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Anti-Industrialism and the Old South: The Agrarian Perspective of John C. Calhoun

Published online by Cambridge University Press:  03 June 2009

Theodore R. Marmor
Theodore R. Marmor
Affiliation:
University of Wisconsin
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Extract

There has been an unending debate in American historiography about the distinctive features of the ante-bellum South. One widely shared view is that the South, by virtue of its dominant agricultural character, was committed to a set of values “inconsistent with a high rate of industrialization”. Writers in this tradition have assumed that agrarian interests entail an anti-industrial bias. They look upon the civilization of the ante-bellum North as “coarse and materialistic” and that of the South as highly refined and aristocratic. The opposite view is that ante-bellum Southerners were no less commercial capitalists than their Northern brethren. Agrarian capitalism, these critics assume, has conflicts of interest with industrial capitalism, not cultural conflicts. The question this essay seeks to answer is whether Calhoun, admittedly a prominant spokesman of agricultural interests, was thereby committed to either an anti-industrial bias or a conventional capitalist position.

Type
Cognitive Processes in the Typing of Cultures: The Old South
Information
Comparative Studies in Society and History , Volume 9 , Issue 4 , July 1967 , pp. 377 - 406
Copyright
Copyright © Society for the Comparative Study of Society and History 1967

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References

1 Nicholls, William, Southern Tradition and Regional Progress (Chapel Hill, N.C.,1960), pp. 9Google Scholar, 19; Spain, A. O., The Political Theory of John C. Calhoun (New York, 1951), p. 254Google Scholar.

2 Pollard, Edwin A., The Lost Cause (New York, 1866), p. 50Google Scholar.

3 Benet, Francisco, “Sociology Uncertain: The Ideology of the Rural-Urban Continuum”, Comparative Studies in Society and History, Vol. VI, No. 1 (October, 1963CrossRefGoogle Scholar).

4 “The Address to the People of South Carolina”, reproduced in Jenkins, John S., The Life of John Caldwell Calhoun (Auburn and Buffalo, 1850), p. 177Google Scholar.

5 Govan, T. P., “Americans Below the Potomac”, in The Southerner as American, Sellers, Charles (ed.) (Chapel Hill, N.C., 1960), p. 21Google Scholar. See for the comparative advantage of cotton and other features of the Southern economy, North, Douglas C., The Economic Growth of the United States 1790–1860 (Englewood Cliffs, N.J., 1961Google Scholar), ch. 10, passim.

6 “The South Carolina Exposition and Protest”, Crallé, Richard K. (ed.), The Works of John C. Calhoun, 6 vols. (New York, 1854–7), VI, p. 5Google Scholar.

7 For the range of discussion in South Carolina and the way the free-trade position was associated with that of state's-rights, see Boucher, C. S., The Ante-Bellum Attitude of South Carolina Towards Manufacturing and Agriculture (= Washington University Series, IV, Vol. III, no. XIV) (St. Louis, 1916), p. 246Google Scholar ff.

8 There has been much discussion of when and why men like Calhoun changed from a pro-tariff to a free-trade position. See, for example, Hofstadter, Richard, The American Political Tradition and the Men Who Made It (New York, 1948), pp. 70–1Google Scholar. By 1828, however, the argument in South Carolina was not so much over whether tariffs hurt agricultural exporters, as it was over what were the appropriate political responses to such legislation. See Kibler, Lillian, Benjamin F. Perry (Durham, N.C., 1946), p. 93Google Scholar, for the arguments of a free-trader fundamentally opposed to the doctrine of nullification. The issue of why Calhoun changed his position must be interpreted in the light of Calhoun's theory of interests; cotton production, considered as an exporting business, gave him grounds for an anti-tariff view in a state that Calhoun described by 1828 as irrevocably agricultural: “from her climate situation, a peculiar institution [South Carolina] is, and must ever continue to be, wholly dependent upon agriculture and commerce….” Works, VI, p. 59. Had Calhoun thought of the tariff issue in terms of an anti-industrial “agrarian philosophy,” the shift from support in 1816 to opposition in 1828 would have been even more difficult than it was.

