John C. Calhoun

Patrick Calhoun died in 1796 and his 14-year-old son took over the family farm and five others in the South Carolina backcountry. He ran them for four years, keeping up his reading and his hunting, until his brothers put up the money to send him north. At Yale he met organized argument for the first time, under the Federalist president Timothy Dwight, who lectured openly on secession as a legitimate remedy for New England's quarrels with Washington. Calhoun graduated valedictorian in 1804, studied under Tapping Reeve and James Gould at Litchfield, and was admitted to the South Carolina bar in 1807. His biographer Margaret Coit argued the obvious conclusion: Connecticut, not Carolina, taught him that leaving the Union was legal.

He held nearly every office short of the one he wanted. The House from 1811, the War Department from December 1817 — where he created the Bureau of Indian Affairs in 1824 — the vice presidency under two presidents, the State Department under John Tyler, and a Senate seat on either side of it. On December 28, 1832 he became the first vice president to quit the office. The doctrines he built afterward, and the crisis they produced, are BriefHistory's subject. What follows is the man they came out of.

He never got the presidency, and the reason was a drawing-room quarrel. When Washington society decided that Peggy Eaton, wife of Jackson's war secretary, had slept with her husband before marrying him, Floride Calhoun led the cabinet wives in refusing to receive her. Jackson, whose own wife had been slandered the same way, took it as a personal attack. Martin Van Buren, a widower with no household to compromise, called on the Eatons and inherited the succession. Meanwhile Fort Hill, the upcountry plantation Calhoun lived on from 1825 until his death, ran on the labor of dozens of enslaved people. His widow and daughter later sold the place and the 50 people on it to a relative. The land is now the campus of Clemson University.

Tuberculosis killed him on March 31, 1850, at a Washington boarding house, and he went into St. Philip's churchyard in Charleston. During the Civil War his friends dug the coffin up, hid it under the church stairs and reburied it in an unmarked grave, expecting Union troops to come looking. It was returned in 1871. The monument Charleston raised in 1887 was defaced so persistently by the city's Black residents that the replacement of 1896 went up on a column 115 feet tall, out of reach. It came down on June 24, 2020. Yale renamed Calhoun College for Grace Hopper in 2017, Clemson took him off its honors college, and Minneapolis gave his lake back its Dakota name.

John C. Calhoun's life against the full span of the corpus.

• Bureau of Indian Affairs company
  Created inside the War Department without waiting for Congress 1824
• South Carolina Exposition and Protest article
  Written anonymously at his own plantation 1828
• Speech against the Force Bill speech
  Delivered February 15, 1833, no longer as vice president 1833
• Final speech on the Compromise of 1850 speech
  Too weak to speak, he had James Mason of Virginia read it for him 1850
• A Disquisition on Government book
  A hundred pages, six years of intermittent work, published after his death 1851
• A Discourse on the Constitution and Government of the United States book
  The companion volume, also posthumous 1851

• 1796 aged ~14 His father dies and the 14-year-old takes over six farms He ran them for four years before his brothers financed his return to school.
• 1804 aged ~22 Graduates valedictorian of Yale College
• January 1811 aged 28 Marries Floride Bonneau Colhoun, a first cousin once removed They had ten children. Three daughters died in childhood.
• December 8, 1817 aged 35 Becomes secretary of war under James Monroe
• 1829 aged ~47 Floride Calhoun leads the cabinet wives against Peggy Eaton The quarrel broke Calhoun with Jackson and handed the succession to Van Buren.
• December 28, 1832 aged 50 Resigns the vice presidency, the first man to do it He took a South Carolina Senate seat the following day.
• April 1, 1844 aged 62 Becomes secretary of state and pushes the annexation of Texas
• March 4, 1850 aged 67 His last speech is read aloud for him in the Senate He died 27 days later.
• June 24, 2020 Charleston removes the Calhoun monument from Marion Square The city council voted unanimously to take it down.

• Andrew Jackson 1767–1845
  Seventh President whose populist policies and Indian Removal Act left a deeply contested legacy. broke with
• Martin Van Buren 1782–1862
  Eighth president who helped build the Democratic Party machine and governed through the Panic of 1837. outmaneuvered by
• Grace Hopper 1906–1992
  Computer scientist and Navy rear admiral who helped develop early programming languages and computing. replaced his name at Yale
• Frederick Douglass 1818–1895
  Former slave who became a leading abolitionist, orator, and advocate for equal rights. argued against him
• Jefferson Davis 1808–1889
  President of the Confederacy whose defense of slavery and secession made him central to the Civil War and its memory. inherited the argument
• Henry Clay 1777–1852
  Senator and statesman known as the Great Compromiser for his role in preserving the Union. negotiated the compromise tariff with him