Basic Information
Name: John Caldwell Calhoun
Nickname: The 'Houn, Mr. Nullification
Born: March 18, 1782
Died: March 31, 1850
Nationality: American
Hometown: Long Canes Creek, South Carolina
WORK & EDUCATION
Occupation: Lawyer, Congressman, Secretary of War, Vice President, Senator
Education: Yale College
FAMILY & FRIENDS
Parents: Patrick Calhoun, Martha Caldwell Calhoun
Siblings: Catherine, William, James, and Patrick Calhoun
Spouse: Floride (Colhoun) Calhoun. Yes, they were related, hence the similar last name—Floride was his second cousin.
Children: Andrew Pickens, Anna Maria, Thomas, Patrick, John, Martha, James, William Lowndes. Three more died in infancy: Floride, Jane, and Elizabeth.
Friends: James Monroe, William Lowndes, Henry Clay (for a little while)
Foes: John Quincy Adams (most of the time), Henry Clay (eventually), William Crawford
Analysis
Every good story needs a protagonist and antagonist. For the epic journey that was the Compromise of 1850, John Calhoun represented the antagonist, although he certainly wasn't alone.
Calhoun was one of the members of the Great Triumvirate of veteran senators (along with Henry Clay and Daniel Webster) during the "Golden Age" of the Senate. He started his career as a nationalist, a supporter of a national bank, strong federal army and navy, and federal spending on infrastructure. But he's remembered mostly for the sectionalism and states' rights stance he took on later in his career. That's why colleges are renaming buildings and cities are thinking about tearing down his monuments.
Calhoun the senator was all about protecting the southern way of life, i.e. the slave plantation system. He died during the very early days of the Compromise debate, but his ideas about states' rights and the "positive good" of slavery, i.e., white supremacy, were championed by his followers after his death.
Understanding Calhoun is understanding why this Compromise was such a big deal in the first place. What was all the fuss about? Why did people care so much that California wanted to be a state without slavery?
Because…well, let's not spoil it right away.
War Hawk Singin' in the Dead of Night
John C. Calhoun grew up in a conservative Calvinist household, the son of a major plantation owner and Revolutionary War patriot who served in the South Carolina legislature. He'd pass onto his son a distaste for the federal government over the sovereignty of the states.
Unlike a lot of his contemporaries, Calhoun waited a while to study law and get into politics. He was practically ancient when he started—27 years old. That's because, unlike many of his lawyer contemporaries, he actually went to college (Yale) and attended a real law school—the only one in existence at the time.
He moved back to South Carolina to practice law in 1807, and a few years later, he was elected to Congress. He became buddies with fellow rep Henry Clay—the guy who wrote the Compromise—when they were both members of the War Hawks group during the lead up to the War of 1812.
No, the War Hawks weren't a special breed of bird evolved for fighting. They were the guys who engineered the U.S. getting into the War of 1812 because they were mad about the British raids on American shipping and for the Brits generally meddling in U.S. affairs. They were not gonna be tyrannized again by their old colonial masters. Calhoun said he preferred war to the "putrescent pool of ignominious peace" (source).
After the army's less than stellar performance in the War of 1812, Calhoun pushed for increased funding for the army and navy, and the infrastructure necessary to support them. He and Clay helped establish the Second Bank of the United States to stabilize the currency and better manage the fast-growing industrial economy.
This set Calhoun on a path towards an eventual showdown with Andrew Jackson, whom he already wasn't crazy about because of Jackson's unauthorized meddling in Florida after the War of 1812.
In 1817, the new prez James Monroe appointed Calhoun as Secretary of War. Calhoun and Clay's relationship went downhill pretty fast when Clay became the driving force behind efforts to reduce funding for Calhoun's War Department. Calhoun again tried hard to modernize the navy and develop a decent standing army, but Congress wasn't all in with providing him with the funds to do it.
Another responsibility of the War Department was managing land negotiations and treaties with the Native American tribes. Like a lot of politicians, he thought the Indians would be better off relocated from their ancestral lands in the east to reservations in the west, where they could live as sovereign nations under the "benevolent" protection of the federal government. A lot of his efforts to modernize the management of Native American affairs were thwarted by Congress (are we seeing a pattern here?), so he turned the problem over to a new agency he created: The Bureau of Indian Affairs.
Inherent Vice
Calhoun ran for president in 1924 but dropped out of the race after failing to drum up enough support. Instead, he was convinced to run for VP (the offices were elected separately back in the day), and won easily. He could never really get behind new president John Quincy Adams, a strong federalist, and in the next election he threw his support behind Andrew Jackson.