9 Van Deusen, J. G., The Economic Bases of Disunion in South Carolina (New York,1928), p. 67Google Scholar. He estimates that the “great argument against the protective tariff was that it raised the price of most staples of Southern consumption while, at the same time, it depressed the price of Southern products.”

10 Calhoun continually emphasized the plight of exporters who consumed protected items, those who would “have to give a higher price-more money, out of their diminished means, to purchase their supplies, whether imported or manufactured at home, than what they could have got them for abroad.” See speech on the Tariff Bill, given in the Senate, August 5, 1842, Works, IV, p. 188. For the threat of retaliation see “The Exposition”, Works, VI, p. 12.

11 Works, VI, p. 5, p. 59.

12 “Report Prepared for the Committee on Federal Relations of the Legislature of South Carolina, at its Session in November, 1831”, Ibid., pp. 114–122.

13 The very use of the term “agriculture” was a part of the plan to win support for the South Carolina position from farmers in other parts of the country, notably in the west. The emphasis on those who earned their profits by tilling the soil allowed Calhoun to avoid the different connotations of social theory that “planter”, “farmer”, and “yeoman” suggested. See Hoftstadter, 71; Benton, Thomas Hart, Thirty Years View (New York, 1854), pp. 100Google Scholar–02.

14 Govan, for example, argues that the “American tariff, despite the almost universal belief that high duties cause economic depression, had little to do with the low prices and reduced sales of the export crops of the South, the relatively small volume of the import and export trade in the ports, and the financial difficulties of this segment of the national economy.” “Americans Below the Potomac”, op. cit., pp. 25–6.

15 Calhoun, Works, VI, p. 185; for Sismondi's views see Elbow, Mathew H., French Comparative Theory, 1789–1948 (New York, 1953Google Scholar) and for the English industrial critics, Williams, Raymond, Culture and Society, 1780–1950 (London, 1958Google Scholar).

16 This is clear in all of Calhoun's complaints about the effects of the protective tariff. See especially “The Exposition”, Works, VI, p. 59. Although Calhoun did not share Carlyle's contempt for the machine nor Cobbett's idealization of the rural village, he had a sort of anti-commercialism that these anti-industrialists conveyed in such epithets as “Mr. Cashman” and the “cash-nexus”. When Calhoun said that he knew “Mammon is the idol of the times, but I cannot get my consent to worship at his shrine,” he was expressing an anti-commercialism that had roots in Jefferson, not in an aristocratic medievalism or condescending view of mass production. Calhoun was not criticizing commercial activity or hard work, but that which focused exclusively on the making of money. His wrath, as I suggested earlier, was for those who worked with the medium of exchange and corporate investment, the capitalists of finance rather than the capitalists of production. See Dorfman, Robert, Economic Mind in American Civilization, Vol. 1 (New York, 1946), p. 433Google Scholar ff.

17 Raymond Williams, Culture and Society, 1780–1950, p. 13

18 Wender, Herbert, Southern Commercial Conventions, 1837–1859 ( = Johns Hopkins Studies in Historical and Political Science, XLVIII, No. 4) (Baltimore, 1930), p. 47Google Scholar; Fitzhugh, George, Sociology for the South, cited in Slavery Defended, McKitrick, Eric L. (ed.) (Englewood Cliffs, N.J., 1963), p. 35Google Scholar.

19 The Papers of John C. Calhoun, I, op. cit., pp. 31–32.

20 For Calhoun's special aversion to bankers and stock-jobbers, see J. C. Calhoun to Duff Green, July 27, 1837, Jameson, J. Franklin (ed.), Correspondence of John C. Calhoun ( = Annual Report of the American Historical Association for the Year 1899, Vol. 2) (Washington, D.C., 1900), pp. 374Google Scholar–5.

21 Carlyle, Thomas, “Chartism”, Essays, Vol. VI (London, 1869), p. 152Google Scholar.

22 Owen, Robert Dale, Observations on the Effect of the Manufacturing System (London, 1815Google Scholar); cited in Williams, op. cit., p. 42.

