John C. Calhoun

John Caldwell Calhoun was a South Carolina lawyer, statesman, political theorist, congressman, senator, secretary of war, secretary of state, and the seventh Vice President of the United States. He became one of the most influential political thinkers of the antebellum South, developing arguments concerning states' rights, concurrent majorities, and the constitutional position of slavery. Calhoun served as vice president under both John Quincy Adams and Andrew Jackson before resigning amid his conflict with Jackson over the tariff and the doctrine of nullification.

Calhoun was born on March 18, 1782, in the Abbeville District of South Carolina to Patrick Calhoun, an Irish immigrant and planter, and Martha Caldwell Calhoun. His father died when Calhoun was thirteen, after which the young Calhoun helped manage the family's plantation before resuming his formal education. He attended Yale College, graduated in 1804, and studied law at the Litchfield Law School in Connecticut before returning to South Carolina and establishing a legal practice.

Calhoun entered politics as a member of the South Carolina House of Representatives and was elected to the U.S. House of Representatives in 1810. In Congress he became one of the leading advocates of the War Hawks who pressed the Madison administration toward war with Great Britain. He served as Secretary of War under James Monroe from 1817 to 1825, where he reorganized the department and worked to improve the administration of the nation's military establishment.

Calhoun became vice president under John Quincy Adams in 1825 after being elected separately under the electoral system then in effect. He was reelected vice president in 1828 alongside Andrew Jackson, but his relationship with Jackson deteriorated over Calhoun's opposition to the administration's position on the protective tariff. Calhoun anonymously published the South Carolina Exposition and Protest in 1828, arguing that a state could declare a federal law unconstitutional and refuse to enforce it; the resulting Nullification Crisis eventually led Calhoun to resign the vice presidency on December 28, 1832. He subsequently served as a U.S. senator, secretary of state under John Tyler, and senator again, becoming one of Congress's leading defenders of slavery and Southern constitutional interests.

After his final return to the Senate, Calhoun devoted much of his attention to the sectional conflict over slavery and the territories. His final years were dominated by the debate surrounding the admission of California and the Compromise of 1850, although he was too ill to deliver his final Senate speech personally. Calhoun died in Washington on March 31, 1850, only weeks before the Compromise of 1850 was enacted.

Calhoun's legacy rests heavily on his political theory of states' rights and concurrent majorities and on his role as one of the most prominent intellectual defenders of slavery. His writings, particularly A Disquisition on Government and A Disquisition on the Constitution and Government of the United States, became influential statements of antebellum Southern constitutional thought. His career also illustrates the growing sectional conflict that eventually produced the Civil War, making him a significant figure in the intellectual and political history of the antebellum United States.