Charleston was NOT the “Cradle of Secession” and Calhoun was NOT its father.

   Recently, while reading the Spring 2021 issue of The Civil War Monitor, I came across an article entitled “Who is Buried in Calhoun’s Tomb?’ by Ethan J. Kytle and Brian Roberts. While the article concerns the removal of John C. Calhoun’s remains from his tomb at St. Philip’s Episcopal Church West Cemetery, the authors repeat a couple of misconceptions regarding the history of secession in the United States.

   First, the authors consider Charleston the “cradle of secession.” This is an oft repeated assertion. In 1888, Rossiter Johnson considered Charleston as much in his history of the War.[1] Robert N. Rosen had a chapter bearing that title in his 1994 history of the city.[2] William C. Davis wrote in 1996 that the destruction in Charleston wrought by the war was price the city paid for being the “cradle of secession.”[3] Yet that title of “cradle of secession” belongs to other places and times, well before historians and entrepreneurs of the tourist traded branded the city as such.

John C. Calhoun (Clemson University)

   Probably the title of first real “cradle of secession,” post-establishment of the United States and its Constitution, falls to east Tennessee. In 1784, the State of Franklin was created as an autonomous territory in land offered by North Carolina as a cession to Congress to help pay off debts related to the American Revolution. Franklin (named in honor of Dr. Benjamin Franklin), had a capital, a president/governor, a congress, a constitution, etc. When Congress did not act upon North Carolina’s cession of property, the state of Franklin once again became a part of the state, whereas the Franklinites then seceded from North Carolina.  In 1784, the residents of Franklin actually submitted a petition for statehood to Congress. Short version of the story – this all eventually failed. Yet its history was remembered by a few in the 1860s. In 1861, John S.C. Abbott, in an address in Cheshire, Connecticut, made mention several times of Franklin being the “cradle of secession.”  Abbott even went as far as to state that the state of Tennessee, as a whole was “born of secession, rocked in the cradle of revolution.”[4]

  There are, of course, many other places that discussed secession prior to Charleston in 1860. In 1794, U.S. Senators Oliver Ellsworth of Connecticut and Rufus King of New York appealed to John Taylor of Virginia for a division of the Union. Taylor believed that there were opportunities to settle inter-sectional issues, and refused to participate.[5] Taylor brought the issue up himself in 1789 with the passage of the Alien and Sedition Acts.[6] Toward the end of Thomas Jefferson’s first term, there was a movement led by Timothy Pickering of Massachusetts to set up “a new confederacy” or “Northern confederacy” made up of New England states.[7] There are of course many other examples of the threat to secede: New England in 1809 over James Madison’s “Enforcement Act”; New England and New York during the War of 1812 (leading to the Hartford Convention in 1814); South Carolina in 1828 and again in 1832-33.  Throughout the 1840s and 1850s, the Abolitionists in New England repeatedly called for disunion.[8] At the same time, the topic again became popular in the South after the introduction of the Wilmot Proviso. While the act of secession came to maturity in South Carolina and the rest of the South in 1860 and 1861, a reading of American history proves that the Cradle of Secession was not Charleston, but New England.

   And what of John C. Calhoun being the “Father of Secession”? Once again, this is an often-repeated claim.[9] Yet the idea did not originate with Calhoun. Where did he learn the ideals and principles of secession? New England. In 1802, with financing from his brothers, Calhoun arrived at Yale College in Connecticut. He graduated in 1804 and moved on to law school, this time, in Litchfield, Connecticut. What was going on during Calhoun’s time in Connecticut? The people in the New England communities were angry over the Jefferson Administration’s perceived hostility towards New England. Timothy Pickering, Rufus King, Aaron Burr, and others wanted a new country that advanced their ideals of Federalism. Into that hotbed of secessionism rode the young John C. Calhoun. Calhoun biographer Margaret Coit argues that: “every principle of secession or states' rights which Calhoun ever voiced can be traced right back to the thinking of intellectual New England ... Not the South, not slavery, but Yale College and Litchfield Law School made Calhoun a nullifier ... [Timothy] Dwight, [Tapping] Reeve, and [James] Gould could not convince the young patriot from South Carolina as to the desirability of secession, but they left no doubts in his mind as to its legality.”[10] A close reading of Calhoun’s speeches and writings does not lead a person to the conclusion that Calhoun wanted secession. He didn’t. Over and over Calhoun expressed love and devotion for the Union. What he was warning the nation about was the dominance of one section of the country over another, the exact same thing that Pickering had written about in 1803 and 1804.

   Kytle’s and Roberts’s article in The Civil War Monitor is disappointing on many levels. Calhoun was not the “dogged defender of their [Charlestonian] culture.” He was a dogged defender of the U.S. Constitution and the rule of law. Calhoun wrote and spoke far more on banking, currency, protection, and free trade that he ever did on the issue of slavery. To be fair, Kytle’s and Roberts’s article deals with his grave in Charleston, a place where he never fit in and probably despised. The Charlestonians were not his people. Yet Kytle’s and Roberts want to take swipes at Calhoun, ignoring the person as a whole. “There was nothing groveling or low, or meanly selfish that came near the head or heart of Mr. Calhoun,” eulogized Daniel Webster from the floor of the senate in April 1850.[11] Maybe we could all learn a little from Webster or at least strive for a balanced approach.

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[1] Johnson, A Short History of the War of Secession, 1861-1865, 307.

[2] Rosen, Confederate Charleston: An Illustrated History of the City, 38.

[3] Davis, The Cause Lost: Myths and Realities of the Confederacy, 27.

[4] Abbott, “An Address Upon our National Affairs,” 1861.

[5] Hunt, ed., Division Sentiment in Congress in 1794.

[6] Ford, ed., Writings of Thomas Jefferson, 7:263-265.

[7] Gannon, “Escaping ‘Mr. Jefferson’s Plan of Destruction,’” Journal of the Early Republic, Volume 21, pt. 3, 413-414.

[8] Mayer, All of Fire: William Lloyd Garrsion and the Abolition of Slavery, 327, 328.

[9] Botts, The Great Rebellion, 2008; Holmes, New School History of the United States, 198; Secor, Vice Presidential Profiles, 27.

[10] Coit, John C. Calhoun: American Portrait, 42.

[11] Webster, quoted in the Carolina Tribute to Calhoun, 11-12.