← Hillsdale College Podcast Network Superfeed
Hillsdale College Podcast Network Superfeed
Constitution 101: Slavery and the Roots of the Secession Crisis
00:37:09
Loading summary
Transcript16 lines
- [00:09]
A
Welcome to the Hillsdale College Online Courses Podcast. I'm Jeremiah Regan.
- [00:13]
B
And I'm Juan Davalos. We're back with Constitution 101, the meaning and History of the Constitution. We're on to lecture number six today, Slavery and the Roots of the Secession Crisis.
- [00:22]
A
Why is this a powerful lecture?
- [00:24]
B
Well, it's interesting that you ask that I share this lecture, this one in the next lecture with people who argue against the Founders and their views on slavery, saying that the Founders were actually in favor of slavery. You've probably heard about the 1619 project that says that actually the country was founded on slavery and that the Founders actually did nothing to try to combat slavery, and they were slave owners and they favored the institution and they did nothing to end it. When you listen to this lecture and, and the next one, it's one of the most powerful arguments to combat that narrative.
- [01:00]
A
And of course, that narrative is designed to discredit the Founding and the Constitution wholesale. If there's one thing wrong with it, the whole thing needs to be discarded. And it turns out, yes, that human beings made this. So there are imperfections and problems, which the Founders acknowledged. But the narrative that the country and the Constitution were made only for white men, and that all men doesn't mean all men, it means white men. These things are patently untrue, as we discussed in the last introduction. You don't have to take our word for it. You certainly shouldn't take the 1619 project's word for it. You should read the words and the laws that the men at the time wrote and passed.
- [01:37]
B
This lie is rooted in this notion that history is always progressing and that past, bad, modern, good, and this very linear view of history, that it's always getting better and better and better, and therefore the past must have been worse and worse and worse. Pick any, any history, any good history book, and you'll learn that that's not the case. History goes up and down and things get better and things get worse and things change and things go back to being better and. And so on and so on. That's the way things work. And so the Founders actually did an amazing work to try to end the institution of slavery at a time when the entire world saw that as just very normal. And you'll see how Dr. Porteus takes you through that history and why it was very powerful in the Founding and why it actually started being. That notion of freedom and equality started eroding as time went on into the 1800s.
- [02:33]
A
That's right. And without spoiling the lecture, a tidbit is you will not find founders who are saying that slavery in itself is a good thing. That argument didn't come until much later. So as the founders were talking about liberty, when they were talking about rights, when they were talking about equality, they did mean all men. And they were trying to create a system that would bring that into fruition. There are difficult practical problems they had to solve. Some of them they addressed imperfectly. But their intention was to create a regime in which all men could exercise the rights that God had given them.
- [03:07]
B
If you'd like to learn more about American history and the history of the nation over the past 250 years, we've been creating a series of short videos commemorating the founding and looking at our history over the past 250 years.
- [03:21]
A
These videos, which are usually about 10 minutes long, chronicle important battles, momentous events, and short biographies of important statesmen from the founding era.
- [03:30]
B
And we're doing this as a gift to the Nation. For the 250th, the White House approached us, essentially recognizing Hillsdale's knowledge of American history and wanted to commemorate this awesome occasion. And we're giving this as a gift to the nation. So you can watch this series by going to storiesofamerica. Hillsdale eduardo that's storyofamerica hillsdale. Edu and you can watch this series by going to storyofamerica hillsdale. Edu that's storyofamerica Hillsdale.
- [04:02]
A
Edu now let's turn to lecture six of constitution 101, slavery and the Roots of the Secession Crisis.
