John C. Calhoun to Percy Walker, October 23, 1847, in Robert L. Meriwether, et.al., ed., The Papers of John C. Calhoun, 25 vols. (Columbia: USC Press, 1959), 24:617. During the debate over the Wilmot Proviso, Calhoun said "I go farther [than merely insisting on national protection of slave property] and hold that if we have a right to hold our slaves, we have the right to hold them in peace and quiet and that the toleration in the non-slaveholding States of the establishment of societies and presses, and the delivery of lectures, with the express intention of calling into question our right to our slaves [and enticing runaways and abolition are] not only a violation of [my interjection here: AHEM!] international laws but also the Federal compact."
Now, for a moment, just consider this breath-taking order of events---that the great Calhoun, defender of the Constitution, Neo-Confederates would have him be, appeals FIRST to international law, then to the "federal compact"!!! Second, there is no wiggle room in this statement. Calhoun makes it absolutely and totally clear that not only is slavery to be protected in its practice, but it must be shielded from any and all public criticism or utterance, including newspapers and speeches. Here is that great defender of "liberty," which of course we really know means the liberty of a white man to hold a black man as property, insisting that to protect slavery requires enslaving whites to his speech codes. Sounds like communism and liberalism to me.
Moreover, if you would but substitute "homosexual marriage" for "slavery," I think you would see clearly what Calhoun had in mind: the public ban on any criticism of an institution that some (many? most?) find utterly immoral and deplorable.
Finally, while I don't expect you to take my word for anything, I'd advise that you stop running to Wikipedia or online Liberty Fund (which I have spoken to and written for many times) sources but do some real historical research. If you had bothered to consult any of the sources sources I've posted here throughout this debate---which apparently few have done (and I'll refresh your memories: Loewenberg's "Freedom's Despots," my own "Brothers in Chains" article, James Huston's "Calculating the Value of the Union,") you'd find a non-Hofstadterian interpretation of Calhoun and Fitzhugh that is internally consistent.
“That’s not the quotation.”
Not the quotation? Who are you kidding? The quotation I posted comes from directly from Marco Bassani’s Arator article:
““improper intermeddling of the Government with the private pursuits of individuals, who must understand their own interests better than the Government”
and he footnotes his source:
Calhoun’s “South Carolina Exposition, Rough Draft”.
That’s not the Wilmot Proviso debate, which is completely irrelevant to Calhoun’s ‘Exposition’.
It’s not that tough to check footnotes. I’ll bet even the Liberty Fund knows how to look up footnotes, which seems to be difficult for some of their critics.