John Taylor of Caroline, Marxist

Yikes! I've heard Old Republican John Taylor of Caroline called many things, but I've never seen him characterized as a proto-Marxist . . . until now. Charles Sellers draws the unlikely comparison:

As Karl Marx would analyze capitalist exploitation of European industrial labor, the Virginian explained capitalist exploitation of American agricultural labor. Both men cherished human labor as the source of economic value. "Labour is in fact the great fund for human subsistence," said the Virginian; "-- a surplus of this subsistence is wealth." Labor's "degree of safety" was for him the "barometer of good government."

Also like Marx, the Virginian thought labor "the object which tyranny invariably attacks." The American Revolution had no sooner guaranteed the republic's labor against the ancient extortions of European aristocracies and priesthoods, he argued, then a new and even more oppressive "aristocracy of paper and patronage" arose. Taylor calculated that "this legal faction of capitalists" was extorting 40 percent of the proceeds of agricultural labor. [Me: Shades of George McDuffie's Forty-Bale theory!] Writing just as wage labor galvanized capitalist exploitation, he anticipated Marx in sensing that capital "will, in the case of mechanics, soon appropriate the whole of their labor to its use, beyond a bare subsistence."

"Shall the bill be rejected?"

As I discussed in the last post, on January 15, 1831 John C. Calhoun predicted that the House Judiciary Committee would favorably report on a bill that would repeal Section 25 of the Judiciary Act of 1789. Calhoun further predicted, somewhat more hesitantly, that the House would pass the bill.

The first prediction was correct. Rep. Warren Ransom Davis of South Carolina favorably reported for the Judiciary Committee on January 24, 1831.

Calhoun's second prediction, however, proved woefully misguided. On January 29, 1831, the full House rejected the bill by a lopsided vote of 138 to 51. I'm too lazy to do it, but some poor academic with time on his hands should go through and correlate the members' votes with their subsequent positions on Nullification in 1832-33.

Looking over the names, one vote that shocked me was that of George McDuffie of South Carolina, who voted in favor of killing the bill. What gives?