John C. Calhoun

• Vice President to 2 consecutive Presidents:
  
  
  John Quincy Adams - Democratic-Republican, from Massachusetts.
  
  • John Quincy Adams, son of John Adams, served 1825 - 1829. He died in 1848, at the age of 81.
    
  General Andrew Jackson - Democrat, from North Carolina.
  
  • General Andrew Jackson served 1829 - 1837. He died in 1845, at the age of 78.
    
    
• Dates Served: Calhoun served as Vice President from 1825 - 1832.
  
• Political Party: Calhoun was a Democratic-Republican, from South Carolina.
  
• Born: 1782.
  
• Died: 1850, at the age of 68.
  
• The presidential opponents during the 1824 and 1828 campaigns were:
  
  
  • 1824:
    
    • General Andrew Jackson - Democrat - War hero from North Carolina
      
    • Henry Clay - Whig - Kentucky Senator, & former Speaker of the House
      
    • William Crawford - Democratic-Republican from Georgia, and President Monroe's Secretary of the Treasury
      
      
  • 1828 - John Quincy Adams - National Republican - Incumbant President
    
    
• Campaign issues:
  
  
  • During the 1824 campaign:
    
    
    • The issues this year revolved largely around the personalities of the 4 candidates, along with various sectional priorities, revolving mostly around tariffs and how much Federal money should be used for internal improvements to the nation's infrastructure. No one won a clear majority and Adams only clinched it after the House of Representatives voted on it.
      
      
  • During the 1828 campaign:
    
    
    • The issue this year was how much everyone loved Andrew Jackson, America's newest war hero. Jackson ran as a down-home regular guy versus the elitist, aristocratic John Quincy Adams. Mud-slinging and smear-tactics were honed to a fine art this year, with charges of bribery, adultery, and murder flying in both directions. Jackson won with the strong support of the West, who related to his self-made image, and the South who approved of his staunchly pro-Slavery running mate, Calhoun.
      
      
  
  
• Notable Facts about John C. Calhoun:
  
  
  • Without question, Calhoun was America's scariest-looking Vice President.
    
    
  • John C. Calhoun never regularly attended school prior to being admitted to Yale, having been mostly self-educated.
    
    
  • Religious affiliation: Calhoun was raised in a Presbyterian household, but as an adult he avoided associating himself with any specific church. He contributed money to the construction of a Unitarian Church in Washington, and he shared many of the Unitarians' laissez-faire approach to doctrine: personal spiritual "journeys" are more important than specific answers. His public comments on religion never revealed his personal beliefs, except that on his death-bed he turned away the Senate Chaplain who had arrived to minister to him, telling him "I won't be told what to think".
    
    
  • Calhoun married his second-cousin.
    
    
  • A Lawyer, Calhoun served in the South Carolina Legislature from 1808 - 1810.
    
    
  • He served in the US House of Representatives, representing South Carolina from 1811 - 1817.
    
    
  • He was a leading "war hawk" during the War of 1812, and wanted eagerly to go to war with Britain, largely for the purpose of expanding US territory into Canada.
    
    
  • He served as Secretary of War under President James Monroe from 1817 - 1825.
    
    
  • Calhoun was elected Vice President in 1825 and served under John Qunicy Adams. He was then re-elected in 1828 and served under Andrew Jackson, a fellow Southerner.
    
    
  • Calhoun and President John Quincy Adams didn't get along well, due partially to Calhoun's habit of working against the President behind the scenes, trying to get people appointed to key posts who were friendly to southern agendas.
    
    
  • Calhoun and Jackson also had an eventual falling out, primarilly over the issue of States Rights vs. Federal authority, with Calhoun insisting that States had the right overrule any Federal laws it didn't like. As a result, Calhoun resigned his seat as Vice President in 1832, becoming the only VP to resign until Spiro Agnew did the same thing 141 years later, in 1973.
    
