Edward Sebesta's selection for April 19 is another quotation from Confederate Veteran, this one from 1911, emphasizing that white-supremacist thought has always been a part of Confederate idolatry.
But for my entry for April 19, I'm going to focus on a speech by Jefferson Davis in January 1844 explaining why he supports John C. Calhoun, intellectual godfather of the Southern secessionists, for the Democratic Presidential nomination. Calhoun dropped out of the running a couple of weeks after this speech. But it's a useful glimpse at the view the future president of the Confederacy took of the man who historian Richard Hofstadter famously described as "the Karl Marx of the master class."
The annexation of the republic of Texas to our Union, is another point of vital importance to the south, and demanding, by every consideration, prompt action. Daily are we [the Slave Power] becoming relatively weaker, and with equal step is the advance of that fanatical spirit [i.e., Abolitionism] which has for years been battering in breach the defences with which the federal constitution surrounds our institutions.
The slaveowners of the South believed it an urgent matter to bring Texas into the Union as a slave state.
Would Mr. Calhoun have less zeal than one less intimately connected with the South, or would he support this measure with less ability? I would answer not less but more. The ardent, able and honest support which he gives to all measures having his entire approbation, enables him more successfully than any one I have ever known, to combat prejudice and error; and I would add that among the many I have known who had enjoyed his intercourse, I recollect not one who had not imbibed some of his opinions.
Calhoun was the great opponent of President Andrew Jackson in the nullification controversy over a decade before this speech. Though Davis delivered this speech in Mississippi capital city of Jackson who had been named for the General, he was endorsing Jackson's greatest nemesis on the issue of Union and American patriotism to become the head of the party of Jackson.
As I noted in a post last October, Old Hickory himself, who was still alive in 1844 when Davis gave this speech, later said from his deathbed that he regretted that he hadn't hanged Calhoun for treason over the nullification incident. "My country would have sustained me in the act, and his fate would have been a warning to traitors in all time to come."
Calhoun is sometimes spoken of with a reverence that his career does not merit. In his biography John C. Calhoun published in 1963, Southern historian Richard Current described the most relevant enduring "heritage" of Calhoun:
Wherever a White Citizens Council meets in Mississippi, or a similar group in another of the Southern states, there is to be sought, nowadays, the true spirit of Calhoun. It is to be sought in the activities of conservative - or reactionary - Southern whites. The way they use the lobby, the bloc, the party convention, and other political devices can be considered as essentially Calhounian.These white Southerners now [1963] face a problem quite similar to the one that Calhoun faced more than a hundred years ago. They talk of maintaining white supremacy and he talked of protecting slavery. The problems remains that of defending, against external attack, institutions based upon a belief in human inequality.
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