(Director’s note: It’s just one week ago today that the Clemson University Board of Trustees voted to un-name the University’s Honors College. To help contextualize and better understand the complicated legacy of John C. Calhoun, I invited Susanna Ashton, Chair of the Clemson Department of English who specializes in the literature and history of nineteenth century America, particularly the writings of enslaved people, to share her reflections. This is Clemson Humanities Now.)
Removing the name of John C. Calhoun from Clemson’s Honors College was a long overdue act that never should have been necessary in the first place. To anyone who knows about Calhoun, he was never just a preeminent South Carolina politician who happened to be a slave owner (although, heck , that’s certainly reason enough to rethink how to honor him). He was known as a brilliant man with an interest in education and with an especial interest in deploying education and its capital against others.
At a time when South Carolina had made African American literacy illegal, punishable by law, John C. Calhoun was reported to have commented at a dinner “that if he could find a Negro who knew the Greek syntax, he would then believe that the Negro was a human being and should be treated as a man.” As a scholar of African American Life Writing, literacy history, and, in particular the writing of people who survived bondage during the 19th century, I’ve long assigned in my American Literature classes the stinging rejoinder to Calhoun offered in 1834 by Black classicist and intellectual, the Reverend Alexander Crummell who was the son of a man who had survived enslavement:
“Just think of the crude asininity of even a great man! Mr. Calhoun went to Yale, to study the Greek Syntax, and graduated there. His son went to Yale to study the Greek Syntax, and graduated there. His grandson, in recent years, went to Yale, to learn the Greek Syntax, and graduated there. Schools and Colleges were necessary for the Calhouns, and all other white men to learn the Greek syntax. And yet this great man knew that there was not a school, nor a college in which a black boy could learn his A.B.C.’s. He knew that the law in all the Southern States forbade Negro instruction under the severest penalties. How then was the Negro to learn the Greek syntax? How then was he to evidence to Mr. Calhoun his human nature? Why, it is manifest that Mr. Calhoun expected the Greek syntax to grow in Negro brains by spontaneous generation!”
Our Clemson Calhoun Honors college was therefore named to honor the man who not merely was the architect of the strategy to subsume Federal jurisdiction over the bondage of human beings and to expand slaveholding power across the continent. It was named also for an enslaver of men, women and children. But–and this is yet another reason why removing his name from an honors college matters so very much–it was named for a man who used his own cultural and political capital to advance the argument that Black people lacked the ability to prove their humanity by mastering “the Greek Syntax.”
Calhoun’s invocation of Greek Syntax was, of course, a nonsensical trope, offensive in its suggestion that mastering grammar as the essence of civilization (qua Western Civilization as understood by Calhoun) was a way to measure and demonstrate one’s humanity. We can easily unpack the troubling assumptions that mastering the supremacist’s language is a liberatory step. And yet: the irony here is a tool – irony always is a method to measure the distance and difference between what is and what should be. In this case, we at Clemson can see that the distance between *our* values of nurturing intellectual growth and the limitless potential of all people from the value of honoring someone who dedicated his career not merely to demeaning and enslaving Black people, but who invoked all the tools at his tremendous command to teach that only certain people would even have the ability, much less a right to participate or be seen as fully human in the world.
The distance between those values about who we are, who we wish to be as a community, and who we publicly honor could not be more stark. As a scholar, teacher, colleague, and resident of the City of Clemson, I have found it particularly helpful to remind students when discussing the Fort Hill Plantation labor camp that injustice was never a given, never “just the way things were.” There were always people who called it out. If you listen and look at the record we have of American history, we can see courage in voices across centuries that dissented. We can see the dissent here in the fact that the witnesses to the comment, Samuel Sewell and David Childs, prominent white Abolitionist lawyers, thought the comments so vile and inhumane that they repeated them in presumably aghast terms in the presence of young Alexander Crummell who was working as a teenage errand boy for the Boston Anti-Slavery Office in 1833. But we can, too, see dissent in the way in which Crummell went on to lead his own life. Calhoun died in 1850 and Crummell’s comments weren’t drafted until 1898. Yet we can see that Crummell led his entire life as a scholar and as a race leader as a defiant rejoinder to the words of Calhoun.
And, of course, any lazy assertion that “that’s just how things were” when seeing cruelties that might be unimaginable today is assuming the people actually actually enslaved and held captive under threat of torture here on what is now our campus were somehow complacent and complicit in their suffering which was, of course, never the case. There was always dissent and we should never relax, I tell my Clemson students, in assuming that “that was just how things were.” We make choices, looking back, about who we choose to listen to.
We can be empowered by knowing, as a tool of the analytical humanities, that we can always look for dissent in history because mores were always challenged and cruelty was always clearly understood by the people on the receiving end of it, for exactly what it was.
I hope by working with undergraduates to unpack and parse the legacies of language, of educational values, and the specifics of site memory, I honor the true mission of the university without buying into the false goals of mastering Greek Syntax.
Read more here:
https://www.blackpast.org/…/1898-alexander-crummell-attitu…/
Or here: https://www.laphamsquarterly.org/sta…/allow-me-enlighten-you
NOTES:
If anyone is interested in learning more about how Calhoun inadvertently launched the careers of other Black Classicists, check out the career of William Sanders Scarborough as well https://bmcr.brynmawr.edu/2005/2005.05.12/