South Carolina Exposition and Protest, Part II: Context, contd.

Beyond what he happened to absorb of contemporary New England particularism, John C. Calhoun’s time at Yale was fruitful in the more expected sense as well. He read voraciously, formed a great many lasting friendships, became a member of the Brothers in Unity debating club – now, like Skull and Bones or Mace and Chain, one of Yale’s vaunted “secret societies” – and graduated as valedictorian for the Class of 1804. Shortly thereafter he enrolled in what would come to be known as the Litchfield Academy, founded in 1784 by lawyer Tapping Reeve (1744-1823) as the first independent law school in the United States of America. Three years later, in 1807, he was admitted to the South Carolina bar, and three years after that, in 1810, he won election to his first term in the House of Representatives. It was a quick rise, to be sure, from undergraduate to Congressmen, at the conclusion of which Calhoun was not yet thirty years old. Fortunately for him, he found like minds in fellow Democratic-Republicans Henry Clay (1777-1852), William Lowndes (1782-1822), and Langdon Cheves (1776-1857) and a cause into which he could pour all the impulses of his youthful conviction.

At the time Calhoun first took his post representing South Carolina’s 6^th District in Congress, the United States was in the midst of a period of heightened tensions with what had previously been its largest trading partner, the United Kingdom. Owing to the state of war which then existed between the UK and Napoleon’s French Empire – and corresponding attempts by both belligerents to cut off their rival’s access to international commerce – American trade with Europe had suffered tremendously between the 1790s and the 1810s, and President Jefferson’s heavy-handed attempt to force the responsible parties to come to some sort of arrangement as regarded “neutral” vessels like those belonging to American merchants had entirely failed to yield results. On the contrary, far from prompting either British or French cooperation, Jefferson’s multi-year embargo on all manner of American trade had wrought significant damage to the American economy. Some kind of policy change was desperately awaited. It accordingly fell to the newly elected President Madison to decide how and to what extent he was prepared to compromise, modify, or abandon perhaps the most contentious initiative of his predecessor’s entire term in office. The Federalists – whose New England contingent, as aforementioned, had become deeply embittered during Jefferson’s two terms in office – advocated doing away with the embargo on American trade entirely and seeking to resume the accustomed commercial relationship between the United States and the United Kingdom. The traditionalist Republicans, led by Virginia Congressman John Randolph (1773-1833), likewise advised Madison to abandon his predecessor’s aggressive commercial policies, not the least of which because they resented the expansion of executive power that had been the direct result. But the “new” Republicans, the young Republicans – the men whom Randolph derisively referred to as “War Hawks” – wanted something else entirely. Insulted by British treatment of American shipping, and still stinging from an incident in 1807 that saw an American vessel fired upon in American waters by a British ship of war, they wanted the United States to teach its former colonial master a painful lesson in humility.

The form that this lesson was supposed to take was entirely unambiguous. In response to what Calhoun memorably described as Great Britain’s, “Lust for power [,]” “Unbounded tyranny [,]” and “Mad ambition [,]” he and his cohorts – the aforementioned Clay, Lowndes, and Cheves, as well as Richard Mentor Johnson (1780-1850), Felix Grundy (1777-1840), and William Bibb (1781-1820) – demanded that the United States declare war on the United Kingdom. For its part, the United Kingdom had no desire to go to war with the American republic. British troops already had the hands full on the Continent, and the British Navy was being kept well busy either attempting to protect British commerce or striking at the whatever French vessels happened to cross its path. To that end, on June 23^rd, 1812, newly appointed Prime Minister Lord Liverpool (1770-1828), revoked the Orders-in-Council (1807) that had initially allowed for the seizure of American vessels known or suspected to be bound for France. Unlike his predecessor, Spencer Perceval (1762-1812), Liverpool was eager to normalize relations between the United States and the United Kingdom and believed that the single greatest impediment to the same was Britain’s continued harassment of American shipping. Whether the Prime Minister would have been proven correct in his assessment or not remains an open question, however, for the United States Congress had already voted to declare war on the United Kingdom (79-49 in the House, 19-13 in the Senate) on June 18^th. Calhoun and his fellow War Hawks, it seemed, ultimately got their way.

