The historian Clyde Wilson has observed that John C. Calhoun’s congressional speeches are “always dealing with a real and known audience and with a subject requiring decision.” Calhoun was not merely expounding on theoretical or abstract points. This is important in understanding his response to the abolition petitions, including the one colloquially described as the “positive good” speech. Like all his speeches, it must be understood in the context of his time. As Garrick Sapp argues in “Context Matters”, that context cannot be understood without reference to “the surrounding debate.”
In 1783, the Supreme Judicial Court of Massachusetts ruled that slavery violated the constitution of Massachusetts—“the Court held that laws and customs that sanctioned slavery were incompatible with the new state constitution.” Massachusetts courts understood their values to be not only the sentiments of their own state, but of “the people of America” as distinct from British and European nations:
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