Return to History Return to Community Calhoun
the Man:
The Name Behind the Body of Water isn’t without Baggage – Chuck
Haga (StarTribune, 1997)
It has changed over the years, the place called Lake Calhoun. "The trees were literally im- purpled by the masses of grapes, " one early visitor wrote in the mid- 1800s. "Plums and cherries were equally abundant and of berries, especially strawberries, there was no end. On the north shore of Calhoun there was a bed of the latter of more than an acre in extent, in which one could hardly set foot without crushing the berries.
"Wagonloads of people used to resort there, and return laden with bushels of the luscious fruit. " So why wasn't it called Strawberry Lake? Or why not Lake of the Loons, o rLake of the Cranes, based on its original Indian name: Mde Med'oza? The lake first showed up on settlers'. maps as Lake Me doza or Lake Mendoza. What can explain its dedication instead to John C. Calhoun, the firebrand South Carolina senator, vice president, secretary of state and war, and - to his deathbed speech on the Senate floor-the nation's most passionate and vigorous defender of slavery?
William
Boudreau, a freelance writer who lives 21/2 blocks from Calhoun's eastern shore
and served on a citizens committee promoting improved water quality for the
lake, raised the name issue in a letter to the Star Tribune earlier this month.
Boudreau noted that people in South Carolina are grappling with the.
appropriateness of their state flag, which includes the "Stars and
Bars" emblem of the Confederacy. "it is interesting that while South
Carolina attempts to deal with its racist past,' he wrote, "Minneapolis
refuses to evoke its own 'flag' of white supremacy, Lake Calhoun.
In an interview, Boudreau said that members of the 1993
citizens advisory committee urged the Park Board to consider restoring the
original Indian name, but that the suggestion went nowhere.
Some objected that dropping the Calhoun name would be
"political correctness," he said.
"But it had a name before. It was 'political
correctness' to rename it in honor of [Calhoun].
"We are working to restore the water quality of
the lake," Boudreau said. "There's nothing wrongwith restoring the
integrity of the name."
Researchers at the Minnesota Historical Society, while confirming that the name commemorates the South Carolina statesman, could find nothing in a quick review of their records to explain why.
One possibility, they said, is that
the lake was renamed at the time Calhoun served as secretary of state in
1844-45. He already had -served as U.S. representative, secretary of war under
President James Monroe, vice president under John Quincy Adams and Andrew
Jackson, and U.S. senator. In 1845, he returned to the Senate, where he served
until he died in 1850.
Boudreau,
48, said his research suggests an earlier naming, when Calhoun was secretary of
war (1817-25) and sent Army surveyors to map Western lands.
It was Calhoun who, as secretary of war, ordered the establishment of Fort Snelling. While that and the lake appear to be his only connections to Minnesota, he was undeniably one of the major national figures of his time.
With Daniel Webster and Henry Clay, Calhoun was part of "the great triumvirate” that dominated the national debate for much of the first half of the 19th century. Their oratorical battles were legendary, and many of those great debates fore- shadowed the Civil War.
Calhoun was described by a contemporary as "the cast-iron man," a rarely smiling, ever vigilant man of "gravity, implacable determination,. incredible industry, and apparent immunity to the. lighter moments in human experience.'
“From
the beginning of his career, Calhoun had demonstrated a fascination with
fundamental constitutional principles,”
according to Irving Bartlett's 1993 biography, "and his insistence that the
separate interests making up the American federal system be allowed to protect
themselves."
The "separate interest" closest to his heart, of course, was the South and its plantation economy built on slavery. On March 9, 1836, Calhoun told the Senate that slavery as a permanent institution in the South was not a matter open to political debate.
"The
relation which now exists between the two races has existed for two
centuries," he said. "It has grown with our growth and strengthened
with our strength. It has entered into and modified all our institutions, civil
and political. None other can be
substituted. We will
not, cannot permit it to be destroyed; come what will, should it cost
every drop of blood."
On
another occasion, invoking the name of George Washington to advance a point,
Calhoun said, "He was one of us- a slaveholder and a planter."
His
last speech in the Senate, just weeks before his death, was in virulent
opposition to Clay and his war-averting, give- and-take Compromise of 1850. He
had to be carried into the chamber, "looking Re a spectral wraith, a mane
of thick gray hair framing ashen, emaciated features," and a colleague read
the speech as Cal- houn listened, silent but with eyes blazing.
His
last words: "The South, the poor South."
Southern Visitors
Lake Calhoun and its environs were no Garden of Eden. Long before white settlers arrived, Indians hunted and fished the lake - but chose not to live too near it. Swampy shores produced "unbearable swarms of mosquitoes and other insects," according to historical accounts.
But it was Calhoun, more than the area's other lakes, that attracted tourists - and that may be part of the answer to its being named for a South Carolina senator. Before the Civil War, Southerners visited Minnesota in considerable numbers, drawn by stories of the lake district's beauty.
Did they press for a name to honor one of their own? Did Twin Cities boosters choose the name to draw ever more Southern vacationers?
By the 1870s, Lake Calhoun had two major resort hotels: Menage's Lake Side Park Hotel and the Lake Calhoun. Swampy areas were dredged beginning in 1911 and continuing for a dozen years. Fill dredged from the lake was used to build Calhoun's park areas, beaches and boulevards. The Calhoun name has spread beyond the lake - to Calhoun Square, the Calhoun Beach Club, the parkways that parallel to the lake, five nearby apartment buildings and a gaggle of shops and professional offices.
There
have been other memorials to the man who said in 1837, "The whites at an
European race, being masters, and the Africans are the inferior race, and
slaves. When South Carolina seceded from the Union in 186 1, people in
Charleston bran- dished a huge banner bearing Calhoun's image. His portrait was
stamped on Con- federate currency and postage. At the end of the war, poet Wait
Whit- man - nursing wounded soldiers in Washington, D.C. - heard one tell
another that he had seen Calhoun's offciial monument in South Carolina.
According
to Whitman's account - reported in historian Merrill Peterson's "The Great
Triumvirate: Webster, Clay and Calhoun" - the second soldier shook his
head. What you saw is not the real monument, " he said. "But I have
seen it. It is the desolated, ruined South; nearly the whole generation of young
men between 17 and 30 destroyed or maimed; all the old families used up; the
rich impoverished; the plantations covered with weeds; the slaves unloosed and
become the masters; and the name of Southerner blackened with every shame - all
that is Calhoun's real monument.
Calhoun
owned slaves all his life, and throughout his adult life he argued-with
conviction - that slavery was not only morally acceptable but a social good.
He used slaves to work his cotton fields in Carolina and a speculative
gold mine in Georgia. "There's no doubt that he used the threat of war as a
club against the North and more moderate voices in the South," Boudreau
said. "He prevented any
moderation in Southern attitudes toward Slavery. "I looked up some of his
writings. He wasn't the kind of person you'd like.
I can't find anything in the record to justify maintaining his name on
our take."