John C. Calhoun was a Yale graduate and the seventh Vice-President of the United States (elected twice). He served as Secretary of War of the United States, as Secretary of State of the United States, and as a two-term Senator of the United States. He was also an ardent supporter of slavery in the decades before our Civil War.
Calhoun died in 1850. Eighty-two years later, when Calhoun College was named for him, there was no controversy. Calhoun was, after all, an eminent politician, an alumnus of Yale, and long since dead. But opinions changed in the subsequent 85 years, enough that Yale recently decided to rename Calhoun College. (“College” is deceiving. It does not denote a college within Yale University, it is roughly synonymous with “dormitory,” though it connotes a bit more.)
I have never been particularly fond of Calhoun (because of his pro-slavery politics), but neither am I fond of the capriciousness of public sentiment. I think Calhoun has a distinctly different argument to continue to be honored than, say, Jefferson Davis, who waged war on the United States. Calhoun died ten years before the Civil War started and he had worked hard (and successfully) to preserve the union of the states.
Davis was honorable man for his time and place, despite being deplorably wrong about slavery. He was a member of the U.S. House of Representatives, a U.S. Senator, and Secretary of War of the United States, before he joined the Confederacy. Fortunately, he lost the war and, along with it, the ability to preserve slavery.
Winston Churchill, himself both a victor and a writer, noted that history is written by the victors. But it is also written by many other people and often many years later. Those people, perhaps understandably, sometimes impose their own moral standards on people who lived generations or even centuries earlier. We now write the histories about him and Calhoun and many others, including George Washington and Thomas Jefferson. Both of those former Presidents owned slaves. They did not defend the institution of slavery quite so vociferously as Calhoun, but they benefitted from the labor of slaves until the day they died.
When Washington and Jefferson owned slaves and when Calhoun supported slavery, slavery was legal. It was abominable, of course, but it was legal. (Many people think the same today about abortion and death sentences: abominable, but legal.) That our Constitution allowed slavery to continue is an important reason that all 50 current U.S. states belong to just one country. Without the oblique references to slavery, it is unlikely the southern states would have ratified our Constitution and our bold experiment could have fractured at the outset.
Times change and the way we view former Presidents and Vice Presidents changes, even if their actions were within the range of normalcy for their time. As a proxy for normalcy, consider that the following countries, among many others, did not abolish slavery or serfdom until after Calhoun died: Ecuador, Argentina, Peru, Venezuela, Russia, United States, Cuba, Poland, Netherlands (colonies), Portugal (colonies), Egypt, Bulgaria, Ottoman Empire (Turkey), Cambodia, Cuba, Brazil, Korea, Madagascar, Zanzibar, Siam (Thailand), Ethiopia, Morocco, and Afghanistan. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Abolition_of_slavery_timeline#1850.E2.80.931899.)
I hope that I am never judged by the standards of the future, it is tough enough being held to contemporaneous standards. But surely it wouldn’t be fair to judge my current morality and actions, which are steeped in 21st century America, by the mores of another time. One hundred sixty seven years after he died, that’s what we are doing to John C. Calhoun. I wonder who is next.
Remember the Blackwell? I think the Development Office at OSU has since revised their gift agreement!
“Deconfederacation” of this sort is over due. Its beneficial for educational institutions to reevaluate who they honor and why. Such reevaluation can clarify which values and perspectives an institution wants to take center stage, and which ones no longer hold water.
I imagine most residents when pressed would prefer to live in a building named after Grace M. Hopper (https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Grace_Hopper) than John C. Calhoun. I surely would.
Fun facts. John C Calhoun was a South Carolina statesman, and his plantation is now the main campus of Clemson University. Clemson’s beginnings were as Clemson Agricultural College of South Carolina, which was the dream of Thomas Green Clemson, John C Calhoon’s son in law. The major funding for its creation came from the federal government’s Merrill Land Grant College act in support of agricultural education.
When my late friend Buddy Goodall was at Clemson, he founded a debate club that he dubbed The John C. Calhoun Forensic Society. All record of this episode, including the T-shirt he gave me, appears to have been lost from Buddy’s biography.
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/H._L._(Bud)_Goodall,_Jr.
When queried about the club’s namesake, he would reply that each year’s first practice debate was on the following proposition:
Resolved: Twentieth century debate clubs should not be named after pro-slavery politicians from previous centuries.
Therein lies the rub…it’s difficult to understand the morality of the time as much as we want to try. Once time moves on and social customs, mores and morality change – it’s difficult, if not altogether impossible, to place yourself in the history of the time and attempt to fully understand it.
While you can argue that Calhoun was a much decorated public servant and that he fought to preserve the Union, he did so in support of an institution that was – as you say – abominable. Without having done the research, I’m fairly certain that I can find individuals from Calhoun’s time who recognized that slavery was abominable and fought against it. Therefore, is it not fair to say that Calhoun also had the chance to recognize the immorality of the institution and as a public servant to do something about it?
The argument against judgment may hold more water if no one was working against the institution of slavery during Calhoun’s life, but that’s not the case.
It’s an interesting question you raise.