Source

• Born: 18 March 1782
• Birthplace: McCormick County, South Carolina
• Died: 31 March 1850
• Best Known As: U.S. viice president to Adams and Jackson

Most famous for his role in the pre-Civil War debate over states' rights, John Caldwell Calhoun was a U.S. senator from South Carolina (1832-43, 1845-50) and vice president under presidents John Quincy Adams (1825-29) and Andrew Jackson (1829-32). Calhoun grew up in South Carolina and was educated at Yale University before opening a law practice back home in Abbeville, South Carolina. He was a state representative (1808) and a U.S. representative (1811-1817) before serving as President Monroe's Secretary of War (1817-25). His terms as vice president were marked by his vocal differences with his presidents. Adams was an avid abolitionist from Boston, but Calhoun was a pro-slavery southern plantation owner, and Jackson and Calhoun were openly hostile to each other. Things heated up in the early 1830s over the issue of federal tariffs: Calhoun claimed that states could nullify federal laws, earning him the nickname of "Arch Nullifier," and Jackson threatened to use the army if South Carolina forced the issue. (Calhoun's colleague, Senator Henry Clay, helped work out a compromise.) Calhoun resigned as Jackson's vice president in 1832 and became a U.S. senator, then briefly served as Secretary of State under President Tyler (1844-45) and finally served in the Senate again until his death in 1850. After his death Calhoun became a symbol for southern unity and his likeness was used on the currency of the Confederate States of America during the Civil War (on $1000 bills in 1861 and $100 bills in 1862).

Calhoun, Clay and Daniel Webster, colleagues in the Senate, were dubbed the "Great Triumvirate" for their oratory and statesmanship... Calhoun was sometimes known as "the cast-iron man" for his cool logic and stern temperament... In 1959 a Senate committee named Calhoun one of the Senate's five most outstanding members ever (the committee was chaired by Senator John F. Kennedy of Massachusetts).

(1782–1850), congressman, secretary of war, vice president, senator, and secretary of state

When James Monroe appointed Congressman John C. Calhoun secretary of war in 1817, the South Carolinian discovered a department mired in financial irresponsibility and managerial incompetence. Calhoun eliminated economic waste, initiated a series of coastal defenses, tightened the army command structure, and improved the curriculum at West Point. He continued the standing policy of negotiating treaties for Indian land and Indian removal, and sent out expeditions to explore the country's vast western expanse. Calhoun, however, struggled to get along with his generals, especially the headstrong Andrew Jackson.

Government retrenchment due to the Panic of 1819 sidetracked many of his initiatives, eliminating his improved transportation system. In 1820 to avoid the disastrous impact of a huge cut in the army, Calhoun proposed his ingenious Expandable Army Plan. The reduction would come among privates; officer and noncommissioned officer strength would remain. In crisis, the army could expand by recruiting privates to serve under experienced leadership. A penurious Congress rejected the scheme. The South Carolinian was, however, able to implement another of his plans, the prohibition of the recruitment of blacks into the U.S. Army, an order that remained in effect from 1820 until the Civil War.

When Calhoun left office in 1825, he had accomplished much less than he had desired. However, he had restored some fiscal responsibility and some order to a department found in chaos. Though better known for his later political career, Calhoun was an influential secretary of war.

[See also African Americans in the Military; Army, U.S.: 1783–1865.]

Bibliography

• Charles M. Wiltse, John C. Calhoun, 3 vols. 1944–51.
• Irving H. Bartlett, John C. Calhoun, A Biography, 1993

The American statesman John Caldwell Calhoun (1782-1850) became the most effective protagonist of the antebellum South. It was his tragedy to be come the spokesman for the dying institution of slavery.

John C. Calhoun was born on March 18, 1782, in the uplands of South Carolina, the son of Patrick and Martha Caldwell Calhoun. The family was Scotch-Irish and Calvinist and was relatively wealthy; his father owned twenty or more slaves, was a judge, and served in the state legislature. John graduated from Yale in 1804. He studied in the law school of Tapping Reeves in Litchfield, Conn., and in an office in Charleston, S.C., and was admitted to the bar in 1807. He quickly established a practice in Abbeville near his family home.

In 1811 Calhoun married a distant cousin, Floride Bouneau, by whom he had nine children. The marriage brought him a modest fortune. He enlarged his holdings and in 1825 established a plantation, called Fort Hill, in his native area.