While the conflict that resulted may not have been the glorious affair that its most ardent supports had hoped – American defeats were numerous in the opening phases, and the Treasury quickly found itself teetering on the brink of bankruptcy – Calhoun certainly threw his back into the effort. Between the declaration of war in 1812 and the ratification of the Treaty of Ghent in 1815, he helped raise troops, raised money, worked in Congress to regulate the economy and stabilize the currency, and generally did everything in his power as a Representative and an private citizen to provide his country and its fighting men with the best possible chance at victory. In the end, of course, this all rather came to naught. The agreement that ended the conflict called for a return to status quo ante bellum. No territory was exchanged, and no concessions were made of any lasting significance. All that remained to tell the tale of there having been a war at all was the sorry state of American finances. That, and the somewhat mixed reputation gained by the American military between its early defeats and its final victory over the British at the Battle of New Orleans (1815). Notwithstanding these somewhat distressing outcomes, the nation was nevertheless left energized by the realization that it had stood toe-to-toe with its former colonial master and emerged relatively unscathed. The victor of New Orleans, the aforementioned Andrew Jackson, was hailed as a national hero, the anti-war Federalists were widely discredited as defeatists – or worse, based on rumors of what was discussed at the Hartford Convention – and the popular reputation of the Democratic-Republicans was burnished yet further. The hyper-partisan era of Jeffersonian democracy was ending. The “Era of Good Feelings” was dawning in America. 

Calhoun was likewise in the midst of a transitional moment in his career as a public servant, not the least which because of his work during the late war. Not only had he witnessed with alarm the deficiencies inherent in the peacetime American military establishment – between the small, poor-equipped army and the undersized, understaffed navy – but he also came to appreciate just how vulnerable the American economy had become to foreign interference. In consequence, Calhoun spent the next several years working in tandem with men like the aforementioned Henry Clay in an attempt to drastically overhaul the American republic’s military, commercial, and economic infrastructure along increasingly nationalistic lines. He called for an expanded professionalized army and navy, a more robust system of internal taxation, public funding for roads and canals, the encouragement of domestic manufacturing, and even the re-establishment of a national bank. This final proposal would doubtless have seemed unthinkable only a handful of years earlier, but the domestic pressures exerted by the war had awakened many a Democratic-Republican to the usefulness of a financial system they had previously decried as corrupt and unconstitutional. Calhoun was most definitely among them and advocated strongly for the creation of the Second Bank of the United States. He also supported the passage of the Tariff of 1816, the purpose of which was to promote domestic manufacturing for the sake of national defense. In the event of another war with the United Kingdom – a prospect which, at the time, appeared far from unlikely – it was believed by men like Calhoun and Clay that American industry needed to be robust enough to meet the demands of the American military establishment. That the resulting legislation – which raised prices on certain imported goods – received widespread support among Southern agriculturalists whose personal interests had previously favored unrestricted free trade is very much a testament to the tenor of the era. Not only had the War of 1812 made Americans more conscious of their vulnerabilities, but the widespread feelings of jubilation that followed made the idea of deviating from orthodoxy that much easier to swallow.

That Calhoun had swallowed it entirely should by now be quite clear. In 1817, after the position had been turned down by four men in succession, he accepted the offer of newly elected President James Monroe (1758-1831) to become United States Secretary of War, in which role he proceeded on an exceptionally ambitious course of modernization and reform. An expansion of the Navy was proposed, with the notable inclusion of steam frigates; the army was to be enlarged and reequipped; new roads were to be built to better facilitate the movement of troops and supplies; domestic manufacturing was to be further encouraged so that the nation could instantly spring into a wartime posture; new fortifications were to be built on the coasts; and new outposts were to be established along the expanding Western frontier. Congress, as it happened, worked to frustrate nearly all of these projects by consistently denying the War Department the funding that Calhoun required – owing mainly to lingering Old Republican sentiment and the machinations of political rivals within the Democratic-Republican organization – but at the very least the Secretary did succeed in creating a separate Bureau of Indian Affairs.

