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The Papers ofJohn C Calhoun: Vol. XXVI, 1848-1849. Edited by Clyde N. Wilson and Shirley Bright Cook. (Columbia: University of South Carolina Press, 2001. Pp. xvi, 578. Cloth $59.95.)
Calhoun and Popular Rule: The Political Theory of the Disquisition and Discourse. By H. Lee Cheek Jr. (Columbia: University of Missouri Press, 2001. Pp. xii, 202. Cloth $29-95.)
On February 6, 1837, John C. Calhoun on the floor of the U.S. Senate declared that slavery was a "positive good." Senator William Rives of Virginia had referred to slavery as an evil that might become a "lesser evil" in some circumstances. Calhoun believed that conceded too much to the abolitionists: "I take higher ground. I hold that in the present state of civilization, where two races of different origin, and distinguished by color, and other physical differences, as well as intellectual, are brought together, the relation now existing in the slaveholding States between the two, is, instead of an evil, a good-a positive good.... I hold then, that there never has yet existed a wealthy and civilized society in which one portion of the community did not, in point of fact, live on the labor of the other." A year later in the Senate (January lo, 1838), Calhoun repeated this defense of slavery as a "positive good": "Many in the South once believed that it was a moral and political evil; that folly and delusion are gone; we see it now in its true light, and regard it as the most safe and stable basis for free institutions in the world."
In the latest volume of The Papers ofJohn C. Calhoun, readers will find that...