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John Caldwell Calhoun (March 18, 1782 – March 31, 1850) was the 7th Vice President of the United States. He was a leading United States Southern politician from South Carolina during the first half of the 19th century. Calhoun was an advocate of slavery, states' rights, limited government, and nullification.
He was the second man to serve as Vice President under two administrations, (March 4, 1825 – December 28, 1832, under Presidents Adams and Jackson), the first Vice President born as a U.S.
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It is harder to preserve than to obtain liberty.
Speech in the Senate (January 1848)
Protection and patriotism are reciprocal.
Speech in the House of Representatives (December 12, 1811)
The surrender of life is nothing to sinking down into acknowledgment of inferiority.
Speech in the Senate (February 19, 1847)
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.
Speech to the U.S. Senate (February 15, 1833)
The very essence of a free government consists in considering offices as public trusts, bestowed for the good of the country, and not for the benefit of an individual or a party.
Speech (February 13, 1835)
A power has risen up in the government greater than the people themselves, consisting of many and various and powerful interests, combined into one mass, and held together by the cohesive power of the vast surplus in the banks.
Speech (May 27, 1836)
Encyclopedia
John Caldwell Calhoun (March 18, 1782 – March 31, 1850) was the 7th Vice President of the United States. He was a leading United States Southern politician from South Carolina during the first half of the 19th century. Calhoun was an advocate of slavery, states' rights, limited government, and nullification.
He was the second man to serve as Vice President under two administrations, (March 4, 1825 – December 28, 1832, under Presidents Adams and Jackson), the first Vice President born as a U.S. citizen (his predecessors were born before the revolution) and also the first Vice President to resign his office.
After a short stint in the South Carolina legislature, where he wrote legislation making South Carolina the first state to adopt universal suffrage for white men, Calhoun, barely 30, began his federal career as a staunch nationalist, favoring war with Britain in 1812. However, Calhoun's position changed in favor of states' rights following the "Corrupt Bargain" of 1824, by which, it is claimed, Speaker of the House Henry Clay gave the Presidency to John Quincy Adams in exchange for the position of United States Secretary of State.
It is said that by renouncing the Vice Presidency in 1832 for a Senate seat he obtained more power than he had under Jackson. He was a Democratic-Republican under President John Quincy Adams and a Democrat under President Andrew Jackson.
Although he died almost 11 years before the American Civil War broke out, Calhoun is considered to be an advocate of secession. Nicknamed the "cast-iron man" for his staunch determination to defend the causes in which he believed, Calhoun pushed nullification, under which states could declare null and void federal laws 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.
He was part of the "Great Triumvirate", or the "Immortal Trio", along with his colleagues Daniel Webster and Henry Clay.
He served in the United States House of Representatives (1810–1817) and was Secretary of War (1817–1824) under James Monroe and Secretary of State (1844–1845) under John Tyler.
Origins and early life
Calhoun was born on March 18, 1782, the fourth child of Patrick Calhoun and his wife Martha (née Caldwell). His father was an Ulster-Scot who emigrated from County Donegal to the Thirteen Colonies where he met Martha, herself the daughter of a Protestant Irish immigrant father .
When his father became ill, the 17-year-old Calhoun quit school to continue the family farm. With his brothers' financial support, he later 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, whose branch of the family spelled the surname differently than did his. The couple had 10 children over 18 years; three died in infancy. During her husband's second term as Vice President, Floride Calhoun, was a central figure in the Petticoat Affair.
Early political career
In 1810, Calhoun was elected to Congress, and became one of the War Hawks who, led by Henry Clay, were agitating for what became the War of 1812. Calhoun had made his public debut in calling for war after 1807's Chesapeake-Leopard affair.
After the war, J. C. Calhoun and H. Clay sponsored 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.
Calhoun's nationalism also manifested itself in his advice to Monroe to sign off on the Missouri Compromise, which most other Southern politicians saw as a distinctly bad deal; Calhoun believed that continued agitation of the slavery issue threatened the Union, so the Missouri dispute had to be concluded.
As Secretary of State John Quincy Adams wrote in 1821, "Calhoun is a man of fair and candid mind, of honorable principles, of clear and quick understanding, of cool self-possession, of enlarged philosophical views, and of ardent patriotism. He is above all sectional and factious prejudices more than any other statesman of this Union with whom I have ever acted." Historian Charles Wiltse agrees, noting, "Though he is known today primarily for his sectionalism, Calhoun was the last of the great political leaders of his time to take a sectional position-later than Daniel Webster, later than Henry Clay, later than Adams himself. "
Vice Presidency
Election
Calhoun originally was a candidate for President of the United States in the election of 1824, but after failing to win the endorsement of the legislature in his own state, he decided to set his sights on the Vice Presidency. While as no candidate received a majority in the Electoral College in the election for President and the election was ultimately resolved by the House of Representatives, Calhoun was elected Vice President in a landslide. Calhoun served four years under Adams, and then, in 1828, won re-election as Vice President alongside Andrew Jackson.
