domestic, dependent nations. And this is very important because the Cherokee were contending in their case that they were a foreign nation, a separate and independent political power. Marshall dismisses the case for technical grounds about its origination. However, in his statement, he dismisses the actual grounds of the suit by saying they are not foreign nations. this is not a foreign sovereign power as they contend.

They are actually under independence on the federal government. And this is a statement of fact and not of theory. Without the beneficence of the federal government, without the annuities, the supplies, the cash payouts from the treaties with these nations in their collaboration with the federal government, These people would have been starving in larger numbers. There is no doubt about it. Their existence where they were was because of the largesse of the federal government. They were not economically independent. They had pretensions to be politically independent.

And the Cherokees, by the way, had more grounds for pretensions on both of those accounts. The Cherokees were more adaptive to permanent agriculture, more adaptive to adopt industry, had famously developed with their own people a written language and had started publishing books, had started publishing newspapers with their own indigenous alphabet. They had ratified a constitution. They had come a very long way. Another way that they'd come along is they had adopted. plantation agriculture with African slavery.

And this is a very long-running problem. When the Cherokee are expelled in the later 1830s by the federal government, the ones that are still there anyway that get expelled. They are expelled with their slaves. And this has been a modern legal quandary with the Cherokee Nation. The Cherokee Nation, the modern Cherokee Nation out in Oklahoma, they've contained. intended for a very long time that the slaves that they took with them were not members of the Cherokee Nation, which is not surprising. But recently there is a court ruling because there are lots of suits about this.

It turned out the Cherokee that went to Oklahoma were put on land that had a lot of oil resources. So there is a lot of communal wealth that's at stake. and the litigants, descendants of the slaves of the Cherokees, got a ruling from the court that they are, in fact, entitled to tribal resources against the will of the Cherokee. So that's an interesting new development. So we get that line, domestic dependent nations from John Marshall. In 1832, we have another interesting case, very interesting for us, Worcester versus Georgia. Now, Mr. Worcester, I think his name was Samuel Worcester.

He's another one of these Anglo-American missionaries on the tribal lands. He's from New England, and he's also a political radical. And he wants a test case for Cherokee sovereignty. So he has financial backing to take this all the way to the Supreme Court, and he does deliberately provocative things to get the case that he wants to get. There are great many examples of this kind of case in history. So Worcester was a white man on tribal land without a license. The state of Georgia prohibits, even after the 28 Act, there are still tribal lands.

The state of Georgia prohibits any white man from going on tribal lands without a license. Now, why might they do that? To control access to the tribes. To make sure that no one squats on Indian land. And there aren't any unauthorized merchants going on Indian land. So the state is regulating contact with the Indian nations, specifically out of paternalism. It's conservation policy. That's why they don't let Worcester on the land without a license.

Now, people doing missions where it get licenses for this all the time. Worcester deliberately did not get a license and then let it be known that he was breaking the state law. So Worcester is now contending against the Georgia law at the Supreme Court. Marshall rules that Georgia laws on a concern. Indian lands are unconstitutional. So Marshall is ultimately ruling against the 28 annexation by the Georgia legislature. Andrew Jackson responds to this. Now, obviously, this is contending more for Indian sovereignty than Marshall's first decision in the Cherokee Nation versus Georgia. Marshall is playing for the Cherokees in this decision. Now, this is where Andrew Jackson has

memorable lines about the Supreme Court power. And I'm sure that we've all heard the quip. Marshall has made his decision. Now let him enforce it. This is perhaps an apocryphal quote. The very first instance of that quote from Andrew Jackson was made by Horace Greeley of all people, the editor of the New York Tribune, and kind of a crackpot. Okay. He, He hired Karl Marx as his European correspondent. He was also a presidential candidate later on. He's at odd times an adherent of all sorts of crackpot socialism things, vegetarianism.

He promotes all sorts of weird ideas. So it's not at all, it's not beyond the realm of possibility. He invents this. we don't have other sources for that quote, even though it's a very famous quote we attribute to Jackson. Jackson has made his decision, or Marshall has made his decision, now let him enforce it. Curiously, the Supreme Court under Marshall does not make an attempt to use federal resources to enforce this ruling. So it doesn't come to that. There isn't an actual conflict between the executive and the judiciary here, other than the judiciary makes an opinion. the president disagreed with. It isn't enforced. Marshall made his opinion. He couldn't enforce it. And the president had no need to push the issue here. What we do have is Jackson on the record

private correspondence with his lifelong friend and military subordinate in the Creek War, the dashing Colonel Coffee of Tennessee, of Jackson's great lieutenant who is with him on his greatest campaigns. He says the Supreme Court decision fell stillborn. They find they cannot coerce Georgia to yield to its mandate. So Jackson has been, from the start, the advocate of the state's prerogatives in regard to these nations. Jackson has contended for Georgia's stance here. And Jackson knows better than anyone in Washington at this stage. what Georgia has witnessed in preceding decades, the constant Indian warfare in the area, the violence that results from it. It's a curiosity in relation to Worcester v. Georgia.

Marshall certainly is thinking of previous Supreme Court rulings against Georgia. back in 1793, a private man from South Carolina sued the state of Georgia, and it went to the Supreme Court. The Supreme Court, under John Jay, ruled in favor of Mr. Chisholm of South Carolina in the case Chisholm versus Georgia. The Georgia legislature immediately responded to this ruling, which was for a half million dollars because of Georgia, laying claim to territory and selling it off that Chisholm had previously made some title to. That was the matter of the case. Georgia says they have sovereign immunity. They cannot be sued by a private individual.

And they are not going to abide by the Supreme Court decision. So the Georgia legislature passes a bill and says if the Supreme Court attempts to enforce this law or this ruling of the Supreme Court in Georgia, Any federal marshal that enters the state to affect that ruling will be executed without benefit of clergy. That is a law in the state of Georgia. And that was certainly on John Marshall's mind when it came to attempting to execute his Worcester versus Georgia ruling. One of my teachers on this matter, the late great Ross Lentz of Houston. said, you might call these people lunatics to say they'll execute the federal marshal in such a way. But, you know, they're my kind of lunatics.

And I much agree. This is what it means for a people to assert their sovereign power. There are no half measures here. Someone wants to subvert your sovereignty. You're at war with them. That's what it comes down to. And that's a long tradition there. in Georgia. So the Georgia situation, they all out go for the confiscation of all tribal lands in 1832.

In 1835, there is an interesting treaty because the Cherokee are still there. There have been outliers among the Cherokee that have elected to go west. They have a long presence in places like Texas and the Indian territory, what becomes Oklahoma. The Cherokee are actually out there before the Indian Removal Act and the organization of the territory. But most of the Cherokee are still in North Georgia. In 1835, we see the Treaty of New Itchota, and the Cherokee are divided into two major parties at this stage.

They still have a national government. they have a legislature, they have a president, but there are two major parties in the Cherokee Nation. There's the national party which says we want to preserve our tribal customs, our national sovereignty, our constitution, our legislature, and we will resist federal force. Well, that's a big problem. If you say, okay, we have a collective here. We are pop. public about this and we will contend against federal authority. The FBI comes down on your head if you say that. You can't make that, I guess, unless you're Antifa or something, right? But this is a challenge to federal authority. So the fact that they're still there and they're still able to convene and make proclamations of this sort and publish it in their newspapers

is kind of extraordinary. This is five years after the Indian Removal Act. And remember, the Indian Removal Act, it's only two pages long. It's easy to find. It's easy to read. There is no provision in it for the forcible removal of the nations. But the Treaty of New Ichota, the National Party, which is urging resistance of the federal government, is up against the Treaty Party. The Treaty Party is led by a very interesting fellow named Stan Watty, who is a chief of the Cherokee. Stan Wadi says the federal government, according to the Indian Removal Act, they have to assess our lands for improvements, and then they'll offer us a payout.

They have negotiated through back channels with federal agents. The federal government is willing to give them $5 million. Now, remember, that's the price that was paid for Florida, for all of Florida. This is a much smaller territory, probably more valuable. because it's Georgia and not Florida without air conditioning. No one really wants to do anything in Florida. And there are major natural resources there in North Georgia, the gold, for instance. But that's a big payout.

There is a vote on this. This is a really tumultuous period. And it's really hard to make out just how all this stuff works. Wadi is up against another chief. the leader of the national party. His name is John Ross. Ross decides to not attend the vote for the treaty of Nuichota because it would lend it credibility. He's hoping to discredit it by denying them a significant number of the convention for the treaty ratification. This leaves Wadi in charge, and they vote unanimously for the treaty.

The treaty then goes to the Cherokee legislature where it narrowly passes. Then John Ross brings huge petitions to the legislature, urging them to reconsider. These petitions are suspect because they claim they've received the outcry of over 16,000 people. That's more people than in the Cherokee territory. That's men, women, and children. So that doesn't make any sense. What are all these petitions supposed to be? Is this fraud?

We don't know. There probably was fraud there. But there's so many things going on in this period. People are wrecking each other's newspapers in the Cherokee Nation because of this matter. People are being assassinated who are leaders in both of these factions in the Cherokee Nation. But the Treaty of Nui Chota means that Wati removes himself and his party to the Indian territory. They take the payout. It's going to be equally divided among the faction.

And they go to the Indian territory, which means that John Ross and those that stay don't get a payout for the seized lands. And this is what they end up opting for politically. And this is part of what is celebrated perversely when people talk about the Trail of Tears later on. So let's get to that. I know we've gone over an hour here, but I'm going to wrap this up here shortly. So there's something comparable going on down in the south a couple years previous. In 1832, the Treaty of Maltry Creek, the Treaty of Moultrie Creek, the Incent, to, or the initiative, I should say, to set up the first Indian reservation in the center of

Florida is a failure. In 1832, there's another attempt to do this with the Seminoles. It's called the Treaty of Paines Landing, and it's trying to get the Seminoles to voluntarily remove themselves to the federal territory, the Indian territory in the West. So they can only get, they can only get nine chiefs together for this. The nine chiefs agree to go and survey the lands in the Indian territory and then make a decision about voluntary removal. They go, they survey. It takes them quite a while to get this done. It takes them a couple of years to actually assemble and then go and then survey. And then they go to Fort Gibson in the Indian Territory, and they sign a treaty saying,

we've surveyed the land, we like it, this is a good deal, let's take the buyout. Congress has appropriated funds in the Indian Removal Act to purchase our lands from us. Let's take the buyout. Let's take the moving aid and let's settle on these lands. As soon as they get back to Florida, they encounter their people face to, face and all nine chiefs reneg and they say that wasn't me adhering to the treaty of fort Gibson back in oklahoma um i didn't sign on to that i didn't say that i disagree with what you say i said we want to stay in florida um in 1833 uh there are raids in georgia again

uh creek and cherokee raids um this renews the outcry in georgia The Georgians are so upset about this and they see this as a federal dereliction of duty. Their congressmen are saying, we are members of the American Union in the United States Army is not defending us against these domestic nations who keep attacking us. We want them out of here or they must submit to our law. And we can imagine plenty of people in Georgia, much preferred, the removal. removal, the total removal of these people. They don't want them around. They don't trust them. In 1836, we see the outbreak of the Seminole War. Now, this is the second Seminole War. This stems from the dissatisfaction with the Treaty of Pains Landing, the reneging of the Seminoles. The United States Army does not attack these people. What happens is the Seminoles actually launch a raid on the, you know, United States Army. They massacre Colonel Dade and his men. This is like 300, 300 soldiers north of Tampa. They ambush them. They massacre them. And this begins the second Seminole War. This is the longest and

most costly Indian war in American history. It's beginning right at the end of Jackson's second term. but in 1836, Allied creeks in the territory of Georgia start raiding the interior of Georgia off of the Chattahoochee River, where the creeks are still settled in the area. Now, something interesting happens. General Winfield Scott goes in to protect Allied Creek villages who were not party to the attack on the Chattahoochee. They have removed themselves to Florida, presumably. However, the Georgia militia has assembled in the region. And Scott, General Scott, puts himself in between the Creek villages and the Georgia militia. He then intercedes with the Creek chiefs at these villages.

And he says, the time has come. You have maintained a tribal mode of government in contradiction to federal law. Remember, this is six years later. You have not accepted a buyout. Now there's a war. Now there are creeks raiding in your area. You are creeks. Georgians are not going to make any distinction between you and the creeks that have been

murdering their civilians lately. You must leave. Or the militia is going to wipe you out. So this is the first instance. This happens in the context of war, but Scott actually creates the circumstances that lead to the removal of the creeks on the Chattahoochee. So there's this strong arm negotiation in the midst of fighting, which is important. And that the Georgia militia was there is also important because these are very aggrieved people at this point. Now, Martin Van Buren takes office in 1837.

The Second Seminole War continues. It lasts like seven years, I believe. Martin Van Buren is president when we see the organized military removal of the creeks that stayed behind with Chief Ross in North Georgia. They continue to publicize. They're going to resist the federal government. They're going to stay there. but the key is it'd be one thing if they said we're going to stay here and we're going to abide by the laws of the state of Georgia where we live. The state that we're inside the state of Georgia.

The state of Georgia has jurisdiction over us. If they had said that, they could have stayed. The fact of the matter was they insisted on keeping their tribal mode of government. We remember the warrior culture of the Indian people is the thing that, the Anglo-Americans cannot trust inside of their own territory. The tribal mode of government means the chief is in between the Indian malefactor and any American authority. This is a conflict of authority, and it's very dissatisfying. The Anglo-Americans also connect the tribal government with the warrior culture, and that's the right of passage of the young man who has

to kill an enemy in battle to be accepted in his tribe. This is a rite of passage into manhood, and this is the origin of customs like taking scalps. So you can prove that you have felled your enemy in battle, and now you can get married because you've taken a scalp. I have people coming to me very regularly, because I talk about this a lot. They say, I thought scalping was this barbarous European custom introduced in the American nations. And that's not to say that no one in Europe ever scalped anybody, but this is a preposterous notion. This is something that was widespread among the Native Americans, and there are many different customs relating to it. Some of them hung the scalps of their victims in their wigwams, and these were, these were like signs of their prowess, their leadership, and so on.

Mighty chiefs typically had a row of scalps that they had on display. But you go to the southwest, the Apaches took scalps. But according to Geronimo, of all people, great Apache warrior, it was considered. to be bad magic to keep a scalp. So they would return to their community with the scalp and then they would get rid of it. But they still displayed it, which is very interesting. But in 1838, the Cherokee that insist on keeping their tribal form of government insist that they have their own tribal laws and they are not under the jurisdiction of the laws of Georgia. They are put into camps and they are forced down to the Indian territory, what is now Oklahoma.

And this is the start of the famous event we call the Trail of Tears. But we see in all of this the drama between the state authorities and the federal authorities of various dissatisfactions with the state authorities and also those compelling Supreme Court cases related to the powers of the states. we see interestingly, John Marshall once again ruling against the state sovereignty and even potentially, you know, leading to some argument about a divided sovereignty inside the territory of Georgia. So the Supreme Court tempting fate proposing to divide a state against its will in the matter of the Indian question. So all that to say, Andrew

Jackson in his creation of the reservations. He is, he sets up a system that survives to this day. He should get credit for the imagination that goes into this. His reason for it was the conservation of the traditional mode of life, the tribal customs and political structure. He wants to conserve these ethnic minorities. And he wants to conserve them at public expense. They are dependent on American resources. And so Jackson codifies this through the Indian Bureau and their administration of the reservations. They are sustained at taxpayer expense on federal territory outside the jurisdiction of American states. The goal remains to teach them the arts of civilization, to incline them towards permanent agriculture and increased economic independence.

That is not entirely the case with the nations even now, but he does this purely from liberal convictions concerning these ethnic minorities. And this is so ironic that he is so maligned for that, blamed as brutal and heartless and all the rest, when he does not actually deserve any of that blame. In fact, he should be lauded as a visionary for such considerations. And these are things that Americans care very deeply about. And so it deserves explaining at some length, as I've done here. And this is also the principal point on which people malign Jackson today.

Jackson also adopted a Creek orphan. I believe I've mentioned that before, raised him as his son, had these Native American allies. the Cherokee, the Chaktaas and Chickazaz who all fought under him in the Creek War and at New Orleans. He's the only president to

attend a tribal council that is an oddity and it shows his sense of honor towards these people. This man who had seen these people at their most brutal, at their most ruthless, and towards innocent

American civilians. It's so extraordinary. It really deserves consideration. So that's my syllabus for this evening. Forgive my occasional coughing. I've been a little congested lately. It's nothing serious. But it's been a real pleasure to join you again tonight.

And thank you for the opportunity. Of course. And thank you for giving us the anti-Judeo-American Howard Zinn. history of this country. We've got to contend it. We have to tell these stories. Who else is going to tell these stories? Yeah.

And people come to us preloaded with Howard Zinn today. They may not have ever heard of Howard Zinn, but it's so ingrained. It's been so consistently used to indoctrinate. It's a radical communist view of American history. and it's actually technically wrong. So it's something we ought to push back against. Whenever you hear this kind of story, you need to come back with the real thing.

And don't let people malign people like Andrew Jackson about his treatment of the Indians. We don't need to look far around the world, after all, to understand why some people have concluded they simply cannot live in proximity to those other people who are always attacking them and murdering them and leveling their cities. We should be able to understand that. That's a very consistent facet of human history. All right.

Let everybody know where they can find your books. Yes. You can find my books at www. Tallmanbooks.com. And there I have a work about Andrew Jackson. It's called The Rain of Andrew Jackson by Frederick Aug. I included in that book an appendix containing a number of excerpts from Jackson's administration, including letters he wrote to various Indian nations. You can also find there my series on famous Indian leaders.

I've got a book about Tacomsa, the great leader, and the great leader. in the War of 1812 and his attempt to form an Indian Confederacy. And I also have a book about the Creek War called Red Eagle and the Wars Among the Creeks. And that much concerns Jackson in 1814. All right. Thank you. Yeah. Thank you.

