Party Over Country: Trump, Calhoun, and a Disturbing Trend in American History

Toren Ballard
Sep 4, 2018 · 6 min read

Should Donald Trump be found to have conspired with Russia to win the 2016 election, it would represent a gross affront to our democratic institutions and a clear violation of our national sovereignty. Trump and any knowing allies would have essentially compromised the integrity of our electoral system — and by extension, the Constitution itself — in order to pursue a hardline conservative agenda. In an era defined by hyperbole and perceived historical exceptionalism, it is easy to assume this partisanship-to-the-extent-of-compromising-national-sovereignty as unprecedented. Yet, a close examination of our nation’s first culture war reveals that Trump would not be the first American politician willing to cede democratic integrity for partisan gain.

41 years before rebel slaveholders went to war to protect their “peculiar institution,” questions over the expansion of slavery — the preeminent culture war of the 19th century — were already beginning to tear our young nation apart. In the winter of 1819–20, America’s leading politicians of the day debated fiercely in Washington whether to allow the ownership of human beings in the soon-to-be state of Missouri. Divisions over slavery can be traced all the way back to the Constitutional Convention, but this particular debate marked a troubling phase in American political discourse.

The political agenda of slaveholding interests have always been at odds with the professed values of our nation’s founding, but in the early days of the Republic these contradictory positions were at least argued with civility befitting the world’s first democracy. However, the civil discourse of 1787 began to give way to talk of civil war by 1819. Arguing against a proposed ban on slavery in Missouri, a Georgia Congressman accused northerners of lighting a fire which only “seas of blood” could extinguish. James Tallmadge Jr. of New York responded in kind:

“If a dissolution of the Union must take place, let it be so! If civil war, which gentlemen so much threaten, must come, I can only say, let it come!”¹

The question of slavery had transcended simple questions of policy and entered the realm of all-out partisan warfare.

John C. Calhoun

Even President Monroe’s own cabinet began to mirror these widening divisions. In his memoirs, future President and then-Secretary of State John Quincy Adams recalls a particularly disturbing conversation with Secretary of War John C. Calhoun. Perhaps the most influential defender of slavery in the Antebellum period, Calhoun did not think the Missouri question would lead to a dissolution of the United States, but if it did he had a plan for what the South would do. To protect the institution of slavery, they would form an alliance with America’s greatest enemy, Great Britain.

Adams was justifiably shocked. Great Britain was the only nation America had ever fought a war against. Just six years before, redcoats had burned down the White House. Stating the obvious concern, Adams replied, “that would be returning to the colonial state.”

Calhoun’s response? “Yes, pretty much.”²

One of America’s leading statesmen, a man who would go on to serve as Vice President for multiple administrations, was willing to cede American sovereignty for the right to own human beings.


Calhoun’s political calculations were alarming, but his ultimate prediction proved true: there would be no civil war in 1820. In the coming weeks, senators hashed out the Missouri Compromise, banning slavery in future states above the 36°30′ parallel and admitting Maine as a free state to counter the extension of slavery into Missouri. Supporters and opponents of slavery alike breathed a sigh of relief.

Of course, the Missouri Compromise did not settle the question of slavery. As the cotton industry grew exponentially in the coming decades, slaveholders became increasingly bold in their agenda. Through the 1850s they achieved stunning political victories, effectively repealing the Missouri Compromise’s ban on slavery north of the 36°30′ parallel through the Kansas-Nebraska Act and later rendering any bans unconstitutional through Dred Scott v. Sanford. By the time Abraham Lincoln was elected president in 1860, the mere existence of a president opposed to the expansion of slavery merited an armed struggle.

John C. Calhoun died a decade before the onset of the Civil War, but his ideas certainly had not. As Confederate morale began to plummet in the winter of 1864–65, an editorial in the Richmond Sentinel, the official paper of the Confederate government, recommended repealing the Declaration of Independence so the South could “voluntarily revert to their original proprietors — England, France, and Spain and by them be protected from the North.”³

Indeed, as early as 1861, as the Confederate States of America actively sought diplomatic recognition from economic partners in Europe, rumors began to fly that the South was open to offering far more than cheap cotton exports in return for diplomatic and potentially military assistance. These schemes, alleged by northern journalists and endorsed by the Sentinel, generally involved installing a European monarch — Napoleon’s nephew was floated as one potential option — and abandoning any semblance of a democracy that still existed in the Confederacy. Below the Mason-Dixon line, the American experiment would be auctioned off to the highest bidder.⁴

For a variety of reasons, including public opinion at home, France and Great Britain never did indulge the monarchical fantasies of the Confederacy. Southerners waged their crusade for chattel slavery alone, and in defeat eventually settled for black codes and sharecropping. But, numerous accounts do suggest that at least the slaveholding elite would have preferred compromising democracy to compromising control over human beings.

Seeing two Trump supporters sporting “I’D RATHER BE RUSSIAN THAN A DEMOCRAT” shirts at a recent rally in Ohio, I can’t help but recall John C. Calhoun and his Confederate successors willing to cede their national heritage for partisan gain. Americans have always disagreed, on everything from tax policy to the ownership of human beings, but generally throughout our history we have been able to shake hands with our political adversaries and share mutual admiration for the land of the free.

But there are exceptions. Some slaveholders expressed prioritizing their property rights over democratic tradition. Today, there appear to be some elements of the far-right willing to do the same for the sake of strict immigration, lower taxes, and “owning the libs.” Perhaps it is no coincidence that Americans who continue to defend monuments to white supremacist traitors are also likely to denounce efforts to examine foreign interference in our elections.

To argue bitterly over policy is one thing. It’s an ugly, but quintessentially American pastime. To achieve policy by sacrificing the integrity of our democratic institutions is a different story, but one that is unfortunately woven into various eras of our nation’s history.

Confronting this history allows us to unmask these schemes for what they really are: treasonous and un-American. Should Donald Trump be found to have knowingly opened our democracy up for exploitation, there will be no reason that he is undeserving of the same classification. For now, we wait and see, and hope the history books of tomorrow get it right.

Citations:

¹Baptist, Edward E. The Half Has Never Been Told: Slavery and the Making of American Capitalism. New York: Basic Books, 2014. Print.

²Adams, John Quincy. Reflections on the Missouri Question (1820).

³Jones, John Beauchamp. A Rebel War Clerk’s Diary at the Confederate States Capital.

⁴Doyle, Don H. The Cause of All Nations: An International History of the American Civil War. New York: Basic Books, 2015. Print

Toren Ballard

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I write about history and education, sometimes both.

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