Calhoun was the impersonation of Southern feelings as well as the representative of Southern interests.  He intensely felt the indignity which the Abolitionists cast upon his native State, and upon its peculiar institution.  And he was clear-headed enough to see that if public opinion settled down into the conviction that slavery was a sin as well as an inherited evil, the North and South could not long live together in harmony and peace.  He saw that any institution would be endangered with the verdict of the civilized world against it.  He knew that public opinion was an amazing power, which might be defied, but not successfully resisted.  He saw no way to stop the continually increasing attacks of the antislavery agitators except by adopting an entirely new position,—­a position which should unite all the slaveholding States in the strongest ties of interest.

Accordingly he declared, as the leader of Southern opinions and interests, that slavery was neither an evil nor a sin, but a positive good and blessing, supported even by the Bible as well as by the Constitution, In assuming these premises he may have argued logically, but he lost the admiration he had gained by twenty years’ services in the national legislature.  His premises were wrong, and his arguments would necessarily be sophistical and fall to the ground.  He stepped down from the lofty pedestal he had hitherto occupied, to become not merely a partisan, but an unscrupulous politician.  He had a right to defend his beloved institutions as the leader of interests intrusted to him to guard.  His fault was not in being a partisan, for most politicians are party men; it was in advancing a falsehood as the basis of his arguments.  But, if he had stultified his own magnificent intellect, he could not impose on the convictions of mankind.  From the time he assumed a ground utterly untenable, whatever were his motives or real convictions, his general influence waned.  His arguments did not convince, since they were deductions from wrong premises, and premises which shocked and insulted the reason.

Calhoun now became a man of one idea, and that a false one.  He was a gigantic crank,—­an arch-Jesuit, indifferent to means so long as he could bring about his end; and he became not merely a casuist, but a dictatorial and arrogant politician.  He defied that patriotic burst of public opinion which had compelled him to change his ground, that mighty wave of thought, no more to be resisted than a storm upon the ocean, and which he saw would gradually sweep away his cherished institution unless his constituents and the whole South should be made to feel that their cause was right and just; that slavery had not only materially enriched the Southern States, but had converted fetich idolaters to the true worship of God, and widened the domain of civilization.  The planters, one and all, responded to this sophistical and seductive plea, and said to one another, “Now we can defy the universe on