Though Mr. Calhoun acknowledged, in his own winning way, the involuntary tributes of friendship and admiration, he courteously declined, whenever he could with propriety, public testimonies of homage which were offered to him. His wife shared with him this unostentatious spirit, preferring the voice of friendship to the acclamations of the multitude. I have heard some of his family say that they coveted nothing, not even the presidency, for him. They, with many of us who knew him, felt that even the first gift of a great nation could not add one gem to his crown--that crown of genius and virtue, whose glorious beauty no mortal power could illumine with new effulgence.
His sincerity was perfect. What he thought he said. He was no diplomatist. Some of his theories might seem paradoxical, but a paradox is not necessarily a contradiction. He has been accused of inconsistency. Those who thus accuse him do him grievous wrong.
Nothing is more inconsistent than to persist in a uniform belief when changing circumstances demand its modification. How absurd to preserve a law which in the progress of society has become null and obsolete! for instance, granting to a criminal "the benefit of clergy." "Nothing," says a distinguished English writer, "is so revolutionary as to attempt to keep all things fixed, when, by the very laws of nature, all things are perpetually changing. Nothing is more arrogant than for a fallible being to refuse to open his mind to conviction." When Mr. Calhoun altered his opinion, consistency itself required the change.
However some of his political sentiments might have differed from those of many of the great and good of the age, he was sincere in them, and believed what he asserted with all the earnestness of an enthusiastic nature, with all the faith of a close and independent thinker, and with all the confidence of one who draws his conclusions from general principles and not from individual facts. Time will test the truth of his convictions. It has been said that he was sectional in his feelings, but surely his heart was large enough to embrace the whole country. It has often been said that he wished to sever the Union, but he loved the Union, nor could he brook the thought of disunion if by any means unity could be preserved. Because he foresaw and frankly said that certain effects must result from certain causes, does this prove that he desired these effects? In his very last speech he speaks of disunion as a "great disaster." But he was not a man to cry "peace, peace, when there was no peace." Although like Cassandra he might not be believed, he would raise his warning voice; he was not a man to hide himself when a hydra had sprung up which threatened to devastate our fair and fertile land from its northern borders to its southern shores. And while he called on the south for union, did he not warn the conservative party at the north that this monster was not to be tampered with? And did he not call on them to unite, and arise in their strength, and destroy it?