    
  • Another cause of the loss of love between Calhoun and Jackson was the so-called "Peggy Eaton Affair", in which Calhoun's wife led a social feud against the wife of Jackson's Secretary of War, John Eaton, ostracizing her from Washington society. This didn't help the tension that already existed between the Pres and his Vice.
    
    
  • As an illustration of the lack of warm fuzzies between the two, Jackson supposedly had this to say about his former VP prior to his (Jackson's) death, "My one regret is that I never had Calhoun hanged".
    
    
  • As a result of his resignation from the Vice Presidency, Calhoun was able to accept his election by South Carolina to the US Senate. He served as a Senator from 1842 to 1843, interrupted by a stint as Secretary of State under President John Tyler from 1844 - 1845, then served in the Senate again from 1845 - 1850. It was during his career as Senator that Calhoun managed to push through legislation that enforced "gag rules", preventing the issue of Slavery from even being discussed on the Senate floor. During his stint as Secretary of State under President Tyler, Calhoun orchestrated the annexation of Texas, which was admitted into the Union as a Slave state, which was a triumph for his adamantly pro-Slavery agenda.
    
    
  • Calhoun was one of the so-called "The Great Triumvirate of Senators" along with Henry Clay and Daniel Webster.
    
    
  • Calhoun spent the rest of his career being a spokesman for the dual issues of States' Rights and the defense of Slavery as an institution, up until his death in 1850.
    
    
  • Calhoun's final words on his death-bed are said to have been, "The South, the poor South".

Notable events during his Vice Presidency under John Quincy Adams:

• John Quincy Adams won the election by the slimmest of margins, and since neither he nor Jackson nor Crawford had won a majority of Electoral votes the election was once again left to the House of Representatives to vote on. Clay dropped out of the running since he had the poorest results and supported Adams, thereby giving Adams the victory, though by a tenuous margin.
  
  
• President Adams liked to swim naked in the Potomac River every morning at 5:00 AM. Adams was the first president to have his picture taken with a camera, but luckily no photos of him in the buff are known to exist.
  
  
• The Panama Congress in 1826. This meeting of the heads of state from the various nations of the American continents was convened in Panama by Simon Bolivar, in order to foster cooperation amongst the American nations. However, Southern Congressmen managed to delay confirmation of any US delegates long enough to ensure they missed the event, since they thought it would be a forum for the condemnation of Slavery, which several South American countries had already outlawed.
  
  
• Photography is invented in April, 1826, by Joseph-Nicephore Niepce in Chalon-sur-Saône, France. Cameras had been used since the 1500's but he was the first to use film. (Artists had long used pin-hole boxes, calling them "camera obscura", to project images onto canvases, upside down, which they would paint over).
  
  While playing with lithography techniques one day Niepce wiped some silver chloride on a piece of paper, then put it in the back of his camera, opened the shutter and left it open for 8 hours, with the pin-hole aimed out of his living room window. When he came back he saw imprinted on the piece of paper a blurry image of the rooftops visible from his window: the world's first photograph. It would take decades to reduce the required exposure time, which long remained in the hours instead of seconds. Cameras were to become to paintings what Napster is to music companies.
  
  
• The Tariff of Abominations, in 1828. President Adams proposed implementing a high tariff on any imported manufactured goods, in order to protect domestic industry, which at the time was centered mainly in New England. Southerners aligned with Andrew Jackson opposed the tariff, since they viewed it as favoring the northern states, and they tried to kill it by adding a clause that included an additional tariff that covered any raw materials imported into New England used for manufacture. They assumed this would be rejected by both northern and southern states, but instead it was accepted and made into law.
  
  It was called "The Tariff of Abominations" due to its obscenely steep rates and was eventually lowered, partially because Vice President Calhoun argued that individual states had the right to nullify any federal laws that it considered unjust, and this was one of them. The rates were reduced by Congress, but Calhoun's insistence on States' rights to "nullification" was the first step in the gradual States vs. Union tension that would erupt into war 33 years later.
  
