John C. Calhoun

John C. Calhoun
7th Vice President of the United States
In office March 4, 1825 – December 28, 1832
President	John Quincy Adams Andrew Jackson
Preceded by	Daniel D. Tompkins
Succeeded by	Martin Van Buren
16th United States Secretary of State
In office April 1, 1844 – March 10, 1845
President	John Tyler
Preceded by	Abel P. Upshur
Succeeded by	James Buchanan
10th United States Secretary of War
In office October 8, 1817 – March 4, 1825
President	James Monroe
Preceded by	William H. Crawford
Succeeded by	James Barbour
Personal details
Born	March 18, 1782 Abbeville, South Carolina
Died	March 31, 1850, age 68 Washington, D.C.
Nationality	american
Political party	Democratic-Republican, Democratic, and Nullifier
Spouse	Floride Bonneau Calhoun

John Caldwell Calhoun (March 18, 1782 – March 31, 1850) was a leading United States Southern politician and political philosopher from South Carolina during the first half of the 19th century, best known as a spokesman for slavery, nullification and the rights of electoral minorities, such as slave-holders. His ideas helped lead to the American Civil War a decade after his death.

Calhoun began his career as a staunch nationalist, favoring war with Britain in 1812 and a vast program of internal improvements afterwards. He reversed course in the 1820s to attack nationalism in favor of States Rights of the sort Thomas Jefferson had propounded in 1798. Although he died a decade before the American Civil War broke out, Calhoun was a major inspiration to the secessionists who created the short-lived Confederate States of America. Nicknamed the "cast-steel man" for his staunch determination to defend the causes in which he believed, Calhoun pushed the theory of nullification, a states' rights theory 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.

Calhoun spent his entire career working for the national government in a variety of high offices. He 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 served in the United States House of Representatives (1810-1817) and was Secretary of War (1817-1824) under Monroe and Secretary of State (1844-1845) under Tyler.

Early life

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. After studying law at the Tapping Reeve Law School in Litchfield, Connecticut, Calhoun was admitted to the South Carolina bar in 1807.

In January 1811 Calhoun 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, Floride Calhoun was a central figure in the Petticoat Affair. Two distant cousins were South Carolina Governors Andrew Pickens and his son Francis Wilkinson Pickens.

An 1822 portrait of John C. Calhoun

Calhoun as Nationalist

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 led a Bonus Bill for public works. With the goal of building a strong nation that could fight a future war, he aggressively pushed for high protective tariffs (to build up industry), a national bank, internal improvements, and many other policies he later repudiated.

In 1817, President James Monroe appointed Calhoun to be Secretary of War, where he served until 1825. As Belko (2004) argues, his management of Indian affairs proved his nationalism. His opponents were the "Old Republicans" in Congress, with their Jeffersonian ideology for economy in the federal government; they often attacked the operations and finances of the war department. Calhoun was a reform-minded executive, who attempted to institute centralization and efficiency in the Indian department, but Congress either failed to respond to his reforms or rejected them. Calhoun's frustration with congressional inaction, political rivalries, and ideological differences that dominated the late early republic spurred him to unilaterally create the Bureau of Indian Affairs in 1824.

Vice President

Election

Calhoun originally was a candidate for President in the election of 1824, but decided to become the running mate to both John Quincy Adams and Andrew Jackson. Thus while no candidate received a majority in the Electoral College and the election was ultimately resolved by the House of Representatives, Calhoun was elected Vice President in a landslide.

The Adams Administration

As his election was separate from that of Adams, whom he believed unfairly favored Northern interests, he was not considered part of the administration and the two feuded frequently. In 1828, he ran for reelection as the running mate of Andrew Jackson, and thus became the last Vice President, as of 2007, to serve under two presidents.

Jackson and the Nullification Crisis

His wife, Floride Calhoun

Under Andrew Jackson, Calhoun's Vice Presidency remained controversial. As with Adams, a rift between Northern and Southern views drove a wedge between Calhoun and his president.

The Tariff of 1828, also known as the Tariff of Abominations aggravated the rift between Calhoun and the Jacksonians. He had been assured that Jacksonians would reject the bill, but the Northern Jacksonians were primarily responsible for its passage. Frustrated, he returned to his South Carolina plantation to write South Carolina Exposition and Protest, an essay rejecting the nationalist philosophy he once advocated.

He now 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 supported states rights, but believed that nullification threatened the union, opposed it. 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.

Sketch of John C. Calhoun

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 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 Vice President.

U.S. Senate and the slavery debate

John C. Calhoun

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 whereas 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.

Calhoun's home, Fort Hill, in Clemson, South Carolina.

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 in March 1850, of tuberculosis in Washington, D.C., at the age of 68, and was buried in St. Phillips Churchyard in Charleston, South Carolina.

Legacy

Calhoun's legacy as one of the leading defenders of slavery in American history made him a highly controversial figure. On the other hand his original and articulate argument in defense of minority rights became the legal basis of much of the civil rights movement.

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.

File:Calhoun grave Charleston.jpg

Calhoun's grave in Charleston, South Carolina.

