Books: Lost Cause

JOHN C. CALHOUN: AMERICAN PORTRAIT (593 pp.) — Margaret Co/V —Houghton Mifflin ($5).

John Calhoun, born to the cotton rows and the linsey-woolsey of a South Carolina frontier farm, became the greatest spokesman the slave-owning aristocracy ever had. He loved the Union with a choked, subterranean passion, but his arguments led fatefully to secession and Fort Sumter. Desperately he yearned for the presidency, but he took such an uncompromising stand on so many unpopular and often sectional issues that he seemed consciously to be disqualifying himself for the big prize.

Many historians have been tempted to explore these puzzles in Calhoun's character, but none has gathered more personal facts about him or analyzed them with more spirit than Connecticut-born, North Carolina-educated Margaret Coit. In her determination to breathe life into the "steel engraving of a mummy so familiar in our schoolbooks," Biographer Coit occasionally falls into huffing & puffing prose; but she does manage to bring the steel engraving to life in a first-class biography.

Whoop for War. Young Calhoun was something of a prig. When" his admiring brothers persuaded him to give up farming and sent him to college at 20, he worked as hard at Yale as if he were plowing a rocky patch of land. To the frequent ridicule of his fellow students, he would reply that he studied hard "in order that he might acquit himself creditably when he should become a member of Congress."

Yale gave him confidence and sharpened his wits, but in his basic thinking the shaggy-haired, long-boned rustic was not deeply affected. He had been reading John Locke and Thomas Paine since 13. He had learned a lean, spare style of debate and he had developed an abiding conviction that the source of all power is the people—a notion that he was later to translate into his brilliant argument for states' rights against the growing power of the Federal Government.

Calhoun's undergraduate cockiness was not unwarranted; seven years after leaving Yale he was in Congress. In 1811 he became Henry Clay's lieutenant in the raucous young "War Hawk" faction which whooped for war against Britain. Afterward, when little "Jemmy" Monroe became President, he offered Calhoun the job of Secretary of War. The ambitious Calhoun grabbed it and did a bangup job. He reformed the Army diet, adding vegetables to the monotonous bread and salt pork, and began projects to extend the Union through exploratory expeditions and the building of a system of national highways. '

He could be irascible and harddriving. When U.S. Army Lieut. Sam Houston shepherded a delegation of Indians to his office—with himself togged out in loincloth and blanket—Calhoun gave him a tongue-lashing for looking "like a savage." Men felt in Calhoun a quality of excitement, of suppressed fire, of the dominating intellectual vitality that had been felt in Alexander Hamilton.