By Boyd D. Cathey
August 7, 2025
Nathaniel Macon was one of the most significant figures during the first half century of American history. Yet Macon is basically unknown in the contemporary United States, and his role and importance in American history, so appreciated before the War Between the States, are largely ignored or glossed over. Mention the name "Nathaniel Macon" to a contemporary politician, and the response is usually a blank stare, betraying ignorance, a lack of basic familiarity.
Years ago, while researching Macon and his life, I was amazed to discover the incredible importance that "the Squire of Buck Spring" (his very modest plantation in northeastern North Carolina) had in the new American nation, and, more interestingly, the incredible influence he had on such later and much better-known figures as John C. Calhoun, President John Tyler, and other, more contemporary figures in our history. Think of the various towns, cities, and counties named in his honor. At one time in the American nation his name and renown were widely known and acknowledged.
Quite a bit of this contemporary ignorance must be attributed, certainly, to Macon's philosophy. He was, to quote his contemporaries, "the father of states' rights" and the figure most critical in the actual development and survival of the states' rights philosophy that, still, in many ways, percolates in American politics. After the War Between the States Macon was largely identified with the defense of slavery. Although during his long tenure in Congress he stoutly defended the "peculiar institution," his strictures were always based on a clear understanding of the Constitution and its provisions and that to abandon it on one major question was to in effect open the floodgates for other, often unforeseen or undesirable changes. And such changes, he predicted, could well lead to civil war.
It was Macon's probity of character and his steadfast devotion to principle that won him general admiration from across the entire spectrum of antebellum political opinion. Leaders as diverse as Presidents John Quincy Adams and John Tyler expressed great admiration for Macon; many attempted to tie in their own views, even those ideas that seemed at odds with Macon's, to those of the Squire of Buck Spring.
Macon was first elected to the United States House of Representatives from North Carolina in 1790-at the very beginning of the new American nation-serving there until 1815. During the presidency of Thomas Jefferson he served as Speaker of the House of Representatives from 1801 until 1807. He quickly became known for his unbreakable "old republican" principles: individual liberty, local and state authority over matters closest to the citizens, strict economy and accountability in government expenditures, frequent elections, avoidance of debt, and a staunch adherence to a decentralist, originalist view of the nature of the new nation. These he stubbornly maintained even if it placed him in opposition at times to American presidents of his own political persuasion.
Along with John Randolph of Roanoke and a few other congressional representatives Macon represented undeviating allegiance to the fundamental principles enunciated during the American Revolution and inscribed in the Constitution. For him those principles did not-and must not-change. During the first fifty years of the nation's history, it was Macon who incarnated them and in various ways ensured their survival. After leaving the U. S. House of Representatives in 1815 and being elevated to the United States Senate by the North Carolina General Assembly, Macon's influence only grew and became more pervasive, especially in the South. It was his significant role during the debates over the Missouri Compromise (1819-1820) that signaled the actual emergence of a genuine states' rights philosophy which would continue and influence significantly subsequent American history.
Although Macon is portrayed almost uniquely for his defense of slavery, it was not that hotly debated issue which dominated his attention. For his views and observations also ranged over topics such as government involvement in internal improvement programs which he considered to be in the purview of the respective states, the establishment of a national banking system (which he opposed), and the essential nature of the Federal union as intended by the Framers. For him all such issues, and not only the increasingly contentious issue of slavery, were a part of a larger question, that of how the Constitution was to be interpreted and applied.
As early as March 1818 he wrote to North Carolina congressman Bartlett Yancey as follows:
I must ask you to examine the Constitution of the United States....and tell me, if Congress can establish banks, make roads and canals, whether they cannot free all the slaves in the United States?....We have abolition, colonization and peace societies-their intentions cannot be known; but the character and spirit of one may without injustice be considered that of all. It is a character and spirit of perseverance bordering on enthusiasm, and if the general government shall continue to stretch its powers, these societies will undoubtedly push it to try the question of emancipation....
With the debate over Missouri looming, Macon wrote to Yancey again, in April 1818:
If Congress can make canals they can with more propriety emancipate. Be not deceived, I speak soberly in the fear of God and the love of the Constitution. Let not the love of improvement or a thirst for glory blind that sober discretion and sound sense, with which the Lord has blest you. Paul was not more anxious or sincere concerning Timothy, than I am for you. Your error in this will injure if not destroy our beloved mother, North Carolina, and all the South country. Add not to the Constitution nor take therefrom. Be not led astray by grand notions or magnificent opinions. Remember that you belong to a meek State and just people, who want nothing but to enjoy the fruits of their labor honestly and to lay out their profits in their own way.
In early 1819 the actual debate in the Senate over the admission of Missouri to the union commenced, and, as Missouri was a territory where slavery existed, that contentious question became central to the debate. A resolution-a compromise-put forward by Senator Jesse Thomas of Illinois proposed admitting Maine as a "free" state and Missouri as a "slave" state but prohibiting slavery in the rest of the Louisiana Purchase north of latitude 36 degrees, 30 minutes.