And we will talk again soon. Have a good evening. You too. I want to welcome everyone back to the Pekiniano show. George Bagby is back. How are you doing this evening, Mr. Bagby? I'm doing all right. I'm very thankful for the opportunity to be here. I am so happy to have you here. And considering what the subject is tonight, a subject that,

something that I think pretty much anyone who came through libertarianism is pretty well, is pretty familiar with. Yeah, this is exciting times, an exciting piece of history in the country. So I'm going to hand it over to you. All right. Well, we're here tonight to talk about Jackson and the Bank of the United States and the long controversy about this particular constitutional issue coming to a head during his administration. And of course, there are inklings at the beginning of Jackson's rise to national fame and political clout that hint that this is going to come to a head at this time. But the way that Jackson seizes this problem and gives it a blow of finality is quite important. And we've talked some time ago about the constitutional issue of the Bank of the United States, that the Constitution does not explicitly give the federal government

any power to establish corporations. But this was done from hands. Hamilton's vision, the broad interpretation of the Constitution, which has a lot of other features that are also prominent in this period. We were talking in relation to Jackson's Rise about John Quincy Adams and his administration, how Adams had a great many innovative ideas, how to use that broad interpretation to establish all sorts of other institutions, a national laboratory, basically a research. a research university with patronage to the intelligentsia, the National Observatory, which eventually does get established under the auspices of the War Department, mostly for the Navy. So there are some other aspects there. But Adams has these very expansive kinds of ideas about what to do with this broad interpretation of federal power. And with the Jackson administration, we see a major counterforce to that

manifest in what becomes the Democratic Party. You recall that at the time of Adams and Monroe, there is really only one party. They're all calling themselves national Republicans. This has no relation to the Republican Party, which is of a later generation. But we see the development of two parties in this period. What becomes the Whig party headed by Henry Clay of Kentucky and the Democrats who are headed by Jackson and his allies. So when Jackson takes office, he speaks out against a large standing army. He says he proposes to cut military expenditure in a time of peace. He is an advocate of the militia. He is an advocate of the militia. as the primary institution of national defense.

We should remember that this is also quite connected to the so-called old Republicans, John Randolph and John Taylor of Carolina, and that set, Nathaniel Macon of North Carolina, these old strict constructionist thinkers who had a long career. Randolph is actually in the House during Jackson's administration. This is the last bit of his long career, but he feels quite vindicated at this point to see many of these old ideas kind of coalesce in what becomes the Democratic Party. Jackson proposes to check the abuse of the civil service, the expansion of federal offices that took place under Monroe and JQ Adams. This is a major issue in his administration. There are an awful lot of allegations in the press that is supporting Jackson. They're basically

Jackson's surrogates at a time when a candidate for high office like the presidency did not campaign. And this remained a tradition in our electoral politics for a long time. Jackson does not travel. He does not make speeches. Instead, the press that supports him that actually has a personal relation with the candidate, they are speaking on his behalf. And one of the things they're doing is they are making a lot of

credible assertions about corruption in the civil service. There are allegations that some of these jobs are simply sinecures to award supporters that the jobs actually don't have any content or duties, that there is embezzlement going on. And indeed, there were trials and such to this effect after Jackson takes office. and these things are substantiated. So these are not just empty sorts of speculations. There's also a major concern about the activity of lobbyists to expand these bureaucracies

to aggrandize themselves, to increase their own political power and such. There's money and politics, of course, because there's so much power in the federal administration, it does attract investment. And this is a concern of Jackson's supporters. During Jackson's administration, he has his official cabinet of his Secretary of War and so on, his vice president, who is John C. Calhoun in his first administration. Calhoun ends up exiting that office kind of dramatically. at a later date, which we will get to by and by. But Jackson famously does not put as much stock in the advice of his cabinet members as did his predecessors.

Instead, he surrounds himself with his great friends and confidants who assemble together in the White House to consult with the president to exchange their views. on issues, and these are called his kitchen cabinet. And some of these actually do get appointments in the federal bureaucracy. One famous example is one Amos Kindle, who is a journalist, a newspaper editor, also a businessman and a philanthropist. He was from Connecticut originally, I believe, but he had settled in Kentucky. and ran some newspapers there. Of course, they're pro-Jackson newspapers. He becomes a undersecretary of the Treasury under Jackson. He's one of Jackson's famous members

of the kitchen cabinet. Also in there is a congressman from New York named Martin Van Buren, who, of course, succeeds Jackson in the White House. first replacing John C. Calhoun in the role of vice president before actually running his own administration in the White House. But Amos Kindle, he becomes the auditor of the Treasury. And he replaces a corrupt auditor. This was a man who was embezzling government money. And under his new role as auditor of the Treasury, he prosecutes his predecessor. So we see certain echoes here of what Thomas Jefferson had wanted to do with the turnover when the federalists lost power at the end of John Adams' administration. You remember that Thomas Jefferson wanted not just to prosecute former federalist officials and to deny them the patronage of government.

government powers and prestige, but also to prosecute federal judges, which he did attempt. He was the last president to do so. But we see certain echoes of that with the actions in Jackson's administration, the successful prosecution, for instance, of the former auditor of the U.S. Treasury, who was a corrupt man? So in 1835, just as a side note, Kendall, he becomes the postmaster general. So he actually joins the cabinet in Jackson's second term in office. And he presides over the largest branch of the civil service, the post office. And Kendall is running a real audit of the civil service in his.

in his role in the Treasury and then later in his role as Postmaster General. He is reviewing the records of the bureaucrats. He is identifying corruption or largesse, you know, unnecessary positions, wasteful government spending for these positions. And according to various historians who have tried to estuble, just how many civil servants were dismissed during Jackson's administration. Some say up to one in five government bureaucrats were dismissed. Others say one in seven. So they do have a span in their estimate and there's argument about this. But what no one denies is that a substantial

portion of the federal bureaucracy was dismissed during Jackson's term. So now we get a to the Bank of the United States. We see Jackson's initiative, his mandate for civil service reform, but he identifies the Bank of the United States early in his private correspondence as his main object for these reforms. He sees the Bank of the United States as a special instrument of patronage of a very hated financial elite. And his constituents share his disdain for this particular class. And there are a number of reasons for this, which we'll get into. He calls the Bank of the United States a hydra-headed monster. He says that it impairs the morals of the people and that they buy members of Congress by the dozen for their lobbying efforts in the legislature.

It constitutes such a powerful financial interest. It is so profitable. And it has this special charter to do business in all of the constituent states of the union by this controversial this controversial interpretation of the Constitution, the broad powers of Hamilton's interpretation of the Constitution, that he has resolved to do away with the institution. Later on, in his veto of Congress's re-charter for the Bank of the United States, he says, it is not, in my opinion, a legitimate power of the federal government. to establish this organization. Now, his enemy has taken to task over this, and they say, well, what about McCullough versus Maryland? John Marshall has already established, you know, in the Supreme Court ruling, that this is a legitimate power given to the federal government by the Constitution.

And this Jackson steadfastly demers on. He says, no, I do not agree, and it is part of my legitimate power as the president to establish the policy on this question. And he succeeds. And this is a remarkable victory for the old Republicans who have been saying this from the start and have been encouraging this. just this kind of action, according to their enemies, a high-handed action using the presidential veto to get rid of the Bank of the United States, but nevertheless establishing the Jeffersonian persuasion. In fact, if not in Supreme Court case law, it is established. and Jackson's destruction of the Bank of the United States is a lasting legacy of his administration, because it is not set up again.

We have to wait until the administration of Abraham Lincoln before we see federal chartered corporations once again. So this is a lasting change. Jackson writes in a private letter, The bank is trying to kill me, but I will kill it. I recall, and I was not able to find, but I recall a remarkable comment from none other than G.K. Chesterton. I know this is in his book, What I Saw in America. Chesterton only went so far south as Tennessee, which he regretted. He said that he wanted to see more of the south.

He must have come like in the later 1800s. He was probably visiting in the 1890s or something. He comes to New York. He goes on a lecture tour. And he does stay in a hotel in Nashville, Tennessee. and he saw a portrait of Andrew Jackson there. And I recall this passage in that book where Chesterton remarks, this was a man who instinctively knew that the bankers were up to no good.

And he did more in his career in politics to strike a blow against that special political interest of high finance than anyone in the West. And that's his commemoration of Andrew Jackson. That was how Chesterton remembered Andrew Jackson. And I really like that remark. I wish that I could quote him here, but that's what I remember him saying. So there's a prejudice against the banks, especially in the rural element that Jackson represents, or I should say the rural and the laboring element, because the Democrats do have a great deal of support in the established East Coast among the working people, among the mechanics and that sort of thing, the wage class. and that's an important element here that we should not lose track of.

We're talking in this series primarily about the South and their position, but this is an important part of the Democrat coalition, and it's a very long-standing part. We might say that that's the part that survives to this day through all of the associations in the modern Democratic Party to organize labor. That's part of the legacy of the Democratic Party, the modern Democratic Party, that extends all the way back to this stage. So the banking situation in America at the time is a real difficult thing to understand. I've spent a lot of time on this year, in fact, I did a series of episodes with the Old Glory Club about the

the Bank of the United States earlier this year where I gave a lot of detail on it. But the gist of it is that there's the Bank of the United States, which is the most powerful established financial institution in the country. They have the largest credit reserve. They make the most loans, but they have a special advantage in that they can operate branches in all of the member states of the union. At no point in their history do they operate branches in all of the states. They do try out branches here and there and find they are not profitable and close them down. But they can move money from one side of the union to the other very quickly.

And this is in the age before telegraphs and all the rest. This is a huge advantage to people doing business across the union. And so the largest commercial interests, the largest industrial interests, will be running their finances from the branch bank in Boston and in the branch bank in New Orleans because they can move their funds from one place to the other very quickly. if they're using the Bank of the United States. The competition of the Bank of the United States are the state chartered banks, which are very differently run. They are chartered by their state where they originate. The states that charter those institutions have a means to regulate them,

but the states have all manner of different regulations. and the chartered banks in the various states may not operate in another state without the permission of those states. And many of them don't. All of these banks, the Bank of the United States and all of the state chartered banks issue their own paper currency. And this is an important factor. Without the Bank of the United States, the only. alternative for a general circulating currency would be the coinage of the United States mint. At no point in this period is there enough specie in circulation, minted gold and silver

coin to meet the needs of the circulation of money for the commercial aspect in the United States, nor even the agricultural interest. Agricultural areas have a major problem when it comes to gold and silver coin for hard currency. Agricultural areas are generating wealth from animal life and from the vegetable world. And from the ground itself, you know, we can link in mining with this, though it's a, in other forms of, of production like the mining of bat guano from caves for nitrates used for fertilizer and gunpowder. That's another special example of bringing wealth literally from out of the ground.

They are selling these things in ports and river towns, in big ports like Charleston and New Orleans, and they need money in exchange. Now, because there's so many commodities going out of those ports, there is a lot of money coming in to those ports. the exchange taking place with factors and merchants in these port cities. But there's a chronic shortage of circulating media. And this means that the banks in the port cities are filling the gap by issuing private currencies. Paper money. Now, this paper money is valued differently from place to place. So if you were in New Orleans in 1830, you would be looking at the newspaper to see how the different paper currencies were trading what the credit was of the different institutions that issue these currencies.

It wasn't only banks that were issuing these private currencies. There were great many chartered institutions of the various states that either they either worked to claim the right to act as a bank if they weren't originally chartered as one or they were explicitly given the right to issue paper currencies. But not all of these were worthy. Some of them were in bad financials. condition and people would read the newspaper and see, oh, well, there's questions about the bonds of this particular institution, say a canal company that had issued paper currency on the side,

and people would short the paper currency. And so it would not trade at par. You might present bills that had been issued by a canal building company, and it looks like they've gone in more for issuing loans and paper currency than they have in actually getting the canal built. And this kind of information goes around. They're like, well, what is this company anyway? Like, do they have a plan to actually make money off of their investments? Is this actually worthwhile? What happens when their loans are called in?

Their paper currency might not be worth anything. And so you might present bills from the canal company. at the mercantile, and the mercantile might say, well, we'll accept that at 75% face value, or 50% face value. This happens all the time with these private currencies. And of course, we see a parallel example, maybe much better today when we look at private currencies in our own day. Cryptocurrencies are a good example of this, that no one really knows what they're worth,

their values fluctuate dramatically based on rumors, and it presents a major downside. One of the advantages of the Bank of the United States is it had the exclusive privilege of being the depository of federal treasury funds. So the customs houses in the port cities across the United States were depositing the tax revenues collected at those ports in the Bank of the United States and only the Bank of the United States. This gave the Bank of the United States a major advantage among all of the other financial institutions that were competing with it. Some of these states had really good regulation for their financial institutions. One outstanding example, which I, I, I,

I like to mention for personal reasons was Louisiana. Louisiana had a very well-regulated banking system. The state was very hesitant to grant banking charters and was quite rigorous in their auditing of these institutions to make sure they were worthy of the privilege to issue paper currency. They had high reserve standards and such things. and Louisiana also had an outsized sort of footprint in that New Orleans was one of the largest ports in the world. And so they did a lot of business with international merchants. And they needed to have a sound banking system in order to keep that business and to keep that investment. So they had certain reasons. other states that were less notable for sound banking were places like Illinois and Rhode Island,

which frequently have financial catastrophes, banks that are revealed to have virtually no credit, but have issued an awful lot of paper currency, and this was a way to farm out profits with unacceptable risks. and there are lots of crises in those particular states. But in the Western states that are growing very quickly, places like Missouri and Kentucky and Arkansas and such, they have a major need for credit. They've got a lot of people coming in trying to set up farms and businesses and such. There's a major market for banking there. great profits to be made, but because these frontier areas are primarily producing commodities, there isn't much money actually coming out of these places. You need to bring money into these places.

The banks try to fill the gap by lowering their standards. And this means that banks have a very bad reputation in the new states in the West. There are an awful lot of bank runs, collapses of these financial institutions, and the circulating media that they've produced becomes worthless. So people that have set up accounts at these banks put their savings into these banks are using the paper currency issued by these banks find themselves up a creek. Their deposits are completely lost when the bank fails. there is no recourse for this. It's the risk that you take in dealing with the bank in this age. The Bank of the United States does not suffer from these problems, having these special privileges and prerogatives. But it's also a special patronage of the federal government. One of the major problems, political problems with the Bank of the United States, is that a lot of foreign capital has come in to invest in share. of the BUS.

And the BUS being so very prominent of the largest financial institution in the United States, having these special privileges being the depository of the federal funds and all the rest, it's issuing dividends. And these dividends are going abroad. Not all of them, but a substantial minority stake in the Bank of the United States is broad. And so they're paying these dividends abroad. And this is a political problem that the Jackson constituency is very interested in.

In 1816, the Bank of the United States had been abolished by President Madison, or at least under his watch. He was not particularly interested in seeing the bank rechartered, the first bank, right before the war of 1812. That causes a lot of problems because now when the United States goes to war with Britain in 1812, they do not have a stable financial institution to finance the war. And this leads to very near disasters, as we previously talked about. In 1816, Madison advocates the founding of a new bank of the United States. we see one William Jones become the CEO of the Bank of the United States. Madison appointed him to the role.

In 1819, there is a major investigation into Jones because he is misusing his position. He is moving funds around in suspicious ways. he's over-extending the bank. Suspitions are aroused when for the very first time in its history, the notes issued by the BUS start trading below par. And this was one of the major outstanding advantages the bank the United States had was that people tended not to speculate on its creditworthiness as they would a state-based bank. But in 1819, Jones is dismissed, an investigation is started, and he has revealed to be corrupt. He has misused his position for personal profit. Anyone that looked into his background would notice that before Madison appointed him,

he was a failed businessman. He had been in bankruptcy. So he didn't have a very responsible record to go on. He got his position because of political connections. He gets replaced by a South Carolinian named Langdon Chiefs, who has a very strict approach to managing the BUS. And in 1819, the year Chiefs comes in, he starts calling in loans and demanding that the bonds of the Bank of the United States

be paid in specie. and not in any other media. So we see he is a hard money guy. He is trying to recover the reputation of the Bank of the United States by insisting on specie payments and accumulating a stock of gold and silver reserves in the bank, increasing its ratio of holdings versus debts. And this triggers a financial panic because a great many of the banks that are buying bonds for the BUS as a means of increasing their own credit. They have no specie to pay the bank of the United States for loans they've taken from the institution and the rest. Cheves insists on specie payments.

And this triggers a huge crisis. In 1819, banks fail mostly in these Western states, which are over-leveraged and badly regulated. And so this causes a disproportionate kind of financial suffering, which the Bank of the United States is blamed for. And we could point our fingers at Jones and his mismanagement, but it's actually it's actually the wise policy of Chiefs, who is actually a responsible sort of figure in the institution that's responsible for this for the crisis of 1819, the panic. One, William Crawford,

who we may remember was one of the presidential contenders in 24, Crawford of Georgia, spoke in Congress on the occasion of the panic in 19. He said, all the evils, oh, my cat is flicking his tail in my notes. I'm sorry.

He said, all the evils which the community in particular parts of the country has suffered are from the sudden decrease of the currency. So he's talking about the disappearance of the paper notes in these less developed areas of the country, agricultural areas of the country, less commercial areas that don't have as much of the circulating currency there, not the established areas in the East Coast. So we see in Crawford, he's blaming the scarcity of money and also blaming. the Bank of the United States for this, saying this is because of the way the Bank of the United States is handling the Western areas, the agricultural areas, and we are suffering disproportionately from it. So we can have a nuanced take here. The Bank of the United States in its history was a stabilizing force. The Bank of the United States was also the recipient of special patronage.

