Cabinet Members - 18th & 19th Century - Biography, Senators & Representatives - Biography, The United States Senate, U.S. Politics & Government - 1812 - 1860, American Revolution - Politics & Government, General & Miscellaneous U.S. Political Biography, 1

John C. Calhoun

Name: John C. Calhoun
Author: Irving H Bartlett
ISBN: 9780393034769

by Irving H Bartlett

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Overview

In this important and highly readable biography of John C. Calhoun, Irving Bartlett sees a man almost unique in American history, a lifelong politician who was also a profound political philosopher. Born on the South Carolina frontier, Calhoun grew up in a postrevolutionary culture which valued both African slavery and the republican ideology of the Founding Fathers. He was orphaned in his teens and, with almost no formal education, suddenly became a man. In less than ten years he had become a Yale graduate, a lawyer, a former state legislator, and a congressman-elect prepared to help James Madison lead the country into the War of 1812. As a congressman and later as James Monroe's secretary of war Calhoun articulated the nationalism of the new nation as cogently as any other American leader. Calhoun was ambitious beyond his years. He was an unsuccessful candidate in the disputed presidential election of 1824 but was easily elected vice president under John Quincy Adams and Andrew Jackson. Determined to avoid the obscurity of that office, Calhoun managed to get into monumental public disputes with both presidents and resigned in the last days of Jackson's first administration to become senator from South Carolina and champion his state's right to nullify the Tariff of 1832. Along with his famous contemporaries Henry Clay and Daniel Webster, Calhoun dominated the Senate of the United States in the 1830s and 1840s. Serving briefly as secretary of state in the beleaguered Tyler administration, he played a key role in the annexation of Texas and created a furor on both sides of the Atlantic with his strident defense of American slavery and his denunciation of what he perceived as the pseudophilanthropy of British abolitionism. Returning to the Senate, he acted as peacemaker in helping avoid a near war with Britain over the Oregon boundary dispute, and he persistently opposed the popular Mexican War. Long before his death in 1850 Calhoun had become known as the cast-

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Editorials

Library Journal

Bartlett ( Wendell and Ann Phillips , Norton, 1982; Daniel Webster , Norton, 1981) examines in detail the life and career of one of the South's great men. He reveals the highlights of Calhoun's career: his role as a war hawk in Congress in 1812, his almost total reformation of the War Department as Secretary of War under President Monroe, and his many clashes with a paranoid but popular Andrew Jackson. He also details Calhoun's family life, revealing a man who appears to be very different from the persona cultivated in public. But, as Bartlett shows, Calhoun's most historic role was as the creator of the concept of nullification, which was a response to the Tariff Crisis of 1824. Calhoun's prime concern was how a state may protect itself against unjust and unconstitutional Federal legislation. A well-wrought study written in an accessible style; highly recommended.-- Robert A. Curtis, Taylor Memorial P.L., Cuyahoga Falls, Ohio

Gilbert Taylor

Though historically unpopular, the stalwart defender of slavery stands among the country's most intellectual politicians, the battler with Clay, Webster, and Jackson. Associated with words such as "nationalism" for his hawkish pro-war stance in 1812, "nullification" for flirting with civil war in 1832, and "concurrent majorities" or "secession" as means of preserving the Southern slave economy in the 1850s, it was not enough for Calhoun to claim his positions on grounds of interest: he was driven to support them with inductive constitutional logic. He had the legal mind to formulate them, and a belief in black inferiority to accept them. That also made him a popular politician: he held federal offices, as representative, war secretary, vice president, senator, state secretary, and senator again, continuously from 1811 until his death in 1850. That span, as well as his domestic life on the plantation, is tolerantly recounted by Bartlett. He ascribes Calhoun's attitudes to his social milieu, but tends to write aloofly, if accurately, about the man's career. Thus the reader is free to wonder, for example, about the dubious story of Calhoun's paternity of one A. Lincoln. An opportune acquisition for libraries that missed buying the previous biography, Margaret Coit's in 1950.