Handsome in early life and with a commanding presence and piercing eyes all his life through, Calhoun had a striking personality. He had a gracious manner, and Daniel Webster and others not his partisans paid tribute to his character and integrity. In later years he struck observers as a "thinking machine," speaking very rapidly and always terribly in earnest. The picture is conveyed in Harriet Martineau's phrase that Calhoun was a "cast-iron man who looks as if he had never been born and could never be extinguished." He was concerned almost exclusively with ideas, politics, and business; he had little humor and no broad, cultural interests. One Senate colleague said there was no relaxation with the man, and another complained that to be with Calhoun was to be made to think all the time and to feel one's inferiority.

Political Career

Calhoun was elected to the South Carolina Legislature in 1808 and 2 years later won election to the U.S. House of Representatives. Henry Clay made him chairman of the Foreign Affairs Committee, and Calhoun and other "War Hawks" moved the country to the unsuccessful War of 1812 against Great Britain. Calhoun led the effort in the House to supply and strengthen the Army, and after the war he continued to work for a stronger military establishment. He advocated measures which he would later denounce as unconstitutional: Federal encouragement of manufactures by means of a protective tariff, and internal improvements to "bind the republic together with a perfect system of roads and canals." To objections that the Constitution did not authorize such Federal expenditures, Calhoun replied that "the instrument was not intended as a thesis for the logician to exercise his ingenuity on. It ought to be construed with plain, good sense…"

Calhoun was secretary of war in James Monroe's Cabinet (1817-1825). He became less and less militaristic through his life. In 1812 he had said that "a war, just and necessary in its origin, wisely and vigorously carried on, and honorably terminated," would establish "the integrity and prosperity of our country for centuries." But in 1846 he refused to vote for the declaration of war against Mexico; he asserted that the grounds for war given by the President were false and said simply, "I regard peace as a positive good, and war as a positive evil."

In Monroe's Cabinet, Calhoun was a nationalist. In 1821 John Quincy Adams appraised Calhoun as "a man of fair and candid mind … of enlarged philosophic views, and of ardent patriotism. He is above all sectional and factional prejudices more than any other statesman of this Union…. " Calhoun was Adams's vice president (1825-1829) and was elected to the office again in 1828 under Andrew Jackson. He had expectations of becoming president following Jackson's tenure, but there was a rupture between them during Jackson's first term. The social contretemps over Peggy Eaton was involved, but more important was Jackson's discovery that Calhoun had criticized his invasion of Florida in 1818. Even without these irritants the clash would have come. Calhoun had anonymously written the "South Carolina Exposition" in response to the so-called Tariff of Abominations of 1828. He argued the right of a state to "nullify" a Federal enactment injurious to its interests if the state believed the law to be unconstitutional. By 1830 Calhoun was known as the author of the doctrine, and at a Jefferson's birthday dinner that year Jackson glared at Calhoun and proposed the toast, "Our Federal Union - it must be preserved!" Calhoun replied, "The Union - next to our liberty, the most dear!"

Jackson threatened military force to collect the duties in South Carolina, and in 1832 Calhoun in an unprecedented action resigned from the vice presidency and was elected by South Carolina to the Senate to defend its cause. Henry Clay brought forth a compromise, which Calhoun supported, to lower the tariff gradually over a decade; the crisis subsided for a time.

In the Senate in the 1830s, Calhoun attacked the abolitionists, demanding that their publications be excluded from the mails, that their petitions not be received by Congress, and finally that a stop be put to agitation against slavery in the North as had been done in the South. By 1837 he was defending slavery as "a positive good" and had become an advocate for the suppression of open discussion and a free press.

Calhoun's shift from a national to a sectional position had virtually destroyed his chances for the presidency, but he continued to aspire to that office. He declared his candidacy in 1843 but withdrew to accept appointment as secretary of state for the last year of John Tyler's term. In his efforts for the annexation of Texas, Calhoun wrote a famous letter to the British minister in Washington, arguing that annexation was necessary to protect slavery in the United States and asserting (against the position of the British government, which was urging the emancipation of slaves throughout the world) that freed African Americans tended to be deaf, blind, and insane in far higher proportions than those in slavery. The letter did not help his cause in Congress. The treaty of annexation which he negotiated with the Republic of Texas was rejected by the Senate, where it was impossible to muster the required two-thirds vote in its favor. Calhoun then supported the device, of doubtful constitutionality, of admitting Texas by a joint resolution of Congress.

Calhoun returned to the Senate in 1845, where he first opposed the war against Mexico and then the Wilmot Proviso, which would have prohibited slavery in all the territories acquired from Mexico by that war. He denounced the Compromise of 1850, which did not guarantee the right of Southerners to take their slaves into all territories of the Union. He did not live to see that compromise adopted, dying on March 31, 1850. His last words were, "The South! The poor South!"