So we can divide the assets and the, let's see, the debits and credits of the Bank of the United States into a couple of categories. There's the constitutional question. We can set that aside for a moment. And we can look at the Bank of the United States from a purely business frame and say the Bank of the United States on the whole was very good for business. And good for stabilizing currency and increasing the efficiency with which money could move from one place to another. Now, for the agrarian point of view, aside from the constitutional question, the agrarians don't like this. Because this means the triumph of what Taylor called the paper system, the conflict between the clever foxes in their own. offices who can manipulate patronage and speculation for profits in the cities versus the actual producers of commodities, the farmers, the mechanics, the entrepreneurs. And we see the crisis that develops about the Bank of the United States in the Jackson

administration is mostly a conflict between those two political. interests, the well-connected establishment, the political class in the East, the merchants, those that do not produce things, those that handle the things others have produced, versus the source of what Taylor would call real wealth, what Taylor, what Jefferson, what Randolph would call real wealth, which is that older vision of the source of wealth, that Aristotelian vision of wealth, that wealth is real goods, the product of plants and animals, the wealth that we dig out of the earth, and that other forms of wealth, such as manufactured goods from a mill, from a factory, or what you buy in a mercantile,

you know, through wholesale and retail processes from the work of merchants, from the work of bankers, is a more derivative form of wealth. And then finally, money itself is a very artificial sort of item. It is not a natural good. It is the product of art. And it's useful because we need a medium of exchange. But this is further removed from the true. source of wealth. This is a very old-fashioned idea, but we find this in the philosophers from the

classical time. So we see a reaction to the crisis. We're going back before Jackson still here. In 1819, Kentucky was hard hit by the financial collapse. The reaction of the legislature there is very interesting. They immediately charter a new state bank, a Commonwealth Bank of Kentucky. They authorize it to issue $3 million in paper currency to fill the gap that has been revealed by the collapse of smaller banks. This is obviously inflationary. They're going to issue a great deal of currency. They're going to back the institution with the state's credit. And there's controversy here. And this was, this was always a tension between the agrarian element and what I would characterize as the more responsible business element. When it comes to

banking, the business element, the establishment for all of their charges of special patronage, corruption, lobbying to keep their special charters. They do know something about how banks should work, and they do worry about inflation. Issuing a lot of paper currency is very disruptive, and it will go down and value very quickly. So they called this out, and that interest in Kentucky leads to a Kentucky court decision that declares this measure unconstitutional. Now, the result of that is also interesting. What happens is there is a reaction in the legislature.

The legislature abolishes the court, and they push through the Commonwealth Bank anyway. So we see, even in this microcosm, this example of Kentucky, the populist agrarians versus the establishment bankers and merchants. And that's a good way to understand this controversy in microcosm. So the Bank of the United States Charter is a manifestation of this point, the conflict between regional financial interests and the establishment interests from the East Coast. And this is one of the reasons why it manifests in the Jackson administration, because Jackson's support is in the South, the West, and in these newly open, newly developing,

agricultural regions. He wins Ohio, Indiana, Illinois. He wins Kentucky, Tennessee, Alabama, Mississippi, Louisiana. He loses New England. He loses New York. He loses, I want to say New Jersey. I think he does lose New Jersey to John Quincy Adams in 28. Those states represent the establishment east coast in this election. And we see there that we see there that consolidation of economic interests in the merchant class, in the maritime element that's based in those areas. The question of the industrial element is not as prominent at this stage. It becomes much more prominent in another decade. But those are the major interests that are supportive of the Bank of the United States. The merchants, the tradesmen, the people that are moving goods from place to

place that want that efficient communication between the branches of the Bank of the United States, which enable their business to operate. There's the inflationary interest, and this is an important one because this is an irresponsible interest in the bank war. It is, and it's overwhelmingly represented in the agricultural areas, in these quickly developing Western states. We would classify Indiana, Ohio, Illinois as Western as well. There are a lot of people going in there. Their population is increasing greatly. They need currency. And because they're producing mostly commodities, they don't have much coming in. And they want patronage. They want a different kind of patronage. One of the great spokesmen for

that interest is Thomas Hart Benton of Missouri. One time enemy of Andrew Jackson, Thomas Hart Benton had demanded a officer's commission in the War of 1812 when he had seen no action. Jackson very rudely dismisses him, and Benton draws two pistols and shoots Jackson twice. I believe I've covered this story a few times. I don't remember if I've covered it in this series. But funny enough, Benton goes off to Missouri. Turns out there are a lot of people in Tennessee that want to kill him after his, dastardly shooting of the venerable general, but he starts a career there in Missouri,

and he becomes known as Old Bullion Benton for his advocacy of hard money. Benton is always calling on increased investment in the United States mint and its apparatus. He wants more hard currency circulating in the West. eventually he gets his dream and there is a mint established in New Orleans. And that's one of his legacies. So he's an interesting figure here, advocacy of Western financial interest, but a responsible one. Many of those that take to the floor of Congress to advocate for financial policy, they are wanting more banks issuing more paper currency, even though that destabilizes the system.

You have over-leveraged institutions that are more likely to fail. This causes banking crises. So we see the American system headed by Henry Clay, this Hamiltonian financial policy, industrial trade policy. the American system wants to use the Bank of the United States to fund internal improvements projects, to fund highways, to fund canals, to fund navigation improvements, lighthouses, to remove obstructions in rivers and such, all of which is to be funded by the protective tariff, the permanent protective tariff. We see the American system advocates like Clay up against the old Republicans who are against this means of national economic development on constitutional grounds, but also on agrarian grounds. That this constitutes a movement of wealth from the overly burdened agricultural areas who have to buy industrial.

produced goods at inflated prices from either northern merchants who cannot produce them as efficiently as foreign competitors or from those foreign competitors with the protective tariff added to the cost of the goods. So it siphons money from the agricultural areas and it benefits the industrial areas. So the argument of the old Republicans, along with constitutional argument, the Jeffersonian response to Hamilton, they are also arguing their areas of the country will be put into a colonial relation with the industrial areas, that they are subsidizing by inflated prices the development of the industrial economy in northern states, which they take offense at. makes perfect sense. It is a colonial relationship. So we see the, this, this conflict between political

interests in the country at the time. The producers, the farmers, the mechanics, the laboring class versus the what Jackson called the parasites, which are the bureaucrats, the bankers, the middlemen, who were only handling things they themselves did not produce. So it's a harsh word to describe them. You might gather here the interest of modern economists, certainly, of the left, who have gotten into this conflict in American history. That's a curious thing about this, is that the old Republican, would be picked up by the likes of Marxists.

But it is the case. And John C. Calhoun has been compared to Marx on occasion, though he's certainly not an advocate of the proletarian revolution, quite the opposite. So Jackson, in 1830, he vetoes a internal improvements bill. This is the Maysville Road Bill from Henry Clay. This is one of Clay's pet bills. It's to build out the national road to Maysville, Kentucky, which is right there on the Ohio River between Ashland, Kentucky and Louisville, Kentucky.

I want to say Louisville. I know that's not the way our beloved Kentucky. would say it, they would say Louisville. You know, they, they eliminate the syllable, I believe. Wonderful place, Kentucky. I think we're mourning for Kentucky tonight with the news about Massey's defeat. Something that's weighing on me this evening. Well, I mean, it's, if anything, it just goes to show who owns the, who owns the government.

Yeah. From clear as day. Yeah. I really wanted to see something different. And, you know, if they can buy one seat for a primary, well, November's coming up. How many seats are they going to buy then? But, hey, just vote harder. Indeed.

Well, Kentucky is a place of a great political heritage. They've produced so many great statesmen in our history, and I have a fondness for them. In a beautiful place, too, if you've never seen it. Incidentally, don't tell anyone, they may be able to keep it that way a little longer. But Jackson, he vetoes the Maysville Road. He says, this is a particular local interest, and it is not in the purview of the general welfare of the United States. It only benefits a particular part. So he says, let's see, Clay's American system lays it down that Congress has constitutional power to make roads and canals without

limitation. The internal improvement mania pervades Congress. The log-rolling principles has fully displayed itself. Where would you stop? Would the people suffer themselves to be taxed for such purposes? So he sees the unfair character, the sectional character of the program, and he vetoes it on that ground. Bradley Berzer, who wrote a very succinct and very interesting volume called In Defense of Andrew Jackson. This was published just a few years ago. I don't have the date in front of me, but it isn't a very old book. It's a very interesting little book, and I recommend it.

Berzer says federal money could be justly appropriated only for undertakings that benefited the entire nation in Jackson's view. Now, Jackson's great opponent in his workup to abolish the bank. the United States was Nicholas Biddle of Philadelphia, who is the executive officer of the BUS, and he gets very busy lobbying very publicly for the maintenance and the renewal of the BUS. This for him is a great mistake. He is ostentatious. He is entitled. He's blue blood from the East coast and Jackson identifies him as his major adversary here. He has a personal dislike for these entitled elites. And Nicholas Bittles, his very ambitious public stand in favor of the United States, his open lobbying of members of Congress to renew the charter of the bank is an incentive for Jackson

to double down and certainly for Jackson supporters, who's see this as a special and unwarranted federal patronage. So Berzer says, again, the entire banking system, especially if not backed by gold and silver, was a con game in the view of the Jacksonians. It took money from hardworking producers and gave it to men who did nothing but push paper. So strangely, the debate about rechartering Bank of the United States took place a couple of years before the charter was due to expire. And that was because both the Jacksonian Democrats and Biddle's Whigs decided to push the issue then. They were both very interested in settling this matter years before it was technically up for vote. And so it went through Congress.

Henry Clay guides it through Congress, because this is a necessary element in his American system scheme, to have this large credit institution to finance his big projects. And in 32, it passes both the House. and the Senate and goes to Jackson's desk. There, Jackson vetoes it. And according to, let's see, according to Romini, Robert Romini, who is the great modern biographer of Andrew Jackson, it is the most important veto in American history. Let's see here. Let me find. excerpts here from the veto message itself. My cat is in my way again. He's a good study companion. He's a good creature. And he only likes me. Doesn't get along with anyone else. Okay. So Jackson, he says in his veto, it is to be regretted that the rich and powerful too often bend the acts of God. government to their selfish purposes.

Now, this, you know, the claim of the lobbying interest of the establishment there, certainly on the nose. Now he says something quite surprising, very interesting, alarming to modern sensibilities, nevertheless entirely true. Distinctions in society will all. always exist under every just government. Equality of talents, of education, or of wealth cannot be produced by human institutions. Well, there's a thunder clap.

It deserves to be repeated far and wide. Andrew Jackson. He says, In the full enjoyment of the gifts of heaven, in the fruits of superior industry, economy, and virtue, every man is equally entitled to protection by law. But when the laws undertake to add to these natural and just advantages, artificial distinctions to grant titles, gratuities, and exclusive privileges,

to make the rich richer and the potent more powerful, the humble members of society, the farmers, mechanics, and laborers, who have neither the time nor the means of securing like favors to themselves, have a right to complain of the injustice of their government. There are no necessary evils in government. Its evils exist only in its abuses. If it would confine itself to equal protection, and as heaven does its reins, shower its favors alike, on the high and the low, the rich and the poor, it would be an unqualified blessing. In the act before me, there seems to be a wide and unnecessary departure from these just principles. Jackson continues, Is there no danger to our liberty and independence in a bank that in its nature has so little to bind it to our country? The president of the bank has told us that most of the state banks exist by its forbearance.

Should its influence become consented as it may under the operation of such an act as this, that is the re-charter of the bank. In the hands of a self-elected directory whose interests are identified with those of the foreign stockholders, will there not be caused to tremble for the purity of our elections in peace and for the independence of our country in war? Their power would be great whenever they might choose to exert it. But if this monopoly were regularly renewed every 15 or 20 years

on terms proposed by themselves, they might seldom in peace put forth their strengths to influence elections or control the affairs of our nation. A topical remark from Andrew Jackson. If any private citizen or public functionary should interpose to curtail its powers

or prevent a renewal of its privileges, it cannot be doubted that he would be made to feel its influence. So this is, again, Jackson's, saying, you know, the bank is trying to kill me, but I am going to kill it. We see the points, natural versus artificial distinctions. The patronage of government here, the artificial patronage. The government picks this group to be the lords of finance in the country is an artificial distinction, which Jackson compares to a title of nobility.

He says that it corrupts the Republic. He points out the element. This influences our foreign relations. This would be an influence in a time of war, potentially. The credit of the bank under the directorship of foreign stockholders, influencing the bank's actions and decisions. He also points out this is a concept. between state authority and federal power grabs, the state chartered banks should not be in competition with this specially privileged organization.

Now, this is one of the big elements in the Jacksonian legacy, and we find it as far out as latter-day Democrats like Huey Long of Louisiana, who often spoke on this question. Huey Long was looking at the industries in Louisiana that were investing in the state, and he was saying, these places are all established in far away locales with stockholders who have no connection to Louisiana, who do not know our situation, do not know their own employees here. They do not know the needs of our state. They are only an extractive force. They're there to make a buck. And we want increased state regulation. We want the state to look after its own people in this place. We are going to tax these corporations, build public works here,

to improve the value in this place to provide for the needs of our own people. And these far-away corporations in New York City, standard oil and the like, do not know what our people need. And Huey Long was speaking to the same point Jackson was in a different circumstance, obviously. But this was a tradition in the Democratic Party for a long time, one that we can trace all the way back to Jackson's administration. Jackson was interested in the states having their own center of gravity in finance, in business, that they should have the businesses doing commerce, producing industry, making investments. those businesses should be chartered in those states. And in effect, this is what Jackson accomplished with his veto of the bank in 32.

He throws the responsibility, the regulatory prerogative onto the state governments. And this is one of the really huge consequences of Jackson's move, is that the states now have their own banks. Those are the only banks now in the country. These banks vary from state to state, but they can only look at their own responsibility if they have a bad banking system. It is their prerogative to regulate their own institutions in those states.

This also arrests the rhaps. movement of money from one side of the country to the other. Now these state charter banks must deal separately with one another. There is no general institution to work through, to move the currency efficiently from one place to another. And this returns that center of gravity, that economic power, it spreads it across the country in a way that it had only been done previously during the War of 1812, ironically, a very bad time to try such a reform. So the state-based banks have regional currencies. The only general currency is the minted hard currency from the mint.

And we see the proliferation of these private currencies across the country. Now, this is not without major negative effects. There are panics in the Van Buren administration just following Jackson because of over-leveraged, state-regulated financial institutions. And this causes a great deal of economic disturbance across the country afterwards. Kind of a knock-on effect of the abolition of the bank of the United States. But they were not promising greater financial efficiency and credibility with this reform. Jackson was saying there is no constitutional power for the federal. government set up this institution to begin with, and the states have that proper power, not the

federal government. So he destroys the Bank of the United States with this. Jackson's enemies in Congress, Henry Clay and Daniel Webster, point to McCullough v. Maryland. On this point, Jackson responds. You remember McCullough v. Maryland is John Marshall, basically rubber-stamping Hamilton's broad reading of federal powers. John Marshall reads Hamilton's opinion about the broad powers of the federal government, the loose reading of the necessary and proper clause, the general welfare clause. He reads that into case law in this landmark decision. Jackson says, to this conclusion, I cannot consent.

The Congress and President must each, for itself, be guided by its own opinion of the Constitution. It is as much their duty to decide on the constitutionality of any bill or resolution as it is the Supreme Court. justices. The authority of the Supreme Court must not be permitted to control the Congress or the executive, and the president is independent of both. Now, this is really the better quote when we come to the famous quip attributed to Jackson. Marshall has made his decision, now let him enforce it. This is the more substantial quote, where we see that is what Jackson believed about the court. That is how Jackson took the opinion of federal judges.

That the president is independent of that. Now, Jackson is emphasizing the constitutional nature of the question. Jackson's opponents in Congress, Clay and Webster, are emphasizing the policy made by Jackson's veto, that Jackson is putting the question of banking into the states exclusively. They say this is a policy choice and that the president is, in effect, legislating from the White House, and thus it is a confusion of constitutionally delegated authority. Jackson, obviously, is taking the question of the interpretation of the Constitution as his primary

justification for the action. But it is on those lines that Jackson's opponents come out against the veto power. Eventually, Clay actually proposes a constitutional amendment to strip the president of the veto power, a measure that fails. But that is a very important development out of this. Biddle calls Jackson a deranged demagogue coming out of that veto, but Biddle is now exiting the stage. The Democrats, Jackson's constituents, they call the veto a second declaration of independence. and in it they see what they call the vindication of the principles of 98.

An important line going forward. The principles of 98 refer to the Kentucky and Virginia resolutions against the Alien and Sedition Acts. The assertion that the states have a prerogative on these matters of constitutional interpretation because they're stakeholders in the federal union. So this is what Jackson's constituents are saying about the situation. The result of the abolition of the Bank of the United States is the immediate process to remove federal deposits from the Bank of the United States. We remember in 32, the bank still has a couple years left in its charter to operate. Jackson wastes no time in this.

He also does not want to destabilize the system by just withdrawing everything immediately, right? The bank still has the special privilege of being the depository of tax revenue coming in at the customs houses and such. But the result is also paradoxical. We remember Jackson says in his veto, the power to grant special privileges to make the rich richer is evil. Well, in the case of the removal of the federal deposits from the bank of the United States, Jackson chooses banks to deposit those funds in. these become known as Jackson's pet banks. And obviously this is the words of his enemies in the matter, but the charge is stinging because there's always going to be someone chosen.

Jackson is just choosing state chartered banks with a lot of friendly political connections to himself. So we can appreciate that criticism of Jackson, but obviously there's not another way of going about that. Men in power will choose who they patronize. What Jackson did was he destroyed an institutional power that was independent of the political process up to the point of chartering. That was where it was accountable. And that was where he destroyed it. But the charge of Jackson's enemies that he's choosing special patronage for his friends is a substantial charge. Now, the result, as I mentioned, is a few years later, broad financial panics and bank failures across the country.

A mushroom growth of irresponsible financiers that follow out of this reform. Again, to fill the vacuum left by the disappearing bank of the United States. So that is the story of Jackson's war against the bank, his disestablishment of the BUS. the end of that phase of that particular constitutional quandary. And in this, we can well appreciate how Jackson became a kind of hero of the Jeffersonians, of the old Republican element. In our next episode, we will be talking of the nullification crisis in Jackson's administration, which is where we see Jackson very independent and also nationalist,

where he puts himself at odds with his sometimes comrades, the old Republicans, and those outspoken supporters of the principles of 98. And that's going to be a very dramatic episode. I'm really looking forward to it. Awesome. Well, this was great. I mean, especially considering what's happening nowadays with inflation, with money printing, and everything. You can at least look back to one person who understood what a national bank was, even if he did have some ties to local banks. But the national bank is way more dangerous than local bank because local banks. banks aren't printing money to start wars. That's what national banks do. Yeah.

Yeah, national banks destroy the, basically destroy the sovereignty of the country. And in our situation, the Federal Reserve is maintaining this, this giant, grotesque system of patronage, the civil service of our own day, the military industrial complex, all of these institutions that have grown up around that special source of funds. And it's a very different system than what Jackson was going against, but he saw the danger inherent in it. And the things that he warned about there, I think, are much more evident to us than it.

was in his own day. For sure. Hindsight's 2020. All right, Mr. Bagby. Remind everybody where they can get your books. Yes, you can find my books at www. tallmanbooks.com. And you can find The Rain of Andrew Jackson by Frederick Aug there.

