John C Calhoun Essay Research Paper John

John C. Calhoun Essay, Research Paper

John Caldwell Calhoun, statesman and political philosopher, was vice-

president, a congressman, secretary of war, senator, secretary of state, and a

leading champion of Southern rights. [Netscape 1] Throughout his life, Calhoun

kept advocating for the South and pushing for the growth of the South. Threw

his career as the vice-president, he kept pushing Jackson to help out his fellow

Southerners and keep the South alive. [Bartlett 26]

He was born on a farm near Abbeville, S.C., on Mar. 18, 1782. His

father, Patrick Calhoun, a man of Scotch-Irish decent, was a very religious man

that treated John very harshly. His father owned more than a score of slaves,

was a judge, and had served in the South Carolina legislature for a while,

fighting to get more representation for the newly set up land that he represented.

[Faber 74-75] John attended college at Yale and graduated in 1804. He studied

in the law school of Tapping Reeves in Litchfield, CN. He was admitted to the

South Carolina bar in 1807 and quickly established a practice near his home in

Abbeville. [Von Holst 37] He married a distant cousin in 1811 and had 9

children. This marriage brought him a large fortune. He enlarged his fortune

and in 1825 he built a plantation, called Fort Hill, in his native area. [Bartlett 39]

He was a very handsome man that had piercing eyes throughout his life. In his

later years, he was thought of as a “thinking machine”, speaking very quickly

and always very earnestly. He concerned himself with political philosophy, idea,

and business. [Niven 49] As one author wrote: “John C. Calhoun is best

remembered as an American statesman and a political philosopher.” [Netscape

1]

Calhoun began his political career by being elected to the South Carolina

state legislature in 1808 and 2 years later won election to the United States

House of Representatives. During his Congressional term, Henry Clay made

Calhoun the chairman of the Foreign Affairs Committee and he and other “War

2

Hawks” and advocated strongly for the War of 1812. [Faber 76] He led the

effort in the House to build up a strong Army, and after the war he continued to

work for a stronger , military establishment. [Niven 98]

Calhoun entered James Monroe’s Cabinet (1817-1825) as secretary of

war as a nationalist. [Bracelet 87] He became less and less militaristic through

his life. In 1812 he said that, “a war, just and necessary in its origin, wisely and

vigorously carried on, and honorably terminated.” [Niven 208] But in 1846, he

refused to vote for the declaration of war against Mexico. He thought that the

grounds that the President set for this war was wrong and said, “I regard peace

as a positive good, and war as a positive evil.” [Von Holst 107] In 1821, John

Quinsy Adams appraised Calhoun as:

A man of fair and candid mind…of enlarged philosophical views,

and of ardent patriotism. He is above all sectional and factional

prejudices more than any other statesman of the Union. [Bartlett

91]

Calhoun was J. Q. Adams’s vice president from 1825-1829 and was elected

vice-president again in 1828 under Andrew Jackson. [Netscape 1] This time in

history is referred to as the Nullification Crisis which refers to the Nullification of

the Tariff of Abominations by South Carolina and the turmoil that it caused.

[Bartlett 102] Calhoun had hoped to run for the presidency after Jackson left the

White House but during Jackson’s first term they had their share of conflicts.

Jackson discovered that Calhoun criticized his invasion of Florida in 1818 and

Jackson blew a fuse. Calhoun began to despise even the sight of Jackson.

[Morris 96] Calhoun anonymously wrote the “South Carolina Exposition” in

response to the Tariff of 1829 or the Tariff of Abominations. He argued that the

state had the right to “nullify” a Federal document, if the state believed that it

3

was unconstitutional. Calhoun believed that the Tariff of 1828 was a direct

attack on the South by depressing the foreign markets for the cotton in the

South. [Niven 180-181] As one author put it:

Calhoun had been driven by what he believed was the growing

weakness of his state and his section in an industrialized society.

Uncertain about a future in which the slave-plantation system

seemed to be increasingly on the defensive, Calhoun, with his

speculative mind and his latent insecurity, tended toward

rationalizing a potential minority position as the only proper

political logic that was blessed by Jeffersonian precedent and

confirmed by historical fact. [Niven 181

Jackson began to threaten military force to collect the duties in South

Carolina. [Morris 165] In 1832, Calhoun resigned the vice-presidency and was

elected to the senate so that he could defend South Carolina’s cause and in

1832 South Carolina

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