The Adams Administration
Calhoun believed that the outcome of the 1824 presidential election, in which the House made Adams President despite the greater popularity of Andrew Jackson, demonstrated that contrated that control of the federal government was subject to manipulation by Adams and Henry Clay. Calhoun, it is said, resolved to thwart Adams' and Clay's nationalist program, opposing it while holding power with them. In 1828, Calhoun ran for reelection as the running mate of Andrew Jackson, and thus became one of two Vice Presidents to serve under two Presidents (the other being George Clinton).
The Jackson Administration
Under Andrew Jackson, Calhoun's Vice Presidency remained controversial. Once again, a rift developed between Calhoun and the President, this time about hard cash.
The Tariff of 1828 (also known as the Tariff of Abominations) aggravated the rift between Calhoun and the Jacksonians. Calhoun had been assured that Jacksonians would reject the bill, but Northern Jacksonians were primarily responsible for its passage. Frustrated, Calhoun 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 between Calhoun's arguments and those of Jefferson and Madison is that Calhoun explicitly argued for a state's right to secede from the Union, if necessary, instead of simply nullifying certain federal legislation. James Madison rebuked the nullificationists and said that no state had the right to nullify federal law.
At the 1830 Jefferson Day dinner at Jesse Brown's Indian Queen Hotel (April 13, 1830), Jackson proposed a toast and proclaimed "Our federal Union, it must be preserved," to which Calhoun replied "the Union, next to our liberty, the most dear.
In May 1830, the relationship between President Jackson and Vice-President Calhoun deteriorated further when Jackson discovered that Calhoun—while serving as James Monroe's Secretary of War (1817-1823)—had requested President Monroe to censure Jackson (at the time a General) for invading Spanish Florida in 1818 during the Seminole War without authorization from either War Secretary Calhoun or President Monroe itself.
Calhoun defended his 1818 request, stating it was the right thing to do. The feud between him and Jackson heated up as Calhoun informed the President that another attack from his opponents was not hard for others to see, and would have a series of argumentative letters sent to each other—fueled by Jackson's opponents—until Jackson stopped the correspondence in July 1830.
By February 1831, the break between Calhoun and Jackson was final after Calhoun—responding to inaccurate press reports about the feud—published the letters in the United States Telegraph.
More damage was done to Jackson and Calhoun's relationship after his wife, staunch and conservative Floride Calhoun, organized a coalition among Cabinet wives against Peggy Eaton, wife of 13th Secretary of War John Eaton. It was alleged that John and Peggy Eaton had engaged in an adulterous affair while Mrs. Eaton was still legally married to her first husband, John B. Timberlake; the allegations allegedly drove Timberlake to suicide, 1828.
The scandal, which became known as the Petticoat Affair or the Peggy Eaton Affair, resulted in the resignation of Jackson's Cabinet except for Postmaster General William T. Barry and Secretary of State, Martin Van Buren (March 9, 1829 – resigned June 18, 1831), but only in order to take an alternative position in Jackson's administration as United States Ambassador to Britain (1831–1832).
Nullification Crisis
In 1832, the states' rights theory was put to the test in the Nullification Crisis after South Carolina passed an ordinance that nullified federal tariffs. The tariffs favored Northern manufacturing interests over Southern agricultural concerns, and the South Carolina legislature declared them to be unconstitutional. Calhoun had also formed a political party in South Carolina known as the Nullifier Party.
In response to the South Carolina move, 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. Tensions cooled after both sides agreed to the Compromise Tariff 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.
The irony in this is that Calhoun (anonymously, making his true opinions unknown to Jackson) argued for the doctrine of nullification, which had gone as far as to suggest secession. Calhoun had written the 1828 essay South Carolina Exposition and Protest, arguing that a state could veto any law it considered unconstitutional.