I put together a appendix in that volume, which contains Jackson's, inaugural addresses his farewell address and the bank veto you can actually get it there awesome all right until the next time have a great evening mr bagby thank you i want to welcome everyone back to the pecaniano show george bagby is back how are you doing tonight george i'm doing well i'm i've been talking a lot of history lately i've really been enjoying my material um been talking a lot about the Tennessee Valley recently. All sorts of wonderful personalities there.

And we're here to talk about them yet again. Another lesson in our series concerning Andrew Jackson. We've been highlighting the upsides of Jackson and how he figures in the sectional conflict and some of the key decisions that he made, such as ending the bank and his, his jeffersonian kind of legacy. But today we're moving into his decisive move concerning the sticking point about states' rights in his own time. And that was the famous nullification crisis of 1832 and 1833. So we've approached this issue a couple of times before. We had our show about the Webster Hain debate, which took place in 1830, and this was in relation to

what the Constitution affected as far as the Union of the States. We remember Webster was pitching the Enlightenment notion of the nation state that the union was, in fact, a union of individuals, not a union of states. However, key to this is that practically everybody at the time still referred to the Constitution as a compact or a contract. And you have to ask the key question there. Well, who were the parties of that contract? They have standing in the meaning of the contract and all the rest. If they're designating a general agent, the federal government, to act on their behalf, that is a legal definition, and we can understand something about the relationship through that.

And of course, that was the Southern point of view of the time. We remember Robert Young Hain, the senator from South Carolina, is heavily relying in that particular debate on historical arguments. He's arguing about what is the nature of the union based on the history of the union. How did the union come to be? How did the states become members of the union through state conventions? Whereas Webster was arguing on a rhetorical point, arguing about theory, divorced from experience to some degree, and even pitched the idea very memorably in his rhetoric, the liberty and union, now and for ever one and inseparable was his great hereration, which everyone should remember in relation to Daniel Webster, one of the great giants of his time. That's his most memorable line. And so we see

this idea of national union or consolidation is one that has a lot of cachet in this period. And this is particularly important when we remember the political conflict between the sections in regards to the tariff. The nationalists led by the likes of the pragmatic Henry Clay and Daniel Webster. Webster wasn't always in favor of the protective tariff and Clay's proposed American system. he was much he was in his early career more of a regionalist more responsive to the concerns of his constituency which is not surprising and justifiable but the nationalists as we might term them say well the federal highway the federal canal program the port facilities and the internal improvements that's going to eventually aid the whole. It may seem like a particular political interest, the needs of manufacturers to have protective duties on imports. But this is going to be a national benefit. Webster, memorably, says back in 1830, I don't see differences between Ohio and South Carolina. For me, they are the same country.

And that is a very important distinctive remark showing the way that they saw the union, the way they visualized the union. So Andrew Jackson, he accomplishes much in his first term. He's retiring the national debt. He has confronted the issue of the bank and that constitutional question. It's coming to a head by the fall of 1832. So the bank recharter is there in Congress. Congress does approve the recharter of the bank, partly through the very public campaigning of Nicholas Biddle, the executive of the Bank of the United States. He becomes a political figure to save his institution at the time and kind of highlights Jackson's point that this is a corrupting influence. He says that private corporation should not be petitioning the government

for policy. And this is obviously a lobbying effort, and it certainly was, whatever else we might say, but we might say it was justified or not, but it was a lobbying effort, and it was a very unusual one where he's palling around with congressmen and making public speeches on the bank matter. Well, this is all coming to a head in the fall of 32, which happens to be the election year. So Jackson is up for re-election. Jackson famously has a... of falling out with John C. Calhoun, who is his vice president back in 1828. He serves that whole first term with Jackson. They start out as allies. They are both of a Jeffersonian frame of mind to some degree united in that. They were both Scotch Irish. But some things come to light

in that first term. Firstly, Calhoun was Secretary of War when Jackson impudently invaded Spanish Florida back in 1817. So a couple years after the war of 1812, the Red Stick Creeks who did not surrender to Jackson in 1814, they've migrated down into Spanish Florida and they've vowed eternal enmity with Anglo-America, and so they're constantly raiding over the borders down there. Jackson is sent by President James Monroe to pursue these raiders, and Jackson instead, he rather loosely interprets the president's instructions. He goes into Florida, and he executes the British agents who are selling the Creek's weapons and encouraging them politically.

So he hangs one, he sentences the other to death by firing squad. Arbuthnot and Ambrister are the names of those British agents. One of them, a Scott, I believe, are both not. And John C. Calhoun, privately with the president, is actually against Andrew Jackson's actions there. The whole cabinet of President Monroe are appalled by Jackson's actions. This causes a international crisis. The one person to stand up for Jackson in that circumstance is ironically John Quincy Adams, who succeeds Monroe in the White House and is then Jackson's great foe in the election in 28.

and he's very much against Adams's policies and statements of a Hamiltonian sort of figure. But nevertheless, Adams defends Andrew Jackson and forces a confrontation with Spain, which results in the sale of Florida. So there were reasons for Adams and Jackson to be friendly with one another, given this very risky gambit of Adams to stand up for Jackson, even when the whole cabinet was against. him. Adams and Calhoun were in conflict over that. Calhoun was wanting to disavow the general's actions. Well, that all comes to light while they are in the White House. So the private correspondence gets sent to Jackson by a third party. Jackson confronts Calhoun about it. Calhoun defends his actions, doesn't make any retractions. Calhoun could be undiplomatic at times. And so Jackson is very suspicious of his vice president and especially Calhoun's known desire

to run for president himself. And he had a kind of coalition, oddly enough, even in the north, there were supporters of Calhoun for the White House. But things come to a more critical juncture with a curious affair. Andrew Jackson's young Secretary of War, a man by the name of Eaton, has, he falls in love with a

tavern keeper's daughter in Washington, D.C. So when he comes to take the office of Secretary of War, he marries this widow of a tavern keeper's daughter who is much maligned

in Washington's society. There are lots of rumors that she was offering other services in her father's saloon rather than just serving drinks. And that when that news reached her first husband, who happened to be a naval officer, a purser, I believe he was, the story was that he had killed himself when he learned of his wife's misbehavior. So that's not totally substantiated. We don't know that for sure, but that was the story in Washington. And at any rate, the officer's death was suspicious and may have been a suicide, whether or not that was concerning his wife is another matter. But Andrew Jackson was insistent that the Eaton's be admitted into Washington society and related Mr. Eaton's ostracization in Washington that he, that he was rejected from admission into the establishments there,

you know, when people would have people over for dinner, they would not invite Peggy Eaton, and they would divide the couple. And it was because of his wife's reputation. Well, Jackson related that entirely to his own experience with his wife. She had also been formally married. She had also separated from her first husband under mysterious circumstances. And Jackson famously insisted, she's as pure as a virgin related to Peggy Eaton.

So he would not countenance any maligning of Mrs. Eaton. And he demanded that John C. Calhoun set the example by inviting the Eatons for dinner and receiving them in Washington society, kind of setting the precedent. If he was willing to do that, others would do it as well. Well, Calhoun responds to Jackson and he says, my wife makes the decisions about who we invite for dinner. And I will not, I will not prevail on her with this. And he says, women maintain the society. Women have this special role of hospitality. And he said, women police the virtue of their own sex. And men should not interfere with that, which I always

thought was a very striking statement. I thought that was very interesting. I used to tell my students that. So Calhoun and Jackson have a relationship that's breaking down here. In 1832, we see the bill to recharter the bank and a new tariff bill. And this is Henry Clay's baby. Henry Clay sends another tariff, a protective tariff, as part of a bunch of bills for his proposed American system to harvest special. duties off of certain manufactured goods and certain commodities like wool and to use the proceeds to build internal improvements. Famously, Clay says about the recharter of the bank and the tariff bill, which are both

sent out of the same session of Congress, should Jackson veto them, I will veto him. play is very keyed up about this. The 32 tariff involved a reduction of duties, but a permanent protection. So it actually scales back the 1828 tariff, the famous tariff of abominations, that Calhoun had written the South Carolina exposition and protest concerning. So the 32 tariff really is less objectionable than the 28 tariff. It is a result of compromise. There are actually a lot of manufacturers in New England who are very upset about the 32 tariff and say this is going to ruin them.

They've become so accustomed and so modeled after the federal tax policy on the matter. They aren't prepared for the reduction of duties. There are people in the middle who say, well, this is. actually a compromise tariff. The South objects to these high protective duties for these special manufacturers and such that have this patronage. We're reducing those duties, so that that ought to leave them more satisfied than they were before. Jackson famously signs the tariff. He takes the matter into account. He decides that the protective tariff is better understood as a compromise, rather than a concession on principle,

but plenty of southerners see it as a betrayal. They had elected Jackson back in 28 with lots of hopes that he would prevail to abolish the 28 tariff that they so strongly objected to. They say that the principle is the concern here, that this is a protective tariff, the matter of the government protecting manufacturers through tax policy and disadvantaging the agrarian areas of the country is their most serious concern. They say this is a matter of constitutional principle and they object to the 1832 tariff on the same grounds that they object to the 1828 tariff.

Curiously, in the, in the midst of the debate about the 32 tariff, an organization devoted to protection, a political organization in Massachusetts holds a meeting. They are very much antagonized by the 32 tariff because it involves the reduction of duties. They say in a public meeting, and I quote, secession is preferable to compromise. compromise on protection. So we see the regional interests here and even the specter of secession arise again in Massachusetts. So Haynes' earlier argument that this is an American tradition, the jealousy of the states concerning the meaning of the Constitution, their prerogative to determine their own political destinies inside the constitutional union, or outside of it is a key here. This is still something that's being talked about in New England,

even at this late date. Now, in 1832, we see the renewal of conflict about the tariff, just as we saw in 28. 28 was also an election year. And this comes to the four in curious ways. So Clay is running in the new Whig Party for the presidency. Jackson is running for re-election. And, And then we see the outbreak of a couple of third party candidates. We see one William Wirt, who is a member of the anti-Masonic party, which springs out of upstate New York. That itself has an interesting backstory. There was one William Morgan of New York, a former Freemason, who published a book called

illustrations of masonry, which was a expose of secret things that mason's believe and do. This was a very explosive issue at the time. Morgan was warned privately by his former Masonic friends that he must not publish this expose printer that had agreed to publish the book. book got ransacked and burned. And then William Morgan himself disappears in 1826. He is last seen being abducted out of his home. And there's later on a drowned corpse that is said to be him, though there still seems to be some question about that. So he disappears and his expose becomes a very popular book and it starts a new party. So they are interested in exposing the mechanations of Freemasons and they're particularly strong in upstate New York. This William Wirt

runs on this third party platform and wins one state in 1832. He wins Vermont. But his party is an influential new force in New England. Incidentally, he is very much in favor of the American system and high protective tariffs. We also see another curious character, a Virginian, who is very outspoken on the matter of nullification of these objectionable tariffs. His name is John Floyd. He is given the electoral votes by the legislature of South Carolina. At this point, South Carolina does not have any popular election in a presidential runoff. The electoral votes are still allocated entirely by the legislature. And South Carolina, incidentally, is one of the last states to do that.

That's a long tradition for them. They didn't have a popular election past the Civil War, in fact. They were still nominating, well, still allocating, I should say, the electoral votes in an election year through the state legislature, as was originally intended, by the way. but they were an outlier then, and they awarded their 11 electoral votes to Floyd. Clay has a poorer showing than did Adams back in 28. He does win New England minus Vermont. He wins his native Kentucky.

He wins Maryland and New Jersey. But Jackson prevails everywhere else. So it's a very resounding reelection for Jackson. And just following that election, Calhoun, chooses to resign. He resigns the vice presidency and returns to South Carolina in December of 1832. Memorably, in the fallout from the tariffs and the rest, there is a formal dinner at the White House. Calhoun is still vice president at this time. Jackson raises a toast and says, to our federal union, it must be preserved. Calhoun offers a rejoinder to Jackson's Toast and says,

To our Federal Union, next to our liberties, most dear. And he is seen to embarrass the president on this occasion. And it's just another sign of their personal falling out. So Calhoun, when he resigns, he's quite aware of the division between the nationals, as they're called, the advocates of the American system and the nullifiers who predominate in the South, especially in South Carolina. South Carolina is the state that really makes a stand on this issue, though they have a lot of sympathizers with their neighboring southern states. The other southern states kind of watch to see what would happen with South Carolina. Hain, who is still in Congress at this time, he said, it is neither more or less,

then the resolution from the Senator of Kentucky reduced to the form of law. This is his remark about the 32 tariff. He says this is going to codify the American system as constitutional. And he's very discouraged about this and resolves that the Jeffersonians, those that contest the constitutional nature of this American system, must resort to the states making a stand rather than federal law. Calhoun remarks about it just before his resignation in a private letter. He says, it is, in truth, hard to find a middle position where the principle of protection is asserted to be essential in one side and fatal to the other. It involves

the question not of concession, but of surrender. And so this is the reason. This is the reason, and ultimately why Calhoun returns to Carolina. He says, the hope of the country now rests on our gallant little state. Let every Carolinian do his duty. Now, in 32, there is a conflict in South Carolina herself. There is a faction in the state. They call themselves the unionist faction. they say that the real risk is secession, that that is what the nullifiers are really after. They're going to force this issue and they will divide the union over it. They say that it may not be their stated object, and the nullifiers were always very careful to say was not what they wanted. They did not want to divide the union.

They wanted to force a compromise. But they said, secession is the real risk. and we can hardly save the union by threatening it. The nullifiers are taking the position of Calhoun's anonymous tract, the exposition and protest, which has circulated in pamphlet form in South Carolina, and has really taken on, made itself into a political force in South Carolina since it was first published in 28. Their argument is that the federal government is the,

agent set up by principles to the contract, and those are the states, and that no coercion inside the union is possible, and that if any coercion is offered by the federal government, then obviously the states should not remain in the union. Now, that turns out to be a really interesting point when we see how this works out. They are risking that possibility, but what do they do when it's actually offered? That's another interesting point. They say they're there to prevent the destruction of the union and the establishment of a colonial relation between the sections.

And this is the American system policy. The agrarian areas are going to be paying more for their manufactured goods. That money will be spent mostly in those northern manufacturing districts. They want to force a vote on an amendment to the Constitution. They do not propose to bring the amendment out of Congress. Instead, they are opting for a convention of the states to resolve the matter whether or not the Constitution has granted those particular economic powers to the federal government. So they want a state convention. In 32, the nullifiers win big in South Carolina, over two-thirds.

of the legislature are open advocates for nullification. The governor calls for a state convention on the strength of that election. The nullifiers dominate the state convention, and they issue a series of declarations, which have a binding force of law. They nullify the 1828 and the newly signed 1832 tariffs to take effect February 1st. 1833. They say that South Carolina will not collect the new federal taxes, the protective tariff. They also declare that coercion will affect secession in South Carolina. So this is a warning. Do not coerce us on this matter. We will leave the union. They also call for a convention of the member states of the union to resolve the constitutional question. Robert Hain then goes into the governor's

house in South Carolina. He is elected governor. And the legislature makes Calhoun, the senator, one of two, obviously, but Calhoun takes Haynes seat in Congress out of the vice presidency and into the Senate. Curiously here, there is an outcry in the north about Jackson's policies, his veto of the bank and the reduction of the protective tariff in 32. A newspaper correspondent from New England makes a startling statement. He writes, all is gone, the bank, the American system, the internal improvements, public lands, which Jackson will sell to retire the federal debt, all is gone,

which the general government was instituted to create and protect. And this is a fascinating statement that this is actually the purpose of the federal government to do these very things. These are the controversial sectional issues of the time. And yet this is what a certain group of New Englanders believe the government is actually for. So the state convention idea would lead to a very interesting division. Like what would happen to the Constitution there when people have such radically different ideas about what the federal government was instituted to do? The state convention may affect the breakup of the union itself, because everything is on the table when the states convened to modify the constitution. Everything is on the table.

Jackson responds very quickly to the nullification convention in Carolina. He issues a presidential proclamation. This is one of the most shocking acts of Jackson's career. We see many reasons to see him as sympathetic to the Jeffersonian persuasion, to the old Republicans, even, especially in his war with the bank. But in Jackson's proclamation, he formulates his view of the, union very much along the lines of Webster and Justice Marshall. He says that it is a national union that the authority of the union is established on the one united people of the United States.

He says disunion by armed force is treason and threatens to meet force in South Carolina with force. He is, in effect, threatening to collect the taxes by using military means. Now, the response from Jackson's own colleagues is dismay. Martin Van Buren, Jackson's new vice president and soon to be president himself, he is Jackson's successor. He faces great embarrassment from this. He has been hard at work to unite the Southern Agrarianianianian. faction with the northern laborers, which is the main base of the Democratic Party. And he sees Jackson as needlessly confrontational here, and that this is also a great danger to the survival

of the union itself. Van Buren conspires with Congressman Verplank of New York. They are old friends. Verplank is also a Jacksonian Democrat, and Verplank is the head of the Ways and Means Committee. in Congress. Verplank is a free trader. We would relate him to the farmers in upstate New York and also the shipping interests in New York City. He proposes a bill, the Verplank bill is what it's called, to withdraw all of the protective tariffs, to actually annul the 32 tariff that was just signed into law, but also the 28 tariff, reverting all the way back to the 1860s. tariff, which had a time limit. The 1816 tariff limited the protective duties. It actually reduced them every year until they finally expired because the reading of the situation is the southerners

are most averse to the permanent nature of the protective duties, which we find in 28 and 32. There is a debate in Congress related to Verplank, and there is great consternation in Washington, given South Carolina's action to nullify. Party loyalty isn't holding at this point. And this is one of the very interesting features of this controversy, that the votes on the various measures that result from the nullification crisis are not isolated to any one organized, political faction. With the exception of the South, which is very supportive of South Carolina through the whole thing elsewhere in the Union, in the West, in these newly developing western areas, even as far out as Louisiana, which really is not part of the Jacksonian regime at this point. Lots of wigs in Louisiana, lots of very wealthy planters who see

major advantages for internal improvements. And they see the center of New Orleans, you know, a huge city, a big laboring class, a significant number of manufacturers. It's very unusual in the South. They are splitting on this issue. But the North is very divided on the issue as well. There are the protectionists who see this as a huge betrayal that

their former allies who are in favor of the internal improvements are now very concerned to compromise with the South. And so the votes are all over the place in this area of history. There is a man in Congress, we've mentioned many times before, the old Republican John Randolph of Roanoke, certainly no friend of Henry Clay. Randolph had accused Clay of conspiracy, with John Quincy Adams to get his position as Secretary of State in the Adams administration. Clay had thrown his electoral college count in favor of Adams. And even though Adams had not won a majority of the electoral votes, Clay's support in Congress and the vote coming to Congress with that too close to call

electoral count, he affected Adams' election. by the Electoral College. Well, Randolph had called him out on that, and they had actually fought a duel over it. Randolph had famously shot into the air and not aimed at Clay. Clay had shot at Randolph because he felt very embittered. But in the debate in Congress concerning the Verplank bill, Randolph makes a speech and says, there is one man and one man only who can save this union, and that man is Henry Clay, which is quite remarkable given their bad relations.

