Mr. Vice-President Calhoun found his Carolina discontented in 1824, when he took up his abode at Fort Hill. Since the Revolution, South Carolina had never been satisfied, and had never had reason to be. The cotton-gin had appeased her for a while, but had not suspended the operation of the causes which produced the stagnation of the South. Profuse expenditure, unskilful agriculture, the costliest system of labor in the world, and no immigration, still kept Irelandizing the Southern States; while the North was advancing and improving to such a degree as to attract emigrants from all lands. The contrast was painful to Southern men, and to most of them it was mysterious. Southern politicians came to the conclusion that the cause at once of Northern prosperity and Southern poverty was the protective tariff and the appropriations for internal improvements, but chiefly the tariff. In 1824, when Mr. Calhoun went home, the tariff on some leading articles had been increased, and the South was in a ferment of opposition to the protective system. If Mr. Calhoun had been a wise and honest man, he would have reminded his friends that the decline of the South had been a subject of remark from the peace of 1783, and therefore could not have been caused by the tariff of 1816, or 1820, or 1824. He would have told them that slavery, as known in the Southern States, demands virgin lands,—must have, every few years, its cotton-gin, its Louisiana, its Cherokee country, its something, to give new value to its products or new scope for its operations. He might have added that the tariff of 1824 was a grievance, did tend to give premature development to a manufacturing system, and was a fair ground for a national issue between parties. The thing which he did was this: he adopted the view of the matter which was predominant in the extreme South, and accepted the leadership of the extreme Southern, anti-tariff, strict-constructionist wing of the Democratic party. He echoed the prevailing opinion, that the tariff and the internal improvement system, to both of which he was fully committed, were the sole causes of Southern stagnation; since by the one their money was taken from them, and by the other it was mostly spent where it did them no good.
He was, of course, soon involved in a snarl of contradictions, from which he never could disentangle himself. Let us pass to the year 1828, a most important one in the history of the country and of Mr. Calhoun; for then occurred the first of the long series of events which terminated with the surrender of the last Rebel army in 1865. The first act directly tending to a war between the South and the United States bears date December 6, 1828; and it was the act of John C. Calhoun.
It was the year of that Presidential election which placed Andrew Jackson in the White House, and re-elected Mr. Calhoun to the Vice-Presidency. It was the year that terminated the honorable part of Mr. Calhoun's career and began the dishonorable. His political position in the canvass was utterly false, as he himself afterwards confessed. On the one hand, he was supporting for the Presidency a man committed to the policy of protection; and on the other, he became the organ and mouthpiece of the Southern party, whose opposition to the protective principle was tending to the point of armed resistance to it. The tariff bill of 1828, which they termed the bill of abominations, had excited the most heated opposition in the cotton States, and especially in South Carolina. This act was passed in the spring of the very year in which those States voted for a man who had publicly endorsed the principle involved in it; and we see Mr. Calhoun heading the party who were electioneering for Jackson, and the party who were considering the policy of nullifying the act which he had approved. His Presidential aspirations bound him to the support of General Jackson; but the first, the fundamental necessity of his position was to hold possession of South Carolina.
The burden of Mr. Calhoun's later speeches was the reconciliation of the last part of his public life with the first. The task was difficult, for there is not a leading proposition in his speeches after 1830 which is not refuted by arguments to be found in his public utterances before 1828. In his speech on the Force Bill, in 1834, he volunteered an explanation of the apparent inconsistency between his support of General Jackson in 1828, and his authorship of the "South Carolina Exposition" in the same year. Falsehood and truth are strangely interwoven in almost every sentence of his later writings; and there is also that vagueness in them which comes of a superfluity of words. He says, that for the strict-constructionist party to have presented a candidate openly and fully identified with their opinions would have been to court defeat; and thus they were obliged either to abandon the contest, or to select a candidate "whose opinions were intermediate or doubtful on the subject which divided the two sections,"—a candidate "who, at best, was but a choice of evils." Besides, General Jackson was a Southern man, and it was hoped that, notwithstanding his want of experience, knowledge, and self-control, the advisers whom he would invite to assist him would compensate for those defects. Then Mr. Calhoun proceeds to state, that the contest turned chiefly upon the question of protection or free trade; and the strife was, which of the two parties should go farthest in the advocacy of protection. The result was, he says, that the tariff bill of 1828 was passed,—"that disastrous measure which has brought so many calamities upon us, and put in peril the liberty and union of the country," and "poured millions into the treasury beyond the most extravagant wants of the country."
