JOHN CALHOUN COULDN’T have agreed more. Calhoun was a scion of the clans of Scots-Irish who had settled the upcountry of the Carolinas in the eighteenth century. The immigrants, who included the parents of Andrew Jackson, were men and women hungry enough in Ulster to consider emigration, resourceful enough to make the journey across the ocean, and pugnacious enough to seize and hold plots of ground in a region still claimed by Indian tribes. The Scots-Irish were said to keep the Sabbath and anything else they laid hold of; in America this started with the land they made their own. Calhoun’s father fought in the French and Indian War and then in the American Revolutionary War; after independence he won election to the South Carolina legislature. He opposed the Constitution of 1787 on grounds that it stole authority from South Carolina. He lost that argument but never changed his mind.
His son John was the fourth of five children. The boy was born six months after the Battle of Yorktown, and he was thirteen when his father died. The death appeared to foreclose a career as anything but a farmer tending the property on which his widowed mother lived. But John was an avid reader of whatever printed matter he could find, and he began to imagine the world beyond his fence and a life past the plow. A brother back from Charleston sang the praises of city life, spurring Calhoun’s ambitions further. His mother recognized his drive and arranged the family finances to fund his education. He prepped in Georgia and entered Yale College at the age of twenty. He was older than his classmates, at least the ones from the North. Afterward remarking that Southern boys often entered college later than Northern boys, he contended that they benefited from the delay. The Southerners developed their character before they developed their intellect. “At the North you overvalue the intellect,” he said. “At the South we rely upon character. And if ever there should be a collision that shall test the strength of the two sections, you will find that character is stronger than intellect, and will carry the day.”
Yale was foreign in other respects to a Southerner of Jeffersonian sentiments. Calhoun endured an Independence Day oration by the brother of Yale’s president, lamenting the decline of the republic under the Republicans. “We have now reached the consummation of democratic blockheadedness,” Theodore Dwight declared. “We have a country governed by blockheads and knaves. The ties of marriage, with all its felicities, are severed and destroyed. Our wives and our daughters are thrown into the stews. Our children are cast into the world from the breast and forgotten. Filial piety is extinguished, and our surnames, the only mark of distinction among families, are abolished. Can the imagination paint any thing more dreadful this side of hell?”
Calhoun’s displacement to Connecticut confirmed his attachment to South Carolina. To a cousin at home he described himself as “far removed from his native land.” This friend had evinced envy of Calhoun’s career as a student. Calhoun set him straight. “Your opinion of the pleasures of a collegiate life is too exalted,” he wrote. “Day after day presents the same unvariegated scenes, a tiresome sameness. Books, books, books engross our whole time and attention. Call up to your mind a student, and trace him through one day of his existence. Let it be a winter’s day. Begin when the morning bell, ere yet the sun has dispelled the darkness, summons him to the chapel. In vain the warm bed entices to indulgence and the piercing cold forbids to rise; rise he must. He riseth, and hastily having thrown on his clothes, half frozen, he repairs to chapel. He spends the day in poring over long and abstruse mathematical demonstrations. The sun now sinks below the western horizon. All the world retires to rest, the student alone excepted. To him rest is a stranger. When now day has surrendered its dominions to night, not contented with that time nature has allotted to man to labour, he trims his lamp and sits down to study. He studies till the clock strikes twelve. Pale and meager, with a shattered constitution, he retires to bed. His sleep is short and interrupted. Again the bell rings, he rises again and again goes the same round.”
Yet books became Calhoun’s friends, and intellectual arguments his passion. After graduation from Yale he moved to Litchfield, Connecticut, where America’s first law school had been operating for two decades. He spent a year at Litchfield, then repatriated to South Carolina, landing in Abbeville, in the western part of the state.
