Page:Henry Adams' History of the United States Vol. 1 (wikilinked).djvu/165

154 marriage of two widely divergent minds produced one of the most extraordinary statesmen of America. In the year 1800 John Caldwell Calhoun, a boy of eighteen, went from the upper country to his brother-­in-law's academy in Georgia. Grown nearly to man­hood without contact with the world, his modes of thought were those of a Connecticut Calvinist; his mind was cold, stern, and metaphysical; but he had the energy and ambition of youth, the political fer­vor of Jeffersonian democracy, and little sympathy with slavery or slave-owners. At this early age he, like many other Republicans, looked on slavery as a "scaffolding," to be taken down when the build­ing should be complete. A radical democrat, less liberal, less cultivated, and much less genial than Jefferson, Calhoun was the true heir to his intel­lectual succession; stronger in logic, bolder in action. Upon him was to fall the duty of attempting to find for Carolina an escape from the logical conclusions of those democratic principles which Jefferson in 1800 claimed for his own, but which in the full swing of his power, and to the last day of his life, he shrank from pressing to their results.

Viewed from every side by which it could be ap­proached, the society of South Carolina, more than that of any other portion of the Union, seemed to bristle with contradictions. The elements of intel­lectual life existed without a sufficient intellectual atmosphere. Society, colonial by origin and depen­dent by the conditions of its existence, was striving