John C. Calhoun

John C. Calhoun was the first to develop the concepts of states’ rights and Southern secession from the Union in the decades leading up to the American Civil War (1861–65). He was convinced that the only way to preserve the South's institution of slavery lay in separation of the slave states from the free (non-slave) states.

Early years

Calhoun was born on March 18, 1782, in rural South Carolina . His Scotch-Irish family was relatively wealthy and owned twenty or more slaves. His father was a judge and served in the state legislature. Calhoun graduated from Yale in 1804. He then studied law and established a law practice near his family home. In 1811, he married a distant cousin, and the marriage brought him a modest fortune. In 1825, he established a plantation in South Carolina.

Calhoun was a handsome young man with a commanding presence. He had little humor and no cultural interests, and he concerned himself almost completely with ideas, politics, and business. He was considered a great thinker.

War hawk

Calhoun's political career began in 1807 with a speech he delivered denouncing Britain for violating American rights at sea. He was elected to the South Carolina legislature in 1808 and two years later won election to the U.S. House of Representatives. In Congress, he became one of the

“war hawks,” a group of congressmen led by U.S. representative Henry Clay (1777–1852) of Kentucky , who strongly and impatiently urged war with England. Calhoun became chairman of the Foreign Affairs Committee, where he played a major role in moving the country into the War of 1812 (1812–14) against Great Britain.

After the war, Calhoun pushed for a stronger military establishment. He advocated measures that he himself would later denounce as unconstitutional, such as federal encouragement of manufacturing interests by means of a protective tariff (a duty, or tax, paid on imports), and federally funded internal improvements like roads and canals.

Calhoun held top positions through several presidential administrations. He was secretary of war under James Monroe (1758–1831; served 1817–25), and he served as vice president under both John Quincy Adams (1767–1848; served 1825–29) and Andrew Jackson (1767–1845; served 1829–37). He had expectations of becoming president, but he fell out of favor because of his involvement in the nullification controversy .

Nullification theory

Just before Jackson was elected president, Congress passed an extremely high protective tariff, taxing goods coming into the United States from other countries. This tariff raised the prices of imported goods, making them less competitive against goods produced within the country. The Tariff of 1828 (also known as the Tariff of Abominations) protected only those goods manufactured in the industrial North. The South had no such protections for its agricultural products. Europeans, resenting the tariffs on their products in the United States, were far less likely to buy any American products.

Most Southerners hated the tariff, but the cotton planters of South Carolina were especially angry. South Carolina was already facing economic disaster as its soil became depleted (its nutrients reduced or used up) by the overplanting of cotton. The proposed tariff would only further damage the frail economy.

Calhoun turned to the Constitution to find a way for his state to avoid the tariff. In 1829, he secretly wrote and distributed copies of The South Carolina Exposition and Protest, a pamphlet with an unusual interpretation of the Constitution. Calhoun argued that the Union (the United States) had not been formed directly by the people of the United States; rather, it had been formed through the individual states, of which the people were citizens. According to Calhoun, it was the states, and not the federal government, that were supreme in power. Thus, when a state objected to a law passed by a majority in the federal government, that state had the right to nullify the law (block its enforcement) within its borders until three-quarters of the other states overruled its decision. At the time it was overruled, the state could choose to yield to the will of the other states, or to secede (withdraw) entirely from the Union. President Jackson, who believed in preserving the Union at all costs, was furious when he learned that Calhoun, his vice president, was the author of this doctrine.

Jackson threatened military force to collect the duties in South Carolina. In December 1832, Calhoun resigned from the vice presidency after being elected by South Carolina to the U.S. Senate to defend its cause. Clay brought forth a compromise, which Calhoun supported, to lower the tariff gradually over a decade. The crisis subsided for a time.

A sectional position

Calhoun was outspoken in his support of slavery in the South. In the Senate in the 1830s, Calhoun attacked the abolitionists (people who wish to eliminate slavery altogether), demanding that their publications be excluded from the mails and their petitions not be received by Congress, and finally urging a prohibition on all protests against slavery. By 1837, he was defending slavery as “a positive good” and had become an advocate for the suppression of open discussion and a free press.

Calhoun began to write his political theory in the middle 1840s. These political writings were published after his death. In them he insisted that the Constitution should be based on the principle that people are not equally entitled to liberty. He argued against government by the will of the majority, which he believed would necessarily take away the rights of minorities (such as Southern slave owners). He proposed to give the minority groups a veto power over federal legislation. He also proposed having two executives, or presidents, for the Union, each to be chosen by one of the great sections of the country, with the agreement of both necessary for federal action.

Calhoun's shift to a sectional position (one concerned with a particular region and its interests) had virtually destroyed his chances for the presidency, but he continued to aspire to that office. He declared his candidacy in 1843 but withdrew to accept appointment as secretary of state for the last year in office of President John Tyler (1790–1862; served 1841–45). In that position, Calhoun championed the annexation of Texas as a slave state. He negotiated a treaty of annexation, but it did not pass in Congress.

For the rest of his life, Calhoun fought federal acts that in any way encroached on the South's right to choose its own institutions. Determined to see the Southern way of life preserved, he must have foreseen the trouble ahead. As he lay dying in 1850, his last words were, “The South! The poor South!”