Birthplace: Mt. In 1811, John C. Calhoun was elected to Congress, and from that date until his death he served in the federal government. US Vice President, champion of the South. If the revolutionary ideal of equality were taken too far, the authority of the elite would not be accepted. Critics of Calhoun simplistically suggest his statecraft and thought, as well as his critique of the American regime, serve a single purpose: the protection of … He developed a two-point defense. To destroy slavery, according to Calhoun, would be to destroy a powerful symbol of what motivated the Southern man to improve himself. In a very real way, he started the American Civil War. The man himself was an enigma. This, Calhoun protested — in repudiation of his earlier views — was an overextension of federal power. You may need to download version 2.0 now from the Chrome Web Store. In the 1820s, Southerners grew increasingly anxious about the North controlling the federal government and about how that situation threatened the South and its distinctive institutions. HistoryNet.com is brought to you by Historynet LLC, the world's largest publisher of history magazines. In the long run, Calhoun believed, regardless of what happened with slavery, the progress of civilization would in time doom the inferior African race to extinction. The second was his development of a political philosophy to limit the federal government’s power and thus protect the minority agrarian South and its institution of slavery. Calhoun did not formally state his authorship at the time, though it was widely suspected and later confirmed. In the North, industry and the economy it created grew in influence and power every day. He recognized it would be a mistake to maintain his association with Adams, whose ideas to expand the use of federal power to promote national economic, intellectual, and cultural development drew a cold reception in South Carolina. John Caldwell Calhoun was an American politician and political theorist from South Carolina who held many important positions including being the seventh vice president of the United States from 1825 to 1832, while adamantly defending slavery and protecting the interests of the white South when its residents were outnumbered by Northerners. Abraham Lincoln. Now, in defending the South’s unique economy and society, Calhoun was exercising away. ‘Our fate as a people is bound up in the question.’. Now, his goal was to insure the power of the local agrarian elite by limiting the power of the federal government. The bill became the target of Calhoun’s first speech upon returning to the Senate. Performance & security by Cloudflare, Please complete the security check to access. He favored going to war with Great Britain in the War of 1812. Jackson vs. Calhoun--Part 2. Your IP: 162.243.108.134 The results of this competition were displayed for all to see in the social order: those with the greatest talent and ability rose to the top, and the rest fell into place beneath them. In Calhoun’s view, slavery benefited black people. Because of the South’s investment in large-scale agriculture, any attack on slavery was an attack on the Southern economy itself. The compromise also prohibited slavery in the remainder of the Louisiana Purchase north of Missouri’s southern border. Contrary to the writings of those who unabashedly celebrated the North’s free labor system, antebellum Southern society, though definitely stratified, was highly fluid. Senator Thomas Hart Benton of Missouri, sternly rebuked an associate who suggested that he honor Calhoun with a eulogy in Congress. By now, relations between Jackson and Calhoun were crumbling fast. By this time, Southerners were increasingly taking an anti-federal-government stance. The first was his emergence as the leading political and intellectual defender of the South. John C. Calhoun - John C. Calhoun - Legacy: 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 Pres. The amount of money a master invested in his slaves made it economically unfeasible to mistreat them or ignore their working and living conditions. In the North, the free laborer was as much a slave to his employer as was the black man in the South, Calhoun argued, but he lacked the protection the black slave enjoyed from a paternalistic master. In these documents Jefferson and Madison applied the social contract theory formulated by 17-century English philosophers Thomas Hobbes and John Locke to the U.S. Constitution. In the late 1820s, his views changed ra… The son of a successful farmer who served in public office, Calhoun went to New Haven, Connecticut, in 1801 to attend Yale College. Calhoun began his political career in 1810 when he was first elected to Congress. Whether or not the story of her relations with Calhoun is true is a matter of no importance so far as Abraham Lincoln is concerned. ‘To govern by the numerical majority alone is to confuse a part of the people with the whole,’ he argued. Back in South Carolina, the state legislature chose Calhoun to fill the U.S. Senate seat recently vacated by Robert Y. Hayne. The South merely institutionalized this into a system that benefited both master and servant. Adams was glad to have Calhoun in his administration, having held him in high esteem since their days together in Monroe’s cabinet. John C. Calhoun, the South’s recognized intellectual and political leader from the 1820s until his death in 1850, devoted much of his remarkable intellectual energy to defending slavery. Cotton was a labor-intensive crop, and as