John Caldwell Calhoun (/kælˈhuːn/;[1] March 18, 1782 – March 31, 1850) was an American statesman and political theorist who served as the seventh vice president of the United States from 1825 to 1832. Born in South Carolina, he adamantly defended American slavery and sought to protect the interests of white Southerners. Calhoun began his political career as a nationalist, modernizer and proponent of a strong federal government and protective tariffs. In the late 1820s, his views changed radically, and he became a leading proponent of states' rights, limited government, nullification, and opposition to high tariffs. Calhoun saw Northern acceptance of those policies as a condition of the South's remaining in the Union. His beliefs heavily influenced the South's secession from the Union in 1860 and 1861. He was the first of two vice presidents to resign from the position, the second being Spiro Agnew, who resigned in 1973.
Calhoun began his political career with election to the House of Representatives in 1810. As a prominent leader of the war hawk faction, he strongly supported the War of 1812. Calhoun served as Secretary of War under President James Monroe and, in that position, reorganized and modernized the War Department. He was a candidate for the presidency in the 1824 election. After failing to gain support, Calhoun agreed to be a candidate for vice president. The Electoral College elected him vice president by an overwhelming majority. He served under John Quincy Adams and continued under Andrew Jackson, who defeated Adams in the election of 1828, making Calhoun the most recent U.S. vice president to serve under two different presidents.
He had a difficult relationship with Jackson, primarily because of the Nullification Crisis and the Petticoat affair. In contrast with his previous nationalist sentiments, Calhoun vigorously supported South Carolina's right to nullify federal tariff legislation that he believed unfairly favored the North, which put him into conflict with Unionists such as Jackson. In 1832, with only a few months remaining in his second term, Calhoun resigned as vice president and was elected to the Senate. He sought the Democratic Party nomination for the presidency in 1844 but lost to surprise nominee James K. Polk, who won the general election. Calhoun served as Secretary of State under President John Tyler from 1844 to 1845, and in that role supported the annexation of Texas as a means to extend the Slave Power and helped to settle the Oregon boundary dispute with Britain. Calhoun returned to the Senate, where he opposed the Mexican–American War, the Wilmot Proviso and the Compromise of 1850 before he died of tuberculosis in 1850. He often served as a virtual independent who variously aligned as needed, with Democrats and Whigs.
Later in life, Calhoun became known as the "cast-iron man" for his rigid defense of white Southern beliefs and practices.[2][3] His concept of republicanism emphasized proslavery thought and minority states' rights as embodied by the South. He owned dozens of slaves in Fort Hill, South Carolina, and asserted that slavery, rather than being a "necessary evil", was a "positive good" that benefited both slaves and enslavers.[4] To protect minority rights against majority rule, he called for a concurrent majority by which the minority could block some proposals that it felt infringed on their liberties. To that end, Calhoun supported states' rights, and nullification, through which states could declare null and void federal laws that they viewed as unconstitutional. He was one of the "Great Triumvirate" or the "Immortal Trio" of congressional leaders, along with his colleagues Daniel Webster and Henry Clay.
John Caldwell Calhoun was born in Abbeville District, South Carolina on March 18, 1782. He was the fourth child of Irish-born Patrick Calhoun and his wife Martha Caldwell. Patrick's father, also named Patrick, joined the waves of Scotch-Irish emigration from County Donegal to southwestern Pennsylvania. After the death of the elder Patrick in 1741, the family moved to Virginia. Following the British defeat at the Battle of the Monongahela in 1755, the family, fearing Indian attacks, moved to South Carolina in 1756.[5][6] Patrick, a prominent member of the tight-knit Scotch-Irish community on the frontier who worked as surveyor and farmer, was elected to the South Carolina Legislature in 1763 and acquired ownership over slave plantations. As a Presbyterian, he stood opposed to the established Anglican planter class based in Charleston. Patrick remained neutral in the American Revolution and opposed ratification of the U.S. Constitution on grounds of states' rights and personal liberties. Calhoun would eventually adopt his father's beliefs on states' rights.[7][8]
Young Calhoun showed scholastic talent, and although schools were scarce on the Carolina frontier, he was enrolled briefly in an academy taught by his brother-in-law Moses Waddel. It stressed the Latin and Greek classics. He continued his studies privately. When his father died, his brothers were away starting business careers, and so the 14-year-old Calhoun took over management of the family farm and five other farms. For four years he simultaneously kept up his reading and his hunting and fishing. The family decided he should continue his education, and so he resumed studies at Waddel's academy after it reopened.[9] With financing from his brothers, he went to Yale College in Connecticut in 1802. For the first time in his life, Calhoun encountered serious, advanced, and well-organized intellectual dialogue that could shape his mind. Yale was dominated by President Timothy Dwight, a Federalist who became his mentor. Dwight's brilliance entranced (and sometimes repelled) Calhoun.