- [04:13]
C
Hello, I'm Kevin Porteous, professor of Politics and Director of American Studies at Hillsdale College. Welcome back to Our online Constitution 101 series. In today's lecture, we're going to be talking about slavery and the roots of secession in American history. Now, in our previous lectures up to this point, we've discussed the basic principles and constitutionalism of America's founding Fathers. But in this talk we have to address what is undoubtedly the elephant in the room of the American Founding. And that is how are we to understand the fact that that in a nation committed to the principles of liberty, equality, natural rights, justice, government by consent, with all of those principles, how are we to understand the fact that slavery survived and not only survived, but became so entrenched that it took a vicious and four year long civil war in order to dislodge it. So that's what we're going to do today. Now, the way we're going to approach this is to begin back at the founding and ask Some fundamental questions. What did the Founders think about slavery? Are we to understand the fact that slavery survived, to indicate that they were indifferent to it, or did not recognize that they had a problem on their hands? What did the Founders do about slavery, that is to say, because slavery survived, is that the same as saying that they did nothing about it or did nothing to try and restrain it, to put an end to it? And then finally, we have to address the question, why did they not do more? Why did they not finish the task of emancipation? Now, once we've answered those questions, we're then going to move forward chronologically and address the question, what went wrong if much progress was made towards the abolition of slavery, if the Founders were sincerely committed to its end, what went wrong after the founding generation that caused progress toward the end of slavery to slow to stop and then in at least part of the country to begin to move in the other direction? And so we'll address all of those topics in this lecture today. Now, in regard to the first question, what did the Founders think about slavery? Well, there's a mountain of evidence that indicates that the Founders understood that slavery was wrong on principle. Hamilton and Madison, for instance, both referred to slaves as men. Men. Now, from our previous lectures, we know that this is a critical insight, because if slaves are men, if slaves are human beings, then that means that they have inalienable natural rights. And that means that slavery can only rest on the basis of positive law, that it's by definition an injustice, and they understood it as such. Alexander Hamilton, in another place indicated that when talking about a program to enlist slaves in the Continental army, said that I foresee that this project will have to combat much opposition from prejudice and self interest. The contempt we have been taught to entertain for blacks makes us fancy many things that are founded neither in reason nor experience. And so Hamilton placed prejudice and self interest on the one side and reason and experience in the other. And we know from studying the American Founding, from studying the Constitution, that reason and experience are to guide us. Thomas Jefferson, in one of the most famous statements on slavery to come out of The American Founding Query 18 in Notes on the State of Virginia, explains that slavery is at war with human nature and with justice. He says it's bad for slaves because it teaches them to hate their country and it teaches them to lack self assertion. But it, it's also bad for masters. It teaches masters to become tyrants. It warps them. It teaches them to have contempt for the rights of other human beings. And once they learn to have contempt for the rights of their slaves. They then transfer that and learn to have contempt for the rights of others who are not slaves. Finally, it's bad for society. It's bad for the country as a whole. Jefferson says that we are so wrong on the question of slavery that it is certain that God will punish us if we don't get it right. In fact, he says, if it ever came down to a contest between slaves and masters over the future of the country, Jefferson says, the Almighty has no attribute which can take side with us in such a contest. So, in short, we can see pretty quickly that the founding fathers understood that they had a colossal problem on their hands, that slavery was a massive injustice, and they understood it as such. Now, second question. What did the Founders do about slavery? Because again, to say that they did not end slavery altogether is not the same as saying that they did nothing about it. For instance, during the founding and early American period, nine states became free states. All of the states, the original states north of Maryland, so from Pennsylvania north, were became free states, abolished slavery in one way or another. Now, sometimes that abolition was very quick, as in the case of Massachusetts, where slavery simply disintegrated. Sometimes it was very gradual, as in the case of New Jersey, where there were still a few legally held slaves in New Jersey on the brink of the Civil war in the 1860 census. But they did do it. Moreover, the new states of Vermont in 1791 and Ohio in 1803 came into the Union as free states from the beginning. Even in the states where slavery was retained, laws were changed in significant ways. Slave states eased their manumission laws. Manumission is simply an individual act of emancipation where an individual owner frees an individual slave. So it was made easier to free one's slaves. And in the southern states that retained slavery, and as a result, thousands of slaves were manumitted. Now, this does not end the institution of slavery altogether, but it is certainly important to you if you are one of those thousands who was manumitted during this period. We also see instances of southern courts favoring the claims of slaves who were suing for their freedom. And the typical way that this happened was that a slave was taken to a free state or territory, he was made a resident there by his owner and then brought back to his owner into that slave state. And then he or more typically, some patron or friend would sue, claiming something along the lines of unlawful restraint or lost wages. And the court, by ruling that the person had been unlawfully restrained, would be simultaneously ruling that that person was in fact free. In fact, this is how the Dred Scott case got its start in the Missouri state courts. In ruling against dred scott In 1850, the Missouri Supreme Court admitted that if Dred Scott's case had come before the court, say, 10 years earlier, they most certainly would have freed him. But times had changed, and so they were no longer honoring the friendly agreement that they had with free states to respect the laws of those states. Because of the intensification of the slavery controversy, there were also reforms in the slave states that tended to recognize the humanity of slaves. For instance, in North Carolina, prior to the Revolutionary period, the punishment for killing a slave, assuming