a farmer acquired greater cotton wealth, he required a greater number of field hands to work his expanding fields. He also became a prominent member of the party’s War Hawk faction, which pushed President James Madison’s administration to fight the War of 1812, the nation’s second war with Great Britain. As a senator, he openly led the fight against the tariff, which he viewed as a zealous attempt by Congress to dictate economic policy. The Fort Hill Address of July 1831 was the first time Calhoun openly and unambiguously identified himself with the nullification cause. Updated February 01, 2018 Historic significance: John C. Calhoun was a political figure from South Carolina who played a major role in national affairs during the early 19th century. The Calhoun-Hanks relationship is no secret to historians. Slavery was the foundation of the antebellum South. ‘It came to us in a low, degraded, and savage condition, and in the course of a few generations it has grown up under the fostering care of our institutions.’. The concepts of liberty and equality, idealized during the Revolutionary period, were potentially destructive to this social order, Calhoun believed. From 1833 to 1850 — as a member of the U.S. Senate, a private citizen, and during a stint as President John Tyler’s secretary of state in 1844-1845 — he worked to insulate the institution from any sort of attack, ranging from abolitionist rhetoric to perceived overextensions of federal power. ‘If ever there was perfection carried into any branch of the public service,’ one federal official wrote, ‘it was that which Mr. Calhoun carried into the War Department.’, Calhoun’s success in improving the country’s war-making capabilities came at the price of a stronger, less frugal federal government. He sought only to give them a way to ensure a strict interpretation of the Constitution and lead the nation away from ‘the dangerous and despotic doctrine of consolidation’ and back to ‘its true confederative character.’ This was especially important for the minority South. The Calhoun Institute dedicated to the purpose of enhancing scholarship, education and critical thinking related to matters of first principles, right-reason and good government. Agriculture, specifically cotton, was what made that society so mobile. ‘There may be no vitality in his body, but there is in his doctrines.’ A decade later, a bloody civil war would prove Benton was right. He aligned himself with the federalist faction of the Republican party led by Speaker of the House Henry Clay of Kentucky. On the surface, the Missouri Compromise seemed to heal the sectional breach that slavery had created. He married Floirde Bonneau Calhoun in 1811. He supported his family in his early years while working when his father was ill. That same year, Congress passed a highly protective tariff that Southerners bitterly opposed, viewing the measure as sacrificing Southern agrarian interests to benefit Northern industry. There was little formal schooling available for the young Calhoun, and he did not attend school regularly in his adolescent years. When that dream fell through, however, Calhoun had no problem accepting the vice presidency under staunch federalist John Quincy Adams in 1824. You can easily fact check why was john calhoun important by examining the linked well-known sources. Calhoun believed the liberty Southerners enjoyed depended on slavery. But he was furious with Calhoun and considered his behavior treasonous. Jackson was no fan of the high tariff, either. • Nullification and Resignation. The disagreements President Andrew Jackson had with Vice President John C. Calhoun in the beginning of their administration were nothing compared to what would take place over the issue of tariffs. They argued that because representatives of the states had written the Constitution, the power of constitutional interpretation rested with the states. After Calhoun’s death on March 31, 1850, one of his greatest foes, U.S. ‘His schemes are too grand and magnificent…,’ a detractor in Congress wrote. During those years John C. Calhoun was the voice of the white South. Calhoun’s political thinking had taken a complete turnabout from the federalism of his early years. Why is john c calhoun famous? • The master got his labor and the slave received a standard of living far above what he could achieve on his own. He … He pointed to the impoverished living conditions of Northern free blacks as proof that black people lacked the ability to exercise their freedom positively. In the South it was inevitable, Calhoun argued, that the African race would be the exploited class. At the time of Patrick Calhoun’s death, John Caldwell Calhoun was 14. Margaret Coit detailed it in her 1 950 Pulitzer Prize-winning biography, John C. Calhoun, American Portrait. In that speech, he proclaimed that the right of state interposition was ‘the fundamental principle of our system’ and that the federal government must accept that right in order to keep the Constitution and the Union secure. In the end, Calhoun supported the institution of slavery for many reasons, but at the bottom of all his argument was this: he believed the African race was inferior. What John C Calhoun actually said when he referred to slavery as a positive good. Calhoun hailed from South Carolina aristocracy and would do anything to protect and defend his native state. Calhoun held major political offices, serving terms in the United States House of Representatives, United States Senate and as Vice President of the United