Calhoun, John C. (1782–1850)

• Author: Merrill D. Peterson
• Pages: 290-293

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John C. Calhoun, foremost southern statesman of his time, was a product of the great Scots-Irish migration that took

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possession of the southern backcountry before the AMERICAN REVOLUTION. Born near Abbeville, South Carolina, young Calhoun received a smattering of education at a local academy and in his twentieth year went "straight from the backwoods" to Yale College. He excelled by force of intellect and zeal. In 1805, not long after graduating, he attended Litchfield Law School. This New England Federalist education left a permanent impression on Calhoun's mind, though all his political associations were Jeffersonian. Returning to South Carolina, he was admitted to the bar and hung out his shingle in Abbeville. But Calhoun did not take to the law. After making it the step-pingstone to the political career he desperately wanted, he gave it up altogether. In 1807 he was elected to the legislature, taking the seat once held by his father. Sometime later he married Floride Bonneau Colhoun, who belonged to the wealthy lowcountry branch of the family, and brought her to the plantation he had acquired above the Savannah River. After two sessions at Columbia, Calhoun won election to the Twelfth Congress. He took his place with the "war hawks" and upon a brilliant maiden speech was hailed as "one of the master-spirits who stamp their name upon the age in which they live."

Calhoun's major biographer has conveniently divided his career into three phases: nationalist, nullifier, sectionalist. During the first, which ended in 1828, Calhoun was successively congressman, secretary of war, and vice-president. As a nationalist, he was the chief congressional architect of the Second Bank of the United States; he supported the tariff of 1816, including its most protective feature, the minimum duty on cheap cotton cloth; and he was a prominent advocate of INTERNAL IMPROVEMENTS. Many Republicans, headed by President JAMES MADISON, believed a constitutional amendment was necessary to sanction federally funded internal improvements. But Calhoun, speaking for his Bonus Bill to create a permanent fund for this purpose, declared that he "was no advocate for refined arguments on the Constitution. 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.?"He held that the GENERAL WELFARE clause was a distinct power; to those who balked at that, he cited the ENUMERATED POWER to establish post roads. Deeply committed to a system of roads and canals and other improvements to strengthen the Union and secure its defenses, Calhoun, like Hamilton before him, viewed the Constitution as the starting-point for creative states-manship. Later, when advocating internal improvements as secretary of war, he passed over the constitutional question in silence, thereby avoiding conflict with his chief, JAMES MONROE, who inherited Madison's scruples on the subject.

Calhoun made his first bid for the presidency in 1824 as an unabashed nationalist who professed "to be above all sectional or party feelings and to be devoted to the great interests of the country." He had to settle for the vice-presidency, however; and in that office he seized the first occasion to join the...