John C. Calhoun

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John Caldwell Calhoun (March 18, 1782 – March 31, 1850) was a prominent United States politician from South Carolina during the first half of the 19th century. He was the first vice-president born as a U.S. citizen.

Although he died a decade before the American Civil War broke out between the North and the South, Calhoun was the primary intellectual architect of what would become the short-lived Confederate States of America. Nicknamed the "cast-iron man" for his staunch determination to defend the causes in which he believed, Calhoun pushed the theory of nullification, an extreme states' rights view under which states could declare null and void any federal law they deemed to be unconstitutional. He was an outspoken proponent of the institution of slavery, which he defended as a "positive good" rather than as a necessary evil. His rhetorical defense of slavery was partially responsible for escalating Southern threats of secession in the face of mounting abolitionist sentiment in the North.

This legacy ties Calhoun to the South Carolina-led Southern rebellion against the federal government, but he spent his entire career working for that government in a variety of high offices in Washington, DC. Calhoun served as the seventh Vice President of the United States, first under John Quincy Adams (1825-1829) and then under Andrew Jackson (1829-1832), but resigned the Vice Presidency to enter the United States Senate, where he had more power. He also served in the United States House of Representatives (1810-1817) and was both Secretary of War (1817-1824) and Secretary of State (1844-1845).

1 Rise to power
2 The Jackson Administration and the Nullification Crisis
3 U.S. Senate and the slavery debate
4 Final years and posthumous legacy
5 Further reading
- 5.1 Primary sources
- 5.2 Academic secondary sources
6 See also
7 External links

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Rise to power

John Calhoun was the son of Scots-Irish immigrant Patrick Calhoun. When his father became ill, the 14-year-old boy quit school to manage the family farm in South Carolina. But he eventually returned to his studies, earning a degree from Yale College in 1804. He was admitted to the South Carolina bar in 1807.

On January 8, 1817, he married his first-cousin-once-removed, Floride Bonneau Colhoun. The couple had ten children over an 18-year period, although three died in infancy. During her husband's second term as Vice President, Mrs. Calhoun was a central figure in the Petticoat Affair.

In 1810, Calhoun was elected to Congress, and became one of the War Hawks who, led by Henry Clay, agitated for what became the War of 1812. After the war, he proposed a Bonus Bill for public works. In 1817, President James Monroe appointed Calhoun to be Secretary of War after Isaac Shelby declined the nomination. In the election of 1824, in which no candidate received a majority in the Electoral College and was therfore resolved by the House of Representatives, Calhoun forged an alliance between factions that made John Quincy Adams president and Calhoun the vice president. But he soon broke with Adams, whom he believed unfairly favored Northern interests.

Image:John C. Calhoun.jpg

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The Jackson Administration and the Nullification Crisis

Calhoun became Andrew Jackson's running mate in the election of 1828, and again was vice president. But once again a rift between Northern and Southern views drove a wedge between Calhoun and his president.

Calhoun supported the theory of concurrent majority through the doctrine of nullification--that individual states could override federal legislation they deemed unconstitutional. Nullification traced back to arguments by Thomas Jefferson and James Madison in writing the Kentucky and Virginia Resolutions of 1798, which proposed that states could nullify the Alien and Sedition Acts. Jackson, who believed in a strong federal government, opposed the idea of nullification. The difference, however, between Calhoun's arguments and those of Jefferson and Madison, is that Calhoun explicitly argued for the state's right to secede from the Union if necessary, instead of simply nullifying certain federal legislation.

In 1832, the states rights theory was put to the test in the Nullification Crisis after South Carolina passed an ordinance that claimed to nullify federal tariffs. The tariffs favored Northern manufacturing interests over Southern agricultural concerns, and the South Carolina legislature declared them to be unconstitutional.

In response, Congress passed the Force Bill, which empowered the president to use military power to force states to obey all federal laws, and Jackson sent US Navy warships to Charleston Harbor. South Carolina then nullified the Force Bill. But tensions cooled after both sides agreed to the Compromise of 1833, a proposal by Senator Henry Clay to change the tariff law in a manner which satisfied Calhoun, who by then was in the Senate.

