The extraordinary abilities of John C. Calhoun, the great influence he exerted as the representative of Southern interests in the National Legislature, and especially his connection with the Slavery Question, make it necessary to include him among the statesmen who, for evil or good, have powerfully affected the destinies of the United States. He is a great historical character,--the peer of Webster and Clay in congressional history, and more unsullied than either of them in the virtues of private life. In South Carolina he was regarded as little less than a demigod, and until the antislavery agitation began he was viewed as among the foremost statesmen of the land. His elevation to commanding influence in Congress was very rapid, and but for his identification with partisan interests and a bad institution, there was no office in the gift of the nation to which he could not reasonably have aspired.
John Caldwell Calhoun was born in 1782, of highly respectable Protestant-Irish descent, in the Abbeville District in South Carolina. He was not a patrician, according to the ideas of rich planters. He had but a slender school education in boyhood, but was prepared for college by a Presbyterian clergyman, entered the Junior Class of Yale College in 1802, and was graduated with high honors. He chose the law for his profession, studied laboriously for three years, spending eighteen months at the then famous law school at Litchfield, Connecticut, and gave great promise, in his remarkable logical powers, of becoming an eminent lawyer.
Whatever abilities Mr. Calhoun may have had for the law, it does not appear that he practised it long, or to any great extent. His taste and his genius inclined him to politics. And, having married a lady with some fortune, he had sufficient means to live without professional drudgery. After serving a short time in the State Legislature of South Carolina, he was elected a member of Congress, and took his seat in the House of Representatives in 1811, at the age of twenty-nine. From the very first his voice was heard. He made a speech in favor of raising ten thousand additional men to our army to resist the encroachments of Great Britain and prepare for hostilities should the country drift into war. It was an able speech for a young man, and its scornful repudiation of reckoning the costs of war against insult and violated rights had a chivalric ring about it: "Sir, I here enter my solemn protest against a low and calculating avarice entering this hall of legislation. It is only fit for shops and counting-houses.... It is a compromising spirit, always ready to yield a part to save the residue." Here at an early date we hear the key-note of his life,--hatred of compromises and half-measures. If it were necessary to go to war at all, he would fight regardless of expense.
Thus Calhoun began his public career as an advocate of war with Great Britain. The old Revolutionary sores had not yet had time to heal, and there was general hostility to England, except among the Virginia aristocrats and the Federalists of the North. Although a young man, Calhoun was placed upon the important committee of Foreign Affairs, of which he was soon made chairman.
Calhoun's early speeches in Congress gave promise of rare abilities. The most able of them were those on the repeal of the Embargo, in 1814; on the commercial convention with Great Britain in 1816; on the United States Bank Bill and the tariff the same year; and on the Internal Improvement Bill in 1817. The main subject which occupied Congress from 1812 to 1814 was the war with Great Britain, during the administration of Madison; and afterwards, till 1817, the great questions at issue were in reference to tariffs and internal improvements.
In the discussion of these subjects Calhoun took broad and patriotic ground. At that time we see no sectional interests predominating in his mind. He favored internal improvements, great permanent roads, and even the protection of manufactures, and a National Bank. On all these questions his sectional interests at a later day led him to support the exact opposite of these early national views. Says Von Holst: "His speech on the new tariff bill (April 6, 1816) was a long and carefully prepared argument in favor of the whole economical platform on which the Whig party stood to the last day of its existence.... Even Henry Clay and Horace Greeley have not been able to put their favorite doctrine into stronger language.... His final aim was the industrial independence of the United States from Europe; and this, he thought, could be obtained by protective duties."
