John C. Calhoun

Biography

John Caldwell Calhoun was born in the Abbeville District of South Carolina in 1782, the son of Patrick Calhoun, a Scotch-Irish surveyor, planter and legislator. After running the family farm as a teenager he went to Yale College, graduating as valedictorian in 1804, and studied law at the Litchfield Law School in Connecticut. Elected to the House of Representatives in 1810, he became a leading war hawk in support of the War of 1812.

As James Monroe's Secretary of War from 1817 to 1825 he reorganised the War Department. He was elected vice president in 1824 and re-elected in 1828, serving under both John Quincy Adams and Andrew Jackson. His relations with Jackson broke down over the Petticoat affair and over tariffs: in the anonymous South Carolina Exposition and Protest he argued that a state could nullify federal laws, and during the Nullification Crisis he resigned the vice presidency in December 1832 to enter the Senate.

He served as Secretary of State under John Tyler in 1844-45, pressing the annexation of Texas to extend slavery and helping settle the Oregon boundary with Britain, then returned to the Senate, where he opposed the Mexican-American War, the Wilmot Proviso and the Compromise of 1850. A slaveholder who called slavery a positive good and advocated a concurrent majority to protect the minority South, he died of tuberculosis in 1850; his ideas strongly influenced Southern secession a decade later.