States, as well as secretary of war and state. To turn the concept of concurrent majority into law, the Constitution needed to be formally amended. He responded to these attacks with the argument that the Constitution gave Congress no regula-tory power over slavery. After the War of 1812, Congress began to consider improving the young republic’s infrastructure. In developing the concept of nullification, Calhoun did not intend to encourage states to secede. The act gradually lowered the offending tariff, but it confirmed Congress’s authority to enact such protective tariffs. Always deeply interested in religion, he was quite learned in the subject. He urged critics of slavery to ‘look at the sick, and the old and infirm slave, on one hand, in the midst of his family and friends, under the kind superintending care of his master and mistress, and compare it with the forlorn and wretched condition of the pauper in the poor house’ in Europe and the North. By embracing state interposition, Calhoun dismissed the 1803 Supreme Court ruling in Marbury v. Madison, a ruling that claimed the power of constitutional interpretation exclusively for the judicial branch. South Carolina responded by repealing its nullification of the tariff, but in a final act of defiance, it nullified the Force Bill. ‘It is no less than to turn back the Government to where it commenced its operations in 1789…on the State Rights Republican tack.’ He felt that keeping governmental power as decentralized as possible would allow the planters to maintain power and protect the labor system that made their great wealth and status possible. (1782–1850). Albert William Stevens, balloonist and photographer. The amendment Calhoun envisioned would also include a provision for each region to have a chief executive invested with veto power over any congressional action, and the power to execute any federal law in accordance with the interests of his region. With or without Calhoun, the Southern institution of slavery would have disappeared, but it will always remain a black mark on the history of the United States and on Calhoun’s reputation. John C. Calhoun March 18, 1782-March 31, 1850 ... His niece, Rebecca Calhoun, was married to Andrew Pickens, one of South Carolina’s most important patriot militia officers in the Revolutionary War. Written with clarity and focus and a certain amount of contrarianism, John C. Calhoun’s Theory of Republicanism would persuade us that we’ve rejected Calhoun too easily. With the stratification of society, those at the top were recognized as authority figures and respected for their proven wisdom and ability. Slavery was an essential condition of Calhoun’s second major contribution to American political thought — the concept of the concurrent majority. If you are on a personal connection, like at home, you can run an anti-virus scan on your device to make sure it is not infected with malware. He suggested a state should first call a convention to consider any federal action in question. To Northern politicians who dismissed this argument and continued to push antislavery measures through Congress, he warned that the South ‘cannot remain here in an endless struggle in defense of our character, our property, and institutions.’ He said that if abolitionist agitation did not end, ‘we must become, finally, two peoples…. AKA John Caldwell Calhoun. Charles Earl Grey, British Prime Minister, Abigail Powers Fillmore, First Lady and wife of Millard Fillmore. H. Lee Cheek, Jr. , is Professor of Political Science and the former Dean at East Georgia State College, and a … At the age of eighteen he entered an academy founded by Moses Waddell, a young Presbyterian … Calhoun’s exercise went beyond mere theorizing. Calhoun unexpectedly found himself the target of sharp criticism from leading South Carolina figures, including Thomas Cooper, the president of the state college. This is not an example of the work written by professional essay writers. One was a political theory that the rights of a minority section—in particular, the South—needed special protecting in the federal union. ‘The truth can no longer be disguised, that the peculiar domestick institution of the Southern States and the consequent direction which that and her soil and climate have given her industry, has placed them…in opposite relation to the majority of the Union….’, There were some pockets in the South that supported a high tariff, but all the slave states were unified on the slavery issue. Still, Calhoun deserves a prominent place in the history of American political thought — if only for this irony: while he fought to protect the Southern minority’s rights and interests from the Northern majority, he felt free to subordinate the rights of the African American minority to the interests of the South’s white majority. John C. Calhounwas born in South Carolina in 1782. Calhoun enthusiastically supported plans to spend federal money, urging Congress to ‘bind the Republic together with a perfect system of roads and canals…. He had experience as a statesman, a political philosopher, a secretary of war, a secretary of state, a member of the Senate, a member of Congress, the leading champion of Southern rights, and even Vice President of the United States (USGenWeb 1). Calhoun was a major inspiration to the secessionists who caused the Civil War (he was dead during the Civil War period, he was only an inspiration). John C. Calhoun was a young war hawk that got elected to Congress. Congress responded to the nullification by drafting the Force