Identify John C. Calhoun.?

Question: Identify John C!. Calhoun!.!?

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American political leader who was a congressman, secretary of war, seventh vice president (1825–32), senator, and secretary of state!. He championed states' rights and slavery and was a symbol of the Old South!.

Early years
Calhoun was born to Patrick Calhoun, a well-to-do Scots-Irish farmer, and Martha Caldwell, both of whom had recently migrated from Pennsylvania to the Carolina Piedmont!. Two years after enrolling in a local academy at age 18, he entered the junior class at Yale College, where he graduated with distinction!. After a year at a law school and further study in the office of a prominent member of the Federalist Party in Charleston, S!.C!., he was admitted to the bar but abandoned his practice after his marriage in 1811 to his cousin, Floride Bonneau Calhoun, an heiress whose modest fortune enabled him to become a planter-statesman!.

An ardent Jeffersonian Republican who called for war with Britain as early as 1807, Calhoun was elected to South Carolina's state legislature in 1808 and to the United States House of Representatives in 1811!. There he functioned as a main lieutenant of Speaker Henry Clay, and, in his capacity as chairman of the House Foreign Relations Committee, he introduced the declaration of war against Britain in June 1812!. His service as majority floor leader during the War of 1812 led a colleague to call him the “young Hercules who carried the war on his shoulders!.”

In the postwar session he was chairman of the committees that introduced bills for the second Bank of the United States, a permanent road system, and a standing army and modern navy; he also vigorously supported the protective tariff of 1816!. Thus, during this period, Calhoun was the major intellectual spokesman of American nationalism!. In 1817 President James Monroe appointed Calhoun secretary of war, and his distinguished performance in that post, as well as his previous legislative prominence, led his friend John Quincy Adams, then secretary of state, to declare that his Carolina colleague “is above all sectional and factious prejudices more than any other statesman of this Union with whom I have ever acted!.”

Calhoun won rapid recognition for his parliamentary skill as one of the leaders of the Republican Party (the old Democratic-Republican Party; later the Democratic Party), yet his eagerness for personal advancement, his glib exuberance in debate, and his egotism aroused an undercurrent of distrust!. Commenting on Calhoun's nomination for president in 1821 by a rump group of Northern congressmen, a former secretary of the Treasury, Albert Gallatin, called him “a smart fellow, one of the first among second-rate men, but of lax political principles and a disordinate ambition not over-delicate in the means of satisfying itself!.”

To a degree not exceeded by that of any of his contemporaries, Calhoun was consumed by a burning passion to achieve the presidency!. He vigorously sought the office three times!. During each attempt, an anonymous eulogistic biography appeared in print; these works were in fact autobiographies written in the third person!.

Calhoun was elected vice president in 1824 under John Quincy Adams and was reelected in 1828 under Andrew Jackson!. In the 1830s Calhoun became as extreme in his devotion to strict construction of the United States Constitution as he had earlier been in his support of nationalism!. In the summer of 1831 he openly avowed his belief in nullification, a position that he had anonymously advanced three years earlier in the essay South Carolina Exposition and Protest!. Each state was sovereign, Calhoun contended, and the Constitution was a compact among the sovereign states!. Therefore, any one state (but not the United States Supreme Court) could declare an act of Congress unconstitutional!. The proponents of the nullified measure, according to the theory, would then have to obtain an amendment to the Constitution—which required a two-thirds vote of each house of Congress and ratification by three-fourths of the states—confirming the power of Congress to take such action!.

Although the tariff was the specific issue in the nullification crisis of 1832–33, what Calhoun was actually fighting for was protection of the South's “peculiar institution,” slavery, which he feared someday might be abolished by a Northern majority in Congress!. The tariff, Calhoun put forth in one of his public letters, is “of vastly inferior importance to the great question to which it has given rise…the right of a state to interpose, in the last resort, in order to arrest an unconstitutional act of the General Government!.”

To Calhoun's chagrin, a majority of the Southern states formally and vehemently rejected his doctrine of nullification!. Even Jefferson Davis, who later served as president of the Confederate States of America during the American Civil War, denied the right of a state to nullify a congressional act!.

