Calhoun saw white Southerners as a permanent hopeless minority by the 1830s

Evidence

Calhoun was driven by a sense of approaching doom. “It is, indeed, high time for the people of the South to be roused to a sense of impending calamities—on an early and full knowledge of which their safety depends,” he wrote in an 1831 report to the South Carolina legislature. “It is time that they should see and feel that…they are in a permanent and hopeless minority on the great and vital connected questions.” — Nikole Hannah-Jones et al., The 1619 Project, 635

Categorization

• SHARE: The ‘permanent and hopeless minority’ line is a revealing contemporary admission — argued a decade before the infamous robust defenses like the ‘Cotton is King’ speech.