John Calhoun of Georgia.
The Defense of the Realm speech was a speech given by John Calhoun, a leading figure in the Southern Confederation Liberal Party. Calhoun's speech came in the wake of the Insurrection of 1829, which resulted in the deaths of over 3,000 Negro slaves and 1,400 whites.
Calhoun began by claiming that the S.C.'s prosperity rested on the cultivation of cotton for the textile mills of the Northern Confederation and Great Britain, and that without cotton the confederation would be a poor and backward place. He conceded that it might have been a mistake to introduce slavery into the South, but that since they found themselves with the institution in place, they had no choice but to make the best of the situation. Sobel quotes Calhoun saying:
"Those who call for an end to slavery, offer us no way of accomplishing such a desired end. Jefferson will not purchase them; that nation has a surplus at present. They cannot be sent back to Africa; no nation has that many ships. Nor can they be massacred; our esteemed friends would not go so far, and neither would any sane or humane man. We cannot give the slave his freedom, for without the restraints of civilization they would either destroy themselves or us. No, gentlemen, the institution must remain as it is."
Calhoun then made a precient proposal for a closer union of the confederations of the C.N.A.:
"Ours is not the only state with such difficulties, and our critics elsewhere had best cleanse their own stables before turning to ours. What of the Indians of Indiana? The common laborers of the Northern Confederation? And the French-speaking population of Quebec? Surely they have complaints as worthy, if not more so, than the Negroes of the S.C. I would submit that the average slave in Georgia is far better off than his counterparts elsewhere in the Confederation of North America, or indeed the world."
Calhoun ended his speech with a call for the Liberal Parties of the four confederations to make common cause against the enemies of the status quo.
Willie Lloyd of the South Carolina Conservative Party offered a rebuttal of Calhoun's speech. He called slavery "the bane of our state, bleeding us at every occasion, destroying the fabric of our society, and making our slave and slaveholder alike less than men." He also denied that freeing the slaves would unleash a catastrophic race war, and ended by calling for an alliance with the abolitionist Southern Union and British abolitionists.
Calhoun was elected Governor of the Southern Confederation in 1833, but the collapse of the global cotton market later in the decade would ultimately doom slavery in the S.C.
Sobel's sources for Calhoun's Defense of the Realm speech are Calhoun's Defense of the Realm and Other Essays (Norfolk, 1845); and Ernest Passman's Lloyd of Carolina: A Political Biography (New York, 1965).