Calhoun's speeches, during the six years that he was a member of the House of Representatives, were so able as to attract the attention of the nation, and in 1817 Monroe selected him as his Secretary of War. And he made a good executive officer in this branch of the public service, putting things to rights, and bringing order out of confusion, living on terms of friendship with John Quincy Adams and other members of the cabinet, planning military roads, introducing a system of strict economy in his department, and making salutary reforms. He tolerated no abuses. He was disposed to do justice to the Indians, and raise them from their degradation, even seeking to educate them, when it was more than probable that they would return to their barbaric habits,--a race, as it would seem from experience, very difficult to civilize. Adams thus spoke of his young colleague: "Mr. Calhoun is a man of fair and candid mind, of honorable principles, of quick and clear understanding, of cool self-possession, of enlarged philosophical views, and of ardent patriotism. He is above all sectional and factious prejudices more than any other statesman of this Union with whom I have ever acted,"--a very different verdict from what he wrote in his diary in 1831. Judge Story wrote of him in 1823 in these terms: "I have great admiration for Mr. Calhoun, and think few men have more enlarged and liberal views of the true policy of the national government."
The post he held, however, was not Calhoun's true arena, but one which an ambitious young man of thirty-five could not well decline, from the honor it brought. The secretaryship of war is the least important of all the cabinet offices in time of peace, and was especially so when the army was reduced to six thousand men. Its functions amounted to little more than sending small detachments to military posts, making contracts for the commissariat, visiting occasionally the forts and fortifications, and making a figure in Washington society. It furnished no field for extensive operations, or the exercise of remarkable qualities of mind. But inasmuch as it made Calhoun a member of the cabinet, it gave him an opportunity to express his mind on all national issues, and exercise an influence on the President himself. It did not make him prominent in the eyes of the nation. He was simply the head of a bureau, although an important personage in the eyes of the cadets of West Point and of some lazy lieutenants stationed among the Indians. But whatever the part he was required to play, he did his duty, showed ability, and won confidence. He doubtless added to his reputation, else he would not have been talked about as a candidate for the presidency, selected as a candidate for the vice-presidency, and chosen to that position by Northern votes, as he was in 1824, when the election was thrown into the House of Representatives, and the friends of Henry Clay made Adams, instead of Jackson, President. Calhoun's popularity with all parties resulted in his election as vice-president by a very large popular vote. He deserved it. The day had not come for the ascendency of mere politicians, and their division of the spoils of office.
The condition of the slaveholding States at this period was most prosperous. The culture of cotton had become exceedingly lucrative. Rich planters spent their summers at the North in luxurious independence. It was the era of general "good feeling." No agitating questions had arisen. Young men at the South sought education in the New England colleges; manufacturing interests were in their infancy, and had not, as yet, excited Southern jealousy. Commercial prosperity in New England was the main object desired, although the war with Great Britain had proved disastrous to it. Political influence seemed to centre in the Southern States. These States had furnished four presidents out of five. The great West had not arisen in its might; it had no great cities: but Charleston and Boston were centres of culture and wealth, and on good terms with each other, both equally free from agitating questions, and both equally benignant to the institution of slavery, which the Constitution was supposed to have made secure forever. The Adams administration was notable for nothing but beginnings of the tariff question and the protectionist Act of 1828, the growth of the Democratic party, the final intensity of the presidential campaign of 1828, and the election of Jackson, with Calhoun as Vice-president.
As the incumbent of this office for two terms, Mr. Calhoun did not make a great mark in history. His office was one of dignity and not of power; but during his vice-presidency important discussions took place in Congress which placed him, as presiding officer of the Senate, in an embarrassing position. He was between two fires, and gradually became alienated from the two opposing parties to whom he owed his election. He could go neither with Adams nor with Jackson on public measures, and both interfered with his aspirations for the presidency. His personal relations with Jackson, who had been his warm friend and supporter, became strained after his second election as Vice-President. He took part against Jackson in the President's undignified attempt to force his cabinet to recognize the social position of Mrs. Eaton. Further, it was divulged by Crawford, who had been Secretary of the Treasury in Monroe's cabinet when Calhoun was Secretary of War, that the latter had in 1818 favored a censure of Jackson for his unauthorized seizure of Spanish territory in the Florida campaign during the Seminole War; and this increased the growing animosity. What had been an alienation between the two highest officers of the government ripened into intense hatred, which was fatal to the aspirations of Calhoun for the presidency; for no man could be President against the overpowering influence of Jackson. This was a bitter disappointment to Calhoun, for he had set his heart on being the successor of Jackson in the presidential chair.