Book Review: Robert Elder’s ‘Calhoun: American Heretic’

Home Culture Book Review: Robert Elder’s ‘Calhoun: American Heretic’
Book Review: Robert Elder’s ‘Calhoun: American Heretic’

While we were watching the political chaos of 2020 and early 2021 unfold, Baylor historian Robert Elder was quietly finishing his long and masterful biography of John C. Calhoun.

In “Calhoun: American Heretic,” Elder makes one of America’s strangest and most controversial figures familiar without understating any of his flaws. From Calhoun’s youthful presidential dreams to his acerbic middle-aged reactionism, Elder tracks his subject’s career from the South Carolina upcountry and Yale College to Washington, D.C., interspersing the stories of his political battles in Congress and the War Department with details of his plantation life and personal reflections. 

The book skillfully examines Calhoun’s changing political philosophy in light of his homeland, his Calvinist convictions, and his many blind spots. Elder also situates Calhoun’s ambition, sense of honor, loyalty to his state, and personal hypocrisy inside the intellectual climate of the early 19th-century United States — American aspirations, American values, and American hypocrisy. 

Like Calhoun, many Americans believed that education, territorial expansion, and the perfection of the republican legal system would ensure a glorious age of freedom, peace, and equality in the New World. But many Americans, including Calhoun, saw their rights as political realities extending from their status as former British subjects, not the universal rights which a literal reading of the Declaration of Independence would suggest. 

When the senator exclaims that “there shall be at least one free state,” referring to tariff-free South Carolina, we rightly gawk at his audacity. But in many ways, Calhoun was a spokesman for his age and a hero to those who were more concerned with preserving their own freedoms than extending them to the oppressed. His brilliant and convoluted arguments for state rights are impossible to decipher without understanding the spirit of his age, and neither can we understand American history without examining its heretics.

Finally, Elder achieves what most biographers cannot — or dare not — undertake: he connects a distant, painful part of our history to current events we know. The political revolutions of the last few years are too recent to digest fully, but “Calhoun: American Heretic” acknowledges them, treating issues like 19th-century racism with enormous sensitivity to our 21st-century struggle over race. 

Understanding Calhoun’s dark and complex life is both challenging and worthwhile. Vengefully denying his humanity or ignoring his influence does us no good. 

“Unlike a monument, history cannot be torn down and bundled off to some dusty corner of a municipal warehouse without consequences,” Elder writes. “It must be told, fully, fairly, and honestly, or else we are left with a limited understanding of our past and no way to explain our present.”