During this same period, the events of the First Seminole War (1816-1819) and the Missouri Crisis (1819) arguably tested Calhoun’s newfound commitment to administrative centralization. In the former case, during which Calhoun’s fellow Southerner and future running-mate Andrew Jackson unilaterally seized Spanish Florida in an attempt to root out the source of frequent Seminole raiding parties, the Secretary seemed to take the position that such a brazen disregard for the authority of the federal government warranted nothing less than censure and removal. The United States made indeed had benefited from the addition of Florida to its sovereign territory – a point emphasized in cabinet discussions by Secretary of State John Quincy Adams (1767-1848) – but the ends, to Calhoun’s thinking, could not justify the means. Conversely, when Congress shortly thereafter found itself deadlocked over the proposed admission of the state of Missouri – Southerners desired it to be a slave state, Northerners wished to prevent the further spread of slavery into the former Louisiana Purchase – the Secretary of War demonstrated a far more flexible attitude. While he did not believe, as some at the time feared, that the disagreement would result in the dissolution of the American republic along sectional lines – a fate which was indeed prevented by the compromise admission of free-state Maine along with slave-state Missouri – he also admitted that, if such a dissolution did occur, the South would have no choice but to form an alliance with the United Kingdom as a means of staving off conquest by the North.

It was a startling confession, given Calhoun’s previous statements on the subject of the British and their empire, and one which speaks to the distinction which he seemed to draw between loyalty to the nation and loyalty to his home state. In most things, Calhoun tended towards the belief that what was good for the United States as a whole was also good for South Carolina. Certainly, there were national priorities and national policies whose immediate beneficiaries were Northerners, industrialists, and merchants rather than the Southern agrarians he had once called his constituents, but the effects of the late war had shown him that strengthening the North could well mean saving the South in the event of an invasion or a similar national catastrophe. But slavery was another matter entirely. The economy of South Carolina – alike with its sister states in the South – was built upon a foundation of ready access to forced human labor. And while the Constitution may have allowed for federal restrictions upon the importation of slaves from abroad – pursuant to Article I, Section 9 – it also made it reasonably clear that the institution itself was entirely subject to the laws and regulations of the individual states. The status quo which emerged from this arrangement was clear enough, if somewhat tenuous. States that wished to allow for the practice of slavery could do so as they wished. States that wished to outlaw the practice of slavery could do so as they wished. Proposed states seeking admission to the Union could do so as slave states. And proposed states seeking admission to the Union could do so as free states. So long as everyone minded their own business, it seemed, there should not have been any cause for concern.

In practice, of course, there was cause for concern. Indeed, there were at least two major problems with this understanding of the relationship between slavery and state sovereignty. First, there was the issue of how states joined the Union. And second, there was the issue of what states joining the Union meant for those who had joined at some point prior. In order for a state to gain admission to the American republic, the proposal in question – whether submitted on behalf of the residents of an Organized Territory, a region within an existing state, or even a foreign nation – must be approved by a majority in Congress. There exists no other means by which a state may come into being under the auspices of the Constitution, and Congress is under no obligation to vote on or even consider an proposal once it has been made. What this means, in practice, is that while the inhabitants of a proposed state are free – nay, required – to write their own constitution, and to thus determine what will and will not be legal therein, Congress has the final say as to whether a proposal for admission is accepted or denied. In most cases, this fact makes little difference. Generally speaking, the states represented in Congress could not care less if a proposed addition to their number desires a unicameral rather than a bicameral legislature or wishes to make the consumption of alcohol illegal on alternating Saturdays. What they do tend to care about, however, for a number of reasons, is whether or not the proposed state in question intends to allow for a legal practice which some of them find to be morally reprehensible and others find to be economically essential.

