That Calhoun Might Dance

It was not until his senior year that Calhoun came directly under Timothy Dwight's eye. For although 'father-confessor to all of his student body,' the seniors were Dwight's special charge. Nor was it only sermons and textbooks that he expounded; manners as well as morals held sway in his discussions. Seated in the drafty classroom on a winter morning, his back to the students and feet within an inch of the blaze, Dwight's man-like voice boomed forth, effortlessly holding the attention of thirty or forty at a time. Truth, honor, manliness were words that slipped from his lips; and "To be always a gentleman," was his credo. He advised the individual always to discuss the subject in which his companion was most interested, a teaching which Calhoun's admirers would later testify that he followed to the letter. And we can even trace the origin of Calhoun's strenuous physical regime to Dwight's lectures on keeping a robust body.

These were incidentals. Dwight's doctrine, as such, Calhoun rejected without equivocation. Outwardly, in insignificant matters, he conformed readily enough, but in the things that mattered he was a rebel. He would neither absorb Yale nor let himself be absorbed. He would not join the Choral Society. He would not join the Church of Christ. He would not even profess Christianity! Worst of all, not only in the classroom would he refuse to accept any doctrines whatsoever 'unless he could imagine them in practical operation and foresee their results,' but outside wherever he was and whenever he got a chance, he 'avowed his 'Republican'[a completely different party at the time] principles in an atmosphere where the very name of Republican was odious.' His heresies were not held against him; were, no doubt, secretly envied. But his friends were compelled to accept him on his own term; and might concede, like the troubled Silliman, that Calhoun was 'a first-rate young man...for pure and gentlemanly conduct...but that his mind was a peculiar structure, and his views also were often peculiar.'

Not even Dr. Dwight could instill the fear of hell-fire and damnation in the young Southerner, who had already a thoroughly developed faculty for absorbing only such material as coincided with his own preconceived opinions. Dwight's failure to achieve conversion might have been expected to anger the dogmatic Puritan; for to him indiffernce was worse than 'direct opposition.' But no one who looked twice into Calhoun's intense face and deep eyes would have accused him of indifference - to religion or anything else. He was merely going through a period of rebelliousness and skepticism normal to his years and to an intellect so independent to authority. Yet all unconsciously, the Puritanism then rampant at Yale left its mark. It fitted Calhoun's own temperament, his own Calvinistic heritage. He could never escape it entirely. It would be years before he could free himself from the conviction that dancing, that the theater, that actual happiness in work or in play, were all to be classifed as sin.

Margaret L. Coit, John C. Calhoun: American Portrait