Southern Constitutional Thought Trivia

I'm spending a lot of time these days dealing with southern constitutional thought before the Civil War. Never ceases to surprise me how much one can bend constitutional interpretation to suit a particular viewpoint -- especially if it's done consistently and by a bunch of people over the course of several decades.  But the specifics of this have to await another venue.

I've been focused in particular on the occupant of the office at right.  Whose office was this and what did he write in it?  And where is it?

Below is the marker in front of Calhoun's office, which discusses what he wrote there.

Once we get this out of the way, I want to talk about the plantation house and family cemetery that're nearby.

Now that Jason identified the building as Senator John C. Calhoun's  office at his Fort Hill plantation -- at the centery of what is now Clemson University (named for Calhoun's son-in-law, who left the plantation to the University), I want to post a picture of Calhoun's house.  I'd been warned before going that the visit might be a little anti-climactic; I have to say that it was.  The Clemson campus is really beautiful.  But the house was, as I had been warned, underwhelming.  I'm more used to the mansions in places like Athens -- like Justice Joseph Henry Lumpkin's house -- and this seemed much more modest in design. Large, but modest in design and appearance.  Calhoun's someone whose work I've been engaged with to a greater or lesser degree for more than twenty years -- so to see the sort of small office where he wrote works that had some important and disturbing consequences for our country was a little disconcerting.  I suppose I expected something more momentous for a place where works that contributed in direct and significant ways to Civil War would feel, well, different.  This may in some ways confirm what Mark Graber (cribbing from Hannah Arendt, obviously) refers to as the banality of constitutional evil.   For some reason I thought Mark Graber used that phrase in Dred Scott and the Problem of Constitutional Evil; but it's actually in the foreword to Earl Maltz' The Constitution and Slavery.

Below is the marker that appears in front of Calhoun's plantation office, which discusses what was written there.

Comments

[Jason Mazzone]

That's John C. Calhoun's office at Fort Hill where he wrote "The South Carolina Exposition and Protest."

[Alfred Brophy]

You're awesome, Jason. As always, you're correct.

[Trussell]

Admire your contraction of that and are.

I don't think I have ever seen that done.

[Alfred Brophy]

I'm trying to fit in around these parts, Tom!

Here's the cemetery story. As I was driving out of town (Clemson) this weekend, I spied a cemetery on the right, so I did a quick u-turn. The cemetery is next to the football stadium -- I love that. Anyway, at the top is the Calhoun family plot. Calhoun is buried down in Charleston and his wife somewhere else (I'm thinking maybe Columbia, don't rightly remember now); but there are a bunch of his children and descendants. And you know what I found inside? Several cemetery markers with US flags -- not Confederate flags, US flags. One of his descendants (maybe a grandson?) fought in the Spanish American War. Pretty amazing changes when the Calhoun family cemetery has US flags in it and no Confederate flags, seems to me. (I get that the Spanish American War was part of the reconciliation between North and South, but still poignant that there are no Confederate flags to be found there -- and I have been surprised at how few there are in cemeteries I've been visiting of late in general.)

I've got a couple of other cool cemetery stories from this trip -- with pictures, coming soon.