The break between Jackson and Calhoun was complete, and in 1832, Calhoun ran for the Senate rather than remain as Vice President; because he exposed his nullification beliefs during the nullification crisis, his chances of becoming President were very low. After the Compromise Tariff of 1833 went into effect, the Nullifier Party, along with other anti-Jackson politicians, formed a coalition known as the Whig Party. Calhoun sided with the Whigs until he broke with key Whig Senator Daniel Webster over slavery as well as the Whigs' program of "internal improvements", which many Southern politicians believe improved Northern industrial interests at the expense of Southern interests. Whig party leader, Henry Clay, sided with Daniel Webster on these issues.
U.S. Senator and views on slavery
On December 28, 1832, Calhoun accepted election to the United States Senate from his native South Carolina, becoming the first Vice President in U.S. history to resign from office, and the third Vice President to relinquish the office prior to its full term (Vice Presidents George Clinton and Elbridge Gerry both died in office). 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 Southern states' right to preserve the institution of slavery in terms of liberty and self-determination.
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.
- "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."
The everlasting influence of Calhoun´s policies on his fierce defense of states' rights and support for the Slave Power, even in the 21st Century, proves that he played, even dead, a major role in deepening the growing divide between Northern and Southern states on this issue, wielding the threat of Southern secession to back slave state demands.
After a one year break as the 16th United States Secretary of State, (April 1, 1844 – March 10, 1845) under President John Tyler, being preceded by Abel P. Upshur and succeeded by James Buchanan, Calhoun returned to the Senate in 1845, participating in the epic Senate struggle over the expansion of slavery in the Western states, formerly Imperial Spanish - Mexican lands till as late as 1848, that produced the so called Compromise of 1850.
He died in March 1850, of tuberculosis in Washington, D.C., at the age of 68, and was buried in St. Philips Churchyard in Charleston, South Carolina.
The Calhoun Doctrine
Southerners challenged the doctrine of congressional authority to regulate or prohibit slavery in the territories. In 1847 Calhoun claimed that citizens from every state had the right to take their "property" to any territory. Congress, he asserted, had no authority to place restrictions on slavery in the territories. If the Northern majority continued to ride roughshod over the rights of the Southern minority, the Southern states would have little option but to secede.
Legacy
During the Civil War, the Confederate government honored Calhoun on a one-cent postage stamp, which was printed but never officially released (as seen below).
Calhoun was also honored by his alma mater, Yale University, naming one of its undergraduate residence halls "Calhoun College" and erecting a statue of Calhoun in Harkness Tower, a prominent campus landmark.
Clemson University campus, South Carolina, 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 and $29,000 for the slaves, some 600 USD apiece. 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 had served as U. S. 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 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.
There is also a Calhoun Community College in Decatur, Alabama, and Lake Calhoun in Minneapolis, Minnesota. Many streets in the South, such as John C. Calhoun Drive in Orangeburg, South Carolina and the John C. Calhoun Expressway in Augusta, GA, are named in his memory. Calhoun County, South Carolina, Calhoun County, Georgia, Calhoun County, Florida, Calhoun County, Illinois, Calhoun County, Iowa , Calhoun County, Mississippi, and Calhoun County, Michigan are also named in his honor.
In 1957, United States Senators honored Calhoun as one of the "five greatest senators of all time."
Calhoun Middle School in Denton, Texas, too, is named after John C. Calhoun.
Calhoun also has a landing on the Santee-Cooper River in Santee, South Carolina, named after him. Calhoun Monument stands in Charleston, South Carolina. Calhoun Street, a large thoroughfare in Charleston was also named after Calhoun and the USS John C. Calhoun was a Fleet Ballistic Missile nuclear submarine, in commission from 1963 to 1994.
John C. Calhoun in Popular Culture
He was portrayed by Arliss Howard in the 1997 movie Amistad.
See also
Primary sources
- The Papers of John C. Calhoun Edited by Clyde N. Wilson; 28 volumes, University of South Carolina Press, 1959-2003. ; contains all letters, pamphlets and speeches by JCC and most letters written to him.
- , January 13, 1834, -- "fanatics and madmen of the North" "No, Sir, State rights are no more."
- to continue the charter of the Bank of the United States, March 21, 1834
- September 18, 1837, on the bill authorizing an issue of Treasury Notes
- to separate the Government and the banks, October 3, 1837
- March 10, 1838, the Clay-Calhoun debate -- "Whatever the Government receives and treats as money, is money"
- 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 (1993)
- 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
- 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
- Gutzman, Kevin R. C., "Paul to Jeremiah: Calhoun's Abandonment of Nationalism," in _The Journal of Libertarian Studies_ 16 (2002), 3-33.
- Hofstadter, Richard. "Marx of the Master Class" in The American Political Tradition and the Men Who Made It (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.
- 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
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