by Marc Wortman
Above all a “good government” legislator, he strived to consolidate the rule of law along civilization’s frontier, a chaotic region where the lynch mob’s rope—or an accused man’s vanishing into the wilderness—too frequently marked the final resolution of criminal cases. Civil disputes were often still resolved by duels. As a member of a celebrated Senate Judiciary Committee, his leadership helped close the door on vigilante justice—at least for accused white citizens. An entirely separate legal code determined a black person’s fate when such cases reached a court. The state assembly passed numerous reforms that James Calhoun coauthored to modernize the legal system, most importantly streamlining the judicial process from indictment through state supreme court appeals.
For many frontier Georgians, judicial matters, tort law, civil procedure, and legal statutes seemed arcane or, worse, out-and-out intrusions into their lives, but Calhoun understood the practical benefits his fellow citizens would enjoy from his outwardly bureaucratic efforts at reform. As late as 1858, one of his clients accused of murder was nearly pulled out of his jail cell by an angry mob intent on lynching the prisoner. Unarmed, Calhoun stopped them at the calaboose door with his sober arguments in favor of letting justice take its course. Though frontier-style punishment still occurred, for the state’s growing urban centers, codified laws and efficient, powerful courts meant more than safer streets and a way to settle arguments without resorting to violence. For the first time, towns hired sheriffs and deputies to enforce the law and ensure fair trade practices. They elected judges and juries to bring felons to justice.
The establishment of a modern legal system encouraged civil society to develop. Merchants and banks, tradesmen, builders, and investors of all kinds, even the small farmers bringing crops to market, could trust increasingly that whatever financial risk they ran and whatever reward they aspired to depended not on a gun but business conditions.
Calhoun seemed destined for great things. In a land where a man bore his family name like a shield of honor, he possessed a Southern one that would have amounted to royal lineage on another continent. Despite this “honorable parentage,” recalled one who knew him, “he claimed nothing from them.” He need not. The name echoed through the government chambers. He counted as legislative and personal friends among the most influential men in the state, including Alexander Stephens, Robert Toombs, and Howell Cobb, politicians with national renown who would rise from Milledgeville to Washington, where they would serve as powerful congressmen, senators, and cabinet members in several administrations. Calhoun seemed to be on course for a similar ascent to high national office.
DURING HIS FIRST TERM in office, Calhoun dealt with the brutal business of purging the last sovereign Indian nation from within Georgia’s borders. The gold discovered within Cherokee country made it too valuable to be left to the Cherokee. An 1832 Georgia State-sponsored land lottery law had raffled off the entire Cherokee territory to whites. The Cherokee were legally barred from participating in a chance to win back their own farms and towns.
The state and federal governments moved to lay the groundwork for the tribe’s final removal to its designated land in the far West. Once again, the white governments turned to native leaders who were not empowered to negotiate on the tribe’s behalf. With the Creek and Seminole wars as a backdrop, in 1836 a dissident Cherokee group led by Major Ridge agreed to terms for the peaceful, compensated departure of all remaining tribe members in the region. Nearly all 20,000 tribe members protested against the agreement, but congressional ratification of the Treaty of New Echota gave the natives a two-year deadline to complete their move to the trans-Mississippi West.
By the beginning of 1838 though, only about 2,000 tribe members had complied. Force would be needed for the rest. Would it lead to another bloody Indian war? Gov. G. R. Gilmer dispatched Rep. James Calhoun to survey conditions in the Cherokee territory. Calhoun traveled along the course of the new railroad line the state government was building, the Western & Atlantic, its bed presently being cut and graded directly through Cherokee land.
Reporting back to the governor on February 20, Calhoun was worried by what he didn’t see. He found relations between white and native residents remarkably calm. He had encountered none of the tensions that had presaged the outbreak of the Creek War. He noted many Cherokee men on the work crews building the new railroad. The natives, he reported, “make very good hands at work,” and their work teams were “making considerable progress.”
The peaceful progress raised the hair on the back of his neck. Whites showed no fear of what might happen. Those living and working in the northwestern corner of the state “do not apprehend that there will be any hostilities.” He found, “They seem to be pretty generally, so far as I could ascertain, of opinion that the Indians would leave without doing any mischief of consequence.” He feared they were being naïve about the consequences of the pending, longrumored removal of their neighbors and coworkers.
Despite the region’s calm and the native’s quiescence, he predicted another Indian war was in the offing. He wrote to the governor, “I am afraid that the people in the Cherokee Country have too much confidence in the Indians. . . . They should bear in mind the condition of the white citizens in the Creek nation at the time of the breaking out of hostilities there. If hostilities should break out there, the same results would be experienced that were in the Creek Country”—that is, insurrection, property destruction, civilian panic, bloodshed, and large-scale warfare.
The government, determined to prevent another drawn-out conflict like that in Florida, moved swiftly, stealthily, and with overwhelming strength. Unprepared or too depleted and defeated to resist, the Cherokee never fired a single shot in defiance when their last day in Georgia arrived.