Many Southern leaders, including the then Secretary of War John C. Calhoun, were prepared to go along initially with the compromise, but Macon, singularly, rose to oppose it. And it was in his famous Senate speech on the question that heralded the birth of a full-fledged "states' rights philosophy." The speech deserves to be quoted at length:
All the states now have equal rights and are content. Deprive one of the least right which it now enjoys in common with the others and it will no longer be content....All the new states have the same rights that the old have; why make Missouri an exception? Why depart in her case from the great American principle that the people can govern themselves? All the country west of the Mississippi was acquired by the same treaty, and on the same terms and the people in every part have the same rights....The [Thomas] amendment will operate unjustly to the people who have gone there from other states. They carried with them property [slaves] guaranteed by their states, by the Constitution and treaty; they purchased lands and settled on them without molestation; but now, unfortunately for them, it is discovered that they ought not to have been permitted to carry a single slave....Let the United States abandon this new scheme; let their magnanimity, and not their power, be felt by the people of Missouri. The attempt to govern too much has produced every civil war that ever has been, and will, probably, every one that ever may be.
And finishing with a prescient vision of the future, Macon continued:
Why depart from the good old way? Why leave the road of experience to take this new one, of which we have no experience? This way leads to universal emancipation, of which we have no experience....A clause in the Declaration of Independence has been read, declaring "that all men are created equal." Follow that sentiment, and does it not lead to universal emancipation? If it will justify putting an end to slavery in Missouri, will it not justify it in the old states? Suppose the plan followed...is it certain that the present Constitution would last long?
The debate over the Missouri Compromise marked a significant turning point in American history and, eventually, in the diverging views of the leaders of both the South and the North. Although Macon had been engaged in a losing effort to block the compromise, it was, above all, his forthright and clear-sighted defense of strict constructionism that singled him out as a prophet. In 1819 his view was nearly unique, even among his fellow Southerners. But not many years after his remarkable interventions in the Missouri debates, a whole generation of Southern congressmen and national political leaders would acknowledge him as the intellectual father of states' rights. In 1821 a chastened Thomas Jefferson, who had also foreseen how the crisis would affect the nation-Jefferson, who termed the stark reality made visible by the debates as "a fire bell in the night"-called Macon "the Depositor of old & sound principles," and wrote him: "God bless you & long continue your wholesome influence in public councils." In a letter Jefferson addressed to Macon on March 26, 1826, a few months before his death, the former president declared that Macon was "Ultimus Romanorum"-"the last of the Romans"-"whom I consider as the strictest of models of genuine republicanism."
Despite his staunch support for states' rights and "old republicanism," Macon was greatly esteemed by a wide variety of American political leaders. President John Quincy Adams, a man of opposite views, in his Memoirs described Macon as "...a stern republican...a man of stern parts and mean education, but of rigid integrity, and a blunt, though not offensive, deportment...one of the most influential members of the Senate. His integrity, his indefatigable attention to business, and his long experience give him a weight of character and consideration which few men of superior minds ever acquire." In 1828 it was widely rumored that Adams, despite differences with Macon, considered him as his potential vice-presidential choice.
In 1824, after the illness of leading states' rights presidential candidate, William H. Crawford, Governor George M. Troup of Georgia put forward Macon as a candidate for president: "I know of no person who would unite so extensively the public sentiment of the southern country...as yourself." In 1825 Macon received twenty-four electoral votes for the vice-presidency. In 1826 and 1827 he was elected President Pro-Tempore of the United States Senate.
As he approached the end of his long career, recognition of his significant role in American history and political development came from some of the most significant voices of the time. From Calhoun, John Tyler, and Thomas Hart Benton came encomiums and words of admiration and the recognition that Macon had played a pivotal role in the history of the first sixty years of the American nation, as well as in the development of their own personal philosophies and political positions.
While many readers in our modern age may think that Macon's most pointed comments deal with the institution of slavery, it was not defending the "peculiar institution" that was at the core of his philosophy. Indeed, his commentary on such important questions as the Federal bank and government support for internal improvements reflect a states' rights consistency and integrity. Slavery, because Macon recognized it as a particularly dangerous lynchpin for the American nation, certainly occupied a salient part of his commentary. But the greater issue for him was the growing power and control of the Federal government and the eventual destruction of the older Constitutional system erected by the Framers.
In 1835, in his last major public role, Macon was elected to preside over the North Carolina Constitutional Convention. While he made few interventions, he generally opposed changes to the state constitution. For him, "all changes in government were from better to worse."
In June 1837 Macon summoned his doctor and the undertaker and paid them in advance. He died on June 29 that year, at Buck Spring. In a simple ceremony on his plantation he was interred, attended by grieving slaves, with whom he had worked side-by-side in his fields. He instructed his executor and son-in-law, Congressman Weldon N. Edwards, that no monument mark his grave, but that a pile of smooth stones be placed upon the site.
His epitaph he spoke eighteen years earlier, in Congress: "The attempt to govern too much has produced every civil war that ever has been, and will, probably, every one that ever may be." Macon understood and clearly foresaw the results of the destruction of liberties and the erosion of states' rights and the emergence of an all-encompassing Federal government.
The pile of stones at his Buck Spring plantation site remains, as does the philosophy that Macon first enunciated, despite the completion of the shattering prophecy he foresaw. And, now, it is up to later generations to attempt to retrieve and recover the Framers' vision.