public works, and a protective tariff, which it was hoped might chiefly operate to encourage promising but “infant” industries and to tax the luxuries of the rich.  Whatever may have been the merits of this policy, which made some commotion for a few years, we can easily understand that it appealed to the imagination of young Lincoln at a time of keen political energy on his part of which we have but meagre details.

A third celebrity of this period, in his own locality a still more powerful man, was John Caldwell Calhoun, of South Carolina.  He enjoyed beyond all his contemporaries the fame of an intellectual person.  Lincoln conceded high admiration to his concise and penetrating phrases.  An Englishwoman, Harriet Martineau, who knew him, has described him as “embodied intellect.”  He had undoubtedly in full measure those negative tides to respect which have gone far in America to ensure praise from the public and the historians; for he was correct and austere, and, which is more, kindly among his family and his slaves.  He is credited, too, with an observance of high principle in public life, which it might be difficult to illustrate from his recorded actions.  But the warmer-blooded Andrew Jackson set him down as “heartless, selfish, and a physical coward,” and Jackson could speak generously of an opponent whom he really knew.  His intellect must have been powerful enough, but it was that of a man who delights in arguing, and delights in elaborate deductions from principles which he is too proud to revise; a man, too, who is fearless in accepting conclusions which startle or repel the vulgar mind; who is undisturbed in his logical processes by good sense, healthy sentiment, or any vigorous appetite for truth.  Such men have disciples who reap the disgrace which their masters are apt somehow to avoid; they give the prestige of wisdom and high thought to causes which could not otherwise earn them.  A Northern soldier came back wounded in 1865 and described to the next soldier in the hospital Calhoun’s monument at Charleston.  The other said:  “What you saw is not the real monument, but I have seen it.  It is the desolated, ruined South. . . .  That is Calhoun’s real monument.”

This man was a Radical, and known as the successor of Jefferson, but his Radicalism showed itself in drawing inspiration solely from the popular catchwords of his own locality.  He adored the Union, but it was to be a Union directed by distinguished politicians from the South in a sectional Southern interest.  He did not originate, but he secured the strength of orthodoxy and fashion to a tone of sentiment and opinion which for a generation held undisputed supremacy in the heart of the South.  Americans might have seemed at this time to be united in a curiously exultant national self-consciousness, but though there was no sharp division of sections, the boasted glory of the one America meant to many planters in the South the glory of their own settled and free life with their