Political Philosophy

The political theory Calhoun had developed from the time of the Nullification Crisis of 1828 he began to organize in a formal treatise in the middle 1840s. His two works, Disquisition on Government and Discourse on the Constitution and Government of the United States, were published posthumously. Calhoun argued that government by mere numbers must inevitably result in despotism by the majority, a proposition supported by the men who drew up the Constitution. He also insisted that the Constitution should be based upon the "truth" of the inequality of man and on the principle that people are not equally entitled to liberty.

Calhoun said the U.S. Constitution lacked the necessary restraints to prevent the majority from abusing the minority. He proposed to give the minorities (the minority he had in mind was the Southern slaveholders) a veto power over Federal legislation and action by means of what he called the "concurrent majority." In the Discoursehe proposed the device of dual executives for the Union, each to be chosen by one of the great sections of the country, with the agreement of both necessary for Federal action.

The 20th-century experience of the dangers of centralized governmental power has brought a renewed interest in Calhoun's proposals for the protection of minority rights. But although Calhoun's critical analysis was perceptive, his proposed solutions have not been regarded as serious contributions to the problem. Indeed, as critics have pointed out, although he spoke in general terms and categories, he was really interested only in defending the rights of a specific propertied minority - the slaveholding South.

Further Reading

Calhoun's own A Disquisition on Government and A Discourse on the Constitution and Government of the United States, originally published in 1851, are now available together in several editions. The Works of John C. Calhoun, edited by Richard K. Crallé (6 vols., 1851-1856), has been the basic published collection of his writings. However, a more recent, definitive collection of Calhoun's writings is The Papers of John C. Calhoun, edited by Robert L. Meriwether (4 vols., 1959-1969).

A representative collection of essays by Calhoun scholars is John L. Thomas, ed., John C. Calhoun: A Profile (1968). It provides an excellent introduction to the literature on Calhoun. The comprehensive biography is Charles M. Wiltse, John C. Calhoun (3 vols., 1944-1951); however, it denigrates his rivals and justifies Calhoun's actions throughout his career. The best one-volume biography, with a better interpretive balance, is Margaret L. Coit, John C. Calhoun: American Portrait (1950). For a more critical account see Gerald M. Capers, John C. Calhoun, Opportunist: A Reappraisal (1960). Richard N. Current, John C. Calhoun (1963), provides a good analysis of Calhoun's political theory.

To examine the changing interpretations of Calhoun over the last century see the biographies by John S. Jenkins, The Life of John Caldwell Calhoun (1852); H. von Holst, John C. Calhoun (1882); Gaillard Hunt, John C. Calhoun (1908); William M. Meigs, The Life of John Caldwell Calhoun (2 vols., 1917); and Arthur Styron, The Cast Iron Man: John C. Calhoun and American Democracy (1935).

(1782-1850) Calhoun has three claims to fame. One stems from his prominence as an American politician between 1811 and 1850. During that period he was, successively, an important member of the House of Representatives (1811-17), Secretary of War (1817-25), Vice-President of the United States (1825-32), senator for South Carolina (1832-44), Secretary of State (1844-5) and, yet again, senator for South Carolina (1845-50). In his lifetime his reputation as a politician was mixed. He was variously described as a patriot, a nationalist, an apologist for the slave-owning South, ‘first amongst second rate men’, an opportunist, and the destroyer of the Union. What is clear is that for the last twenty years of his life he was one of the leaders of the Old South in its attempts to defend its interests in the Union.

As a political theorist his claim to fame rests largely on three works, The South Carolina Exposition and Protest (1828), A Disquisition on Government, and A Discourse on the Constitution and Government of the United States (both published after his death in 1850). The Exposition presents the case for state nullification of federal laws, the Discourse is a states' right tract incorporating ideas for a plural executive, and the Disquisition presses the case for a ruling concurrent majority, that is, one rooted not in numbers but in interests, each of which possesses a ‘mutual negative’. These ideas were all attempts to avoid the South's secession. The problem was that although presented in a scholarly fashion they all suffered from the same crucial weakness—their success depended on acceptance by Northern politicians. For a theorist obsessed with power this was, to say the least, a significant weakness.

Calhoun's final claim to fame rests on the analytical problems he bequeathed to politicians and theorists who followed him. One of these is the role of pressure groups. The other, and more important problem, is how, short of secession, the interests of territorial minorities can be defended in wider Unions. Calhoun never resolved these problems, but neither has anyone else. In short, Calhoun remains important because of the problems which defeated him.

