their dignified equals round them and their often contented dependents
under them. Plain men among them doubtless took things as they were,
and, without any particular wish to change them, did not pretend they
were perfect. But it is evident that in a widening circle of clever
young men in the South the claim of some peculiar virtue for Southern
institutions became habitual in the first half of the nineteenth century.
Their way of life was beautiful in their eyes. It rested upon slavery.
Therefore slavery was a good thing. It was wicked even to criticise it,
and it was weak to apologise for it or to pretend that it needed
reformation. It was easy and it became apparently universal for the
different Churches of the South to prostitute the Word of God in this
cause. Later on crude notions of evolution began to get about in a few
circles of advanced thought, and these lent themselves as easily to the
same purpose. Loose, floating thoughts of this kind might have mattered
little. Calhoun, as the recognised wise man of the old South,
concentrated them and fastened them upon its people as a creed.
Glorification of "our institution at the South" became the main principle
of Southern politicians, and any conception that there may ever have been
of a task for constructive statesmanship, in solving the negro problem,
passed into oblivion under the influence of his revered reasoning faculty.

But, of his dark and dangerous sort, Calhoun was an able man. He foresaw
early that the best weapon of the common interest of the slave States lay
in the rights which might be claimed for each individual State against
the Union. The idea that a discontented State might secede from the
Union was not novel--it had been mooted in New England, during the last
war against Great Britain, and, curiously enough, among the rump of the
old Federalist party, but it was generally discounted. Calhoun first
brought it into prominence, veiled in an elaborate form which some
previous South Carolinian had devised. The occasion had nothing to do