John C. Calhoun

A leading antebellum statesman and one of John Quincy Adams’s presidential-era rivals, as recounted in James Traub’s biography John Quincy Adams. In the book Calhoun appears as one of the men (with Henry Clay and William Crawford) widely assumed to want the presidency; he discusses with Adams a plan for a politically independent Washington paper, which Adams laughed off as bound to draw “slander, obloquy, and probably assassination.” Later Calhoun advances a conspiracy theory that “a scheme has been formed to perpetuate power in the present hands,” warning that corrupt patronage would turn elections into a “farce.” Traub treats it as astonishing that “one of the nation’s greatest political thinkers” embraced such a baseless theory. Calhoun is also shown as right that any tariff bill split the country along sectional lines, and — through Hayne in the Webster–Hayne debate — as the architect of the states’-sovereignty argument that Daniel Webster rose to rebut (“Liberty and union, now and forever, one and inseparable!”). Adams reflected that the need to defend slavery had “warped as fine a mind as Calhoun’s.”

Context: John C. Calhoun (1782–1850) of South Carolina served as U.S. vice president, senator, and secretary of state, and was the foremost theorist of nullification and states’ rights in the decades before the Civil War.

Where this appears

• John Quincy Adams — recurring rival and political thinker: the independent-paper scheme, the “perpetuate power” conspiracy theory, the tariff/sectionalism prediction, the nullification argument behind Webster–Hayne, and Adams’s view that slavery warped his mind.