
John Caldwell Calhoun
Former Vice President of the United States
Education
- Yale University in Connecticut -
- Graduate - Yale College in New Haven
- Litchfield Law School - Connecticut
- -
Overview
John Caldwell Calhoun was an American statesman and political theorist from South Carolina who held many important positions including being the seventh vice president of the United States from 1825 to 1832. He adamantly defended slavery and sought to protect the interests of the white South. He began his political career as a nationalist, modernizer, and proponent of a strong national 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. He saw Northern acceptance of those policies as a condition of the South remaining in the Union. His beliefs and warnings heavily influenced the South's secession from the Union in 1860–1861. He was the first of two vice presidents to resign from the position, the other was 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, Calhoun strongly supported the War of 1812. He served as Secretary of War under President James Monroe and, in that position, reorganized and modernized the War Department. Calhoun was a candidate for the presidency in the 1824 election. After failing to gain support, he agreed to be a candidate for vice president. The Electoral College elected Calhoun 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).
Calhoun had a difficult relationship with Jackson, primarily because of the Nullification Crisis and the Petticoat affair. In contrast with his previous nationalism, 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 entered 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 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. His concept of republicanism emphasized approval of slavery and minority states' rights as particularly embodied by the South. He owned dozens of slaves in Fort Hill, South Carolina. Calhoun asserted that slavery, rather than being a "necessary evil", was a "positive good" that benefited both slaves and owners. 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.
Personal life :
In January 1811, Calhoun married Floride Bonneau Colhoun, a first cousin once removed. She was the daughter of wealthy United States Senator and lawyer John E. Colhoun, a leader of Charleston high society.
The couple had 10 children over 18 years:
Andrew Pickens (1811-1865)
Floride Pure (1814-1815)
Jane (1816-1816)
Anna Maria (1817-1875)--married Thomas Green Clemson, who later founded Clemson University in South Carolina.
Elizabeth (1819-1820)
Patrick (1821-1858)
John Caldwell Jr. (1823-1850)
Martha Cornelia (1824-1857)
James Edward (1826-1861)
William Lowndes (1829-1858)
Calhoun was not openly religious. He was raised as an orthodox Presbyterian, but he was attracted to Southern varieties of Unitarianism of the sort that attracted Jefferson. Southern Unitarianism was generally less organized than the variety popular in New England. He was generally not outspoken about his religious beliefs. After his marriage, Calhoun and his wife attended the Episcopal Church, of which she was a member. In 1821 he became a founding member of All Souls Unitarian Church in Washington, D.C.
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' ...
Early Life
John Caldwell Calhoun was born in Abbeville District, South Carolina, on March 18, 1782, the fourth child of Patrick Calhoun (1727–1796) and his wife Martha (Caldwell). He was a member of the well known Calhoun family. Patrick's father, also named Patrick Calhoun, had joined the Scotch-Irish immigration movement from County Donegal to southwestern Pennsylvania. After the death of the elder Patrick in 1741, the family moved to southwestern Virginia. Following the defeat of British General Edward Braddock at the Battle of the Monongahela in 1755, the family, fearing Indian attacks, moved to South Carolina in 1756.
Patrick Calhoun belonged to the Calhoun clan in the tight-knit Scotch-Irish community on the Southern frontier. He was known as an Indian fighter and an ambitious surveyor, farmer, planter, and politician, elected to the South Carolina Legislature. As a Presbyterian, he stood opposed to the established Anglican planter elite based in Charleston. He was not a patriot in the American Revolution and opposed ratification of the federal Constitution on grounds of states' rights and personal liberties. Calhoun would eventually adopt his father's states' rights beliefs.
Young Calhoun showed scholastic talent, and although schools were scarce on the Carolina frontier, he was enrolled briefly in an academy in Appling, Georgia. It soon closed. 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 the academy after it reopened.
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.
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."Dwight also expounded on the strategy of secession from the Union as a legitimate solution for New England's disagreements with the national government.
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.
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.
Career
- United States - Former Vice President