As the Union was on the brink of a great conflict, a number of individuals held heightened influence over the people’s thoughts and actions. John C. Calhoun became a prominent figure in the Southern cause. While his political thoughts did not desire the splitting of the South from the Union, his speeches seemed to provide no clear way out of this conflict. However, in one of his most notable speeches, know as “Slavery a Positive Good,” Calhoun established a firm view on the necessity of slavery in the Union and worked to become a “moral” based voice for the Southern cause. His “Slavery a Positive Good” speech began to justify the concept of slavery as a universally beneficial cause, turn the Southern focus towards the inevitability of war, and ultimately flipped the evil title from the South to the North. …show more content…
This included the idea of abolitionism. Thus, Calhoun provided the claim that the concept of slavery were not evil or wrong, but instead were normal methods of society and were mutually beneficial. In his speech he states, “...never has yet existed a wealthy and civilized society in which one portion of the community did not, in point of fact, live on the labor of the other.” According to this claim, it was only natural for the society to have an “upper class” rule over the other members of this society. Using the origins of the initial slaves, Calhoun argued that these individuals would actually experience a better life in the Americas under the rule of a white slave owner than they would in there root homeland, Africa. These claims began to question the severity of the evil nature of slavery that was depicted in literary pieces such as Uncle Tom’s