Bill, which authorized the president to use military power to compel South Carolina to comply with the tariff. During the 1830s and 1840s, the growth of the Northern abolition movement and attempts by Northern politicians to push the federal government to act against slavery confirmed for Calhoun that the North intended to exercise its power as a majority to the detriment of Southern interests. The role of nullification in any future debate over slavery was clear: with the ability to define the terms of their membership in the Union, states would be able to deny the federal government any regulatory power over slavery. Senator John C. Calhoun, of South Carolina, who served in the Senate 1832-43, 1845-50. ‘The major and dominant party will have no need of these restrictions for their protection,’ Calhoun wrote. This article was written by Ethan S. Rafuse and originally published in the October 2002 issue of Civil War Times Magazine. � Calhoun had a distinguished career in public service as a congressman, senator, cabinet member, and vice president. Carmel, SC Location of death: Washington, DC Cause of death: Tuberculosis Remains: . ‘The Constitution…was not intended as a thesis for the logician to exercise his ingenuity on,’ he proclaimed in 1817. Though it was the tariff controversy that brought Calhoun to the forefront as the leading spokesman for Southern interests, slavery was the most important issue to the South. Without this authority, Calhoun argued, society would break down and the liberty of all men would be threatened. John C. Calhoun (1782-1850), was a prominent U.S. statesman and spokesman for the slave-plantation system of the antebellum South. Calhoun hoped to use his accomplishments as war secretary as a springboard to the presidency. To no one’s surprise, Jackson refused to accept South Carolina’s defiant stance, and the Nullification Crisis of 1832 was born. Throughout his lifetime, John Caldwell Calhoun achieved many different titles. ‘My aim is fixed,’ he proclaimed. He loudly threatened to march down to South Carolina and personally hang Calhoun and his fellow nullifiers. The North opposed slavery and began to develop large cities. We are under the most imperious obligation to counteract every tendency to disunion.’, Calhoun left the legislature in 1817 to become President James Monroe’s secretary of war and dedicated himself to strengthening the nation’s military. From Calhoun’s viewpoint, the purpose of the concurrent majority concept was to prevent the North, with its population majority, from ruling the nation as a tyrant. To do this, Calhoun developed two major ideas that are perhaps his greatest legacy: the concepts of state interposition and concurrent majority. Summary of Religious Views: Calhoun was raised in a strongly Presbyterian household. American statesman and parliamentarian, was born, of Scottish-Irish descent, in Abbeville District, South Carolina, on the 18th of March 1782. Problems had been brewing well beforehand, but now, personal conflicts and Jackson’s commitment to the supremacy of the national government made it impossible for the two men to work together. A major crisis seemed imminent until Senator Henry Clay fashioned the Compromise Tariff of 1833. Born in 1782 in upcountry South Carolina, Calhoun grew up during the boom in the area’s cotton economy. HistoryNet.com contains daily features, photo galleries and over 5,000 articles originally published in our various magazines. As the antislavery movement continued to build up steam, Calhoun continually found himself having to defend slavery on moral, ethical, and political grounds. Although he never joined a church, and refused to profess himself a Christian, he frequently attended church, particularly the Episcopal church to which his wife belonged. The federal government would then have to either amend the Constitution to legitimize its action or repeal the measure. When confronted with the argument that slavery was an exploitative labor system, Calhoun replied that in every civilization a propertied class emerged and exploited the labor of the others. He helped develop a procedure for states to use their power of interposition. The country was dividing into two increasingly self-conscious sections with different priorities. He asserted that the slave system was actually superior to the ‘wage slavery’ of the North. Please enable Cookies and reload the page. When it became clear that Calhoun’s chief cabinet rival, Martin Van Buren, was Jackson’s choice to succeed him as president, Calhoun quit the administration. Slavery provided black people with a quality of existence Calhoun believed they were incapable of obtaining for themselves. I refer to the Ironically, when Calhoun, the future champion of states’ rights and secession, arrived in Washington, he was an ardent federalist like his former law professor. He is the author of John C. Calhoun’s Theory of Republicanism. The second was an argument that presented slavery as an institution that benefited all involved. Calhoun was born on March 18, 1782, to Patrick Calhoun and Martha Caldwell, both of Scotch-Irish descent, in the northwestern region of South Carolina called Abbeville. If you are at an office or shared network, you can ask the network administrator to run a scan across the network looking for misconfigured or infected devices. ‘The Constitution of the United States is, in fact, a compact, to which each State is a party,’ he argued. ‘If we had a revenue of a hundred million, he would be at no loss how to spend it.’