The Reactionary Mind: Conservatism from Edmund Burke to Donald Trump

by Corey Robin

In his last major address to the Senate, John C. Calhoun, former vice president and chief spokesman of the Southern cause, identified the decision by Congress in the mid-1830s to receive abolitionist petitions as the moment when the nation set itself on an irreversible course of confrontation over slavery. In a four-decade career that had seen such defeats to the slaveholder position as the Tariff of Abominations, the Nullification Crisis, and the Force Bill, the mere appearance of slave speech in the nation’s capital stood out for the dying Calhoun as the sign that the revolution had begun.6 And when, a half-century later, Calhoun’s successors sought to put the abolitionist genie back into the bottle, it was this same assertion of black agency that they targeted.