Slavery, of course, is exactly that kind of practice. And while it might have been the better part of discretion for Representatives and Senators in early 19^th century America to simply have allowed slave-states to join the Union as their inhabitants desired, their collective convictions evidently wouldn’t allow it. Not only was slavery considered by most Northern members of Congress to be an unambiguously immoral practice whose spread they felt personally compelled to arrest, but they also understood that the political culture of the United States of America was becoming increasingly fixated on the balance of power between pro-slavery and anti-slavery interests. Representatives of the slaveholding Southern states were conscious of this latter development as well, and thereby came to understand that any threat to the admission of further slave-states represented a concomitant diminution of their collective power. As of 1819, at which point the proposed state of Missouri petitioned for admission to the Union, there were twenty-two states in total. Eleven of them permitted slavery, the other eleven did not. The upper house of Congress was therefore evenly divided between twenty-two pro-slavery Senators and twenty-two anti-slavery Senators. From the perspective of the Northern states, the admission of Missouri as a slave state would have thrown off this balance and given a distinct – perhaps even permanent – advantage to the slave-holding bloc. And from the perspective of the Southern states, the rejection of Missouri’s admission as a slave state would have constituted an expansion of federal authority to include the institution of slavery. Having thus made the rejection of slavery a condition for admission to the Union, how much further would Congress be willing to go? Why not restrict slavery within the existing states? Why not abolish it altogether?

The cited opinion which Calhoun expressed during the Missouri Crisis of 1819 had clearly been formed with these questions in mind. And while it most definitely represented a very telling admission, it was not necessarily a very surprising one. Calhoun was a native of the Palmetto State, a former Congressmen from the same, and a personal beneficiary of the institution of slavery. His experiences during the War of 1812 may indeed had convinced him of the importance of seeking national solutions to national problems, but likely nothing could have persuaded him that the federal government had any right whatsoever to interfere with slavery as practiced in the states. Notwithstanding what the Constitution had to say on the subject – very little, in point of fact, but enough for most Southerners to claim its protection – there was simply no way that a population which had amassed a tremendous amount of wealth over the course of generations, and created an entire quasi-aristocratic culture as a result, would ever consent to give anyone but themselves the ability to alter or abolish the institution to which all of it was owed. If, in order to prevent such an outcome from taking place, the population in question was forced to appeal to the protection of its former colonial master, one may rest assured that this is what would take place. The Southern states may have just recently waged the second of two wars with the colonial power in question, but the preservation of their socio-economic well-being would most definitely have trumped all other considerations. The British had never seemed to take issue with the prevalence of slavery in their former American possessions, after all, and there was every reason to believe that the British government would have seized any opportunity to weaken the economy of the United States. The resulting alliance may not have been a particularly comfortable one, but Calhoun was unlikely to have been bluffing when he expressed his opinion that the South would have made its peace with the prospect if the states therein felt they had no other choice.

While the successful resolution of the Missouri Crisis meant that Calhoun was never forced to test his claim, the incident itself arguably marked another turning point in the course of his public career. From having acted, since the end of the War of 1812, as one of the foremost nationalists in the Democratic-Republican party, the 1820s would see the Congressman-turned-Secretary bend increasingly towards the narrow, sectional interests of the contemporary South. This trend proceeded slowly at first – he served out his full term in the Monroe Administration, continued (unsuccessfully) to advocate for a larger and more professionalized military, and even pursued the office of President – but it began to gain significant traction following the election of his former cabinet colleague John Quincy Adams to the office of Chief Executive in 1824.