. State interposition was first presented in the 1798 Virginia and Kentucky resolutions, written by Thomas Jefferson and James Madison to protest the anti-Republican Alien and Sedition Acts. Home — Essay Samples — Psychology — Thought — John C. Calhoun’s Perspective on the US Rights This essay has been submitted by a student. In the years between 1820 and 1850, the United States became divided over the issue of slavery. For more great articles, be sure to subscribe to Civil War Times magazine today! He began his political career as a nationalist, modernizer, and proponent of a strong national government and protective tariffs. Joseph Priestly, scientist credited with the discovery of oxygen. Abolition and the Union cannot co-exist.’ Even compromise was not possible, in his opinion. John C. Calhoun (1782-1850) of South Carolina was the most important proslavery politician in the country in the decades before midcentury. A new book by John G. Grove aims to argue against this common view. While Calhoun was defending slavery, he extended his argument to indict the North and industrial capitalism. Calhoun’s early childhood was spent on his father’s plantation, which was cultivated by thirty-one enslaved Africans. So if a state believed the federal government was violating the terms of the national charter, it had the right to interpose itself between its people and the federal government to provide protection from tyranny. As a young congressman from South Carolina, he helped steer the United States into war with Great Britain and established the Second Bank of the United States. John C. Calhoun Speech On The Importance Of Domestic Slavery CALHOUN'S RESOLUTIONS: Resolved, That in the adoption of the Federal Constitution, the States adopting the same acted severally, as free, independent, and sovereign States; and that each, for itself, by its own It turned out that Calhoun was late in publicly promoting his commitment to federalism. So the ownership of slaves became a measure of status and upward mobility. For Calhoun the tariff controversy had two important results. So when Andrew Jackson began preparing to challenge Adams in the 1828 presidential election, Calhoun switched sides. Since, in his view, ‘the States…formed the compact, acting as Sovereign and independent communities…, the several States, or parties, have a right to judge of its infractions.’. (Flip to pages 49-52.) Calhoun’s commitment to those two points and his efforts to develop them to the fullest would assign him a unique role in American history as the moral, political, and spiritual voice of Southern separatism. Cloudflare Ray ID: 62f8783afb4d3829 If Calhoun wanted to maintain his status as a Southern leader and reach his political goals, he could not ignore the changing political landscape. In support of his argument, he cited census figures indicating that free blacks were much more likely to suffer mental or physical disabilities than were slaves. He shared the prevailing prejudices of the day — held in both the North and South — that black people were mentally, physically, and morally inferior to whites. ‘I have ever had but one opinion on the subject,’ Calhoun wrote. Seven years after Calhoun’s initial departure from South Carolina, he returned home, where he soon inherited his father’s substantial land and slave holdings and won election to the U.S. Congress in 1810. Let us conquer space…. John C. Calhoun, in full John Caldwell Calhoun, (born March 18, 1782, Abbeville district, South Carolina, U.S.—died March 31, 1850, Washington, D.C.), American political leader who was a congressman, the secretary of war, the seventh vice president (1825–32), a senator, and the secretary of state of the United States. In 1824, Cooper published a widely circulated pamphlet attacking Calhoun. In 1807, he became a lawyer in South Carolina. Calhoun had become the chosen mouthpiece for Southern rights. So it made political sense for Calhoun to devote himself to the cause of slavery. To his mind, despite all the progress the race had supposedly made in America, to free the slaves and place them in situations where they would have to compete with white people on an equal basis would only result in catastrophe. In Congress, he quickly aligned himself with the War Hawks. Calhoun was at the center of the Nullification Crisis, served in the cabinet of Andrew Jackson, and was a senator representing South Carolina. More than any other characteristic, it defined Southern social, political, and cultural life. When the fighting ended in 1815, Calhoun championed a protective national tariff on imports, a measure he hoped would foster both Southern and Northern industrial development. ‘There is no instance of any civilized colored race of any shade being found equal to the establishment and maintenance of free government,’ Calhoun argued. After graduating, he attended the Litchfield Law School, also in Connecticut, and studied under Tapping Reeve, an outspoken supporter of a strong federal government. This inferiority necessitated that they be slaves. John C. Calhoun was not a perfect man, with perfect insight and a perfect character. ‘He is not dead, sir — he is not dead,’ remarked Benton, a staunch Unionist. The freed slave’s inherent inferiority would place him at such a disadvantage that he would not be able to achieve the quality of life he enjoyed as a slave, Calhoun insisted. Completing the CAPTCHA proves you are a human and gives you temporary access to the web property.
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