— Jim Bulpitt

(1782-1850), preeminent spokesman for the slave-plantation system of the antebellum South, U.S. representative, secretary of war, senator, vice president, and secretary of state. A nationalist at the outset of his political career, Calhoun was one of the leading War Hawks who maneuvered the unprepared United States into war with Great Britain in 1812. After the Treaty of Ghent that ended that conflict, Calhoun was responsible for establishing the Second Bank of the United States, and he wrote the bonus bill that would have laid the foundation for a nationwide network of roads and canals if President James Madison had not vetoed it.

A candidate for the presidency in 1824, Calhoun was the object of bitter partisan attacks from other contenders. Dropping out of the race, he settled for the vice presidency and was twice elected to that position. But after Andrew Jackson's assumption of the presidency in 1829, Calhoun found himself isolated politically in national affairs.

At first he supported the Tariff of 1828, the so-called Tariff of Abominations, but responding to his constituents' criticism of the measure and believing that the tariff was being unfairly assessed on the agrarian South for the benefit of an industrializing North, Calhoun drafted for the South Carolina legislature his Exposition and Protest. In this essay he claimed original sovereignty for the people acting through the states and advocated state veto or nullification of any national law that was held to impinge on minority interests. He later developed the argument in his two essays Disquisition on Government and Discourse on the Constitution, presenting the classic case for minority rights within the framework of majority rule. A moderate during the nullification crisis of 1832-1833, Calhoun joined with Henry Clay in working out the Compromise Tariff.

By then he had resigned from the vice presidency and had been elected a senator from South Carolina. For the rest of his life he defended the slave-plantation system against a growing antislavery stance in the free states. He continued his strident defense of slavery even after he joined the Tyler administration as secretary of state. In that position he laid the groundwork for the annexation of Texas and the settlement of the Oregon boundary with Great Britain. Reelected to the Senate in 1845, he opposed the Mexican-American War because he felt American victory would result in territorial concessions that would place the Union at jeopardy. Similarly he opposed the admission of California as a free state, and the free-soil provision in the Oregon territorial bill. In his last address to the Senate, he foretold the disruption of the Union unless the slave states were given adequate and permanent protection for their institutions.

Calhoun, along with Daniel Webster, Henry Clay, and Andrew Jackson, dominated American political life from 1815 to 1850. A tall, spare individual, Calhoun was a gifted debater, an original thinker in political theory, and a person of broad learning who was especially well read in philosophy, history, and contemporary economic and social issues. His public appearance as the so-called Cast Iron Man was belied by his personal warmth and affectionate nature in private life.

Bibliography:

John Niven, John C. Calhoun and the Price of Union (1988); Charles M. Wiltse, John C. Calhoun, 3 vols. (1944-1951).

Author:

John Niven

See also Nullification Controversy; Secession; War Hawks.

(kăl'hūn') , 1782–1850, American statesman and political philosopher, b. near Abbeville, S.C., grad. Yale, 1804. He was an intellectual giant of political life in his day.

Early Career

Calhoun studied law under Tapping Reeve at Litchfield, Conn., and began (1808) his public career in the South Carolina legislature. Frontier born, he acquired a large plantation by marrying (1811) his cousin, Floride Calhoun. (Calhoun's plantation, with his house, Fort Hill, is now the campus of Clemson Univ.) Later he came to represent the interests of the Southern planter aristocracy.

A Congressman (1811–17) and acting chairman of the House Committee on Foreign Affairs, Calhoun was one of the leading “war hawks,” who whipped up enthusiasm for the War of 1812. He remained a nationalist for some time after the war, speaking for a strong army and navy, for encouragement of manufacturing, for internal improvements, and for a national bank; many of these causes he later opposed. Calhoun was an efficient Secretary of War (1817–25) under President Monroe.

Vice President

Calhoun first served as Vice President (1825–29) under John Quincy Adams. Throughout Adams's administration he opposed the President and aligned himself with the supporters of Andrew Jackson. An able constitutional lawyer, he made an imposing figure skillfully presiding over the Senate. When the Jacksonians finally triumphed in 1828, Calhoun was again elected Vice President.

It was widely assumed that he would succeed Jackson in office, but relations between the two men soon cooled. Calhoun, prodded by his wife and his supporters, offended the President in the Eaton affair (see O'Neill, Margaret). Jackson finally became furious when he discovered that years before Calhoun had privately denounced Jackson's conduct in Florida while publicly giving the impression that he had supported the general. Primarily, however, Jackson and Calhoun had come to disagree on the nature of the Union.

