had been elected and which met in special session in the crisis of the last great struggle between the republic and Great Britain. Of his private life we know very little. He seems to have destroyed much of that variety of document which is known after a man's death as his "literary remains." His correspondence, memoranda, and other private papers were bequeathed to a friend living in Virginia, under certain restrictions, and it is said that during the War of the Rebellion much of this accumulation was lost or destroyed. He was a planter and a slave-owner, and his estate at Fort Hill, S. C., was well managed and prosperous. His slaves were well treated and they came to him as an umpire, judge, and friend. A rigid justice characterized his management and regulated all his doings with the highest and the lowest. One biographer says that "his countenance at rest was strikingly marked by decision and firmness; in conversation or when speaking, it became highly animated and expressive. His large, dark, brilliant, penetrating eyes strongly impressed all who encountered their glances. When addressing the Senate he stood firm, erect, accompanying his delivery with an angular gesticulation. His manner of speaking was energetic, ardent, and rapid, and marked by a solemn earnestness which inspired a strong belief in his sincerity and deep conviction. He very rarely indulged in figures of speech, and seldom left any doubt as to his meaning." He appears to have been utterly destitute of either

wit or humor. Nathan Sargent says of him : "Able as Mr. Calhoun certainly was, he found an antagonist in Mr. Clay too adroit and ready for him. He required time to prepare his matter and arrange his ideas, even to select his words. Mr. Clay did not, at least in a personal controversy. As he said, he was self-poised, ever ready, he could fire off-hand without rest. Mr. Calhoun, on the contrary, must have time to load and take deliberate aim. In doing so he was sure to hit and penetrate the most vulnerable point of his antagonist, but while he was doing this his antagonist would have hit him in a half dozen places.'

I have said that he was destitute of humor, but he was sometimes the cause of wit in others. Even Webster, who seldom employed any pleasantry in his speeches in the Senate, was provoked into a humorous sally when Calhoun, on going into the Cabinet of John Tyler, landed in the camp of his former enemies. Webster referred to a mock play written in England by some wit to ridicule the sentimentality of a certain German school of literature. Two strangers meet at an inn; suddenly one springs up and exclaims: "A sudden thought strikes me; let us swear eternal friendship." The offer was instantly accepted. Mr. Webster graphically described the contest in which he and his friends and Senator Calhoun and his friends were and had been long engaged, and when victory was at last apparently in their grasp, the South Carolina Senator suddenly cries out to his enemies,

"Halloo! a sudden thought strikes me; I abandon my allies; they have always been my oppressors; let you and I swear eternal friendship."

It is curious to note how Calhoun advanced his lines of the defence of slavery from year to year. His attention had been attracted to the breaking out of abolitionism in the North. He deprecated these distant attacks upon the cherished institution of slavery, and he appeared to think that the Northern Senators were blamable because they did not by some process which he did not himself explain suppress the words which so excited his anger. He appeared to think that wordy fulminations from Washington or from the South would deaden or misdirect the moral sense of the North, then very slowly awakening to the enormity of the crime of human slavery. Suddenly, in January, 1836, his attention was aroused by the appearance in the Senate of petitions for the abolition of slavery in the District of Columbia. The attacks of these abolition petitions were not in the least directed against slavery in the States, but solely against slavery in the District; but from his point of view all petitions on the subject of slavery were in themselves a "foul slander on nearly one-half of the States of the Union." It made no difference to him that their ultimate result was unpromising. His objection was that unless an undoubted provision of the Constitution compelled the receiving of such petitions, it was the duty of the Senate to reject them at the door. He took the

ground that Congress had no jurisdiction whatever over the subject of slavery in whatever form it might be presented, and no more power over it in the District of Columbia than in the States. The Senate, however, decided to receive the petitions and then to reject them.

His next line was drawn at the exclusion of so-called "incendiary documents" from the mails. These documents were tracts, books, or papers containing arguments designed to show that human slavery was wicked and that its maintenance was not in any way economical to the States in which it existed; but it pleased Mr. Calhoun and others to assume that these documents were incendiary, because, as they said, they were designed to foment insurrection and risings among the people held in slavery. His contention was that "the internal peace and security of the States are under the protection of the States themselves, to the entire exclusion of all authority and control on the part of Congress. It belongs to them and not to Congress to determine what is or what is not calculated to disturb their peace and security." President Jackson had recommended that the mails should be closed to all publications tainted with the spirit of abolitionism, and he invited Congress to pass a law prohibiting "under severe penalties the circulation in the Southern States, through the mails, of incendiary publications intended to instigate slaves to insurrection." As a matter of fact, no such publications had ever been issued, and what the President really wanted was to ex