He was preparing to take the bar examination when the British assault on the Chesapeake sent waves of patriotic outrage rolling across America. An angry crowd gathered in Abbeville, and the young man gave his first public speech. The neighbors were impressed enough to ask that he draft a series of resolutions summarizing their grievances against Britain. The assignment called to Calhoun’s mind the work of Jefferson in drafting the Declaration of Independence three decades earlier, and he poured himself into it. “When on our coasts, and almost in sight of our capital,” he proclaimed on behalf of Abbeville, “our citizens, by her brutal violence, are murdered; a public armed vessel wholly disabled; the American Eagle struck and insulted; when unheard of indignities and outrage are offered to a humane, just, patriotic and powerful nation, every tongue should be raised to denounce the insult; every arm be stretched to avenge the injury; there should be one burst of national indignation.” The resolutions followed: that Abbeville abhorred the assault on the Chesapeake, that anyone who didn’t share Abbeville’s abhorrence should be regarded as an enemy of the United States, that all who allowed partisanship to dilute their outrage were equally culpable, that men of military age should rally to the national colors.
The document was just what the patriotic citizens of Abbeville and its district desired, and at first opportunity they elected Calhoun to the South Carolina legislature. Two years later, still angry at the British and impressed by Calhoun, they nominated him for Congress.
BY THEN HE had fallen in love. Floride Colhoun was the daughter of John E. Colhoun, a cousin of Calhoun’s father and a distinguished figure in South Carolina politics until his sudden death in 1802. Calhoun, a traditionalist in affairs of the heart, cultivated the mother before approaching the daughter. He was also waiting for the daughter to grow up. Floride was ten when her father died and Calhoun began writing to the widow. Topics ranged from family matters to politics. Gradually references to Floride crept into his letters. Mrs. Colhoun encouraged his suit, to his delight. “I know not how to express my gratitude for that almost maternal regard which you have always exercised towards me,” he wrote. “Such is the warmth of affection which I feel towards you that I can scarcely refrain from addressing you by the endearing epithet of mother. I hope the time will not be long when I may with propriety use it.”
Floride responded as Calhoun and her mother hoped, and in due course she and Calhoun were engaged. His anticipation knew no bounds. “I rejoice, my dearest Floride, that the period is fast approaching when it will be no longer necessary to address you through the cold medium of a letter,” he wrote in September 1810, when she was eighteen. Floride and her mother were in Newport, Rhode Island, where they annually escaped the heat and disease of South Carolina’s summer. “At furthest it cannot be much longer than a month before I shall behold the dearest object of my hopes and desires.” He extolled the life they were about to commence together. “To be united in mutual virtuous love is the first and best bliss that God has permitted to our natures. My dearest one, may our love strengthen with each returning day, may it ripen and mellow with our years, and may it end in immortal joys.”
Floride appreciated her fiancé’s gushings, as befitted the bride-to-be. But she also had a practical side, one that took a close interest in her husband’s career. Calhoun addressed this as well. “I am much involved in business at present,” he explained. “Court commences in two weeks, and in a week the election for Congress will take place. My opponent is Gen. Elmore of Laurens, but it is thought that I will succeed by a large majority.”
HE DID SUCCEED, and handsomely. He and Floride married. He left for Washington to make his wife and constituents proud.
Appointed by Henry Clay to the House committee on foreign relations, Calhoun picked up the thread he had started spinning in his Abbeville resolutions. His committee colleagues recognized his gift for argumentation, and as the mood of the House grew ever more anti-British, they assigned him the drafting of a statement summarizing the indictment against Britain.
Calhoun began by condemning Britain for waging “a desolating war upon our unprotected commerce.” Yet British insults touched far more than commerce; they traduced American honor and independence. Would the United States defend itself against foreign aggression? Would the American government insist on the rights of its citizens? Or would it let Britain essentially recolonize the country? Congress must take a stand, Calhoun declared. “We have borne with injury until forbearance has ceased to be a virtue. The sovereignty and independence of these states, purchased and sanctified by the blood of our fathers, from whom we received them, not for ourselves only but as the inheritance of our posterity, are deliberately and systematically violated.” The injury and violations must cease. “It is the sacred duty of Congress to call forth the patriotism and resources of the country.” Calhoun urged his colleagues to gird the country for war. Ten thousand new army regulars should be enlisted, fifty thousand volunteers recruited, the state militias readied for action, the navy rounded into fighting trim, and American merchant vessels armed. By these means, and with God’s aid, America would teach Britain a lesson it wouldn’t forget.