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American statesman John C. Calhoun was one of the most prominent advocates of the "slavery as a positive good" viewpoint.. Slavery as a positive good in the United States was the prevailing view of Southern politicians and intellectuals just before the American Civil War, as opposed to seeing it as a crime against humanity or a necessary evil.
Calhoun was firmly convinced that slavery was the key to the success of the American dream. [131] Whereas other Southern politicians had excused slavery as a "necessary evil", in a famous speech on the Senate floor on February 6, 1837, Calhoun asserted that slavery was a "positive good". [4]
Written in response to what Calhoun saw as the growing subjugation of the Southern United States by the more populous Northern United States, especially in terms of Northern promotion of tariff legislation and opposition to slavery, the 100-page Disquisition promotes the idea of a concurrent majority in order to protect what he perceived to be ...
He believed rights of his home state were being trampled for the "good" of the North, though he also recognized the political dangers of secession. In 1828, Calhoun decided upon the primacy of "states' rights", a doctrine which he would support for the rest of his life. He believed that constitutionally, the state government of each state had ...
The South Carolina Exposition and Protest, also known as Calhoun's Exposition, was written in December 1828 by John C. Calhoun, then Vice President of the United States under John Quincy Adams and later under Andrew Jackson. Calhoun did not formally state his authorship at the time, though it was widely suspected and later confirmed.
He moved from a strong nationalist position in the 1810s and 1820s, to a states' rights position emphasizing the rights of minorities (by which he meant white South), and rejecting a powerful central government. Jefferson and Madison in 1798 had developed a theory of nullification that would enable states to reject unconstitutional federal actions.
The three would remain in the Senate until their deaths, with exceptions for Webster and Calhoun's tenures as Secretary of State and Clay's presidential campaigns in 1844 and 1848. The time these three men spent in the Senate represents a time of rising political pressure in the United States, especially on the matter of slavery. With each one ...
Within the states' rights movement, the traditional desire for "a weak, inactive, and frugal government" was challenged. Ellis writes, "in the years leading up to the Civil War the nullifiers and their proslavery allies used the doctrine of states' rights and state sovereignty in such a way as to try to expand the powers of the federal ...