one could obtain a conviction, was one to two years in prison, which is frankly, far below the punishment for killing a free person. Now, by the Beginning of the 19th century, North Carolina had reformed its laws so that killing a slave carried the same penalty as killing a free person. It was still hard to obtain a conviction, but at least this is a recognition that a slave is in fact a human being and not an article of livestock. There was the abolition of the slave trade, which was legally abolished in 1807, and the abolition took effect in 1808. Later on, the slave trade was declared to be piracy, making it a death penalty offense. This was a law which was extremely hard to enforce in the age of sale, but at least you have a declaration of a commitment to end this inhumane practice. If one looks to the Constitution itself, one notices that conspicuously absent from the entire Constitution, including the provisions that deal directly with slavery, is the word slave in any variation. Madison, Frederick Douglass, Abraham Lincoln, all came to the same conclusion about why this was the case. They did not want to taint the document with any implication that slavery existed, so that if someone came along in the future without any particular knowledge of our history or politics, they could not read the original Constitution and know that slavery had been a part of it. If one turns to the particular provisions in the Constitution that deal with slavery, we also can see ambiguities and compromises that reflect the Founders desire to see slavery gradually removed from our society. The three fifths clause, for instance, in Article 1, Section 2, that number three fifths was not indicative of some judgment about the human value of the slave or the monetary value of the slave's labor. It was simply a compromise. Congress, under the Articles of Confederation, had attempted to adopt the 3/5 ratio and had gotten 11 states to approve it. But amending the Articles of Confederation required all 13 states. So when they got to the Constitutional Convention, where they were only going to need nine states. They knew that they had a ratio that was acceptable to enough states to get it beyond the ratification hurdle. The importation clause in Article 1, Section 9 was looked upon by many people as a death sentence for slavery. It was widely believed at the time that slave populations could not be self sustaining, that only continual importation would allow slavery to survive in a particular community. And so many people, such as James Wilson, believed that cutting off the slave trade killed slavery itself. And that proved to be largely true in many places, except in America. In America, the slave population, contrary to expectations, proved to be self supporting. Finally, one has the fugitive slave clause in Article 4, Section 2, which allows for slaves to be returned to their masters upon claim of that master or his agent. But there's an ambiguity in the three fifths clause, and the ambiguity is it simply says that the slave shall be delivered up. It never says by whom. That is to say, it does not impose upon the federal government or anybody else an affirmative obligation to return those slaves. Finally, if one is looking at what the founders did about slavery, perhaps the most important thing that they did about slavery was to pass a piece of legislation called the Northwest ordinance. Now, laws under the articles of confederation were called ordinances, but the northwest ordinance was also repassed by Congress after the ratification of of the constitution. The Northwest ordinance was significant because the northwest territory, present day Ohio, Indiana, Illinois, Michigan, Wisconsin, and part of Minnesota comprised the entire area over which the federal government had jurisdiction with regard to slavery. They could not affect it in the states and they could not affect it in the southwestern territories because they had made agreements with those states, North Carolina, South Carolina, Georgia, that had given up their western land claims in those areas that they would not outlaw slavery in the southwestern territories. So the northwest territory was the full area in which the federal government could control slavery. And the northwest ordinance banned it in perpetuity. And it was passed by a large margin in congress both times under both forms of government. This was significant in a number of ways. Indiana, when it petitioned for statehood, asked for the right to be exempt from the Northwest ordinance. Now, one does not ask for that exemption if one wants to be a free state. And the federal government told them that they were not exempted, they could remain free under the Northwest ordinance or they could become a free state. So it certainly made one state that might have been a slave state into a free state. It provided, when we got to the civil War, an enormous amount of manpower and material resources for the union war effort. And finally, the language of the slavery prohibition in the Northwest Ordinance became the basis for the 13th Amendment to the Constitution, outlawing slavery nationwide by constitutional amendment. So many things were done to restrict slavery, to hem it in, as Lincoln would later say, within the narrowest limits of necessity. Now, finally, why did they not do more? Well, there are several reasons, and the first of these is simple self interest, which is part of the human condition. It doesn't make it right, but it helps us to understand why they did what they did. That is to say, many people believed, rightly or wrongly, that slavery was essential to their livelihood. And it's very difficult to get people to ignore what they perceive to be a critical interest for, for the sake of an abstract principle, again, doesn't make it right. Does help us to understand. Another reason is survival. Now in this case, we don't mean economic survival, we mean literal physical survival. Despite all of the claims by apologists for slavery later on that slaves were contented in their condition, slave owners and slaveholding communities lived in perpetual terror of slave insurrection. And there were plenty of examples of them. The Stono Rebellion, Denmark Vesey's conspiracy, Nat Turner's Rebellion. And the real nightmare that lurked in the minds of the American south was the rebellion on the island of Santo Domingo, present day Haiti, where the slaves revolted and it led to a more than decade long civil war which was incredibly brutal on both sides. They were desperate to avoid that. And we can't say that simply because it did not happen, that that concern was not a legitimate one in that time. Jefferson once said that we have the wolf by the ears that justice is in one hand and self preservation in the other. Even a disinterested commentator like Alexis de Tocqueville predicted that the slavery problem would end in America either by separation or by race war. And Tocqueville was neither a slave owner nor a Southerner. He didn't have a particular interest in slavery. But it's helpful to see that reasonable people, even outside observers, recognized that this was a very distinct possibility.
