Calhoun stands today, as he did in his own time, as the premier defender of white racial supremacy, of slavery as a legitimate labor system, of the triumph of minority factionalism, and ultimately as the intellectual spark to disunion and civil war. He was the anti-Washington, and, for that matter, the anti-Madison and the anti-Lincoln, of American history. When the Supreme Court, in the notorious Slaughterhouse Cases judgment in 1873, successfully crippled the Fourteenth Amendment’s extension “of the common rights of American citizens under the protection of the National Government,” Justice Stephen Field’s dissenting opinion stigmatized that conclusion as “the opinion of Mr. Calhoun and the class represented by him.” Henry Wilson’s History of the Rise and Fall of the Slave Power (1875) pinned “the dissolution of the Union” on the “wrong position” in which Calhoun had “placed the South.” Calhoun’s first major biographer, Herman von Holst, condemned him in 1882 as “interested in nothing outside slavery,” whose defense he raised to the level of “abstraction, as a principle.” W. E. B. Du Bois denounced Calhoun in Calhoun’s own home state of South Carolina in 1946 as one of those “men whose names must ever be besmirched by the fact that they fought against freedom and democracy in a land which was founded upon democracy and freedom. . . . This class of men must yield to the writing in the stars.” And the late Harry Jaffa, defending to the last syllable the reputation of Abraham Lincoln, fingered Calhoun’s writings as “a landmark in the transition from individual rights to group rights” and a repudiation of “constitutionalism and the rule of law.” Calhoun was, for Jaffa, “reminiscent of Hegel” in seeing that human history is the product of “not human art or reason but human passion.”
The most recent turn around Calhoun’s memory has been iconoclastic. In 2017, Yale University renamed the residential college it had called Calhoun College eighty-four years before; this past summer, Clemson University removed Calhoun’s name from its honors college; in June 2020, the Charleston City Council voted to remove the statue of Calhoun which stood on a pedestal in Marion Square as a gesture toward “racial conciliation and for unity in this city”; and Fort Wayne, Indiana, is at this moment debating renaming Calhoun Street as a “constant symbol of an oppressive past.”