Unlike previous contests, in which the Democratic-Republicans found themselves either arrayed against their longstanding opponents, the Federalists, or else entirely unopposed, 1824 witnessed multiple nominations for the office of President by different factions within the Democratic-Republican party. Secretary of State John Quincy Adams enjoyed support mainly in New England and New York, Treasury Secretary William Crawford (1772-1834) was the favorite of Virginia and Georgia, now Senator Andrew Jackson was strongest in the Mid-Atlantic, the Midwest, and parts of the South, and Speaker of the House Henry Clay was the preferred candidate of his native Kentucky, neighboring Ohio, and Missouri. Given how widely this situation seemed likely to split the national vote, it should come as no surprise that Calhoun favored his own chances and decided to pursue a nomination of his own. But while South Carolina was already securely in the Jackson camp – seemingly quashing Calhoun’s presidential ambitions outright – the Secretary of War was still sufficiently popular among his fellow partisans to gain their support as a candidate for the office of Vice-President. Indeed, he was chosen as running-mate by both Quincy Adams and Jackson, thus effectively elevating his chances at success significantly above those of any of the frontrunners. Granted, Calhoun was opposed to most of the Quincy Adams platform, and his attitude toward Jackson was still colored by his experiences in the Monroe cabinet during the events of the First Seminole War. Nevertheless, he proved an enthusiastic campaigner, and made very effective use of the contemporary partisan press to clarify his own policy positions and promote his own personal appeal. If the results were any indication, this was a wise choice on Calhoun’s part.

Pursuant to the ratification of the Twelfth Amendment in 1804, members of the Electoral College were required to submit separate votes for President and Vice-President, the purpose of which was to almost completely eliminate the possibility of a Chief Executive being elected from one party while his replacement-in-waiting was chosen from another. This rule change did not prevent there ever being a tie for the office of President – for which outcome the Constitution described a very specific procedure – but at the very least it ensured that partisan rivalries did not extend into the Executive Branch itself. The efficacy of this arrangement was well proven by the outcome of the Election of 1824. None of the four candidates were ultimately able to secure the required Electoral College majority to become President of the United States – leading to a contingent election in the House of Representatives – but the fact that the Vice-President was chosen separately, and that Calhoun appeared on two separate tickets, ensured that his own candidacy met with incontestable success. With one hundred and eighty-one electoral votes – compared to Quincy Adams’ eighty-four and Jackson’s ninety-nine – John C. Calhoun was to be the next Vice-President. All that remained, of course, was to determine who he was destined to share the dais with when Inauguration Day rolled around. The Constitution mandated that only the top three candidates would be allowed to participate in the contingent election in the House – thus eliminating Clay as a contender – and that voting would take place by state delegation rather than by individual Representative. The resulting poll, unlike the last instance in 1800, took only one round. Though Quincy Adams had received fewer electoral and popular votes than Jackson, he was ultimately supported by the bare majority of thirteen states necessary to win. John Quincy Adams thus became the President of the United States of America, with John C. Calhoun as Vice-President, and Henry Clay – who, as Speaker of the House, had overseen the contingent election – as Secretary of State.

Andrew Jackson unsurprisingly cried foul at this turn of events, alleged the existence of a “corrupt bargain” between Quincy Adams and Clay, and vowed to run again and win in 1828. Calhoun, for his part, was somewhat more sanguine. What concerned him far more, it seemed, then how the President had become the President was how he was supposed to position himself within an administration whose policies he openly opposed. During their shared service in the Monroe Administration, Calhoun and Quincy Adams had been of like minds on a number of issues. The latter may have had to convince the former that Gen. Jackson’s effective conquest of Spanish Florida was cause for celebration rather that rebuke, but both men seemed to agree on the necessity of things like protective tariffs, high prices for public land, a stable currency backed by a central bank, and federal funding for major infrastructure projects. But as the heightened nationalism of the 1810s gave way to the increasing factionalism of the 1820s, the threat of armed conflict dissipated, and the Atlantic economy began to shift away from the war footing it had been on since the early 1790s, Calhoun’s positions began to change. Having supported the aforementioned Tariff of 1816, for example, he came out strongly against the succeeding Tariff of 1824. Quincy Adams was a keenly in favor of the latter, believing as he did that the cultivation of a thriving domestic economy was more important than ensuring unhindered American access to the larger global economy. But while this may have suited Quincy Adams’ mainly Northwestern supporters – whose occupations were increasingly mercantile and industrial – it did not sit well with Southerners like Calhoun whose livelihoods depended on foreign markets to absorb their produce and provide them with cheap manufactured goods.