Randolph knew that Clay was the only man who could affect a compromise on the issue. Most ironic because the tariff is actually Clay's baby. So it's up to Clay to decide how to diffuse the tension here. Clay had just lost the presidential election to Jackson, and it was even an embarrassment to him. it was much more decisive than the 28 election, and Clay is in bad spirits, but Clay is also very alarmed by the president's proclamation. He says the president is entirely too ultra for me. It might say he's too extreme in his confrontation with Carolina.

Clay also looks at the Verplank bill and sees some means to affect a compromise. will return to Clay in just a moment. He gets busy on this behind the scenes. Webster, Daniel Webster of Massachusetts, is enthused about the president's proclamation. He is convinced that South Carolina is bluffing, that they have far too many advantages from the union to risk leaving it, and is convinced that the president's proclamation will call South Carolina's bluff. he is encouraging the president behind the scenes, even though

they had a major falling out concerning the bank war, now Webster is regularly invited to the White House and has a habit of flattering Jackson for his firm stand against the traders in South Carolina. On February 15th,

the president requests and receives a bill from Congress. It's going around in committee of, but it's called the Enforcement Act. It's more popularly known as the Force Bill or the Bloody bill, as the Southerners termed it. Webster claimed authorship of this bill. He was, however, ill and bedridden when it was proposed to Congress, but he insisted that it was his work. It was proposed by another Massachusetts congressman. The Force bill provided for the military protection

of customs houses, obviously aimed at Charleston, the impoundment of goods that are received into port without paying the tax, even the seizure of goods at military forts. Obviously, here it would have been Fort Sumter in Charleston Harbor that would make sure that the taxes were collected on their way into the harbor. Clay stays absent from Congress while this. is being debated. He does not want to be forced to take a stand one way or the other on the issue, but is also disheartened by the force bill. Calhoun says, the force bill exhibits the impious spectacle of this government, the creature of the states, making war against the powers to which it owes its existence. So we see, again, Calhoun's argument hinging on the circumstances of

the ratification of the Constitution. The states were the actors there. The states designate an agent for special purposes, as the Kentucky Resolution had said back in 98. Calhoun says it is not one people in this union, but 24 separate peoples. And this is the famous southern reaction to the the growing nationalist rhetoric from their opponents in the north. Again, focusing on the historical circumstances. This is the southern pension in these debates. Calhoun delivers that speech in Congress in the Senate, of course. Webster then rises to mock Calhoun.

Now, in this instance, this was not so well considered as Webster's famous debate with Hayne a couple years earlier. Webster is openly contemptuous of the arguments of his Southern colleague. He argues once again restates his nationalist formulation of a consolidated government. He says the union is perpetual and the states may not depart it, but he also lets slip the famous term for the union in his speech, and that is that it is a complex. of the states. He says this a few times. Kind of as a matter of fact, this is just the way that people talked, not necessarily considering the implications in the debate. Calhoun then replies, and this is where Calhoun really buries Webster. Webster is embarrassed in the Senate when Calhoun

rises to speak and actually does not offer a rebuttal. Calhoun says if it is a compact, it means that the states have standing. He reiterates the historical argument, the same one that Hain had done just previously a couple years. Randolph remarks in his notes, I saw Webster dying muscle by muscle as Calhoun spoke because he was dismantling Webster's argument with a strong historical response. and remarkably Webster does not make a big debate of it like he did with Hain. Meanwhile, behind the scenes, Clay is approaching Calhoun. There are a number of mediators, southern statesmen.

They are trying to broker an agreement between the men. They meet a couple of times. They're rather cold to one another. It doesn't seem to the observers as if they're working something out. but in fact, something is emerging behind the scenes. Calhoun is quietly making it known to Clay some ways to diffuse the situation and to avoid a military confrontation in Charleston. Clay writes a bill to present to Congress. It's known as the compromise bill. He says he proposes a new tariff with a time limit. It's not going to be a permanent protective tariff. In fact, it will

ensure that the protective duties fall year after year until 1842 when they will expire. So it's the principle of the 1816 tariff again. Clay in his bill writes, it is solely for the purpose and with the intent of providing such revenue as may be necessary to an economical expenditure of the government without regard to the protection and encouragement of any branch of industry. So while Webster and Calhoun have their famous interaction in the Senate, Clay is writing this into the compromise bill, the new tariff regime, which effectually repeals the 32 tariff and the 28 tariff without removing immediately the protective duties. So they have a time limit on them. This is better. This is more palatable

than Verplank's proposed sudden repeal of the protective duties, which is very alarming to the manufacturing interests and would certainly have caused them a great deal of stress. Lots of bankruptcies would have resulted from that with the sudden cessation of protective duties. So this is a more palatable kind of compromise for the manufacturing districts. Clay also includes in his bill a remark

about the manufacturers. Now, remember, Clay is the American system guy. He wants the permanent protective duties. He did not think that the South Carolinians were going to force the issue with nullification as they did. And he is quite alarmed at the prospect of military confrontation or a division of the union. He does not want to alienate his southern colleagues to that degree. So he says, in his bill, after the accumulation of capital, the manufacturer will stand alone, unaided by the government and in competition. So in his compromise bill, he removes the idea of the permanent protection of the manufacturers. He calls it in the Senate a treaty of peace and amity between the sections. So Clay, oddly, or correspondent with his character, he's a very pragmatic man. He's not a dogmatic sort of statesman. He adjusts to circumstances. He's malleable. He says that this legislation is founded on the great principle of compromise and concession, which lies at the bottom of our institutions.

Now, at this point, it is mid-February, and the situation is critical. Jackson is proposing heading an army and going to South Carolina in person. Jackson is always very direct, and this has reached a key moment. The force bill has been amended, gone through committee, and is now before Congress. make sure that his compromise bill coincides with the vote on the force bill. So they're actually voted on the same day. Webster then gets up in the Senate to challenge Clay. Webster is also a great proponent at this point in his career of the protective

tariff and the American system. He's going to New England regularly to pitch his advocacy for both. Webster challenges Clay and says, who are you really? You're for the protective tariff. You're against the protective tariff. Where do you stand exactly on this issue? You are, you are too malleable to be a great statesman. Clay responds to Webster and says, would the senator of Massachusetts send forth the force bill without this measure of conciliation? So he challenges Webster. Are you really risking, are you really willing to risk bloodshed over attacks? Are you really willing to risk the union

over this? And as the force bill comes up in Congress, a great many southern statesmen are watching this with bated breath, many of them, including Randolph, suggesting that the other states should join South Carolina if it comes to a military confrontation over the tax, not in a convention for the constitutional amendment, but actually calling up their militias and affecting secession from the union. So there is a lot of talk about this at this time among the congressmen from the southern states, and North Carolina and Virginia standing out on that. Curiously, the north part of the south, the middle states who are seeing that if compromise is not affected here, perhaps the union really is broken.

Clay then gives his, maybe his greatest speech, I'm certainly drawn to it, in favor of his compromise bill to make the protective tariffs time limited and hopefully to ensure a compromise with Carolina. Though Carolina has gone on the record that all of these protective duties are unconstitutional, they had previously assented to the time limited ones in 1816, even Calhoun was in favor of that, and that was in the wake of the War of 1812, obviously, and there were major war debts to consider. Clay gets up in front of Congress and says, the difference between the friends and foes of the compromise is that they would, in the enforcement act, send forth alone a flaming sword. We are in favor of the law executed in mildness and power tempered with.

mercy. They would hazard civil commotion beginning in South Carolina and extending God knows where. We are for peace, union, and liberty. We want no war. Above all, no civil war, no family strife. We want no sacked cities, no desolated fields, no smoking ruins, no streams of American blood shed by American arms. And Clay, bringing this out in the open, in this very visual way, brings over enough of a coalition to pass the compromise tariff, which frankly declares that protective duties are not a permanent feature of federal policy. Instead, suggesting that they serve better to retire the national debt, as was the goal of the Jacksonians. So March 1st, 1833, Congress passes both the compromise bill and the force bill.

South Carolina responds by nullifying the force bill, not backing down on the principle of nullification, but also reconciled to collecting the protective duties of the compromise bill, the time-limited ones. They see themselves victorious on the principle. They didn't get it the way they intended. They expected to have a state convention to modify the Constitution and resolve the question in black and white. But they still see it as a victory. It didn't come to them the way they expected to have it. It came from Henry Clay, who they saw as their main foe in the matter. the origin of these schemes.

March 1st, Henry Clay writes in his diary, It was the most proud and triumphant day of my life. And Clay is applauded from many sides. A great many of his political opponents come together here to commemorate his heroic action, much of it behind the scenes and unknown to historians, to affect this compromise and to divert this potential calamity. This is why, among other famous deals that he made,

importantly, the Missouri compromise and also the great compromise of 1850, which we will get to later, Clay earns his honorific the great compromiser, the man who can bring everyone together and find common ground, and also a man who can make huge concessions on his own side. Of course, he doesn't rid the country of protective duties, but he compromises on the principle. Even sacrificing his much-cherished American system, he saw the demise of the Bank of the United States only a few months previous, and he's taking a more sober view of his ambitions. but above all, Clay did not want the union rent over this matter.

Clay did not believe that any political program was to risk the division of the union. And for that, he deserves to be in the annals of heroic statesmanship. Meanwhile, down in South Carolina, they are claiming victory. They forced a compromise by the means of nullification, and they feel vincent. indicated. They do not feel discredited. Many in the North see this in terms of the force bill. Oh, South Carolina was intimidated into concession. They saw that they could not withstand the might of the United States Army, therefore they backed down. That was not the way that Carolinians interpreted the situation. They saw it as a victory, a forced compromise through

the means of nullification and it got the response they wanted. Maybe not everything that they wanted. There are still protective duties, but they're time limited like the 16 tariff was. So that is my brief on the nullification drama and how this figures in the sectional conflict more broadly. Just more evidence piling up that just didn't all happen at once and that the divisions were there right from the start. And most curiously for the students of the era, the fact that the federal troops occupied Fort Sumter in Charleston Harbor, it was in some ways a replay of the drama in 33. Abraham Lincoln, in his inaugural address, said, the states have not left the union.

and he also says he will collect the duties at the ports. The only place where that threat was valid, or the only places, I should say, were Pensacola, where the Federals maintained their possession of Fort Pickens in the harbor, and at Charleston, where Major Anderson had gone over to Fort Sumter and occupied the fort. He had abandoned his post at Fort Moultrie. and spiked the guns and then crossed under cover of darkness to occupy Fort Sumter. He had no supplies and had to be provisioned somehow. But Lincoln was determined on holding Fort Sumter and collecting the duties there, along with his big new protective tariff, which he presided

over his first year in office. Curiously, back in 32, Lincoln is starting his political career. The same year that Calhoun resigns the vice presidency and then goes to contend with Webster in the Senate, Abraham Lincoln is a state legislator elected to office, and he gives his first political speech. Lincoln says in his homey way, My politics are short and sweet, like the old woman's dance. I am in favor of a national bank, internal improvements, and a high protective tariff. And that's where Lincoln got his start in politics back in 1832.

It's interesting that he figures so prominently in the renewal of that very issue in 1860. Seems like American history is just arguing over the same issues over and over and over again. You would think that a written constitution would be better for such things. That was the optimism of the founding generation, that this was better than tradition. But of course, the memory of the events has everything to do with how they're interpreted. The historical memory of what people believed the union was for. We remember that remark by the journalist from New England that the, union was established to have a national bank, to have protective tariffs. They believe that

Hamilton's vision was the point all along, but that was the world they lived in. The Southerners had to rely on the historical argument, which I think is a much stronger argument about the nature of the union. But it is the same issues again and again. Yeah. Well, so everybody where they can find your books. Absolutely. You can find me at www. tall menbooks.com. That's M.E.N. Tall men, plural. I also have an account on Buy Me a Coffee. If you'd like to leave me a tip for these lectures, I would much appreciate it. You can find me at George Bagby on Buy Me a Coffee. I'll find that link and I'll include it in the show notes. Thank you very much. Of course. Until the next time. Thank you very much. I want to welcome everyone

back to the Pekignano show. George Bagby is back, and we are going to continue the series on the lead-up to America's Civil War. How are you doing tonight, Mr. Bagby? I'm doing well. Being very productive, doing lots of study, and it's just a daily routine for me now, and that's good for me. That suits me. Awesome. Yeah.

I like routine. I still set my alarm for a certain time every day to make sure I get up. And I'm usually up before it and I have a routine every morning. And when it breaks, like if I'm on the road or somewhere, I always feel like my routine, like everything's out of whack until I get back home and I can resume what I consider to be normal life. Yeah. It's really good.

I spend a lot of time working away from home and it means that I kind of have a dual mode life right now. And I'm trying to keep it cohesive, trying to keep it predictable while I'm away at work and while I'm at home. It's just a very different pace from one to the other. For sure. All right. Let's talk about John C. Calhoun tonight. I look forward to it. Yes, indeed. And you've done a lot of work on this. And that's very valuable. John C. Calhoun is a remarkable American statesman, much, much, aligned, but his heart was always for preserving the union, which is really important to understand. He saw a potential division of the union as a great tragedy that was unnecessary.

And that's an important perspective as we're approaching the Civil War, that the armed conflict between the sections in the Civil War was ultimately an unnecessary failure of political deal-making. And that was something that Calhoun had dedicated his life to. He has a multifaceted career, a famous man for compromise for the union interest when he takes his seat in Congress during and immediately after the War of 1812. Famously, he compromises on things like the Bank of the United States and protective tariffs and even to a certain degree to internal improvements. But he comes around to a more stalwart sort of position, and that is what he is best known for.

He's quite an interesting character, and I know you've done a lot of work on him in your series on your podcast. You've gone through his disposition on government, I believe. And that's a particularly valuable document. When it comes to political science, America is quite prominent in modern times. We've produced the Declaration of Independence, the Constitution, and most remarkably the Federalist Papers, which are studied all around the world today because of their great success in our political system. But Calhoun is an outstanding rejoinder to the tradition that's best presented in things like the Declaration and the Constitution. The Declaration of independence is kind of in the back of our minds as Americans. We kind of take it for granted when it

says, we hold these truths to be self-evident. This is a kind of American creed. And I think for many these days, it's displaced the more profound religious creeds that we used to hold. For some Americans, this is a kind of religious declaration, a dogma even, that all men are created equal, that they are endowed by their creator with certain inalienable rights. For most of us, that's even more important than the decision of the declaration, that whenever any government becomes destructive to these ends of the pursuit of happiness and so on, It is the right of the people to alter and abolish it and institute a new government. That is the part of the declaration.

That's actually the point of the declaration that many of us forget about these days. And there's a reason for that because we look back at the Civil War in particular. And we say, oh, well, that was for 1776. It's not for now. It wasn't for 1861. Obviously, it wouldn't apply then, right? But this isn't the way that our forebears saw the document. They saw this as a declaration of the right of revolution, which deserves a deeper dig, a deeper dive that I propose to give here, at least in part.

Calhoun is a very outstanding political thinker in his own right. He's one of the few people in the modern Western world that took an exception to the social contract theory of the Enlightenment. And he was an unlikely fellow to give us that. He was not a religious fellow. If anything, he had some ties to Unitarianism, which is just anomalous in the South, wasn't something that ever took strong roots in the South. He was a more apathetic sort of man as far as religious matters went. Was not an observant man, though he was certainly raised in it. His forebears were Scotch Irish.

I say this not to malign him, but just to put him in his convent. context, he's an unusual fellow to be sticking up for pre-enlightenment political theory. But that is what he did. And this is such a remarkable instance of an American exception that you can find Calhoun's Great Treatise, the disquisition on government, published by people like Hackett Press, which publish people like John Stuart Mill and John. Jacques Rousseau and John Locke and such. They publish primary source readers as textbooks.

They've published John C. Calhoun for a long time. I don't know if they're still doing it, but that's an easy copy to acquire from Hackett. Social Contract Theory, which John C. Calhoun takes exception to, it emerges in the Enlightenment milieu, and particularly for us in the English Enlightenment, with people like Thomas Hobbs. Thomas Hobbs was a survivor of the English Civil War. So this was the war of the Puritans against the Stuart Monarchy of Charles I. They eventually cut off the king's head, and Oliver Cromwell takes charge. Hobbs saw a particular violent and vindictive aspect of that war. It was a socially rending kind of conflict. The most

important thing about the conflict for Hobbs is that no one understood where political legitimacy was based in the society. Everyone was questioning this. Everyone was taking up arms to fight for different convictions and the social fabric was torn. And this results in the burning of towns and the displacement of population and questioning the political order for generations to come. So Hobbs' response to this is what we might call a pre-liberal political philosophy, which he gives in the Leviathan, his great book, which was published in 1651. In the Leviathan, Hobbes gives us a political myth, which we call the state of nature. Hobbes imagines human life before political communities, before law, before government, before religion,

before any of our social apparatus that enables us to live together and organize. Hobbes' vision of the state of nature is every man for himself, that everyone is in competition with one another to the point that they murder one another on site, because they have everything to gain and everything to lose by the conflict, the essential conflict that exists between them. He imagines the state of nature as a state of perfect anarchy, where life is brutal. brutal and short, that they're in warfare. It's a state of conflict of all against all in Hobbs' memorable phrase. Nasty, poor, brutish, and short is his description of this state of nature. And he says that because this is so untenable, because this is so uncertain, everyone came together as an individual sovereign to form the first government. So they picked a member of their lot and gave him absolute authority to prevent the anarchy that prevailed previously.