23 The best expression of Calhoun's view of the mind is in his speech on the subtreasury bill in 1837, Works, III, p. 248 ff. Hammond echoed this view when he wrote in 1852 that “whoever is incapable of faithful and persevering industry is not capable of anything great… and in training of a truly great people, no effort must be spared to enlarge all the faculties of the intellect, and to purify and elevate every sentiment of the heart…. But I see no incompatability between the pursuits I have endeavored to recommend [industrial and agricultural diversification] and the exercise of the highest powers of the human mind, and the cultivation of the noblest sentiments that dignify nature.” Industrial Resources of the Southern and South-Western States, Vol. III (New Orleans, 1853), p. 36Google Scholar.

24 Quoted in Styron, John C. Calhoun, pp. 90–91.

25 Taylor, William R., Cavalier and Yankee (New York, 1961), p. 69Google Scholar. For the devaluation of work, see Smith, H. N., Virgin Land (New York, 1959), p. 172Google Scholar, and C. Eaton, The Growth of Southern Civilization, p. 221.

26 Ed., Parks, Winfield, Segments of Southern Thought (Augusta, Ga., 1938), p. 140Google Scholar.

27 This point is forcefully made in Leo Marx's discussion of Jefferson, , The Machine in the Garden (Oxford, 1964Google Scholar).

28 See Hammond's, James H. critique of this view of the worth of labor in Industrial Resources of the Southern and South-western States, Vol. III (New Orleans, 1853), p. 24Google Scholar ff.

29 See footnote 13 above.

30 Charleston Courier, December 17, 1843.

31 The development of this legend and the themes it included is ably and fully sketched in W. R. Taylor's Cavalier and Yankee. My disagreement with him is not over the character of the legend, but over the question of its representativeness.

32 Cited in Sellers, The Southerner as American, p. 64.

33 Calhoun, like many of his followers, stressed the equality of white men that the definition of Negro slavery involved in America. See the section on legal equality in Works, III. “Slavery was the best guarantee of equality among the white, producing an unvarying level among them”, or “with us, the two great divisions are not the rich and the poor but the black and the white”, p. 292.

34 See Dorfman, op. cit., I, for the development of this view of rural life in America, ch. XVII.

35 Calhoun, Works, I, p. 10.

36 Disraeli, Benjamin, Coningsby (London, 1854), p. 134Google Scholar.

37 Ibid., pp. 74–76.

38 Cited in William R. Taylor, Cavalier and Yankee, p. 3.

39 Cf. Nicholls, Southern Tradition …, pp. 19, 20. See Hammond, “Industrial Resources …”, op. cit., for a critique of this view in the ante-bellum period, p. 24 ff.

40 Calhoun, Works, VI, pp. 274, 284.

41 Calhoun, “The Exposition and Protest”, Works, I, p. 59.

42 Wender, Herbert, Southern Commercial Conventions, 1837–1859 (= Johns Hopkins Studies in Historical and Political Science, XLVIII, No. 4) (Baltimore, 1930), p. 47Google Scholar. George Fitzhugh, op. cit., p. 35.

43 Hammond, “Industrial Resources …”, p. 21.

44 Russel, op. cit., pp. 17–19.

45 Calhoun to James Edward Calhoun, September 7, 1837, Correspondence, p. 412.

46 Quoted in Smith, A. G., Economic Readjustment of an Old Cotton State: South Carolina, 1820–1860 (Columbia, S.C., 1958), p. 120Google Scholar.

47 Wender, Southern Commercial Conventions, p. 83.

48 Parks, Segments of Southern Thought, p. 144.

49 In Wender, Southern Commercial Conventions, p. 47.

50 Calhoun to James H. Hammond, August 2, 1845, Correspondence, p. 669.

51 Nicholls, op. cit., p. 19.

52 H. N. Smith, Virgin Land, p. 108.

53 James Gadsen to J. C. Calhoun, October 9, 1845, Correspondence, p. 1060.

54 Southern Quarterly Review, January, 1946, IX, p. 267.

55 Calhoun, Works, VI, pp. 275–77.

56 Osterweis, Rollin G., Romanticism and Nationalism in the Old South (New Haven, 1949), p. 156Google Scholar. Russel, op. cit., p. 31.

57 Taylor, Cavalier and Yankee, Introduction.