- [19:43]
D
Classical music is one of the greatest achievements of Western civilization. It took 2,000 years and the work of the greatest philosophical, scientific, political and religious minds to properly tune the piano and make great music possible. But classical music can be intimidating. In Hillsdale College's new free online course, the History of Classical Chopin, through Gershwin, you'll learn how to appreciate humanity's greatest musical accomplishments. In the history of classical music, concert pianist and Hillsdale College distinguished fellow Hyperion Knight explains how music has developed and what distinguishes the greatest musical achievements of Western civilization. To enroll today and Secure your spot in this completely free online course. Visit Hillsdale. Edu Network. That's Hillsdale.
- [20:50]
E
Hi there, it's Bill Gray from Hillsdale College. Before you skip ahead, can I ask you a question or two? If you could teach 50 million Americans one thing, what would it be? Would you teach our great American story that this nation is unique, founded on self government and individual liberty? Maybe you would teach the truth about free enterprise, how hard work and opportunity allow anyone to rise? Or would you teach the gospel and the Christian faith that helps us live good and meaningful lives? At Hillsdale College, we're doing exactly that. Teaching the best that's been thought and said. Through our free online courses, K12 programs, Imprimis, podcasts and more, we reach and teach millions every year with the principles of liberty that make America free. And with your help, we can reach even more. Your tax deductible gift today will help us teach millions more people to pursue truth and defend liberty. Just text the word give to 7 1844. You'll get a secure link to make your donation in seconds. That's give to 718 44. Thank you for standing with us. Now back to the show.
- [22:04]
C
The third reason that they didn't do more was because they were greatly concerned for the survival of the Union. Certain states, particularly South Carolina and Georgia, had made it abundantly clear that if the delegates at the Constitutional Convention tried to outlaw slavery in the Constitution, that they would leave and they would set up an independent republic or republican republics as separate states. And this was, in the eyes of the Founders, a disaster in the making. Washington's Farewell Address, the early essays of the Federalist Papers, 2, 3, 4, 5 up through 8, all deal very directly with the importance of the Union to preserving the liberty of all. They were terrified that America would turn into Europe junior a bunch of feuding small tribalized nations, and even worse, that we would become clots states of the various European powers and that they would use us as proxy warriors for their own benefit. So they were terrified of the idea that we would not preserve the Union, that we branch out into separate republics. And so they were faced with a choice. Do we end slavery and face disunion, or do we preserve the Union and tolerate slavery, at least for the time being? And the choice they made was to preserve the Union. And one must ask what would have happened to the slaves of South Carolina and Georgia if South Carolina and Georgia had not stayed in the Union? Knowing what we know now that again, it took a titanic civil war in order to end slavery in those States and in the other slave states. Finally, the Founders were optimistic about the future of slavery. If you were living in their time, you probably would be too. There had been enormous progress. America was the first nation to declare as a people that slavery was bad for everyone and that every man should be free. Not simply that slavery is bad for us or for me, or for me and my friends, but for everybody. And that was momentous. Now, they couldn't act on it right away, but they declared the principle and were moving in that direction. And it's no coincidence that all of this was happening at the same time that people were beginning to think about the laws of nature and nature's God, equality, liberty, natural rights, and so on. Now, some Founders were more optimistic than others. Jefferson seemed to think that, well, we're just moving in that direction. Others, like John Jay, understood that the reason we were moving in that direction is because we were continuing to educate and reform the hearts and minds of the American people to the principles of justice, liberty and equality. But there was good reason to be optimistic during this time. Alright, now we move on to the second part of our discussion. What went wrong? The Founders saw slavery as a necessary evil to be tolerated, but also to be placed in the path of extinction. On the other hand, as I mentioned at the outset, after the founding period in the Southern states, progress toward emancipation slowed and then stopped and then began to reverse. Now, in attempting to answer the question why, we can point to several factors. There are personal factors involved. Founding principles required slaveholders to acknowledge on a continual basis that they were behaving unjustly towards their fellow men, that is to say, that they were wronging people on a daily, on a continuous basis. It's very hard for people to do that. We all like to think of ourselves at some level and as basically good or justified. Even if we're not, we still like to think of ourselves that way. And it's hard for us to live our entire lives acknowledging the injustices that we are committing on a continuous basis. There were economic factors connected with slavery. In other words, there were new developments that made slavery possible. We're probably all familiar with the cotton