Obviously, this is something never recorded in human history, but it is a powerful myth. And this is what social contract theory is based upon. It is a story of humanity, a way of explaining human nature. to make sense of a political system or a political ideal. So Hobbes's solution to this was absolute monarchy, and he was a monarchist, in spite of his assertion that every individual human being had a kind of political authority in their own right. He said that if everyone asserted their political rights, we would have total anarchy, and that would be the worst of all possible solutions to human problems.

Therefore, we must recognize the authority of the monarch, who was originally chosen before history, and that ensures order, political order. Now, you might be able to tell where these ideas would lead. And John Locke is another great example of this. Locke is more influential, probably in all respects, than Hobbes. Locke is called the father of liberalism. And when I say liberalism, think libertarianism. Think of older Western political order that lionized the rights of the citizen and representative government and such things.

If you want to imagine what liberalism consists of, you could do little better than to look at the Bill of Rights or the Constitution or the Declaration. Many credit Locke's ideas for Jefferson's formulations in the Declaration, by the way. Locke produced two treatises on civil government in 1689. The first treatise is extremely interesting. It is the more ignored of the two, but he is arguing against monarchy and against patriarchy in the first treaty or treatise. Says that it is a mistaken analogy to compare monarchy to the authority of the father in a family, denies that there was any original monarchy in the creation of Adam and his sovereignty over the created world, decreed by God in the book of Genesis, denies that Adam has a legacy of responsibility or authority over his family or descendants, and by extension, denies that monarchy has any natural basis. in creation. He denies that monarchy is a natural mode of government for human beings. Also,

which is very interesting, Locke is a Protestant reformer, among other things. In the first treatise, he declares that divorce should be an efficient means to rectify conflict between the sexes, basically, that marriage is an institution for the procreation and raising of children. It's very interesting that Locke makes this exception. This was very radical in his day. Of course, now we think of him as kind of reactionary about this, that Locke proposed that when children had entered maturity, that couples should be able to separate at will, that this was not a match that was meant to last the rest of their lives. So he's justifying divorce on some level here, kind of tentatively. The second treatise is much more interesting and applicable and much more often

studied. The second treatise is a declaration that human beings are created equal, that they form communities to preserve their property from those that might threaten it. and that they naturally elect leadership. Now, it's important to note that Locke is not arguing from history. He does not give any historical circumstances for this. Like Hobbs, he is presenting a myth about the origins of humanity. He's giving a story to explain his preferred mode of government, which is parliamentary. Locke is a Republican. Locke believes in representative government. He believes that government's

legitimacy rests on consent. Now, he goes on to write a famous book called the essay concerning human understanding, where he gives a kind of a view of human nature. He says that human nature is not fixed, it is not consistent, that it is determined by environment, determined by the way that we are nurtured, determined by our upbringing, and that we are very malleable by nature. He gives us the famous image of the tabula rasa, the blank slate, that human beings are very malleable, and that we can change our nature based on the way that we are educated. So he puts great emphasis on education, on early childhood, and things like that. We should remember how important Locke is in influencing modern institutions and notions about human nature.

The social contract theorists are extremely influential. They basically give us the mental furniture of modern times, give us the basic presumptions that people have about how human nature works and what sorts of governments we should have and such. They are all at odds with tradition. And one of the best exemplars and explainers of the old order is Aristotle, not surprisingly. Aristotle wrote a book called The Politics. This is a book of notes that Aristotle once delivered in lecture form. Unlike Plato, whose literary works survive today, whereas his teaching notes are entirely lost. Aristotle's teaching notes survive while his literary works are entirely lost.

So Aristotle makes for very different reading than Plato. There is some justification for Plato's popularity because of this difference in the surviving sources. But Aristotle's politics is excellent reading. I used to teach it. And in the first book of Aristotle's politics, he makes the explanation that is most applicable to us today. Aristotle says man is a political animal. Now, in this, there is no implication that man is a brute beast. When he says animal, that is not at all what he means.

He means creature, a being who is designed to live in community, which is what political means. Now, this is a most fundamental difference with Hobbs and Locke. Aristotle says that everywhere we observe human beings, they have social characteristics that are part of their nature. Aristotle is a natural scientist, and this is actually the bulk of his work, works on natural science, observing living creatures and deducing from the way that they behave how the universe must consist.

There are criticisms. There are Aristotle's natural science observations are notoriously off base on some level, but that isn't very important for us here. Aristotle says man is designed to be social, and his justification for this is observation of human beings. This is something that Hobbs and Locke are not able to put into their theory, because at best that's what it is. It is myth-making.

That is what Hobbs and Locke are engaged in. They're imagining prehistoric human beings and how they lived. They cannot give any real evidence from experience or archaeology for their conclusions. Aristotle, however, says human beings everywhere you find them, have religion, have property, have language. Nowhere do you find human beings that do not have language. They have law, they have marriage, they have slavery, everywhere you find them, they have these characteristics. This is human nature.

And if you recall Raphael's famous wall painting, the School of Athens, which is physically painted on a wall in the papal apartments in Vatican City, Plato, the elder teacher, is pointing up at the sky, pointing up at ideals, whereas Aristotle, Plato's,

student is pointing down at the earth, pointing down on what can be perceived by the senses. And this is a wonderful image to explain what Aristotle is really getting at. He's saying, what we observe contains nature. We can understand the nature of the universe by observing the specimens we have in front of us. So Aristotle asserts man was designed. designed to live in a community. Locke and Hobbes, to various degrees, take exception to that with their mythical state of nature. Aristotle asserts there is a natural hierarchy with human beings that human beings are designed to practice benevolence over those under their authority. Hobbes says that in the state of nature, everyone is looking after their own personal interests exclusively, and that this results in universal violence and war.

And that is Hobbs, in his explanation for the formation of absolute monarchy, to enable human life and development, because obviously you cannot raise a family in a state of universal war. Locke similarly says the individual is looking after his own interests exclusively until he forms a commonwealth. And then he gives some of the authority that he is born with some of the inalienable rights that the Declaration of Independence mentions, certainly an influence from Locke there. he cedes some of those to a general authority that he gives his assent to. The social contract is an idea that the individual is the base unit of society, and that the individual, in some time long before recorded history, assented to cede some of that sovereignty to a third party, to the Commonwealth, to a government. This is what Hobbs and Locke have in common, that government is a human creation and not a natural institution, that law itself is a human creation and not a natural element in human life.

Aristotle asserts the exact opposite, that law is natural, that community is natural, that we were designed to live in groups to communicate, to cooperate, to practice authority over one another? Now, for this, Aristotle has a most compelling argument that the family is a base unit of society, not the isolated individual. Aristotle memorably says the isolated individual is politically inconsequential for simple reasons. Human beings are mortal.

they will die, and an isolated human being cannot form a family and reproduce. Therefore, his political opinions are of no consequence whatsoever. His individual sovereignty matters for nothing, because he is not a member of a community. The community for Aristotle is really the basic organization of society. The family is the most basic unit, not the individual. And the community is the most basic organization. This is where Calhoun makes his splash in political science. At a late date and a most unusual location in the United States,

Calhoun asserts Aristotle's conclusions in an American context. So Calhoun's disquisition on government, which was published after his death in 1850 is his most important work. He says early in the disquisition, human nature is preliminary to theory on government. Before we discuss what government is, we must first understand what human beings are. This is, of course, what Obs and Locke first started to do

in their treatises on government. They first give us anthropology. And basically a philosophy of human nature must be preliminary. If we were to understand how to govern human beings, we must first delineate what human beings are. Calhoun says, just at the beginning of his disposition on government, his treatise on government, I assume as an incontestable fact that man is constituted to be a social being. He asserts community is natural and not artificial. It is not the creation of human thought or aspiration.

This is something that man has been born to live in. We cannot exist outside of it, even if we could become a hermit on a mountaintop. Our ideas would be inconsequential. We could not communicate them or perpetuate them certainly with any likelihood. Calhoun says, man has never been found in any age or country, in any state other than the social. So he's coming out swinging for Aristotle's view of human nature here. That man, everywhere we find him, is religious, has language, has law, has marriage, has marriage, has property, that these are natural aspects of human nature.

He next says, I next assume also as a fact equally incontestable, that while man is so constituted as to make the social state necessary to his existence and the full development of his faculties, this state itself cannot exist without government. The assumption rests on universal experience. Let us take a step back now and understand the philosophical approach of the social contract theorists in contrast with Aristotle and John C. Calhoun.

The social contract theorists have an a priori idea of human government, human life, human flourishing. They begin with a theory. And then they try to do. to explain how their theory is correct. Calhoun and Aristotle begin with the philosophical posture of A. Posteriori, which is a reference to experience and not to theory. They are realists. They are scientists, if you like, real political science, and that they are observing human nature. and they're not taking exception to it and saying, well, human beings must have been a totally different kind of creature long ago. Remember, John Locke says that human nature is malleable. So John Locke can imagine us swinging through the trees and coming down to establish a social contract to formulate a government and laws.

John C. Calhoun is, like Aristotle, is looking at human beings as they, they are and has, as we've always known them to be, thanks to history, and saying this is how human beings have always been. This is human nature. Remember Aristotle's depiction in the painting of Raphael, where he is beckoning to what he can see on the surface of the earth. That is his point of reference. Chancy Calhoun demers on the point that man is a selfish creature. He says he will not say man is selfish. He will not say man is primarily self-interested. He takes a nuanced view here. He says he is at the same time so constituted as to feel more intensely what affects him directly. So he declines to say man is selfish, but he does say man feels things that

relate to him more directly. And therefore, man is self-assertive. Man is inclined to argue. Man is inclined to fight based on what he recognizes as his interests. But for Calhoun, this means interests as an individual, interests as a member of a community with a certain perspective on things as a member of a family and the family's distinct interests. He frames this as a social problem, not an individual isolated, alienated problem, as Hobbs would frame it. He says individuals naturally come into conflict, but communities also have interests and communities have conflicts. Ultimately, Calhoun says our identity in our community is for human beings more important even than our individual identity, that we fall into patterns of group conviction, group thought.

Calhoun says government is the controlling power established to moderate conflict and that government is divinely ordained. Now, for a man who was not a small, O Orthodox Christian, not an observant believer or worshipper of God, this is a remarkable base that he takes, that human nature has been established by divine providence, that God made us to be social creatures, and that government itself is based in divine ordination. This is precisely what the social contract theorists were ultimately arguing against. They were part of the Enlightenment, which is, among other things, a move to desacralize human institutions, to make them more plastic and malleable to human demands,

to make divorce a norm, to divide the marriages of men and women, to divide families, to divide states even. One of Locke's great contributions is the argument of the right of revolution that tyrants merit revolution and such. not something that's on the curriculum this evening, but nevertheless a very compelling and influential ideal, obviously very much part of the Declaration of Independence. But Calhoun is arguing for the divine legitimacy of government and law, that it's ultimately based in the authority of God, which is, of course, what we see in Romans 13 and elsewhere in the Bible. Calhoun then takes a step back and says there are a number of different governments. A constitution, he says, and I quote,

a constitution is the contrivance of man while government is of divine ordination. So we must have some kind of government. But we do come up with our own forms based on our own particular needs. This is a good American nuance to his philosophy, quite necessary given the circumstances of the American government. He then has a section concerning protection against the powers of government. Obviously, tyranny, the abuse of state power, is always a risk. So how does Calhoun address and understand this? Aristotle, by the way, is very interested in this question and devotes an awful lot of space to it.

Like Aristotle, Calhoun is interested in the division of centers of authority. Calhoun is not a monarchist. He does believe, even in monarchies, there are many centers of authority. And he does give historical examination later. He says, how can those invested with powers of government be prevented from aggrandizing themselves instead of using them to protect and to preserve society. So the powers invested in the executives of government are a temptation.

They may abuse these powers. They may use them to enrich, enrich and ingrandize themselves. How are the communities they govern to protect themselves from that risk? Calhoun says the major mistake of the social contract theorists is universalism, something that we are often hearing about among the folks that we follow, the idea of the unity of the human race, that we're all ultimately the same. We see the formula in the declaration itself.

We hold these truths to be self-evident. Well, let's stop there for a moment. Obviously, the British imperial government took exception to that, which is why they fought a war many years about it. It's not self-evident to all human beings. It's self-evident to those who accept the premise. Calhoun says, the human race is not comprehended in a single society or community. This is a really interesting choice of words. He does not say the human race is not a single community.

He says the human race is not comprehended in a single society or community. We comprehend by understanding. We observe and we comprehend. This is an invitation to look around. Like Vilfredo Pareto says, The only person that speaks of a unified humanity is one that does not look at human beings. I'm paraphrasing him here. I can't remember the exact quote, but this is the gist of it.

Philfredo Pareto said, anyone that looks at human beings know they differ tremendously from one another. And this is a great anti-liberal criticism. This is, it's not as deep as what's, Pareto is saying here, but Calhoun's point is notable that human beings are divided into nations. This is a fundamental thing and a disturbing thing for many. I was once asked to teach Herodotus in high school. Later on, when I was subjected to an inquisition by concerned board members, they had not the least awareness.

They were lawyers and accountants and things like that. They hadn't read Herodotus. They had no idea Herodotus divides his history into studies of the nations of the world, that they're also different from one another. Herodotus was not a universalist. He took it for granted that anyone that looked at the peoples of the world would know that they're distinct from one another, that they have different languages, that they have different customs, that they have different complexions, as Calhoun mentions. They have different religions. They have different perspectives.

They have different placement on the surface of the world. According to the Bible, this is by divine intention. The origins of the nations of the world go back to the Tower of Babel. At one point humanity was united. They start an ambitious, project to put themselves on level with God symbolically or literally building a tower into the heavens. And they are punished for this. The punishment is most evident in their division in language. They no longer can comprehend one another. And so they divide. They go to the corners of the earth due to their division of language. So Calhoun, he says, we do not see a single society. We do not see a single country. We do see distinct nations and particular geographical interests around the world.

He says, the great diversity of language, customs, pursuits, situation, and complexion formed a great many separate communities acting independently of each other. Between these, there is the same tendency to conflict as there is between individuals. Communities have differences with one another. Communities go to war with one another. These are far more relevant characteristics of human nature than is the individual. It takes exception with another individual and goes and rolls around on the street, biting each other's ears, tearing out each other's hair. That is an inconsequential kind of action, just like the hermit on the mountain.

side is politically inconsequential. He's seceded from community. He's seceded from the gene pool. He's not taking part in political society. The individual conflict is inconsequential, basically. The conflict between communities is far more significant. And that is why, by the way, we study things like political leaders, political choices, and their wars as our first object, our first exposure in history. That's where we begin. We go much deeper past that point, but we begin with the most dramatic. We begin with the great leaders. We begin with their great choices. We begin with their great consequences which result in wars. That's what we start with when we study history. history. He says, these community loyalties, these community conflicts, are stronger than any

individual selfishness. They're more politically consequential. He says, self-preservation is the supreme law as well with communities as with individuals. And anyone that has an organic connection to another human being, knows well of what he speaks. To a lesser degree, just to be the child of a father and a mother, you want to preserve them. You feel a duty and responsibility to them. More so, do you feel it when you are a parent, where you would throw yourself between your child and whatever might threaten it. You would immediately sacrifice your life for your children. Your feeling of group loyalty is assintuated, which is one of the reasons why to have a family and to have children is meaningfully to have a stake in the future of your community.

It changes one's perspective. I look back on my own life and I can't well understand my motivations and ambitions before I became a father. marrying my wife was one level of that, and I felt a tremendous responsibility to her in her well-being. But when I had children, a new aspect of my nature was revealed to me, and there's not a day go by when I'm not making efforts for the well-being of my children. It's really something that gets me up in the morning. It's something that pushes me late into the night, because I'm thinking about my children all the time. It's a very important aspect of human nature. And this is where Calhoun is quite perceptive here.

He sees into the nature of things here. This really does well explain human behavior. It's much more on the point. It's much more illustrative than any theory of the individual as the basic unit of society. is what the social contract theorists would have, that the individual is the basic unit and not the community or even the family. Now, Calhoun's great contribution in American politics is his doctrine of the concurrent majority. Calhoun is a unionist all through his career.

Right up to his death in 1850, he is arguing for the continuing, of the union. He's arguing for compromise, for innovations to enable the states to maintain the union under the Constitution. He does not want to replace the Constitution. He does want to amend it and makes his opinions known in the nullification crisis, of course. But he is, to the last, a unionist. He is misunderstood by those that blame him for, um, ambitialification. for secession, he believes nullification could save the union. And his, his justifications for this are very interesting. We see it best explained in his disquisition on government. Later in his treatise, we've been covering his introduction up until this point, later in the treatise,

emphasizing community interest and community cooperation, that communities differ greatly from one another. You may remember in our last podcast episode, we talked about Calhoun saying that the states were infant nations, that they would develop into distinct regional characters, that they were, in fact, sovereign communities inside the union of the United States, and that they should have an ability to defend their own regional interests. This is his justification for the nullification gambit in South Carolina. In the disquisition, he says, by giving to each interest or portion, the power of self-protection, all strife and struggle between them for ascendancy, is prevented, and thereby not only every feeling calculated to weaken the attack,

to the whole is suppressed, but the individual and social feeling are made to unite in one common devotion to country. Each sees and feels that it can best promote its own prosperity by conciliating the goodwill and prosperity of the others. Therefore, he says the best way to prevent the aggrandizement of the political class is to seed to every community, however you might organize that. In America, it is states, to cede to them a measure of self-protection for their own distinctive interests. For Calhoun, the solution is nullification. This is his veto power, which he claims the states retain, that they never see. to the federal government as a political authority.

Now, just to take a step back for a moment, another Enlightenment thinker, John Jacques Rousseau, another social contract theorist, is the origin of theories about national government. According to Jean-Jacques Rousseau, every citizen is an individual authority that makes up the authority. of the state. So the citizens yield their authority to a spokesman, an elected official, and he exercises that authority in their stead. This is a basic principle of representative government in theory. John C. Calhoun says the individual is not the base unit of society. It is actually the community. In this, he has everything in common with Aristotle. He says that for communities to form a government that has authority over all of them collectively, they must retain some of their sovereign rights to determine their destiny.