Clemson University is also part of Calhoun's legacy. The campus occupies the site of Calhoun's Fort Hill plantation, which he bequeathed to his wife and daughter, who promptly sold it to a relative along with 50 slaves, receiving $15,000 for the 1100 acres and $29,000 for the slaves. When that owner died, Thomas Green Clemson foreclosed the mortgage as administrator of his mother-in-law's estate, thus regaining the property from his in-laws' widow. 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 1943.

Calhoun is also the namesake for Calhoun Community College in Decatur, Alabama and Lake Calhoun in Minneapolis, MN. John C. Calhoun Drive, a well known street named after him, is located in Orangeburg, South Carolina. In 1957, United States Senators honored Calhoun as one of the "five greatest senators of all time."

Calhoun also has a landing on the Santee Cooper River in Santee, South Carolina named after him.

Other facts

• Calhoun was the first cousin of Joseph Calhoun and John Ewing Colhoun. He was also the son-in-law of John Ewing Colhoun having married his daughter Floride Bonneau Colhoun. This would make his wife also be his first cousin once removed. (see cousin page to understand better)
• Calhoun was the first as well as the earliest Vice President of the United States to have his photo taken.
• Calhoun is one of only two vice presidents to serve the position under two presidents (George Clinton being the other).
• Calhoun is one of only two vice presidents to resign from the vice presidency (Spiro T. Agnew being the other).
• Calhoun was the last person re-elected to the vice presidency until Thomas Marshall's re-election more than eight decades later (in 1916).

See also

• List of places named for John C. Calhoun

References

Primary sources

• The Papers of John C. Calhoun Edited by Clyde N. Wilson; 28 volumes, University of South Carolina Press, 1959-2003. [1]; contains all letters, pamphlets and speeches by JCC and most letters written to him.
• Slavery a Positive Good, speech on the Senate floor, February 6, 1837.
• Calhoun, John C. Ed. H. Lee Cheek, Jr. Calhoun: Selected Writings and Speeches (Conservative Leadership Series), 2003. ISBN 0-89526-179-0.
• Calhoun, John C. Ed. Ross M. Lence, Union and Liberty: The Political Philosophy of John C. Calhoun, 1992. ISBN 0-86597-102-1.
• "Correspondence Addressed to John C. Calhoun, 1837-1849," Chauncey S. Boucher and Robert P. Brooks, eds., Annual Report of the American Historical Association, 1929. 1931

Academic secondary sources

• Bartlett, Irving H. John C. Calhoun: A Biography (1003)
• Belko, William S. "John C. Calhoun and the Creation of the Bureau of Indian Affairs: An Essay on Political Rivalry, Ideology, and Policymaking in the Early Republic." South Carolina Historical Magazine 2004 105(3): 170-197. ISSN 0038-3082
• Brown, Guy Story. "Calhoun's Philosophy of Politics: A Study of A Disquisition on Government"
• Capers; Gerald M. John C. Calhoun, Opportunist: A Reappraisal 1960.
• Capers Gerald M., "A Reconsideration of Calhoun's Transition from Nationalism to Nullification," Journal of Southern History, XIV (Feb., 1948), 34-48. online in JSTOR
• Cheek, Jr., H. Lee. Calhoun And Popular Rule: The Political Theory Of The Disquisition And Discourse. (2004) ISBN 0-8262-1548-3
• Ford Jr., Lacy K. Origins of Southern Radicalism: The South Carolina Upcountry, 1800-1860 (1988)
• Ford Jr., Lacy K. "Republican Ideology in a Slave Society: The Political Economy of John C. Calhoun, The Journal of Southern History. Vol. 54, No. 3 (Aug., 1988), pp. 405-424 in JSTOR
• Ford Jr., Lacy K. "Inventing the Concurrent Majority: Madison, Calhoun, and the Problem of Majoritarianism in American Political Thought," The Journal of Southern History, Vol. 60, No. 1 (Feb., 1994), pp. 19-58 in JSTOR
• Hofstadter, Richard. "Marx of the Master Class" in American Political Tradition (1948)
• Niven, John. John C. Calhoun and the Price of Union (1988)
• Peterson, Merrill. The Great Triumvirate: Webster, Clay, and Calhoun (1987)
• Rayback Joseph G., "The Presidential Ambitions of John C. Calhoun, 1844-1848," Journal of Southern History, XIV (Aug., 1948), 331-56. online in JSTOR
• Wiltse, Charles M. John C. Calhoun, Nationalist, 1782-1828 (1944) ISBN 0-8462-1041-X; John C. Calhoun, Nullifier, 1829-1839 (1948); John C. Calhoun, Sectionalist, 1840-1859 (1951); the standard scholarly biography

External links

• United States Congress. "John C. Calhoun (id: C000044)". Biographical Directory of the United States Congress.
• Works by John C. Calhoun at Project Gutenberg
• University of Virginia: John C. Calhoun - Timeline, quotes, & contemporaries, via University of Virginia
• John C. Calhoun House at Clemson University.
• Other images via The College of New Jersey: [2], [3], [4]
• Response to Calhoun's Disquisition

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