John C. Calhoun's False Arguments in Defense of Slavery

As a defender of slavery, John C. Calhoun made arguments explicitly opposed to the Founders' conception of individual rights. Calhoun, in his Disquisition on Government, denied the existence of a state of nature in which people are born free and equal. For Calhoun, this state of nature never did nor can exist; all men are born subject to social and political authority, and man's natural state is the social and political one. Calhoun also insisted in his 1837 Speech on Abolition Petitions that the Southern states could not possibly surrender their institutions of slavery, which Calhoun claimed were beneficial to both races.

Calhoun believes that under slavery, the black race has attained a condition of unprecedented civilization and moral, physical, and intellectual improvement, a state vastly superior to its "initially low, degraded, savage conditions." Furthermore, Calhoun claims that "there has never yet existed a wealthy and civilized society in which one portion of the community did not live on the labor of the other," and in the South the conditions of the laborer were allegedly superior to those of the tenants of European poorhouses or the factory workers in the North; the slave is always in the midst of his family and taken care of by his master, whereas the poor outside the South have no such recourse. The Southern slave system, according to Calhoun, does not exhibit the destabilizing conflicts between capital and labor observed in the North.

Calhoun furthermore views slavery as protected by the Constitution; in delegating a portion of their rights to be exercised by the federal government, the states retained the exclusive right over their own domestic institutions-including slavery. Therefore, any intermeddling of one or more states with the domestic institutions of the other states under any pretext whatsoever is subversive of the Constitution (1838 speech). Any attack on slavery for Calhoun amounts to an attack on the states' mutual constitutional pledge to protect and defend each other.