The Ghost of Calhouns Past...

But who can resist a little bit of a downer? Not me! Mac Owens had a piece on National Review Online that proves to me he is the most thoughtful historian writing on the web. He is writing about the legacy of Lincoln and Calhoun, and he is giving kicks to both left and right...the right including not just those boobs at Chronicles and the so-called American Conservative but several of his colleagues at NRO, most of them English.

I'll just quote him, at length. But read the whole thing:

In Lincoln's view, America is a nation by virtue of its commitment to the principle of equality, by which he meant simply the idea that no person has the right to rule over another without the latter's consent. For Lincoln, what made the United States unique, and constituted the foundation of American nationhood, was the incorporation of this moral principle into the Union. This belief lay at the heart of his opposition to slavery, an affront to the very idea of republican government.

Of course, defenders of slavery such as South Carolina senator John C. Calhoun, Georgia senator Alexander Stephens, and Chief Justice Roger Taney and "don't-care" politicians such as Illinois Senator Stephen Douglas disagreed. Taney and Douglas argued that Jefferson did not mean to include blacks when he wrote that all men are created equal. Calhoun and Stephens contended that he did mean to include them but that his view was false.

The irony is that while Lincoln's view prevailed with the Union triumph in the Civil War and was subsequently incorporated in the Constitution via the 13th and 14th Amendments, it is the Taney view that often predominates today. The rejection of Lincoln's view of American nationhood is visible on both today's political left and political right.

The best part of that, btw, is "Calhoun and Stephens contended that he did mean to include them but that his view was false." That is why, as the Doc likes to say, Calhoun was the ultimate political radical in American history. He believed that both the Declaration and Constitution needed to be destroyed in order to conform to the new reality of human existence. Calhoun, Stephens and Louisa McCord despised Jefferson; they did not believe that they were conforming to the spirit of the founding, they wished to kill it off once and for all if equality of races was what it meant. And they believed that that is what it did mean.