The passage of this tariff bill was accomplished by the tact of Martin Van Buren, aided by Major Eaton, Senator from Tennessee. Mr. Van Buren was the predestined chief of General Jackson's Cabinet, and Major Eaton was the confidant, agent, and travelling manager of the Jacksonian wire-pullers, besides being the General's own intimate friend. The events of that session notified Mr. Calhoun that, however manageable General Jackson might be, he was not likely to fall into the custody of the Vice-President. General Jackson's election being considered certain, the question was alone interesting, who should possess him for the purposes of the succession. The prospect, as surveyed that winter from the Vice-President's chair, was not assuring to the occupant of that lofty seat. If General Jackson could not be used as a fulcrum for the further elevation of Mr. Calhoun, would it not be advisable to begin to cast about for another?
The tariff bill of 1828 was passed before the Presidential canvass had set in with its last severity. There was time for Mr. Calhoun to withdraw from the support of the man whose nearest friends had carried it through the Senate under his eyes. He did not do so. He went home, after the adjournment of Congress, to labor with all his might for the election of a protectionist, and to employ his leisure hours in the composition of that once famous paper called the "South Carolina Exposition," in which protection was declared to be an evil so intolerable as to justify the nullification of an act founded upon it. This Exposition was the beginning of our woe,—the baleful egg from which were hatched nullification, treason, civil war, and the desolation of the Southern States. Here is Mr. Calhoun's own account of the manner in which what he correctly styles "the double operation" was "pushed on" in the summer of 1828:—
"This disastrous event [the passage of the tariff bill of 1828] opened our eyes (I mean myself and those immediately connected with me) as to the full extent of the danger and oppression of the protective system, and the hazard of failing to effect the reform intended through the election of General Jackson. With these disclosures, it became necessary to seek some other ultimate, but more certain measure of protection. We turned to the Constitution to find this remedy. We directed a more diligent and careful scrutiny into its provisions, in order to understand fully the nature and character of our political system. We found a certain and effectual remedy in that great fundamental division of the powers of the system between this government and its independent co-ordinates, the separate governments of the States,—to be called into action to arrest the unconstitutional acts of this government by the interposition of the States,—the paramount source from which both governments derive their power. But in relying on this our ultimate remedy, we did not abate our zeal in the Presidential canvass; we still hoped that General Jackson, if elected, would effect the necessary reform, and thereby supersede the necessity for calling into action the sovereign authority of the State, which we were anxious to avoid. With these views the two were pushed with equal zeal at the same time; which double operation commenced in the fall of 1828, but a few months after the passage of the tariff act of that year; and at the meeting of the Legislature of the State, at the same period, a paper known as the South Carolina Exposition was reported to that body, containing a full development, as well on the constitutional point as on the operation of the protective system, preparatory to a state of things which might eventually render the action of the State necessary in order to protect her rights and interest, and to stay a course of policy which we believed would, if not arrested, prove destructive of liberty and the Constitution."—Works, II. 396.
Mr. Calhoun omits, however, to mention that the Exposition was not presented to the Legislature of South Carolina until after the Presidential election had been decided. Nor did he inform his hearers that the author of the paper was Mr. Vice-President Calhoun. Either there was a great dearth of literary ability in that body, or else Mr. Calhoun had little confidence in it; for nearly all the ponderous documents on nullification given to the world in its name were penned by Mr. Calhoun, and appear in his collected works. If the Legislature addressed its constituents or the people of the United States on this subject, it was he who prepared the draft. The South Carolina Exposition was found among his papers in his own handwriting, and it was adopted by the Legislature with only a few alterations and suppressions. There never was a piece of mischief more completely the work of one man than the nullification troubles of 1833-34.
The South Carolina Exposition, when Mr. Calhoun had completed it, was brought before the public by one of the usual methods. The Legislature of South Carolina passed the following resolutions:—
"Resolved, That it is expedient to protest against the unconstitutional and oppressive operation of the system of protective duties, and to have such protest entered on the journals of the Senate of the United States. Also, to make a public exposition of our wrongs, and of the remedies within our power, to be communicated to our sister States, with a request that they will co-operate with this State in procuring a repeal of the tariff for protection, and an abandonment of the principle; and if the repeal be not procured, that they will co-operate in such measures as may be necessary for averting the evil.