Biographer John Niven says:
Calhoun admired Dwight's extemporaneous sermons, his seemingly encyclopedic knowledge, and his awesome mastery of the classics, of the tenets of Calvinism, and of metaphysics. No one, he thought, could explicate the language of John Locke with such clarity.[10]
Dwight repeatedly denounced Jeffersonian democracy, and Calhoun challenged him in class. Dwight could not shake Calhoun's commitment to republicanism. "Young man," retorted Dwight, "your talents are of a high order and might justify you for any station, but I deeply regret that you do not love sound principles better than sophistry—you seem to possess a most unfortunate bias for error."[11] Dwight also expounded on the strategy of secession from the Union as a legitimate solution for New England's disagreements with the national government.[12][13] Calhoun made friends easily, read widely, and was a noted member of the debating society of Brothers in Unity. He graduated as valedictorian in 1804. He studied law at the nation's first independent law school, Tapping Reeve Law School in Litchfield, Connecticut, where he worked with Tapping Reeve and James Gould. He was admitted to the South Carolina bar in 1807.[14]
Biographer Margaret Coit argues that:
every principle of secession or states' rights which Calhoun ever voiced can be traced right back to the thinking of intellectual New England ... Not the South, not slavery, but Yale College and Litchfield Law School made Calhoun a nullifier ... Dwight, Reeve, and Gould could not convince the young patriot from South Carolina as to the desirability of secession, but they left no doubts in his mind as to its legality.[15]
In January 1811, Calhoun married Floride Bonneau Colhoun, a first cousin once removed.[16] She was the daughter of wealthy United States Senator and lawyer John E. Colhoun, a leader of Charleston high society.
The couple had ten children:
Calhoun was not openly religious and was generally not outspoken about his religious beliefs. He was raised as an orthodox Presbyterian, but was attracted to Southern varieties of Unitarianism like those that attracted Jefferson. Southern Unitarianism was generally less organized than the variety popular in New England. After his marriage, Calhoun and his wife attended the Episcopal Church, of which she was a member.[20][21][22] In 1821, he became a founding member of All Souls Unitarian Church in Washington, D.C.[23]
Historian Merrill D. Peterson describes Calhoun: "Intensely serious and severe, he could never write a love poem, though he often tried, because every line began with 'whereas' ..."[24]
With a base among the Irish and Scotch Irish, Calhoun won election to South Carolina's 6th congressional district of the House of Representatives in 1810, defeating John Archer Elmore. He immediately became a leader of the War Hawks, along with Speaker Henry Clay of Kentucky and South Carolina congressmen William Lowndes and Langdon Cheves. Brushing aside the vehement objections of both anti-war New Englanders and ardent Jeffersonians led by John Randolph of Roanoke, they demanded war against Britain, claiming that American honor and republican values had been violated by the British refusal to recognize American shipping rights.[9][25] As a member, and later acting chairman, of the Committee on Foreign Affairs, Calhoun played a major role in drafting two key documents in the push for war, the Report on Foreign Relations and the War Report of 1812. Drawing on the linguistic tradition of the Declaration of Independence, Calhoun's committee called for a declaration of war in ringing phrases, denouncing Britain's "lust for power", "unbounded tyranny", and "mad ambition".[26]
The United States declared war on Britain on June 18, inaugurating the War of 1812. The opening phase involved multiple disasters for American arms, as well as a financial crisis when the Treasury could barely pay the bills. The conflict caused economic hardship for Americans, as the Royal Navy blockaded the ports and cut off imports, exports, and the coastal trade. Several attempted invasions of Canada were fiascos, but the U.S. in 1813 seized control of Lake Erie and broke the power of hostile Indians in battles such as the Battle of the Thames in Canada in 1813 and the Battle of Horseshoe Bend in Alabama in 1814. These Indians had, in many cases, cooperated with the British or Spanish in opposing American interests.[27]
Calhoun labored to raise troops, provide funds, speed logistics, rescue the currency, and regulate commerce to aid the war effort. One colleague hailed him as "the young Hercules who carried the war on his shoulders".[9] Disasters on the battlefield made him double his legislative efforts to overcome the obstructionism of John Randolph, Daniel Webster, and other opponents of the war. By 1814 the British were thwarted at the invasions of New York and Baltimore, but Napoleon Bonaparte capitulated, meaning America would now face Britain's formidable reinforcement with units previously committed to Europe if the war were to continue. British and American diplomats signed the Treaty of Ghent undertaking a return to the borders of 1812 with no gains or losses. Before the treaty reached the Senate for ratification, and even before news of its signing reached New Orleans, a British invasion force was decisively defeated in January 1815 at the Battle of New Orleans, making a national hero of General Andrew Jackson. Americans celebrated what they called a "second war of independence" against Britain. This led to the beginning of the "Era of Good Feelings", an era marked by the formal demise of the Federalist Party and increased nationalism.[28]
Despite American successes, the mismanagement of the Army during the war very much distressed Calhoun, and he resolved to strengthen and centralize the War Department.[29] The militia had proven itself quite unreliable during the war and Calhoun saw the need for a permanent and professional military force. In 1816 he called for building an effective navy, including steam frigates, as well as a standing army of adequate size. The British blockade of the coast had underscored the necessity of rapid means of internal transportation; Calhoun proposed a system of "great permanent roads". The blockade had cut off the import of manufactured items, so he emphasized the need to encourage more domestic manufacture, fully realizing that industry was based in the Northeast. The dependence of the old financial system on import duties was devastated when the blockade cut off imports. Calhoun called for a system of internal taxation that would not collapse from a war-time shrinkage of maritime trade, as the tariffs had done. The expiration of the charter of the First Bank of the United States had also distressed the Treasury, so to reinvigorate and modernize the economy Calhoun called for a new national bank. A new bank was chartered as the Second Bank of the United States by Congress and approved by President James Madison in 1816. Through his proposals, Calhoun emphasized a national footing and downplayed sectionalism and states rights. Historian Ulrich B. Phillips says that at this stage of Calhoun's career, "The word nation was often on his lips, and his conviction was to enhance national unity which he identified with national power"[30]
Regarding his career in the House of Representatives, an observer commented that Calhoun was "the most elegant speaker that sits in the House ... His gestures are easy and graceful, his manner forcible, and language elegant; but above