Nullification

As the preeminent spokesman for the South, Calhoun tried to reconcile the preservation of the Union with the fact that under the Union the South's dominant agricultural economy was being neglected and even injured for the benefit of the ever-increasing commercial and industrial power of the North. When a still higher tariff replaced (1832) the Tariff of Abominations of 1828, he maintained that the Constitution, rightly interpreted, gave a state the power to nullify federal legislation inimical to its interests. He returned to South Carolina, had a state convention called, and directed the passage of the famous ordinance of nullification.

Senator and Advocate of States' Rights

In Dec., 1832, Calhoun quit the vice presidency after being elected to the Senate, where he eloquently defended his states' rights principles in dramatic debates with Daniel Webster. The firmness of Andrew Jackson and the compromise tariff proposed by Henry Clay resolved the nullification crisis in 1833, but the larger issue of states' rights persisted, leading ultimately to secession and the Civil War.

Martin Van Buren, Calhoun's bitter political enemy, held the vice presidency in Jackson's second term and went on to succeed Jackson in the office Calhoun had coveted for many years. As the abolitionists grew stronger in the North, Calhoun became an outspoken apologist for slavery and made every effort to maintain the delicate balance between North and South in the Senate by opposing the prohibition of slavery in newly admitted states. Thus, while serving briefly (1844–45) as Secretary of State under John Tyler, he completed negotiations for the admission of Texas as a slave state, but later tried to avert war with Mexico.

Again (1845–50) in the Senate, he advocated compromise in the Oregon boundary dispute but opposed the admission of California as a free state in the debates over the Compromise of 1850. In rejecting the Wilmot Proviso, Calhoun set forth the theory that all territories were held in common by the states and that the federal government merely served as a trustee of the lands.

Political Philosophy

His Disquisition on Government and Discourse on the Constitution and Government of the United States, both published posthumously, crystallized his political philosophy. The Constitution, he stated, established a government of concurrent majorities composed of two elements—the state governments and the federal government. Hence the states enjoy the power of veto, or nullification, and the right of secession results necessarily from the origin of the Union as a compact among the sovereign parties. His theories attempted to formulate democracy in terms of protection for a minority, specifically, the South, and they were later embodied in the Confederate constitution. Because his ideas are associated with an institution—slavery—offensive to the idealism of most Americans, Calhoun has not been a popular figure in U.S. history.

Bibliography

See Calhoun's works (ed. by R. K. Crallé, 6 vol., 1851–55); his papers (ed. by R. L. Meriwether and W. E. Hemphill, Vol. I–VII, 1959–73); biographies by C. M. Wiltse (3 vol., 1944–51), and G. M. Capers (1968).

(1782-1850)

1828

South Carolina Exposition and Protest. A report drafted at the request of the South Carolina legislature in response to federal protective tariffs deemed harmful to Southern states. Outlining a doctrine later to be termed nullification, Calhoun opposes President Jackson's nationalist agenda. Jackson's vice president at the time, Calhoun writes the paper secretly but would break openly with Jackson later and resign as vice president in 1832.

1851

A Disquisition on Government and a Discourse on the Constitution and Government of the United States. This posthumously published essay attempts to establish a theory of minority rights within the framework of majority rule and argues that government is less important than society. Calhoun served as secretary of war, senator, vice president, and secretary of state, and this essay caps his reputation as one of the South's preeminent political theorists.

(kal-hoohn)

The leading southern politician of the early nineteenth century; he served as vice president under both John Quincy Adams and Andrew Jackson and then was elected senator from South Carolina. Calhoun championed slavery and states' rights. During the early 1830s, he led the nullification movement, which maintained that when a state found a federal law unacceptable, the state had the right to declare the law null, or inoperative, within its borders. Nullification was aimed particularly at the high protective tariff of 1828; Calhoun opposed protective tariffs. A man of powerful intellect, Calhoun increasingly became obsessed with the South's minority status and with finding ways to protect slavery. Although he died in 1850, his influence helped point the South toward secession and the Civil War.

Quotes:

"The surrender of life is nothing to sinking down into acknowledgment of inferiority."

"The Government of the absolute majority instead of the Government of the people is but the Government of the strongest interests; and when not efficiently checked, it is the most tyrannical and oppressive that can be devised."

"I never know what South Carolina thinks of a measure. I never consult her. I act to the best of my judgment, and according to my conscience. If she approves, well and good. If she does not, or wishes any one to take my place, I am ready to vacate. We are even."

"Our well-founded claim, grounded on continuity, has greatly strengthened, during the same period, by the rapid advance of our population toward the territoryits great increase, especially in the valley of the Mississippias well as the greatly increased facility of passing to the territory by more accessible routes, and the far stronger and rapidly-swelling tide of population that has recently commenced flowing into it."