By David Gordon & Wanjiru Njoya via Mises Wire | November 12, 2026
Historical interpretation is seldom easy. If the question before us is “Did George Washington exist?” or “Was there a conflict that took place in the United States between the North and South in the years 1861 to 1865?” there is no problem; but usually matters are harder to figure out. The historian must unravel conflicting strands of evidence.
This is not to say, though, that all interpretations are equal. Some are clearly better—judged by objective criteria—than others. While recitation of historical facts and dates may be easy to accomplish and may be correct as a record of what happened when and where, the dominant emphasis of the narrative may yet turn out to be grossly misleading.
For example, John C. Calhoun is often depicted as a man of consuming ambition who wished to become President of the United States and sought to justify slavery in order to prop up his devotion to white supremacy. Libertarians unfamiliar with the life and philosophy of Calhoun might easily wonder why on earth Murray Rothbard would admire such an obviously bad man. But such an analysis of Calhoun distorts the facts. If it were right, one would expect Rothbard to be strongly opposed to Calhoun; but in fact, he admired him as an outstanding thinker. Reviewing a book by the Yale Law School professor Charles Black, Rothbard wrote:
As Black recognizes, one major political theorist who recognized—and largely in advance—the glaring loophole in a constitutional limit on government of placing the ultimate interpreting power in the Supreme Court was John C. Calhoun. Calhoun was not content with the “miracle,” but instead proceeded to a profound analysis of the constitutional problem. In his Disquisition, Calhoun demonstrated the inherent tendency of the State to break through the limits of such a constitution:
A written constitution certainly has many and considerable advantages, but it is a great mistake to suppose that the mere insertion of provisions to restrict and limit the power of the government, without investing those for whose protection they are inserted with the means of enforcing their observance [my italics] will be sufficient to prevent the major and dominant party from abusing its powers. Being the party in possession of the government, they will, from the same constitution of man which makes government necessary to protect society, be in favor of the powers granted by the constitution and opposed to the restrictions intended to limit them. . . . The minor or weaker party, on the contrary, would take the opposite direction and regard them [the restrictions] as essential to their protection against the dominant party. . . . But where there are no means by which they could compel the major party to observe the restrictions, the only resort left them would be a strict construction of the constitution. . . . To this the major party would oppose a liberal construction. . . . It would be construction against construction? the one to contract and the other to enlarge the powers of the government to the utmost. But of what possible avail could the strict construction of the minor party be, against the liberal construction of the major, when the one would have all the power of the government to carry its construction into effect and the other be deprived of all means of enforcing its construction? In a contest so unequal, the result would not be doubtful. The party in favor of the restrictions would be overpowered. . . . The end of the contest would be the subversion of the constitution . . . the restrictions would ultimately be annulled and the government be converted into one of unlimited powers.
Rothbard proceeds to praise Calhoun’s solution to this problem, the doctrine of the “concurrent majority,” though he thinks it did not go far enough:
The solution advanced by Calhoun (and seconded, in this century, by such writers as Smith) was, of course, the famous doctrine of the “concurrent majority.” If any substantial minority interest in the country, specifically a state government, believed that the Federal Government was exceeding its powers and encroaching on that minority, the minority would have the right to veto this exercise of power as unconstitutional. Applied to state governments, this theory implied the right of “nullification” of a Federal law or ruling within a state’s jurisdiction.
In theory, the ensuing constitutional system would assure that the Federal Government check any state invasion of individual rights, while the states would check excessive Federal power over the individual.
The way in which it did not go far enough was that it did not deal with minority interests within a state, a point most commentators rightly recognize. But it should be borne in mind that Calhoun was dealing with how the Constitution should be interpreted to preserve the rights of the states, rather than discussing the rights of individuals.
