John C. Calhoun

John C. Calhoun was a United States vice-president, senator and cabinet officer who built the constitutional theory behind Southern secession. Born in South Carolina in 1782 to a slaveholding farmer, he was educated at Yale and studied law in Connecticut, and married a wealthy cousin. He entered Congress in 1811 as one of the War Hawks who pushed the country into war with Britain, and in his early career was a strong nationalist — supporting a national bank, protective tariffs and federally funded roads and canals. He was an effective Secretary of War under James Monroe from 1817, reorganising the department. He was vice-president under John Quincy Adams and then Andrew Jackson, and reversed his nationalism completely as South Carolina's cotton economy suffered under high tariffs. In 1828 he anonymously wrote the South Carolina Exposition and Protest, arguing that a state could declare a federal law void within its borders. The nullification crisis of 1832-33 followed; Jackson threatened force, Calhoun resigned the vice-presidency to enter the Senate, and a compromise tariff defused it. He spent the rest of his life defending slavery and the South's position within the Union. In 1837 he abandoned the older apologetic line entirely, telling the Senate that slavery was a positive good for both races — a formulation that hardened Southern politics for a generation. As Secretary of State he pushed the annexation of Texas explicitly to protect slavery, and he opposed the Mexican War's territorial gains as a threat to sectional balance. His posthumous Disquisition on Government proposed a concurrent majority, giving each interest a veto. He died in 1850, warning that the Union could not survive.

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