gin and the way in which the cotton gin makes cotton cultivation more efficient to get the seeds and out of the lint and therefore to make the cotton viable for spinning, for weaving, and therefore for production. We're perhaps not familiar with improvements like the introduction of new strains of cotton that allowed cotton agriculture to move into the interior South. But in the 18th century, the kind of cotton that was cultivated in The United States would only grow in very specific areas, primarily the coastal and sea island areas of South Carolina and Georgia. It was very finicky about soil, about precipitation, about temperatures, climate, etc. On the other hand, new strains of cotton introduced in the early 19th century allowed cotton production to spread throughout the interior South. It was much hardier, much more tolerant of inferior conditions. And so therefore cotton could become profitable in Tennessee, in Alabama, in Mississippi, in Arkansas and in northern Louisiana, places where it would not have been profitable in the 18th century. There are social factors involved as well. Over time, Southerners, particularly of the slave holding class, came to like the social system and the culture that slavery made possible, at least for themselves. A life of refinement, a life of imitation of European aristocracy. And southerners were very cognizant of the fact and very intentionally creating an aristocratic society in the south in the years leading up to the Civil War. The complete with effective disenfranchisement of non slave holding whites, of non property owning whites, people who were nominally free. Finally, there were intellectual changes in the south which brought about this transformation. There were new theories of government, some of which were imported. Frankly, you had the introduction of German philosophy in the United States. Students would go to Germany, study philosophy. And what that meant at the time was studying with the students and disciples of people like Immanuel Kant and Georg Hegel, who were openly hostile to the American founding, and then bringing those ideas back, and European intellectuals immigrating and bringing ideas with them. And what that meant was the introduction of new ideas that were hostile to the Founders principles. But you also had homegrown ideas that were hostile to the American founding. You had a very overturned rejection of the principles of social compact or social contract. The idea of rights being derived from nature, the laws of nature, nature's God. And those theories originated and developed right here at home. And all of this culminated in the development of a new ideology which saw slavery as a positive good rather than as a necessary evil. And perhaps the most articulate expositor of this new view, and there are many expositors of it, but the most articulate defender of slavery is John C. Calhoun of South Carolina, a man who occupied virtually every office in the United States. Vice president, secretary of state, secretary of war, senator, congressman, every major office except president, he was probably involved with at some time or another. But he was also one of the brightest and most articulate, not just defenders of slavery, but people of this period. And he was extremely and openly critical of the American founding. He looked at statements like all men are created equal, or all men are born free and equal. And he proclaimed them to be the most false and dangerous of all political errors. Now, in making that point, he does engage in some semantic games. He says, all men are not born and infants are born. And this can kind of seem silly on the surface, but Calhoun is establishing something important. He's saying that Jefferson in the Declaration of Independence said, we hold these truths to be self evident. Calhoun's response is, it's not self evident to me. I reject these truths. I do not believe that they are the truth. He says, look, the reality is the Founders were not really interested in natural law and natural rights and rights descended from God. These founders as revolutionaries, they were interested in preserving the rights of Englishmen, rights derived from the English Constitution, from their colonial charters and compacts, from the development of English law and English rights over a period of centuries. He rejects the notion that man has inherent rights and says that instead of being naturally an individual endowed with rights, he says, no, man by nature is a political creature. He exists in civil society. That is his natural condition, not as an individual or even as an individual living in society with other people, but no government, which was what the Founders believed, that people live together but without government. And then they formed government. Well, Calhoun rejects that and says, no, everybody's born into government of some kind. If nothing else, they're born into the government of that most fundamental of political societies, the family. And they did assert, people like Calhoun, that the family was a political society, which is something that the Founding fathers tended to reject, following more along the lines of people like Locke and the other natural law thinkers. So man is a political creature by nature. And the reason that this is the case is because it's only in political society that man can be the moral and intellectual creature that God made him to be. It's the only place where his nature can develop. And there's some truth to this in the sense that if you were truly off on your own, which the Founders never believed was man's natural state, but if you were, you would spend all of your time trying to find food and trying to avoid being food. And so there's