Creating Citizenship in the Nineteenth-Century South

4. Citizenship, Democracy, and the Structure of Politics in the Old South: John Calhoun’s Conundrum

4 Citizenship, Democracy, and the Structure of Politics in the Old South John Calhoun’s Conundrum David Brown In the South, John C. Calhoun asserted in 1848, “the two great divisions of society are not the rich and poor, but white and black; and all the former, the poor as well as the rich, belong to the upper class, and are respected and treated as equals, if honest and industrious, and hence have a position and pride of character of which neither poverty nor misfortune can deprive them.” In isolation, this passage suggested not only the unity of southern white men but the egalitarianism between them as well. Yet Calhoun was actually attacking the idea that “all men are born free and equal” in this speech, something that he was concerned “has become an axiom in the minds of a vast majority on both sides of the Atlantic.” There is “not a word of truth in it,” he countered. “They are not born free. . . . They grow to all the freedom of which the condition in which they were born permits.” Far from endorsing white male equality on the basis of skin color, Calhoun’s conceptualization of the “divisions of society” retained distinctly hierarchical overtones of liberty as something attained rather than granted by birthright. In the context of the times, however—Calhoun was speaking in the middle of the tumultuous year of European revolutions—this position was decidedly at odds with the rising clamor for democratic citizenship in which rights resided with the individual.1 Calhoun spoke to the central dilemma of democratic citizenship in his age: should the political sphere, for so long the preserve of the privileged few, be opened to the masses? “All men,” Calhoun asserted, did not have Citizenship, Democracy, and the Structure of Politics in the Old South · 85 “the same right to liberty and equality” but were entitled to particularistic rights according to their station. The Greeks and the Romans, among others, shared this view: citizenship was suitable only for those capable of responsibly exercising civic duties. As Aristotle put it, “that some should rule and others be ruled is a thing not only necessary, but expedient.” Classic republican theory of government distrusted the masses and sought to keep political control in the hands of propertied gentlemen. Inalienable and universal political rights, the cornerstone of modern liberal citizenship , were deeply worrying to elites whose control of government had hitherto been assured by restricting the franchise to property holders, effectively a minority of wealthy men.2 By the mid-nineteenth century, contrary to Calhoun, the proslavery argument loudly proclaimed the equality of white men, secured on the bedrock of universal suffrage. James D. B. De Bow insisted that non-slaveholding sons were “among the leading and ruling spirits of the South; in industry as well as in politics” in his 1860 appeal.3 The notion of political democracy bridging class differences was projected forcefully by southerners in the 1850s. This model of democratic citizenship subsequently became the dominant historiographical interpretation. Fletcher M. Green set the tone in his seminal 1946 article depicting the clash “between the forces of aristocracy and democracy” from the Revolution to the Civil War, in which democracy emerged triumphant. “The establishment of white manhood suffrage, the abolition of property qualifications for office holders, the election of all officers by popular vote, and the apportionment of representation on population rather than wealth, with periodic reapportionment, dealt a death blow to the political power of the landed, slaveholding aristocracy of the Old South.” Charles Sydnor’s contemporaneous , and equally influential, work agreed that “a broader and more equitable distribution of political power . . . was in large measure gained.” William J. Cooper was typical of later historians who depicted a vibrant political system paying “equal homage to the same sovereign—the people or the voters.” 4 Structural changes in the Jacksonian period, facilitated by the writing of new state constitutions, nurtured the transition from republican to democratic politics. As J. William Harris puts it, “a wave of political democratization swept the South . . . after 1820.” The Jacksonian period, Lacy K. Ford suggests, was a major political watershed “that enshrined 86 · David Brown whiteness as the standard measure of citizenship and racial entitlement” in which “the slaveholding elite had to accept white equality, the spirit of herrenvolk democracy, in the public realm to ensure white solidarity.” This compromise resulted in a redistribution of political power...