In Calhoun's view, Jackson was the lesser of two evils. Calhoun had been moving more and more towards a states' rights view of the nation, and he saw in Jackson someone who was supportive of the rights of the southern agrarian states to maintain their "peculiar institution" of slavery without meddling from the abolitionists of the north.
Those annoying abolitionists...
Despite their previous animosity, Andrew Jackson asked Calhoun to be his VP. Things did not go better the second time around (source). Calhoun ended up leaving the job a few months early to return to the Senate to argue about the despised Tariff of 1828.
Rules Were Made to be Completely Ignored
Jackson's presidency, and especially his support for the 1828 "Tariff of Abominations," which increased taxes on imported goods to around 60%.
Now that's what we call a tariff.
Calhoun thought this was totally favored the northern industrial states, and it inspired him to propose his famous and ultimately very influential concept of nullification.
The basic idea of nullification was that if a state didn't like a federal law, it could just…nullify it, or void it. Don't like that tariff? Don't like that regulation on civil liberties? Consider it gone. After all, the Union is a pact between states, so they shouldn't be forced to follow legislation from the central government.
Calhoun published his version of this nullification theory anonymously with the title: "The South Carolina Exposition and Protest." Like most anonymous documents, everyone knew he wrote it. Jackson issued a very public, very determined rebuttal stating that nullification was a ridiculous idea because we are a Union after all, not just a club you can quit if you don't like the menu.
Calhoun tried to re-take control of the nullification debate, since he thought they were veering too close to secession, but the cat was out of the bag. After South Carolina hinted at secession and Jackson threatened to send in troops to enforce the Tariff, a compromise was reached thanks to Henry Clay, who designed a new tariff that had something for everyone. It would be one of the Great Compromiser's many great compromises, including the big one of 1850.
States' Yeah Rights
Much of Calhoun's career was dedicated to preserving states' rights, which in the south meant protecting the institution of slavery. Like so many southerners at the time, Calhoun saw the guarantee of slavery (and its potential expansion into the new western territory) as the key to southern prosperity.
He was worried about the rise of Free Soil ideology in the 1840s. Free Soilers said it was fine to keep slavery where it was, but it shouldn't be spread to the new western states.
Then came the Compromise of 1850.
By the time the Compromise was being proposed, Calhoun was deathly ill from tuberculosis. In fact, he basically dragged himself to the Senate chamber in order to oppose the Compromise.
On March 4, 1850, he delivered his final speech to Congress. Except he didn't—he was so sick by this point, he had to ask his friend James Mason, a senator from Virginia, to give the speech for him.
The No-Compromiser
Calhoun and Henry Clay had been opponents for a while now, so it shouldn't be a surprise that the senator from South Carolina was not on board with the Kentuckian's plan. In fact, Calhoun had given a speech in 1837 called "Slavery as a Positive Good". Here's a delightful excerpt:
Never before has the black race of Central Africa, from the dawn of history to the present day, attained a condition so civilized and so improved, not only physically, but morally and intellectually.
So there's that.
Calhoun argued that northerners simply had to accept that the racism of the South was their way of life and the right way to preserve peace between the races. He claimed that all this agitation over slavery was tearing apart the Union, so the North should just get over it and let the South do their thing. He has this to say about slavery, which he refers to as "a question of vital importance to the southern section" (source):
I refer to the relation between the two races in the southern section, which constitutes a vital portion of her social organization […] Those most opposed and hostile regard it as a sin, an consider themselves under the most sacred obligation to use every effort to destroy it […] On the contrary, the southern section regards the relation as one which cannot be destroyed without subjecting the two races to the greatest calamity, and the section to poverty, desolation, and wretchedness; and, accordingly they feel bound by every consideration of interest and safety, to defend it (source).
No one articulated the perspective of the antebellum South better than Mr. Calhoun.
Calhoun died a few weeks after giving the speech. Apparently, on his deathbed, he managed to croak to his younger followers: "The South, the poor South" (source).
We're sure the millions of slaves were saying the same thing.
Gone But Not Forgotten
Although Calhoun died early in the Compromise process, his ideas continued to be influential. Remember that in the South, the Civil War was (and is) often referred to as the "War of Northern Aggression." Calhoun's idea, that the union of the states would only survive if the South were protected, was self-evident to other southerners.
In fact, it's said that Calhoun responded once to Henry Clay as Clay defended the Compromise, by yelling "No, Sir! The Union can be broken!" (source). A decade later, the state he represented would be the first to secede.
You can read more about Calhoun's political career in the "Key Figures" sections of our handy guides to the Monroe Doctrine and Proclamation Regarding Nullification. He was one busy guy.