Therefore, they must be able to interpose when the government is doing something that is adversely effective on them. That is the theory of nullification. Now, John C. Calhoun is always very interested in historical examples, and he gives a great many in the disquisition to justify his stance. He says that in late Republican Rome, the Tribune of the Pledbs exercised a veto over the legislative power of the Senate. He uses the Iroquois Confederacy of New York State as an example. A very remarkable example for him to use, a Native American example. The Iroquois Confederate Confederate,

was made of six Indian nations, and they came together for common policy, and each nation retained a veto power. This is very interesting because that is directly analogous to the organization of the Articles of Confederation, our first constitution. He uses medieval Poland as an example, late medieval, where the nobility exercised a veto on the diet of Poland, which was the legislature of Poland. So there are great many fiefdoms in 17th century Poland, and the crowned heads, the minor princelings and nobility of Poland could exercise a veto over any general legislation. most compellingly because the three former examples were rather short-lived. We can look at each one of them and say, well, they fail soon after Calhoun's example. This is actually one of the weakest points in Calhoun's argument from my perspective.

Calhoun finally gives a more compelling example, and that is the organization of the Kingdom of England, where he says the king, the lords, and the commons all exercise vetoes over their respective interests. In previous times, we could have added the church to that as well. So we see several distinct interests in the broader and more ethnically unified community of England, exercising a kind of veto power in politics. So that is Calhoun's justification for his philosophy. I have a great deal more information here, but I see I've already gone to an hour. So I propose that we have a second episode on Calhoun at our next opportunity.

Absolutely. Absolutely. We will do that very soon. Wonderful. Yes, Mr. Bagby, please tell people where they can buy your books. Yes, indeed. I may have mentioned before I just got a biography of Sam Houston into print. This is a particularly valuable biography of Houston, and it is out of copyright, and I put it back into print. It is The Raven by Marquist James. It is not yet on my website, but if you go to my Twitter handle at Tallman Books, you can find a link to purchase.

it there. That's my most recent offering. You can find most of my books available on www.tallmanbooks.com. I have a few new titles that I need to upload to the web page, but that's where you can find most of my books that I've republished. Awesome. Thank you very much, and we'll pick up again about Calhoun in the next sitting. I appreciate you. That'll be delightful. Thank you, Pete. Thank you. I want to welcome everyone back to the Peking Yenna show. George Bagby is back and we are going to continue talking about the lead up to America's Civil War.

How are you doing this evening, Mr. Bagby? I'm doing well. I'm busy. I'm studying. It's what I do now. So it's become a pattern. That's a good thing. It's fun to be an amateur academic.

All right, well, sounds like we're going to continue talking about Mr. John C. Calhoun, so take it away. Yeah. Last time we were talking about Calhoun's disquisition on government, which he had written privately and it was found in his personal papers after his death in 1850. And so it was published after that point. and it has its influence in the decade just previous to the war's outbreak. But his idea of the concurrent majority, if you recall from the last episode, this was explicitly a unionist strategy to hold the various interests of the different states

together under a federal government. So Calhoun's great contribution, if we can call it that, this hasn't worked. And his historical examples of this are various, many of which are governments at the point of failure, like the Roman Republic, or governments that soon just ceased to exist, like the Iroquois Confederacy, or the Polish. Confederacy. These are examples of what he described as the concurrent majority, more like a confederation government, as we saw under the articles. That also was an unsuccessful thing, though maybe for different reasons. We could, there have been people that have debated that about the articles. But Calhoun's strategy for the preservation of the union, was certainly much more decentralized than what the union ends up turning into.

As far as his works during his life, during his active career, he has another important contribution that gives us insight into his thought in 1842. So you recall the anger at Andrew Jackson's veto of the recharter of the Bank of the United States. Henry Clay and other members of Congress, they were looking at the majority of Congress that had voted for the bill and the controversial aspect of the veto. They found Jackson's veto message demagogic, unnecessarily angry at the elites, in their opinion. they thought that Jackson was risking some kind of civil unrest. Of course, that did not happen.

But there was a group led by the likes of Clay and Daniel Webster, who were very upset about the president's veto power. And so in 1842, they proposed a constitutional amendment to strip this power from the executive. On this occasion, Calhoun produces a great public paper, a speech given in Congress, of course, on the matter, where he is supporting the veto power. And of course, this is a key element in his strategy of the concurrent majority, which is basically giving or proposing the state government's retain.

not that they be explicitly given, but that they actually retain a power to block, to interpose federal law, which is a veto power. And this is how South Carolina saw her role in the nullification crisis in the Jackson administration. So there are a number of people very interested in this. there are two schools of thought on the subject. One, which is Daniel Webster's, was that South Carolina was intimidated by the force bill and just put into a position she had to back down on nullification. The other position was more of what South Carolina thought about the matter

in a number of southern statesmen at the time. they were looking at the ordeal of the nullification crisis. They looked at Henry Clay's quick repeal of the protective tariffs and the conciliatory effort. And they saw this as a success. They got exactly what they intended to get by upping the ante on the matter. The force bill notwithstanding. So Calhoun delivers this speech in response to Clay's proposal. Clay wanted to change the Constitution on the veto because he said the veto was essentially anti-democratic.

And certainly it is. There's no question about it. A majority of both houses of Congress vote on legislation, send it to the president, and the president has a prerogative there to decide on the wisdom of the legislation. So the president's supposed to take a longer view than Congress. He's supposed to be an executive. Clay says, quote, that the nation has a will of its own,

that the numerous majority of the whole was the appropriate organ of the voice, and that whatever derogated from it, to that extent, set up the will of the majority. So this is a framing that the popular voice measured at one point is the will of the people and should prevail. So Clay's vision of the legislature is that of the National Assembly, that this represents the individual citizen's collective will. This is the formula, more or less, basic formula that we see in Rousseau's social contract, that the individual citizen is the partaker in the powers of the state, that the citizen has delegated his individual powers, his sovereign individual will, as it were, to the state for these special purposes that are all spelled out in the Constitution.

So Clay's vision of the union is a national union, a union made of individual Americans, that they're the parties to the union. And this is why, he says, the will of the majority of the legislature should be the final determinant of what becomes law. Clay criticizes the executive here noting the executive is not elected by a popular majority. Of course, this is an indirect means of election.

The president does not contend for the popular vote. Candidates for the president are contending for the electoral votes because the states allocate their electoral votes. These days, as in most of American history, the states give all of their electoral votes to the majority popular vote winner. Of course, much earlier in our history, the state legislatures themselves could elect to award the electoral vote and not even have a popular vote for the presidency.

This was the original system. This is how Washington was unanimously elected. there was no popular vote at the time at all. Most of the states then adopt to allocate their electoral vote based on a popular referendum on the presidency. But of course, this is an indirect system at best. And what it does is it apportions, it has disproportionate power in smaller and less populated states. because the electoral vote is determined by the total number of congressional representatives from the state. And no matter how small, the state always has two senators.

So tiny little Delaware is equal to Texas in the Senate. Wyoming, with the smallest population in the union, is equal to California. in the Senate. And though the House of Representatives apportions according to population, giving California the largest contingent in the House, the smaller states have a disproportionate electoral vote because tiny Wyoming, tiny in population, still has three electoral votes because of the two senators and the one House member.

This means that presidential candidates have never campaigned only for the popular vote. They've been determined by a plurality of support. And this was because we have a federal union and not a consolidated popular government. So this difference is important in the organization of the federal government. Union. This is an American invention of the indirect means of electing the president. This has not been exported around the world. The electoral college is a rather unusual system. They did have inspiration from the electors of the Holy Roman Empire, which is an interesting system in its right of various bishops and crowned heads had electoral votes in the Holy Roman Empire.

And that was an indirect means, obviously aristocratic means, which the electoral college is a kind of aristocracy, at least by design. The idea was the electors would debate among themselves in a committee who the best who the best aspirant to the office should be and it was supposed to be disconnected from political partisanship. Obviously that's just way too optimistic. That's not how people work. That's not how people organize. They're clashing factions in politics.

But Clay, criticizes the electoral college and says the president doesn't have a popular mandate, and this undermines the legitimacy of the office. So the basic question in this debate about the veto power is who has a stake in the Commonwealth? Is it a union of individuals or is it a union of states. And this is the key question as regards the sectional conflict. What we're seeing in this period is a coalescing of mostly northern opinion. We have a little ways to go before we see this come to a head.

But Daniel Webster, in his famous debate with Robert Hayne, is organizing his thoughts in this way, and we see Henry Clay doing it here with the veto measure, that the United States of America is best understood as a national union, that it is a union of individuals who have surrendered a part of their individual sovereignty. This is like a basic enlightenment idea that we all have the prerogative to determine all manner of things about ourselves. We see this evolving in modern times to the point where people choose their sex and change their name based on their personal preferences. Of course, this has much deeper roots, something that you and I, for instance, are familiar with, we have both changed our religious affiliations in adulthood.

That is one of the results of the liberal social order. This is something that's very deep rooted in our culture, and it kind of forms the way that we think about the world. we don't we don't take organic connections for granted when it comes to our identity. This is, I think, very deeply rooted in America. The American project has been about ideals of self-determination. We'll argue about just how far that goes. legitimately, how far it ought to go, or to what extent we can change these affiliations.

That's a really big aspect of the idea of naturalization, the idea that you could choose to be a citizen of another country. For instance, that's a very fundamental aspect of identity, who's law are you going to live under? Should individuals have the human right to use another liberal ideation to choose what country they live in? Do they have a right to just move wherever they prefer to live. We can just look around inside the United States and understand the plausibility of that

idea. People move from place to place all the time in the United States. They marry, they divorce, they remarry, they change their religious affiliations, they change their political parties. These things are all very changeable, fungible in our lives. And this is an aspect of that. So the idea that the individual has sovereignty for this, and also that individual should be liberated from systems that limit their private choices, for instance, to abolish slavery, to liberalize laws on divorce, to enable people to more freely match up according to their individual whims and preferences. The freedom to leave an established church,

to become a dissident, to join a sectarian group, or indeed to proclaim you have no religion at all, and yet you maintain your civic rights, you're right to vote, you're right to participate in the community order and so on. That's a form of liberation as well. And that's been part of the liberal project as well. So we see some of these things evolving at this point. And it goes back to this question about the sovereign individual,

whether or not the order of the United States of America, is made of sovereign individuals, that is a very plausible proposition for many of these people, and it grows more popular over time. Of course, there is an obstacle here, and that is the role of the states. The federal organization of the United States, this unique American invention that we see with the Articles of Confederation, and the Philadelphia Constitution. It's the only aspect of the Constitution that's been successfully exported around the world. Forrest McDonald, a great Southern historian, also a very interesting fan of Alexander Hamilton,

kind of with Whigish sympathies. They're still an absolutely amazing historian, and everyone should be. read him. He said in one of his books, the federal organization of states retaining powers inside of a federal union is the only aspect of our constitution that has been exported around the world and found success. McDonald also lamented, and this is this is, this is part of his complexity as a historian of some wiggish, wiggish sympathies, his admiration of Hamilton and such. This is what makes him very complex and a really compelling man to read. He has profound observations. He says, America is the only place, it is the land of where this was

invented, but it does not exist in the land where it was invented. It was destroyed by the Civil War. And that is a really fascinating observation. We can look for federal unions around the world, and we frequently see them in the name of the country. The Russian Federation, for instance, adopted this mode of government, and they have a huge number of states and autonomous republics and city states and things in the Russian Federation today, it's something that was purpose built for an especially large country like ours with

lots of regional interests, different ethnic groups that are concentrated in different parts of the country, it's meant to help protect these different communities, to allow them to defend themselves, to defend their interests and the rest. We see other places where there are federal forms of government. Australia has a federal system. Canada has a federal system. also both of them very large countries with very dispersed populations, distinct regions, and so on. It's a very interesting design. And this is ultimately the matter here, or at least Calhoun emphasizes this in his defense of the veto. Calhoun responds in Congress.

he defends the electoral college. He defends the Senate. He brings the Senate into the conversation. He says, well, if you really want popular representation, you can't have that and retain the Senate itself. This is ironic because they're actually speaking in the Senate. Clay is a senator. Calhoun is a senator. He says that the union was formed in the history. with conventions of states.

The only state that held a popular referendum on the Constitution was Rhode Island, and it was overwhelmingly defeated. It was the very first state to vote for the Philadelphia Constitution, and it was defeated in that referendum, that plebiscite. States had the prerogative to join the union or not join the union. Again, Rhode Island, an example of that, and also North Carolina. He notes that there have to be protections for the states with smaller populations.

Otherwise, the interests of the most populous states will override their essential interests. Again, going back to what we covered on our last episode, the disquisition on government, where he identifies political communities, that there are a great many political communities in the United States, and the federal system is there to protect their interests against the overweening or aggressive interests of their neighbors that are in union with them. Calhoun calls the federal government of federal republic of states, not of individuals. So he's pushing back again with the characteristic southern response with historic examples. What kind of system do we have? We know this by looking at experience. We know this by the

record of history, not by abstract theory about how things ought to work in the ideal society or otherwise. Calhoun says, instead of a nation, we are in reality an assemblage of nations or peoples united in sovereign character immediately and directly by their own act. So they unite together under the Constitution with their own community sovereignty. So again, we see Aristotle's important point. Political organization begins with communities. families are the basic element of this, but even an isolated family is in a hopeless situation. Who will their children marry? You have to think in multi-generational terms.

Aristotle says the single person isolated from a community can't do anything adequately. He has to make his own shoes. He has to make his own tools. He has to make his own house. He has to make his own food. And so on. His life is miserable because he cannot specialize in anything. His life is necessarily going to be at a low level. Aristotle says, because of human mortality, just the fact that we are all going to die. We have to marry. We have to have to have. families, we have to raise our children. That means we have to have durable connections to other people and trusting relationships. Aristotle says the community explains the nature of man, that man is what he calls the political animal. Man is designed to be social. Man will go extinct if he is not social. And this is what sets human beings apart from brute beasts. that were designed to live in community together. So these communities in Calhoun's

of reckoning here, they form the federal government. They could have opted out of that, and indeed, initially two of them did. But they had the sovereign capacity to form this special agent that acts on behalf of the states, the federal government. This all sounds so ironic from our own time.

But nevertheless, early republic stuff is great because these ideas worked to some degree, could have worked given different circumstances. It's my favorite period of history. it's so nice to spend time in this period. I was reflecting on this recently. It seems to me the political class has understandable motives. There are certainly cynical characters.

There is certainly Machiavellian power plays. there are certainly secret things that we might never discover about some of these people and subversion. On the whole, they seem so remarkably sincere. We can read biographies of Henry Clay, for instance. and he doesn't seem like a spook. There's nothing in the facts of his life that would lead one to think he is actually the agent of a subversive power. You can understand where he's coming from.

And his actions reflect his character. And at some point in American history, we're looking at our political class and we're wondering what their actual motives are versus what they say and we're in the dark about most of the activities of the federal government and I have some difficulty just drawing that line where where these people become these secret boards of power and motives I'm not sure where that line lies. And this is, I guess, part of the question among the cynical these days, which I can sympathize with.

At what point did they start lying to us? Well, think about this. Imagine if you could bring Henry Clay or John C. Calhoun or any of them forward and introduce them to Lindsay Graham. Yes. What will they have thought that the country had become? They would be hopelessly confused, and they would be livid with anger. That might be just the best place to leave that, because the motives of our public men today, they're just, I can't interpret what's going on.

it is so preposterous and confusing. And so I like the early republic because things make sense. If I can give that excuse. Anyway, Calhoun, his line that America is, quote, an assemblage of nations or peoples. This is his vision of the union. that these are nasient nations in union together, basically an empire with a federal system over them, rather than a king, a organization, a political organization, common enough in history, and the basic structure of the great governments, the dominant,

nations of history who almost always, I must say always, had subordinate nations inside of their territory. So they set the norms. They had an official language, had an official religion, had a law that applies generally in some sense or another, but frequently has peoples that have been conquered, like the Gauls were conquered by the Romans, things like that, who have some standing or not in the empire. But an empire, a simple way to understand it, a large monarchy that contains many nations. A simple explanation of what an empire is in history. So Calhoun, he says the states, they use their sovereign character to create the federal government by their own action, but without losing their separate and independent existence.

So they do not abolish themselves by joining the union. They do not surrender this sovereign capacity by joining the union. They surrender specific sovereign capacities that are all listed in the country. Constitution. Things that the states may not do. They may not issue titles of nobility. They must guarantee a representative form of government. They may not issue their own currency. They may not keep, they may not have foreign relations on their own authority. they've ceded general foreign relations capacities to the general government. Calhoun says, to give the dominant interest, say, the simple majority of citizens,

to give the dominant interest an unlimited and despotic control over all the others, what in a country of such vast extent and diversity of condition, institutions, industry and productions, would that be, but to subject the rest to the most grinding despotism and slavery? Now, whenever we hear a figure like Calhoun mentioned slavery, our minds turn in an alienating direction. Calhoun is talking about free people that are members of free institutions. He is talking about the Anglo-American element that dominates the union at his time. He's not talking about the slaves. He is not talking about the Native Americans who are not American citizens unless they've assimilated,

generally married into it, into Anglo families and assimilated over the course of generations, there is a way to inherit citizenship this way or be granted or recognized as a citizen that way. He's not talking about the excluded groups. He's not talking about immigrants or travelers coming through America. He's talking about the actual citizens. to deprive a free citizen of the United States of his legitimate concerns, interests. That for him is despotism and the reduction of status of a citizen, what he's calling slavery, the tyranny of the majority.

This is Calhoun's special focus. He wants to prevent the tyranny of the majority. and the complex system of government under the Constitution is there to establish safeguards for that. The process of amending the Constitution is very complicated, has to go to the state legislatures, or could come out of a convention of the states, the means by which a bill becomes law. It must go through, I must originate either in the House or the Senate, it depending on the bill, must pass both houses. They send it back and forth and amend or change

the legislation. Then it goes to the president. And the president has prerogative to say yes or no to the proposed legislation. This is a complex system of government. And it was never designed to be done through simple majorities. Frequently, much more is required. Calhoun says, the effect, that is the effect of withdrawing the veto power is to make the president look more to the interests of the whole to soften, or let's see, the effect of the veto power, not the withdrawal of the veto power. The effect of the veto power is to make the president

look more to the interest of the whole, to soften sectional feelings and aspirations, to be more of a patriot than of a partisan of any particular interest, and through the influence of these causes to give a more general character to the politics of the country and thereby render the collision between sectional interests of less force. So he emphasizes here the effect of the veto to nullify overtly sectional legislation, something that would benefit one section over another. indeed Calhoun's theory about the use of the veto is subsequently used and referenced by several Democrats after this point.

