John C. Calhoun

John C. Calhoun (born March 18, 1782, Abbeville district, South Carolina, U.S.—died March 31, 1850, Washington, D.C.) was an American political leader who was a congressman, the secretary of war, the seventh vice president (1825–32), a senator, and the secretary of state of the United States. He championed states’ rights and slavery and was a symbol of the Old South.

Early years

Calhoun was born to Patrick Calhoun, a well-to-do Scots-Irish farmer, and Martha Caldwell, both of whom had recently migrated from Pennsylvania to the Carolina Piedmont. Two years after enrolling in a local academy at age 18, he entered the junior class at Yale College, where he graduated with distinction. After a year at a law school and further study in the office of a prominent member of the Federalist Party in Charleston, South Carolina, he was admitted to the bar but abandoned his practice after his marriage in 1811 to his cousin, Floride Bonneau Calhoun, an heiress whose modest fortune enabled him to become a planter-statesman.

An ardent Jeffersonian Republican who called for war with Britain as early as 1807, Calhoun was elected to South Carolina’s state legislature in 1808 and to the United States House of Representatives in 1811. There he functioned as a main lieutenant of Speaker Henry Clay, and, in his capacity as chairman of the House Foreign Relations Committee, he introduced the declaration of war against Britain in June 1812. His service as majority floor leader during the War of 1812 led a colleague to call him the “young Hercules who carried the war on his shoulders.”

Political career

In the postwar session he was chairman of the committees that introduced bills for the second Bank of the United States, a permanent road system, and a standing army and modern navy; he also vigorously supported the protective tariff of 1816. Thus, during this period, Calhoun was the major intellectual spokesman of American nationalism. In 1817 Pres. James Monroe appointed Calhoun secretary of war, and his distinguished performance in that post, as well as his previous legislative prominence, led his friend John Quincy Adams, then secretary of state, to declare that his Carolina colleague “is above all sectional and factious prejudices more than any other statesman of this Union with whom I have ever acted.”

Calhoun won rapid recognition for his parliamentary skill as one of the leaders of the Republican Party (the old Democratic-Republican Party; later the Democratic Party), yet his eagerness for personal advancement, his glib exuberance in debate, and his egotism aroused an undercurrent of distrust. Commenting on Calhoun’s nomination for president in 1821 by a rump group of Northern congressmen, a former secretary of the Treasury, Albert Gallatin, called him “a smart fellow, one of the first among second-rate men, but of lax political principles and a disordinate ambition not over-delicate in the means of satisfying itself.”

To a degree not exceeded by that of any of his contemporaries, Calhoun was consumed by a burning passion to achieve the presidency. He vigorously sought the office three times. During each attempt, an anonymous eulogistic biography appeared in print; these works were in fact autobiographies written in the third person.

Champion of states’ rights

Calhoun was elected vice president in 1824 under John Quincy Adams and was reelected in 1828 under Andrew Jackson. In the 1830s Calhoun became as extreme in his devotion to strict construction of the United States Constitution as he had earlier been in his support of nationalism. In the summer of 1831 he openly avowed his belief in nullification, a position that he had anonymously advanced three years earlier in the essay South Carolina Exposition and Protest. Each state was sovereign, Calhoun contended, and the Constitution was a compact among the sovereign states. Therefore, any one state (but not the United States Supreme Court) could declare an act of Congress unconstitutional. Calhoun outlined his position in his Address to the People of the United States on November 24, 1832, in which he said, in part:

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We, then, hold it as unquestionable that on the separation from the Crown of Great Britain, the people of the several colonies became free and independent states, possessed of the full right of self-government; and that no power can be rightfully exercised over them but by the consent and authority of their respective states, expressed or implied. We also hold it as equally unquestionable that the Constitution of the United States is a compact between the people of the several states, constituting free, independent, and sovereign communities; that the government it created was formed and appointed to execute, according to the provisions of the instrument, the powers therein granted as the joint agent of the several states; that all its acts, transcending these powers, are simply and of themselves null and void, and that in case of such infractions, it is the right of the states, in their sovereign capacity, each acting for itself and its citizens, in like manner as they adopted the Constitution to judge thereof in the last resort and to adopt such measures—not inconsistent with the compact—as may be deemed fit to arrest the execution of the act within their respective limits. Such we hold to be the right of the states in reference to an unconstitutional act of the government; nor do we deem their duty to exercise it on proper occasions less certain and imperative than the right itself is clear.

The proponents of the nullified measure, according to the theory, would then have to obtain an amendment to the Constitution—which required a two-thirds vote of each house of Congress and ratification by three-fourths of the states—confirming the power of Congress to take such action.

Although the tariff was the specific issue in the Nullification Crisis of 1832–33, what Calhoun was actually fighting for was protection of the South’s “peculiar institution,” slavery, which he feared someday might be abolished by a Northern majority in Congress. The tariff, Calhoun put forth in one of his public letters, is “of vastly inferior importance to the great question to which it has given rise…the right of a state to interpose, in the last resort, in order to arrest an unconstitutional act of the General Government.”

To Calhoun’s chagrin, a majority of the Southern states formally and vehemently rejected his doctrine of nullification. Even Jefferson Davis, who later served as president of the Confederate States of America during the American Civil War, denied the right of a state to nullify a congressional act.

A genius unto himself, Calhoun lacked the capacity for close friendship and eventually drove most of his associates into active enmity, not least among them President Jackson. His banishment by Jackson was, however, mainly a matter of bad luck. No one did more to make Jackson president than Calhoun, and his prospects in 1828 were most promising. “I was a candidate for reelection (as vice president) on a ticket with General Jackson himself,” he wrote later, “with a certain prospect of the triumphant success of the ticket, and a fair prospect of the highest office to which an American citizen can aspire.” But Calhoun joined his wife and the wives of other cabinet members in a social boycott of Peggy Eaton, the wife of the secretary of war, for her alleged adultery. Jackson leapt to the defense of Eaton and eventually fired his entire cabinet and broke with the vice president. Late in 1832 Calhoun resigned the vice presidency, was elected to the Senate, and vainly debated Daniel Webster in defense of his cherished doctrine of nullification. He spent the last 20 years of his life in the Senate working to unite the South against the abolitionist attack on slavery, and his efforts included opposing the admittance of Oregon and California to the Union as free states. His efforts were in vain, however, and his exuberant defense of slavery as a “positive good” aroused strong anti-Southern feeling in the free states.

Typical of Calhoun’s defense of slavery were remarks he delivered in February 1837 (excerpted here):

We of the South will not, cannot surrender our institutions. To maintain the existing relations between the two races inhabiting that section of the Union is indispensable to the peace and happiness of both. It cannot be subverted without drenching the country in blood and extirpating one or the other of the races. Be it good or bad, it has grown up with our society and institutions and is so interwoven with them that to destroy it would be to destroy us as a people. But let me not be understood as admitting, even by implication, that the existing relations between the two races, in the slaveholding states, is an evil. Far otherwise; I hold it to be a good, as it has thus far proved itself to be, to both, and will continue to prove so, if not disturbed by the fell spirit of Abolition.

I appeal to facts. Never before has the black race of Central Africa, from the dawn of history to the present day, attained a condition so civilized and so improved, not only physically but morally and intellectually. It came among us in a low, degraded, and savage condition, and, in the course of a few generations, it has grown up under the fostering care of our institutions, as reviled as they have been, to its present comparative civilized condition. This, with the rapid increase of numbers, is conclusive proof of the general happiness of the race, in spite of all the exaggerated tales to the contrary.