During the Nullification Crisis, President Jackson said in a famous toast, "Our federal Union—it must and shall be preserved." In Vice President Calhoun's toast, he replied, "The Union; next to our liberty most dear!" The humor in this is that Calhoun argued for the Doctrine of Nullification, which had dangerously gone as far as to suggest secession, anonymously, making his true opinions unknown to Jackson. The break between Jackson and Calhoun was complete, and, in 1832, Calhoun ran for the Senate rather than remain as Jackson's Vice President.

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U.S. Senate and the slavery debate

On December 28, 1832, Calhoun accepted election to the United States Senate from his native South Carolina, becoming the first Vice President to resign from office in U.S. history. He would achieve his greatest influence and most lasting fame as a senator.

Calhoun led the pro-slavery faction in the Senate in the 1830s and 1840s, opposing both abolitionism and attempts to limit the expansion of slavery into the western territories. He was also a major advocate of the Fugitive Slave Law, which enforced the co-operation of Free States in returning escaping slaves.

Calhoun couched his defense of the institution of slavery in terms of (white male) Southerners' liberty and self-determination. And where other Southern politicians had excused slavery as a necessary evil, in a famous February 1837 speech on the Senate floor, Calhoun went further, asserting that slavery was a "positive good." He rooted this claim on two grounds—white supremacy and paternalism. All societies, Calhoun claimed, are ruled by an elite group which enjoys the fruits of the labor of a less-privileged group. But unlike in the North and Europe, in which the laboring classes were cast aside to die in poverty by the aristocracy when they became too old or sick to work, in the South slaves were cared for even when no longer useful:

I may say with truth, that in few countries so much is left to the share of the laborer, and so little exacted from him, or where there is more kind attention paid to him in sickness or infirmities of age. Compare his condition with the tenants of the poor houses in the more civilized portions of Europe—look at the sick, and the old and infirm slave, on one hand, in the midst of his family and friends, under the kind superintending care of his master and mistress, and compare it with the forlorn and wretched condition of the pauper in the poorhouse.

Calhoun's fierce defense of slavery and support for the Slave Power played a major role in deepening the growing divide between the Northern and Southern states on this issue, wielding the threat of Southern secession to back slave-state demands.

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Final years and posthumous legacy

Image:Calhoun grave Charleston.jpg After a one year break as Secretary of State, Calhoun returned to the Senate in 1845, participating in the epic Senate struggle over the expansion of slavery in the Western states that produced the Compromise of 1850. But his health deteriorated and he died on March 31, 1850, of tuberculosis in Washington, DC, at the age of 68, and was buried in St. Phillips Churchyard in Charleston, South Carolina.

Calhoun received many honors by subsequent generations after his death, but his legacy as one of the leading defenders of slavery in American history has also rendered him a highly controversial figure.

During the Civil War, the Confederate government honored Calhoun on a one-cent postage stamp, which was printed but never officially released.

Calhoun was also honored by his alma mater, Yale University, which named one of its undergraduate residence halls "Calhoun College." (In recent years some students have called for the residence hall to be renamed, either by dropping the name of the slavery defender entirely or by hyphenating Calhoun's name with the name of a civil rights leader. Their efforts have not been successful, but the issue flares periodically.) The university also erected a statue of Calhoun in Harkness Tower, a prominent campus landmark.

Clemson University is also part of Calhoun's legacy. The campus sits on Calhoun's Fort Hill plantation, which he bequeathed to his son-in-law, Thomas Green Clemson. Clemson's chief claim to fame, prior to founding the university in his will, was having served as ambassador to Belgium -- a post he obtained through the influence of his father-in-law, who was Secretary of State at the time. In 1888, after Calhoun's daughter had died, Clemson wrote a will bequeathing his father-in-law's former estate to South Carolina on the condition that it be used for an agricultural university to be named "Clemson." A nearby town named for Calhoun was renamed "Clemson" in the 1930s.

In 1957, United States Senators honored Calhoun as one of the "five greatest senators of all time." A 2000 Senate resolution named him one of the "seven greatest" of all time.

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