A WARM MAY 24, 1838, marked the final sunrise on 12,000 years of Indian civilization in Georgia. The state of Georgia took official possession of Cherokee County, the last sovereign native nation within its borders. Under Gen. Winfield Scott, 7,000 troops descended upon an estimated 16,000 Cherokee. Uniformed soldiers, hurling insults and firing their rifles to terrorize and cow the population, swept through the small towns, isolated farms within the pine forests, riverside mills, and scattered dwellings. Men, women, and children were seized where they were found. There would be no opportunity to raise an alarm, let alone organize resistance. (In North Carolina, where a similar removal was underway, some Cherokees fled into the remote areas of the Appalachian Mountains and lived on there to gain a tribal reservation in later years.) The troops forced the Cherokee people at bayonet point into awaiting stockade-enclosed fields.
A soldier participating in the removal described what he saw:Women were dragged from their homes by soldiers whose language they could not understand. Children were often separated from their parents and driven into the stockades with the sky for a blanket and the earth for a pillow. And often the old and infirm were prodded with bayonets to hasten them to the stockades. In one home death had come during the night, a little sad faced child had died and was lying on a bear-skin couch and some women were preparing the little body for burial. All were arrested and driven out leaving the child in the cabin. I don’t know who buried the body.
As they were marched by the soldiers into the concentration camps, the Cherokees could look back to their former homes being torched and looted by whites who followed in the army’s wake. A hardened war veteran from Georgia declared the Cherokee roundup to be “the cruelest work I ever knew.”
In less than two weeks, all the Cherokee homes and villages stood empty or destroyed. White squatters moved immediately into the better remaining structures. By June 3, the soldiers’ work in Georgia was done. Over the next five months, troops herded the 16,000 Cherokee people some six hundred miles west across the Mississippi River to Oklahoma. At least 4,000 died of starvation, cold, and disease along what came to be known as the Trail of Tears.
Not an Indian soul remained within Georgia’s borders as a speed bump to slow the
Empire State of the South’s development.
FOR JAMES CALHOUN, the final capture of the state’s western frontier marked an auspicious moment to live within and represent Georgia’s wilderness upland, perhaps not unlike what his forebears experienced when finally rid of their dangerous native neighbors eight decades ago. Senator John C. Calhoun, who had followed his young cousin’s rise with interest and familial pride, reached out from his U.S. Capitol office in Washington, where he was now the South’s greatest voice, writing a letter to commend James, though “still young,” for “the formidable start you have made.” He was confident that “you may accomplish all you desire.”
His belief in the young man’s political promise was to prove unfounded. James Calhoun would never scale the heights his apparent and oft-touted gifts indicated. As he strove for higher office, he faltered again and again. The aspiring political leader knew exactly what held him back: the national controversies that swept local politics aside.
IN THAT SAME 1839 LETTER, the “Cast-Iron Man” warned his up-and-coming cousin that he should not expect an easy time of it in the rough-and-tumble politics of the age. He confessed, “My political course has, indeed, been one of great difficulty; as any public man’s must be, who honestly performs his duty, without regard to personal consequences.”
Honestly performing his duty came easily enough for James Calhoun, but unlike the senator, he would pay a price for his sense of duty that would keep him pinned down in his home district. Twice in succession he ran for a congressional seat, and twice he lost. (A third, much later effort at a race for the House of Representatives proved equally futile.) He had little chance, despite his many assets and personal popularity.
James Calhoun, like a large percentage of the antebellum nation’s men of wealth and high standing, from the South and North, was a political Whig. He was an avowed supporter of popular causes including sectional rights and the nation’s self-proclaimed Manifest Destiny to conquer the continent. However, unlike Senator Calhoun in Washington, he would not move from his Whig alignment to side with his home district’s dominant political organization, the Democratic Party, because, above all else, he believed in the need for effective governance in the ripening republic. The need was especially evident in his frontier home, where the population had doubled, then doubled again, while raw local institutions failed to keep pace. The frontier was an anarchic place, lacking the foundations of civil order necessary to build a thriving American civilization. James Calhoun went to Milledgeville—and he hoped beyond—to create the conditions that would boost the region’s opportunity and affluence.
Good government, though, mattered little to the large majority of voters, many of them newly arrived in western Georgia. Most settlers rolling into the region in fact resented government, whether in Milledgeville or the dimly perceived federal government 650 miles and several weeks’ travel away in Washington, D.C. Government legislators were thought by many to erect legal structures that more often than not acted as an imposition on their freedom to pursue their individual interests. Government meant tariffs on goods, laws against the taking of native land, high and mighty bankers with their notes and interest, militia drafts, schools and sheriffs, state roads and lands, and debt, duties, and taxes to pay for them. Mostly, it meant a publicly supported official’s interference in the conduct of their lives. In the South, yeoman farmers toiling to make their small piece of red dirt feed their family formed the largest bloc of voters, and to their eyes the Whig Party had come to represent all those dominant people and institutions the men once known as Virginians resented most: banks and corporations, city dwellers, Yankees and Puritans—abolitionists all—plus the plantation owners, the bloated self-styled squires who looked down on the crackers. The frontiersmen despised those who dared tell them where they could settle and what laws would govern their lives and property. Little wonder that in Calhoun’s almost entirely rural DeKalb County district, Jacksonian Democrats outnumbered Whigs by nearly two to one.
