Answer to Question #254769 in History for Trip

Question

Read through John Quincy Adams’ “Reflections on the Missouri Question” (For the Record, p. 222-225). On page 225, Adams stated that John C. Calhoun of South Carolina believed that slavery “was the best guarantee to equality among the whites.” What did Calhoun mean by that statement? What does Adams’ account reveal to us about sectional differences within the U.S.?

Answer 1

Quincy Adams made that everybody is a slave to political forces as long as he or she has harbored ambitions for higher office. Adams described the result of that combination as the cement of that common interest produced by slavery is stronger and more solid than unmingled freedom. He added that free of the political force of those common interests and answerable only to his neighbors and admirers back in Quincy, Massachusetts, Adams could take a more forceful role in the efforts to end slavery.

The Missouri Cooperation marked a major turning point in America's sectional crisis because it exposed to the public just how troublesome the slavery issue had developed. It further led to a line of latitude that detached the land that would be slave states and those that would be free.

After this meeting, I walked home with Calhoun, who said that the principles which I had avowed were just and noble: but that in the Southern country, whenever they were mentioned, they were always understood as applying only to white men. Domestic labor was confined to the blacks, and such was the prejudice, that if he, who was the most popular man in his district,

were to keep a white servant in his house, his character and reputation would be irretrievably ruined. I said that this confounding of the ideas of servitude and labor was one of the bad effects of slavery: but he thought it attended with many excellent consequences. It did not apply to all kinds of labor not, for example, to farming. He himself had often held the plow: so

had his father. Manufacturing and mechanical labor were not degrading. It was only manual labor the proper work of slaves. No white person could descend to that. 

This shows that the US has sections of racism and is very prominent which implies that identification of the whites and blacks is very key.