On a somewhat more philosophical note, it was also increasingly a cause of suspicion on the part of the Southern wing of the Democratic-Republican party as the 1810s gave way to the 1820s that Northerners like Quincy Adams seemed so keen to extend the authority of the federal government into the realms of domestic commerce and infrastructure. Not only did it appear to these Southerners to be pushing the envelope of what the Constitution explicitly permitted, but it gave them cause to wonder how much further a man of Quincy Adams’ convictions might conceivably go. Like his father before him, the younger Adams was a noted opponent of the institution of slavery. He had been tactful enough over the course of his career up to his victory in 1824 not to allow his opinion on the subject influence his actions as a public servant, but it was far from unthinkable – in the minds of his Southern opponents, at least – that he might have felt the office of President finally lent him both the power and the political cover to make manifest what had long been a profound personal belief. Without knowing for certain that Calhoun was of this opinion himself, it bears acknowledging both the possibility and the likelihood. Along with the tariff issue, Calhoun and Quincy Adams had also come down on different sides of the aforementioned Missouri Crisis in 1819. The latter was of the opinion that slavery was a clear example of bad policy if a disagreement about its potential expansion into new states might conceivably lead to the dissolution of the American republic. The former, meanwhile, held to the opinion that slavery, by supposedly making all white men equal, was essential to American democracy, and that protecting is was tantamount to protecting the republic itself. As this was not what one might call a tractable argument, it was little wonder Calhoun already felt alienated from his former cabinet colleague upon their shared inauguration in March of 1825.

President John Quincy Adams’ subsequent selection of Henry Clay as his Secretary of State certainly didn’t help matters between himself and his Vice-President. Whatever Calhoun felt about the “corrupt bargain” that Jackson loudly alleged, the appointment of the Kentuckian sent an unmistakable message as to the long-term intentions of the new Chief Executive. The reason for this would have been plain enough at the time. At the turn of the 19^th century, being handed the reigns of the State Department was tantamount to being anointed as the President’s preferred successor. James Madison had been elected President after serving Jefferson in that selfsame capacity, as had Monroe after serving Madison and Quincy Adams after serving Monroe. Vice-Presidents had been elected President before, of course. Adams had previously been Washington’s VP, and Jefferson had filled the same role for Adams. But this trend had been broken with Madison’s election in 1808. From that point until the early 1840s, the office of Secretary of State would function as the primary steppingstone for public servants eager to ascend to the highest office in the land. That this was an informal practice doubtless gave cause for people like Calhoun to hope that perhaps they might be the one to break the pattern and win the endorsement of their former running-mate. Clay’s elevation, unfortunately, made it plain that this was not to be. The Kentuckian may not have shared Quincy Adams’ belief in the fundamental incompatibility of slavery with American republicanism, but he and the President were virtually in lockstep on the subject of tariffs, internal improvements, and the broad authority of the federal government. In short, he was someone to which Quincy Adams would have been quite comfortable handing the office of President once his own term of service expired.

It should not come as much of a shock that Calhoun refused to accept that his political career was over at the age of forty-two. Having perhaps a premonition that the Hero of New Orleans would yet make good on his promise – or maybe just seeking a way of leaving office less shameful than resignation – he thereafter bided his time, made such entreaties as were necessary, and finally agreed to serve as Andrew Jackson’s running-mate in the Election of 1828. Calhoun remained suspicious of the former general – no less for his tendency towards populism and his support of successive federal tariffs than because of any lingering disdain left over from the events of the First Seminole War – but Jackson, at the very least, was a fellow Southerner, and someone who accordingly understood the importance of slavery to the Southern way of life. The resulting national poll, though it followed what was arguably one of the most vicious presidential campaigns in American history, was quite emphatic in its result. Jackson was called a warmonger and a murderer, a heartless slaver, and the husband of a convicted adulteress, but he nonetheless defeated the incumbent President by a margin of one hundred and seventy-eight electoral votes to eighty-three. Once again, it seemed, John C. Calhoun would be Vice-President. But while, at the outset, he surely believed this to be a tremendous boon – particularly given the recent passage of yet another federal tariff which he was hoped the newly-minted President would seek to repeal – the events of the next several years would show quite clearly that it was actually anything but.