Books: Lost Cause

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He became Vice President under both John Quincy Adams and Jackson, but farther he could not go. In part he failed because his personality was too dry and abstract, in part because he mortally antagonized Jackson; Old Hickory never forgave the South Carolinian for what he took as a threat of secession in 1832. Later Jackson was to tell friends that one of the regrets of his life was that he never hanged John Calhoun. But essentially Calhoun failed because he remained the unyielding and uncompromising spokesman of lost political causes. He clung to slavery and states' rights when those issues had begun to make him hated and feared in the North. He even had the temerity to stand almost alone in the Senate against war with Mexico, when his Southern colleagues were dreaming of the new states to be won for the slave system in the great Southwest. Calhoun had simply referred the matter to his conscience; he did not believe the U.S. had just cause for war.

Mistimed Hope. The last years of Calhoun's life were full of galling frustrations. His wife Floride, eleven years younger than he and a frothy Charleston belle when he married her, was jealous of the time he gave to his work and flew into rages that, according to local legends, often ended with the china flying at John Calhoun's head.

In his defense of the South, Calhoun argued that to allow the majority to rule without restraint would establish a tyranny in which "the minority is subject." These theoretical arguments Calhoun and his friends buttressed with attacks on Northern capitalism. Calhoun warned that "after we [the planters] are exhausted, the contest will be between the capitalists and operatives." "When gentlemen preach insurrection to slaves," cried another Southerner, "I will preach . . . insurrection to the laborers of the

North." But Calhoun's hopes that the North would turn to the South as a conservative bulwark was mistimed, for he wrongly expected the conflict between capital & labor in the North to erupt before the conflict between North & South. When he died, in March 1850, Charleston gave him a square of marble cut with the one word CALHOUN. Fifteen years later, a Yankee soldier standing in ruined Charleston uttered a sharper epitaph: "The whole South is the grave of Calhoun."