no opportunity for the development of those higher moral and intellectual faculties. But this carries with it, for Calhoun, important implications, and that is this. If it is in fact the case that political society is so important, then what follows is any government, the worst form of government. Tyranny is better than no government. And that's a direct inversion of the formula that Madison gives us at the end of Federalist 51 where he says, no, no, anarchy is better than tyranny. Now Calhoun literally says tyranny is better than anarchy because we need order. So much so that we can fully develop into human beings that we need whatever government can provide that order. Now, government shouldn't exercise more power than it has to. And there are some people, some groups of people who are capable of a significant amount of liberty and self government. And so in that case, the scope of government power should be severely curtailed. But there are other people who are more vicious, more barbaric, less civilized, more endangered by their neighbors, less intellectual. Those people are going to need a stronger hand, even to the point of abolishing liberty altogether and establishing absolute despotism. If that's what's necessary to preserve order, then that's what that people needs. In other words, instead of liberty being inborn with man, instead of liberty being natural, and instead of all men being created equal, liberty is in fact a prize to be won. He says it's the reward for civilization, for virtue, for moral and intellectual development. Now you may be able to see where this is going because once you make the leap, once you say, well, some people can handle liberty and others cannot, then transfer that to America's own particular situation. And what you will find is this. And Calhoun makes this argument, he says that there are two races in America. There are two distinct groups. One of those groups can handle liberty and self government to the highest degree and the other cannot. And so the unique benefit of slavery in a society where these two races coincide is that slavery allows each group. Now notice again, we're not referring to men as individuals with rights. Men are members of groups and their rights, their liberty, their capacity for self government in is determined by their membership in that group. Okay, so we have two groups and each group can get what they need. And so again, if we apply this to the particular situation in America as Calhoun understood it in his own time, slaves get access to the fruits of civilization, at least to the extent that they are able to handle them. They get order, a level of civilization that they could never have enjoyed in Africa. They also get protection. See, unlike white industrial workers in Europe or even in New England, the Southern argument says that, well, we care for our slaves, they're a part of our community, whereas these factories, they just kick everybody to the curb. One of the interesting facets of pro slavery ideology is the overtly or indirectly Marxist arguments that are made about the treatment of northern workers. It's simply that Southerners like Calhoun and Marxists are going to differ about, well, what do we do about it? But to get back to the main thread, whites are able then to coexist with their slaves and not be pulled down to the level of barbarism that they see in their slaves. That is to say, whites are able to enjoy liberty and self government. Calhoun says, in this arrangement, and slaves get what they need. At the same time, slavery makes possible a way of life that is beneficial for both groups. Calhoun does not claim that it's a universal good. It's good for us because the two races live together. It would not be good for whites to be slaves any more than it would be good for blacks to be free. Now, of course, one of the problems that they encountered was that there were simply a number of counterexamples. For instance, and most prominently the example of Frederick Douglass, clearly one of the moral and intellectual giants of his age and condemned simply by virtue of his race to be ruled by a succession of fools and monsters, at least until his own escape. But never mind those messy little details getting in the way of Calhoun's theory. The essential takeaway is once we walk away from the Founding, it doesn't take us very long. Think about how quickly, right here in this lecture, once we walked away from the Founding, we were able to get ourselves in a situation where we were able to make an affirmative defense of slavery as a positive good. And it's this theory that is going to pull the Southern states away from their attachment to the Union, to the Constitution, and to the principles of the Founding. It's this attachment to the institution of slavery and the defense of it as a positive good that is going to bring the nation to the brink of destruction by the beginning of the 1860s.
- [38:34]
B
Thank you for listening to this episode of the Hillsdale College Online Courses Podcast. If you want to continue learning, please visit Hillsdale. Edu Course. There you will find over 40 free online courses, including Ancient Christianity, the Genesis Story, classic children's literature, and many more. The courses include additional readings, study guides, fully produced videos, and you can chat with your fellow students on a dedicated forum. Upon completing a course, you will also get a certificate. All our courses are free because we believe that what you'll learn will enrich your life and that a virtuous citizen is the best defense for liberty. So pursue the education necessary for freedom and happiness at hillsdale.edu coursetoday. That's hillsdale edu Course. Thanks for listening.