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Vol. 30:3 ISSN 0160-8460 September 2002
John C. Calhoun, Southerner
by Clyde N. Wilson
More than a century ago, J. Franklin Jameson, a leading member of the pioneer generation of American professional historians, observed that the lack of an accessible edition of the correspondence of John C. Calhoun, who had been a major player in U.S. politics from 1811 to 1850 (and perhaps beyond), was a serious impediment to scholarship. This was a perceptive observation, and, for a born-and-bred Massachusetts man, a generous one. Jameson did more than observe: he produced two volumes of selected letters.
Unlike the Adamses, say, Calhoun did not make and keep copies of the letters he wrote. Nor did he take great care to preserve those he received. Jameson's main source of documents was the collection of Calhoun intra-family correspondence that had been inherited by Clemson Agricultural and Mechanical College, which was built on Calhoun's plantation and named for Calhoun's scientific son-in-law Thomas G. Clemson.
Somehow, Jameson persuaded the authorities of that day to allow him to take the Calhoun manuscripts to Johns Hopkins University in Baltimore for transcription. He kept them for about 4 years during the 1890s, which was providential, because during that time the Clemson library suffered a major fire.
Jameson also expended great efforts in tracking down descendants of those to whom Calhoun wrote. He was pretty successful at that, too. He found a great deal of material, including an important series of letters to Calhoun's friend and kinsman Duff Green, which were in the possession of a Green descendant in Washington State and have since disappeared from the known world. Jameson's main impediment to recovering letters was the "liberation" of documents and the "mysterious" series of fires that swept the South from 1861 to 1865. Lost in this way were Calhoun's letters to William Lowndes, Langdon Cheves, Robert Barnwell Rhett, James L. Orr, and others.
Jameson beheld the two volumes of Calhoun letters that he had prepared for publication, and was pleased. He wrote in his introduction that he felt he had provided "materials with which others may elaborate the fabric of American political history." He was also pleased that in his time a renewal of "fraternal feelings" between the sections had created a "historic breadth of view, which enables all alike to do justice to the memory of a great and noble statesman who, whether his opinions be ours or not, is seen to have spent a long and laborious life in the conscientious service of our common country."
Fast forward to the 1940s, to the University of South Carolina and Prof. Robert L. Meriwether, Ph.D. Those were heady days. The National Historical Publications Commission (NHPC), as it was then, was getting under way and planning the creation of accessible, objectively produced editions of documents of leading American statesmen. It was also a heady time for Calhoun scholarship. The works of Margaret L. Coit (Pulitzer Prize biography) and Charles M. Wiltse were under way and there was a mini-boom of prominent writers celebrating Calhoun as a far-seeing thinker and prototype of American pluralism.
Meriwether inaugurated the The Papers of John C. Calhoun, which he conceived as a comprehensive edition of documents, including Calhoun's speeches (perhaps his most important documents) and writings. In the process, with the aid of the NHPC and other institutions and individuals, he extended Jameson's document search and founded the private University South Caroliniana Society. The Society has aided the project for half a century with the purchase of documents as they came on the market and with other substantial help. More recently, another South Carolina institution, the Lucy Hampton Bostick Trust, has been a substantial supporter. The NHPRC, of course, has always been the mainstay of funding, supplemented during the 1980s by the National Endowment for the Humanities (NEH).
Meriwether created Volume 1 in the face of hostile or indifferent administrators, with bootlegged time and hands-on editorial help from his family. On the eve of publication, he passed away. Volume 1 was welcomed by the scholarly world and public opinion, but the edition's future was thrown into doubt. It was saved only by Dr. Meriwether's friends securing an appropriation in the State General Assembly to continue work under the South Carolina Department of Archives and History, which was the sponsor until 1978. The editorship was assumed by Dr. W. Edwin Hemphill, an editor in the Archives Department.
Meanwhile, the NHPC searching activities in the National Archives had turned up an unexpected bonanza of Calhoun documents for the 7 years during which he had headed the War Department, which was the period that Volume 2 was to begin with. For more than two decades, Dr. Hemphill labored prodigiously in searching, collecting, and transcribing. He produced eight volumes of selected documents for the years 1817-1825.
Editor Shirley Bright Cook joined the staff in 1970, and editor Clyde N. Wilson in 1971. A byproduct of the involvement of the South Carolina Archives in the project was the active and distinguished participation for a number of years of its director, Charles E. Lee, in the NHPC during the movement to make it into the NHPRC.
At Dr. Hemphill's retirement in 1978, the University of South Carolina resumed sponsorship of the project under the direction of Yours Truly, tenured professor. The rest, as they say, is history. As I write, the 27th and final volume is in press. (Actually, there will be a 28th volume with Calhoun's Disquisition and Discourse, which will require no substantial documentary work.) It has been all along a day-to-day and hands-on operation by Cook, Wilson, and for some years Dr. John Alexander Moore, who has gone on to become an editor with the USC Press. Several dozen graduate assistants have joined our labors over the years. Some of them are now conducting substantial careers of their own, and all of them will testify that their documentary editing work was a very valuable part of their formation as historians.
Academic reviewers have been kind to us. They have liked our editorial methodology, our concise annotations, our comprehensive searching, our fast progress, and our interpretive introductions. I can recall only two unfavorable reviews among several hundred favorable ones. One criticized our indexes. We took this in stride, because we have created our index for each volume (an art, not a science) as a guide to research materials in context rather than as a detailed reference tool, as is appropriate for an expository work. The other critical review was by a youngster who seemed to be upset that we had allowed Calhoun to speak for himself rather than covering him with a veneer of Political Correctness.
Dr. Meriwether's purpose in founding The Papers of John C. Calhoun, as expressed in his preface to Volume 1, was to correct superficial and partisan interpretations of Calhoun that had persisted from the controversies of his time. This would assist in the larger purpose of understanding "Southern history, which is subject to the defects of interpretation usually attendant upon causes involved in defeat and continuing controversy."
This goal was praised at the time. It would not be today in mainstream academia. Our man does not have a good press, on the whole, these days. Yet we behold our handiwork and count it good. Our predecessors could not have foreseen the revolution in electronic information-handling that has overtaken us in recent years, but it is a pretty sure bet that books are not completely obsolete, nor ever will be. Those volumes are there, in the most important libraries of North America and in some libraries on four other continents.
Our books, we believe, are rich in materials for understanding in depth a great chunk of American history. Furthermore, John C. Calhoun, unlike most public figures of his own time and since, but like the Founding Fathers, wrote and spoke as a thinker and statesman who has drawn and will continue to draw the attention of the thoughtful of future generations. Those who pay attention will find much of permanent interest in regard not only to a pregnant period of history, but also in regard to economics, foreign policy, the nature and functioning of societies, constitutions, governments, and much else.
Professors Jameson and Meriwether could not have foreseen (but perhaps would not have been too surprised by) the social and political changes that have brought new interpretations of history that have cast John C. Calhoun back into the limited and negative role in American history that prevailed in the post-Civil War period. However, in a free society historical interpretations will always be changing, but the documents remain.
Clyde N. Wilson is the editor of The Papers of John C. Calhoun.