A genius unto himself, Calhoun lacked the capacity for close friendship and eventually drove most of his associates into active enmity, not least among them President Jackson!. His banishment by Jackson was, however, mainly a matter of bad luck!. No one did more to make Jackson president than Calhoun, and his prospects in 1828 were most promising!. “I was a candidate for reelection (as vice president) on a ticket with General Jackson himself,” he wrote later, “with a certain prospect of the triumphant success of the ticket, and a fair prospect of the highest office to which an American citizen can aspire!.” But Calhoun joined his wife and the wives of other cabinet members in a social boycott of Peggy Eaton, the wife of the secretary of war, for her alleged adultery!. Jackson leapt to the defense of Eaton and eventually fired his entire Cabinet and broke with the vice president!. Late in 1832 Calhoun resigned the vice presidency, was elected to the Senate, and vainly debated Daniel Webster in defense of his cherished doctrine of nullification!. He spent the last 20 years of his life in the Senate working to unite the South against the abolitionist attack on slavery, and his efforts included opposing the admittance of Oregon and California to the Union as free states!. His efforts were in vain, however, and his exuberant defense of slavery as a “positive good” aroused strong anti-Southern feeling in the free states!.

Certainly the American Civil War was too vast an event to be the responsibility of any one man, but it can be argued that Calhoun contributed as much to its coming as did abolitionist crusader William Lloyd Garrison and President Abraham Lincoln!. The man himself was an enigma!. A staunch nationalist during the first half of his public life, one who told the son of Alexander Hamilton in 1823 that his father's attempt to create a strong federal government “as developed by the measures of Washington's administration is the only true policy for this country,” in the latter part of his career Calhoun became an unwavering champion of states' rights!. Yet he said shortly before his death, “If I am judged by my acts, I trust I shall be found as firm a friend of the Union as any man in it!.…If I shall have any place in the memory of posterity it will be in consequence of my deep attachment to it!.”

After Calhoun's death, his protégé, James H!. Hammond, said that

pre-eminent as he was intellectually above all the men of this age as I believe, he was so wanting in judgment in the managing of men, was so unyielding and unpersuasive, that he never could consolidate sufficient power to accomplish anything great, of himself and [in] due season !. !. !. and the jealousy of him—his towering genius and uncompromising temper, has had much effect in preventing the South from uniting to resist [evil]!.

Calhoun's two books on government, published posthumously, and his many cogent speeches in Congress have gained him a reputation as one of the country's foremost original political theorists!. He has been credited with preceding Karl Marx in advancing an economic interpretation of history, yet most of his basic ideas, particularly that of nullification, were acquired from James Madison, who was 30 years his senior!. Although Calhoun is remembered as the defender of minorities, he had no use for any minority—certainly not labourers or abolitionists—except the Southern one!. His solution to the problem of the preservation of the Union was to give the South everything it demanded!. He was truly devoted both to the Union and to the South, and death took him before he had to choose between them!. But with rare insight, in 1850 he told a friend that the Union was doomed to dissolution: “I fix its probable occurrence within twelve years or three Presidential terms!.”

In his thinking Calhoun worked backward, as if from the answer at the end of a mathematics primer!. With his objective in mind, he chose a seemingly innocuous premise and then proceeded with hard logic to the desired conclusion!. The historian William P!. Trent said in the 1890s that he “started with the conclusion he wanted and reasoned back to the premises!.!.!.!.Calhoun led thought rather than men, and lacking imagination, he led thought badly!.”

Calhoun's life was a tragedy in both the Greek and the Shakespearean senses!. The gods thirsted after him, but he helped them along!. Almost his last words were “The South! The poor South!” The poet Walt Whitman heard a Union soldier say shortly after the surrender of Confederate forces at Appomattox Court House that the true monuments to Calhoun were the wasted farms and the gaunt chimneys scattered over the South!.

Additional Reading
Calhoun's writings are collected in Richard K!. Crallé (ed!.), The Works of John C!. Calhoun, 6 vols!. (1851–56, reissued 1968)!. Biographies include Charles M!. Wiltse, John C!. Calhoun, 3 vols!. (1944–51, reissued 1968), withWww@QuestionHome@Com

He was best known as the vice-president to Adams and Jackson!.Www@QuestionHome@Com