ABSTRACT
As he worked through the details, Parrington’s imperial thesis became more nuanced. The East consisted of two subcultures: Puritan New England and the Quaker Middle Atlantic region. In addition, ideological influences flowed between the three regions. Parrington analogized John C. Calhoun, the South’s intellectual and political leader until his death in 1850, to the Federalist President John Adams. Both men sought to solve the problem of protecting aristocratic property and culture - political systems they believed to be both inevitable and desirable - by creating elaborate constitutional structures that would maintain political and cultural equilibrium.6 Adams, for example, supported a bicameral legislature; an aristocratic Senate would check the inevitable excesses of the more democratic House of Representatives. Calhoun sought to guarantee the slave culture by giving both his State and his region ultimate veto power over the Federal government. Such intersectional influences extended beyond analogy. Early in the century, Calhoun studied at Yale University and Litchfield Law School, where he met and was taught by Yankee Federalists who had developed “small-town, localist, antinational sentiment, combined with skepticism of numerical majorities” in response to Jefferson’s presidency.7