Calhoun’s personal popularity, keen legal mind, and in-state legislative effectiveness overcame the odds, winning him local races despite his party’s deep minority status. Those assets were not enough to overcome the Democratic candidates’ enormous majority among voters, though, when it came to the races for U.S. Congress.
Senator John Calhoun tacitly appealed to his talented cousin to consider switching parties if he hoped to climb the political ladder. Party meant little to the elder Calhoun, an outlook shared by most men of an earlier political generation. He had already made several canny moves from his early days. Why should his young cousin not climb his way up via the most convenient ladder?
IN EARLY 1846, U.S. Senator Calhoun sent James a copy of his already widely circulated speech calling for a compromise—eventually passed—to avoid going to war with Britain over the disputed northern boundary of the vast Oregon Territory in the Northwest. America was in the process of sealing its continentwide hold on the land, its Manifest Destiny. The position Calhoun staked out pitted him against Jacksonian president James K. Polk’s administration, as well as against the public’s enormous support for annexation well beyond the forty-ninth-parallel compromise he favored—as the Democratic slogan went, it would be “Fifty-four-forty, or fight.” His views even placed him against his own party in Congress. He seemed to have set a course for himself at odds with his own political future.
James could sympathize well with the challenge the senior Calhoun faced in Washington. He wrote back a long, introspective letter discussing his own dilemma over principles that placed his still young, yet already stumbling, political career in jeopardy.
James found himself in hearty agreement with the senator’s views. He applauded his cousin’s actions at the time. “I was one of the first nul[l]ifiers in Georgia though then very young,” James proclaimed and added, almost apologetically, “and eaven [sic] now I scarcely know of any great question but upon which I agree with you entirely.” This put him directly at odds with his own Whigs.
He stopped himself, though, and asked the obvious question that had to be on his cousin’s mind: “Then you will say I agree with the Democratic Party upon most all of the great questions of the day. Why are you a Whig?” He understood that on the most defining issue of what it meant to be an American, indeed of the continued life of the nation, he parted ways with his cousin’s party and the South’s now dominant political organization. It had to be an agonizing choice, for, with that, he blasted to pieces whatever hopes he may have held for winning national office from Georgia.
Remarkably, James’s party allegiance was driven not by grand ideological ideas like federal power, the creation or dissolution of a national bank, states’ rights, western expansion, or even the unspoken Southern fundamental of slavery’s future. He split from the Democrats over what seemed a less than consequential matter: good government and who would best be able to bring it to the young nation. He was a practical man, but for him practicality harbored a deep philosophical core. “I think the successful administration of the laws of the government of more importance, than a fiew, eaven great questions,” he insisted. The value of government—what defined a democratic nation—was found in its practical success in executing the laws of the land, its ability to serve its citizens fairly and efficiently. Good government would sustain the explosively fast-growing American nation better than resolution of the great questions that threatened even now to split it in two. Building and maintaining law and order was government’s preeminent role. That enabled all else, including peaceful debate and potential resolution of the “great questions.”
James Calhoun displayed no uncertainty about his loyalties: “I do believe, the Whigs, have been the best dispensers of the laws of the government both State & national, & feel very sure it has been so in Georgia.”
He was confident that if he were a Democrat, his advance to higher office would be smoothed and more than likely assured. The local Democratic Party, which “has ever treated me
with great kindness” and helped him “very warmly” in his legal practice, made abundantly clear the future they planned for him if only he jumped. Still, he could not do it. As a result of his political principles, he lamented, “it has been a great misfortune to me to dif[f]er with the Democratic Party. Could I have acted with that party, & done justice to my honest opinions—I do not doubt but that I might have been elevated to respectable offices.”
THE YOUNGER CALHOUN’S moderate views were largely out of step with most of his neighbors’, but his ability to work behind the scenes helped put the brakes on what appeared at the time to be an unavoidable national train wreck. Still, he needed to break with the Southern States’ Rights political faction for good to do so, even as its leader John C. Calhoun used the little remaining energy left to him in his last, dying days to fight a compromise that his cousin James had worked so hard to see enacted.
Extension of the nation from coast to coast brought to a head the question of the place of slavery, protected in the original thirteen states by the Constitution but now abolished throughout the nation’s northern tier. White expansion throughout the Southeast, largely complete within that corner of the nation, continued westward. Mexico’s Texas territory was the natural next step—with only the weak Mexican government standing in the United States’ way. American settlers and disenchanted Mexicans in Texas first declared their independence in 1836. In 1845, Polk offered to purchase Texas outright, but Mexico refused. Despite Mexican opposition, Polk went ahead and formally annexed Texas with statehood, as a slave state, in March. By the following spring, Mexico and the United States were caught up in a bloody war. A greatly disproportionate number of Southerners joined the U.S. Army as it fought its way south into Mexico City. Mexico acceded to the victorious America’s peace terms in 1848, granting the United States all of its territory north of the Rio Grande. The United States at last reached from sea to sea.