And if we have time today, I'll get to it. I'm not sure I will. So, John C. Calhoun has an interesting personal life. Let's see. trying to find my page of notes. Here we go. So Calhoun lived in the upcountry of South Carolina, near Anderson, South Carolina, way up in the corner between North Carolina and Georgia. He was born into a slaveholding family. This was the typical experience of southerners that did own slaves.

there are, of course, many exceptions, usually entrepreneurs that journey to the west and start a plantation, have the wealth to invest in slaves and expand their operations in such a way. So there are a great many examples, especially in the Mississippi Valley and in Texas, of farmers who formerly did not own slaves, whose families did not own slaves. slaves becoming slave owners. The typical experience, the majority experience, is that of inheritance. It was not something that the individual himself chose to engage in. It was something that he inherited from his ancestors. And the slaves themselves were typically multi-generational under the same family. Now, there are a great many exceptions to this, and the exceptions are what form the popular picture of slavery. So the exceptions involve the sale of slaves, whether they're landing on the continent from the

Caribbean or from the African trade, the initial sale in coastal markets like New Orleans and Charleston. that is the it's a standard picture that most of us have about the nature of slavery this was the experience of the first generation of slaves they arrive on the shores of America

they are sold in the market the majority experience is that of multi-generational slavery they are born into a family of slave owners. They are part of the household. This is also an element that's very important in Aristotle's politics. If you want to know more about the political philosophy about slavery and how it works in politics, Aristotle is a good resource. He's an excellent read. I highly recommend him. They are his lecture notes, so they're a little clunky. He repeats. He repeats.

heats himself with various modes expressing the same thoughts, basically, but that's because they're his lecture notes. So it's not the best organized treatise, but it is a very valuable treatise, and you will find a great many nuggets of wisdom to it. So the exceptions, we think of slaves being sold in the market. We especially are concerned with the division of. of families, the fact that husbands and wives, slaves, could be separated from one another permanently through the commerce of slavery, that children could be separated from their parents,

that people could be uprooted from their communities where they had lived their entire lives and transported long distances never to see them again. All of this is true. All of that happened. This was also a minority experience. It was far more frequent in the colonial stage when the vast majority of slaves arrive in North America. Incidentally, this is an important thing to know about the slave trade, only 5% of the total of all slaves that came over the Atlantic from Africa ended up in what is now the United States. So about 45% of them went to the Caribbean Islands.

Another 50% go to South America and Central America, most of them to Brazil. So it's a very small minority of the Middle Passage that actually ends up here. One of the basic reasons for it is that plantation, slave economy is just not as profitable here, as it is in the sugar-growing regions of the Caribbean and Brazil and such, where it is a far more profitable enterprise. American slavery is really unusual in an American context, in that family formation was the typical experience. life expectancies were a little less than that of the white population.

Fertility was about equal. There's a lot of talk about slave families and such. There is a fair amount of evidence of polygamy in the plantations in the deep south. every once in a while you come across a memoir that mentions this. This is not the typical experience, however. Polygamy is a source of a lot of conflict. Any of us that care to look into the dynamics of polygamy can easily understand that. Jealousy, fighting.

Those are all things that the slave owner does not want. He wants order. He wants harmony. He does not want conflict. He, the slave owner especially, does not want sexual jealousy among the slaves. So this is one of the reasons why monogamy was preferred. And we do have a lot of information about this.

people writing tracks about slavery, writing articles in journals such as DeBow's Review out of New Orleans, popular Southern periodical, contains an awful lot of advice about slave management. And this is the consensus view. So it's not to say there isn't there isn't fornication on plantations certainly there is that's something that is

to some degree outside of the control of the masters is not to say there isn't adultery, there is it's not to say there isn't well-regulated monogamy frequently there is not many of these people

are coming from polygamist society, after all. So this is a tradition that is being modified, being enforced to various degrees around the South. All interesting points. There is a popular theory that the institution of slavery destroyed the Black family. This was an especially popular point among historians and those with axes to grind in the mid-20th century. I think there are a great many reasons to discount this, especially because immediately after the Civil War, when the black family is no longer in the institution of slavery, there is a liberalization of family norms in black America. This is a major point during Reconstruction. It's a very controversial point.

There are state reforms during the Reconstruction regimes that permit divorce among the freedmen. And this has the effect of liberalizing their marriage norms. And what we see is widespread reports of divorce and family abandonment during Reconstruction. that was new. That was alarming to the white southerners. They were outspoken against it. This was done against their will, but of course, most of them were disenfranchised and had no say. So that's an interesting point of contention. Anyway, going back to Calhoun, he was raised with several dozen slaves. his father was poor, which meant that they were working alongside their slaves. Now, he's relatively poor, but he's in a kind of a remote area of South Carolina.

The land is not flat. It's not river bottom country or anything. They're having to work harder to get a living out of that land. So they're upcountry people. They're not in an area where most of the slaves do live and are more profitable. He does get raised among these slaves. He does grow up with them. He is nursed by a slave woman.

This is a relatively common feature, especially in this period of time. It's not particular to America, indeed. Anyone that has been around a new mother will know that nursing a child is a very intensive and inconvenient process, also frequently very uncomfortable. So this was something that people of status would give to domestic servants. This was the case in aristocratic England, for instance. In the 18th century, there's a famous novel published. It has a lot of fame as the first popular novel. It's called Pamela by Samuel Richardson.

Richardson wrote a couple other novels. He's perhaps most famous for his Clarissa, a gigantic novel. it's probably 2,500 pages or something. I've never taken the trouble to read it. But it's a famous book about a failed love affair. He wrote a sequel to Pamela. That was his original bestseller. Pamela II, which I've never seen a copy of,

concerns the heroine's choice to breastfeed her own child, which is very controversial in her social class, because nobody does that. And that's a curious element of that era. Anyway, Calhoun has a female slave who nurses him in his infancy, and he has a very special connection to her for the rest of his life and writes about it in his memoirs. And this is a southern trope, as it were, slave-owning families or people that grew up in a slave-owning family will, write affectionately about these people and this is like tributes to motherhood and such. These people were like surrogate mothers to him or to them.

That's a curious feature. Calhoun, when he enters into politics, he has established himself as a major wealthy figure in his area. through the course of his life he owns, depending on the time between 30 and 90 slaves. So this is a very large holding of slaves, especially when you approach 100. There are very few people in the South that own that many slaves. So this is a sign of his personal affluence. He is outspoken against the slave trade from an early date.

And this is an element that's important. We mentioned the drama of the slave trade and how families are split apart in the slave trade. This is just inside the domestic slave trade. This is very troublesome, very worrying, popularly opposed in politics. and the rest. Calhoun is focused on the international slave trade, so there is a consensus to shut that down. There are a couple of interests that oppose the closing of the international slave trade in early American history. One important one is the New England shippers, the ship owners. They want to keep it open. They are in the business of trans-encompassing.

transporting goods across the sea. This for them is a profitable business, a very socially shunned business in the north and in the south. And there's modern controversies about this, famously the Brown family, which left a bequest to found the university in Providence, made part of their fortune out of the, the slave trade. And so there's been campaigns to blot out their memories and all the rest.

You know how this stuff works. But that's an interest there. And then there are others that see this as essential to the agricultural economy of the South and say that the importation of more slaves from Africa is an economic benefit to the South. And so oppose the shutting down. of the foreign slave trade. Calhoun is outspoken against this early in his career. The domestic slave trade is another issue. If slaves are movable property, if they are chattels, they can be bought and sold. This is not serfdom. There is no tie to a particular piece of land. Surfdom is a different legal organization. Surf is in a a special feudal relationship with his noble lord, he cannot be removed from his tenetry.

He has to stay where he is. So serfs are often used in analogy to slavery. There are several important differences. Slaves could move around. They could have different masters in different places. there are a couple of their reasons why the domestic slave trade was really an insurmountable problem alongside the institution of slavery people could lose their property and this is a common problem then as now people suffer bankruptcy people have personal tragedies they lose the ability to work uh they they they have personal problems and fall into ruin. This happens in whatever form of government, whatever social institutions we could possibly devise.

This is a feature of human life. And what happens to someone whose property is liquidated? Their property is sold. Their property is auctioned. This is the origin of many of the slave sales, not all, but a substantial number of them. to give an example of this, a Confederate general Leonidas Polk. A very interesting man, he went to West Point, but did not take a commission as an officer. He later becomes a priest in the Episcopal Church and becomes the first missionary bishop of the state of Louisiana.

as Bishop of Louisiana, he travels around and builds some of the very first Protestant churches in the territory. He was born in Tennessee. He inherits slaves from his father. He decides to move his slaves, who he had inherited, to Louisiana. He settles just outside of Tibado, Louisiana, a lovely Cajun town. down on Bayou Lafouche, southwest of New Orleans. He starts a sugar plantation there. This is while he is Bishop of Louisiana. So he is a wealthy man. He brings a lot of resources with him. He transports his slaves,

which he grew up with, which is the typical experience of these people. He moves them all down. These are people that he's known his entire life. He does not want them separated. He does not want to sell them off. He doesn't want to disperse them. They have their own old relations with one another. You know, he's moving down grandparents with their grandchildren. You know, he's moving down several generations of slaves. It's another interesting aspect of the institution. There is a social security element to it. We shouldn't misunderstand this. This isn't a federal program. It has nothing to do with the government. A slave was a slave is provided for in whatever condition they're in. They could be a chronic invalid. You cannot starve them.

You cannot deny them shelter. You own them. And in fact, no one wants a slave like that. what use are they? They have no economic value. In fact, they take a lot of resources. There are a great many examples of this, which are historically very interesting. It's mostly in wills, but we can find strange sales that involve these slaves who are too old to work, injured or ill that cannot work for whatever reason. We find instances in the law, in legal proceedings, people transferring slaves by paying someone to take the slave.

Like an elderly woman, she needs someone to provide for her. so she gets from her master someone that can take care of her for whatever reason the master can't maybe he's moving he's not going to take her with him maybe he's bankrupt there are many possible reasons he pays someone else to take the slave and agrees to pay the new owner every year the slave remains alive and this is because the owner of a slave has a responsibility for the life of the slave. So this is a different kind of personal sovereignty, obviously. The master has to take care of these people in some way or another.

Well, going back to Polk, he's bringing down his chattels, his slaves, from Tennessee. He settles in Tibado. he starts a sugar plantation. This is a very risky operation. Sugar plantations require an industrial plant to process the sugar. You have to process the sugar very close by, typically on site. The sugar has to be crushed and boiled to produce molasses and sugar crystals to create brown sugar and the rest. And so they have to set up this complex industrial operation to make the operation profitable.

Hulk takes out a mortgage on the property to set up the sugar plantation. Now, this is always a risky operation, and there are great many tragedies that result because of Louisiana's peculiar climate. Storms blow in its tropical area, their epidemics, and the rest. sometimes it will freeze before you can harvest the sugar in an unusually cold season. You harvest sugar like between Thanksgiving and Christmas. So you can have a freeze in that period. Well, Hulk suffers a series of disasters in his first years. He has an epidemic that takes the lives of many of his slaves.

This reduces his productivity. He also has a hurricane that comes through. and destroys property on his plantation. So, in short, Polk goes bankrupt. He has to satisfy his mortgage with the bankers. He has to liquidate his property, and he has to sell his slaves. We do not know the fate of Polk's slaves. Likely, they were auctioned in New Orleans or some rivertown nearby.

This was a catastrophe for everyone involved, for Polk and for his slaves. Polk has to go to New Orleans to live in a parsonage afterwards because he was financially destroyed by this. Later on, Polk famously becomes a Confederate major general and dies outside of Atlanta. But this is an interesting aspect of the institution. So Calhoun, in observation, of slavery. He said, every planter must answer, not for the institution, for which he has no more accountability than the fall of Adam, but for his individual discharge of his duty. So, Governor Wise of Virginia wrote a memoir after the war and said, every slave,

owning southerner accepted slavery as a legacy of duty. Not generally speaking, this was not something that the men who were alive then who had this particular social power. It was not something most of them, the vast majority of them, had ever made a conscious choice to adopt. The vast majority of them found themselves inheritors of the system. And this forms their perspective on it. And that's one of the reasons why you see Calhoun here, saying, well, this isn't necessarily what any of us want.

We don't answer for the institution. We didn't make it. We didn't choose it. It was a duty we found ourselves with by the character of our society, by our circumstances of birth. We inherited the property. We inherited the duty. We inherited the slaves. He mentions the fall of Adam, an illusion to sin and evil.

evil. An association that many slave-owning Southerners did relate to the institution of slavery. There were a great many of them that had moral qualms about the institution. In many other respects, these are early liberals. We will get into that at a later date about liberal thought among southern leadership among southern elites concerning the institution of slavery. And there is a lot there. Jefferson Davis, Robert E. Lee, to mention two prominent examples, I'll tell you about them at another time.

They had very progressive ideas about what was possible for slaves, about what their political and social destiny would be in America. I do not think it's at all controversial to call their positions progressive, in fact. They believed that the social condition of the African American was improvable. This was not to say that they thought that the races would mix. virtually none of them North or South abolitionist or slave owner

contended that point that was a very unusual position we can narrow it down to just a few different individuals that had that progressive notion which of course is very widespread now they didn't think that

but they thought that slaves could be improved, that they could find some political position and even a solidarity, a provision for themselves outside of the institution of slavery. They had great hopes for the freed population. And there was an experience with freed slaves and many generations of black southerners that lived outside the institution of slavery. Calhoun, just to wrap up this section here for today, Calhoun said about slavery, relating it to his political policies, give the planters free trade and let every planter be apparent as well as the master of his slaves. That is, let the slaves be made to do their duty as

well as to eat, drink, and sleep. Let morality and industry be taught them, and the planter will have reasons to be satisfied. Calhoun goes into economic calculations concerning slavery, as many Southern reformers and statesmen, writers of pamphlets, agriculturalists like John Taylor of Caroline, Ruffin, George Fitzhue, interesting people to read, all of them. They frequently calculate the investment made in slaves to improve their productivity and encourage this paternalist attitude that many of these people, they don't go as far, not all of them, go as far as to say all of them, many of these people don't take provision for themselves.

This is actually one of the key aspects of the institution of slavery that we could blame it for, that it cultivated a lack of foresight and provision for the future. Calhoun calculates what good paternal guidance could mean for agricultural productivity on a plantation. He estimates, and this stuff does get rather complicated and even comical, just how exact they wanted to make these calculations, he thought that with his prescribed means of management for the social skills of the slaves, the private morality of the slaves, he estimated productivity could rise from 5 to 8%. It's kind of, it's absurd in retrospect to look back at these kinds of arguments in the amount of thought and effort they made to make these arguments.

But nevertheless, it's an element in the literature of the time. He says that increasing the productivity by this effective management, which all of these people paint in terms of benevolence, by the way, of humanitarian concern, these people are of, we might say, early liberal sentiments. They believe in human initiative. They believe in limitless human improvement. They are creatures of the Enlightenment to some degree. We've talked about how Calhoun is a dissenter from many Enlightenment points.

Nevertheless, he speaks that language when he talks about this. That's all very interesting. There's criticism about this that they're self-deluded Genevese. Eugene Genevazy, if you want to read a single book, about American slavery, you can do little better than to pick up Genovese's Roll Jordan Roll, which is the main work on the subject. Renowned, fair, and I think that it's invaluable. Eugene Genovese wrote a book called The Fatal Conceit about the Self-Ealtheat. the self-delusion of the slave-owning southerners.

That's of a fascinating criticism, perhaps of this particular perspective, that they saw themselves as paternalist slave owners, they thought they could redeem the institution by better management. Perhaps this was a source of corruption, self-delusion for them. That's more or less, well, Eugene Genovese says it was a source of self-delusion. It was the fatal conceit.

They were too self-assured of their own power in this situation. Calhoun says, increasing the productivity of the plantations will, quote, help us avoid the distressing alternative of parting with them. again, an allusion to the domestic slave trade. If the plantation is a failure, if the bills can't be paid, if the mortgage can't be paid, it results in this distressing result, the separation of families, the auctioning of the slaves. Calhoun is speaking to the planter class here, and he's saying, nobody wants that. You don't want it.

It brings disrepute on the whole section, the domestic slave trade, the parting of families, the auctioning of men and women. That's insight into their perspective on all of this. So in our series, we've gone into the politics of slavery now several times, and it's about to take. a larger role, and there are special reasons for that. Up unto the annexation of Texas, the Missouri compromise had been a workable solution between the sections about the division of slavery, the geographical areas of the country where slavery was an institution, where slavery was not an institution. with the expansion of American territory and states, the division, the delegation of political power, the balance of power in the union, increases sectional tensions. Ironically, in my opinion, this was another thing Henry Clay gets right.

Henry Clay is outspoken against the annexation of Texas because it will upset the balance of power in the Union. And that is precisely what we see in the 1850s. I'm preempting myself a bit here because I propose to talk in more detail on our next episode about the annexation of Texas and the Mexico. war. And also this interesting period between the administration of Andrew Jackson and James Polk, who annexes Texas, admits Texas as a state, and then wins the Mexican War, adding a huge amount of territory to the union, from Texas to California to Washington State. A gigantic area. And this, in fact, does instigate a major sectional division right at the end of the Mexican War. And the grounds for the division is the expansion of slavery in the new territories.

So just a teaser about future episodes there, that's what we're headed towards. and we see a major degeneration by the 1850s, the death of these great statesmen that were able to make the union work under a different context with different resources, different territory. Clay, Calhoun, and Webster all exit the scene in 1850. The last thing they do is they stitch together the great last compromise between the sections. And from that point, tensions only build, and we see a much less mature batch of statesmen that are managing the situation. So that is my brief on Calhoun about nullification

and also his personal connection with slavery. We will have more to say on the issue later. Awesome. Awesome. Thank you very much. Remind people where they can buy your books and we will end the episode. Marvelous. Yes. You can find my work at www. Tallmanbooks.com. And I have most of my books available there. I'm going to have to get in touch with my administrator and get some more added soon. Awesome. Thank you, Mr. Bagby. Until we talk again. Thank you very much.