In interpreting the Constitution in this way, Calhoun was entirely at one with Thomas Jefferson. Clyde Wilson, the world’s leading authority on Calhoun, explains in his book Calhoun: A Statesman for the 21st Century, that, “Calhoun began as, and always considered himself to be, a Jeffersonian Republican.” In his June 1848 speech on the Oregon Bill, Calhoun was not addressing a purely ideological debate about racial equality in the abstract sense, but was specifically addressing the equal sovereignty of states—in his view, neither Congress nor the Northern States had the constitutional right to restrict any state from entry into territories of the United States. Calhoun saw himself as following Jefferson, who wrote the Kentucky Resolution of 1798:
Resolved, That the several States composing, the United States of America, are not united on the principle of unlimited submission to their General Government; but that, by a compact under the style and title of a Constitution for the United States, and of amendments thereto, they constituted a General Government for special purposes, -- delegated to that government certain definite powers, reserving, each State to itself, the residuary mass of right to their own self-government; and that whensoever the General Government assumes undelegated powers, its acts are unauthoritative, void, and of no force; that to this compact each State acceded as a State, and is an integral party, its co-States forming, as to itself, the other party: that the government created by this compact was not made the exclusive or final judge of the extent of the powers delegated to itself; since that would have made its discretion, and not the Constitution, the measure of its powers; but that, as in all other cases of compact among powers having no common judge, each party has an equal right to judge for itself, as well of infractions as of the mode and measure of redress.
Rothbard also praised Calhoun’s analysis of taxpayers and tax-consumers: Calhoun explained this in the Disquisition:
. . .it must necessarily follow, that some one portion of the community must pay in taxes more than it receives back in disbursements; while another receives in disbursements more than it pays in taxes. . . The necessary result, then, of the unequal fiscal action of the government is, to divide the community into two great classes; one consisting of those who, in reality, pay the taxes, and, of course, bear exclusively the burthen of supporting the government; and the other, of those who are the recipients of their proceeds, through disbursements, and who are, in fact, supported by the government; or, in fewer words, to divide it into tax-payers and tax-consumers.
Throughout his life, Rothbard supported states’ rights. He was a member of “Youth for Thurmond” while a student at Columbia University and supported Strom Thurmond’s candidacy for president in the 1948 election. As Lew Rockwell has said, “In cultural matters, Murray started out on the Right, and he always remained there.” He called the Southern side in the War Between the States one of the two just wars in American history. He did so because, like the great libertarian anarchist Lysander Spooner—like him an opponent of slavery—he saw the War as a fight against the right of Lincoln and the Radical Republicans to impose a government on the South against its will.
It is easy to ascribe the conduct of those one does not like to base motives. But in his book John C. Calhoun: Nullifier, Charles M. Wiltse shows that Calhoun’s principled attempts in the 1830s “to prevent violence or disorder” in a time when “young fire-eaters” were pushing for “forcible resistance to the law” do not fit the narrative that he was primarily focused on his own presidential ambitions. In a chapter titled “Calhoun is Purged,” Wiltse explains that Calhoun sought the middle ground between one extreme—consolidation of total power in the federal government—and the other extreme of disunion. Calhoun’s friends indeed expressed concern that his failure to join the “consolidation” faction would end his political career. Ultimately, Calhoun resigned his vice-presidential office under Andrew Jackson. Hardly the action of a man consumed by ambition.
We suggest that the author of Egalitarianism as a Revolt Against Nature would agree with the analysis of Clyde Wilson:
In the Disquisition, Calhoun begins, as anyone should, with human nature. Rousseau had said that men are born free and are everywhere in chains. Calhoun’s first task is to free us from such nonsense. This is not because he wants to establish racial inequality or to defend slavery, but because he wants to start from sound premises. We are not born free, or equal. We are, every one of us, born as helpless, puling infants who cannot survive more than a few hours without society. However, it does not necessarily follow that we must always be in chains.
David Gordon is Senior Fellow at the Ludwig von Mises Institute. He was educated at UCLA, where he earned his PhD in history. He is the author of Resurrecting Economics, An Introduction to Economic Reasoning, An Austro-Libertarian View (three volumes), and Resurrecting Marx.
Dr. Wanjiru Njoya is the Walter E. Williams Research Fellow for the Mises Institute. She is the author of Economic Freedom and Social Justice (Palgrave Macmillan, 2021), Redressing Historical Injustice (Palgrave Macmillan, 2023, with David Gordon), “You Stole Our Land: Common Law, Private Property, and Rothbardian Principles of Justice” (Journal of Libertarian Studies, 28 (1): 91–119 (2024) and “Individual Liberty, Formal Equality, and the Rule of Law” (Palgrave Handbook of Classical Liberalism, forthcoming, 2026).
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