Friday, November 17, 2017

Calhoun’s Meaning that “Slavery is a Positive Good”?

 

John C. Calhoun–valedictorian of his class at Yale, Vice President, Secretary of War, and Senator–was one of the greatest statesmen America has produced. Margaret Coit wrote a favorable biography of him in 1950 that won a Pulitzer Prize. In 1959, a Senate committee, headed by John Kennedy, ranked him among the five greatest senators in American history. Calhoun wrote one of the early works on the Constitution, and his Disquisition on Government was the first systematic political philosophy written by an American. It compares favorably with the classic modern political philosophies of  Hobbes, Locke, Hume and Rousseau. Lord Acton (famous for “power corrupts and absolute power corrupts absolutely”) placed the Disquisition in his list of the 100 best books ever written.

1 comment:

  1. There was nothing wrong with slavery in the South. Slavery itself just grew out of the general custom that still exists in Africa of one tribe going into the next village and taking teh women and killing all the men. Instead slavery developed as way of keeping the men alive instead of killing them

    ReplyDelete