  

Notable events during his Vice Presidency under Andrew Jackson:

• The lawn mower is invented in England, by Edwin Budding in 1830.
  
  
• The Resignation of Secretary of War, John Eaton in 1831. From the day of Jackson's inauguration to Eaton's resignation 2 years later the administration was under the cloud of a Clintonesque scandal involving charges of adultery and lying.
  
  When Andrew Jackson was 24 years old he had married his wife, back in 1791, whom he thought had gotten divorced from her first husband the previous year. However, her first husband had never finalized their divorce and they were still legally married. When he learned that his wife had married Jackson in the meantime he then formally divorced her in 1793 under the charge of adultery, 2 years after Jackson had married her. Jackson claimed he didn't know about this, though as a lawyer he could have easily checked, and so they got married again in 1794. Technically, the first 3 years of Jackson's marriage was not legally legitimate.
  
  The issue was dug up by his opponents during Jackson's presidential campaign in 1828 and used it to maximum political advantage, though failed to tarnish Jackson's image enough to derail his campaign. A month after winning the election Jackson's wife suddenly became ill and died, and Jackson forever blamed the political mud-throwing and resulting stress for her death.
  
  When he became president there began a scandal involving the new wife of his Secretary of War, John Eaton. A social feud had begun amongst the Cabinet wives, led by Vice President Calhoun's wife, ostracizing Peggy Eaton from Washington society. According to the grapevine, that hussy Peggy Timberlake had been having an affair with John Eaton, close buddy of President Jackson, while her husband was out at sea serving with the Navy. Her husband committed suicide in 1828 and she then married John Eaton shortly thereafter. The other wives hissed and sneered at her, they did.
  
  Jackson disapproved of the way she was being snubbed by his Cabinet members' wives, seeing similarity between how she was being treated and how his wife had been during his campaign. He adamantly defended the new Mrs. Eaton, demanding that she be treated with due courtesy by the other wives. But no one did. The only person who socialized with her was Secretary of State Martin Van Buren, thus securing his future job as Vice President after Calhoun resigned. The distracting mess quietly died out when John Eaton resigned. (Jackson then appointed him Governor of the Florida Territory).
  
  So you see, throwing around accusations of sex and adultery and legal shenanigans for political gain is nothing new in Washington.
  
  
• The question of "Nullification". For years there had been a growing problem surrounding the question of tariffs on imported goods into the country. Domestic manufacturers wanted to keep tariffs high to protect America's young industries, but as to what the rates of these tariffs should be, opinions varied between the northern and southern states. Many southern states argued that if they didn't approve of a particular tariff they had the right to nullify that law in their state. Jackson disagreed, arguing that federal laws were binding across all states and only federal action could void federal laws. States only had jurisdiction over their own state laws.
  
  In 1832 President Jackson signed a law that set a tarrif that was less steep than the previous "Tariff of Abominations" four years earlier, which he assumed would appease the southern states. South Carolina wasn't satisfied however, so they nullified it, saying that it didn't apply in their state. Jackson responded by threatening to send in the military to enforce the collection of import duties in the state, reiterating that individual states did not have the right to nullify federal laws. He also reminded them that anyone contemplating seceding from the Union was toying with treason. The crisis was resolved with the passage of another tariff the following year, sponsored by Senator Henry Clay from Kentucky which was acceptable to both the southern states and to Jackson.
  
  Despite being a southerner himself, Jackson was the first president to champion the rule of federal authority over states rights.
  
  
• Jackson's war on the Banks. Up until President Jackson's term there had been a central Bank of the United States that more or less regulated the banks in the states. But in 1832 Jackson vetoed a bill that would have renewed the central bank's charter, effectively dissolving it.
  
  Jackson hated banks, and blamed them for maintaining an elitist economic class-distinction between Eastern businessmen and hard-working commoners out West. Jackson had lost money during some land-speculation problems he had years earlier, and he resented the roles the banks had played in enforcing his loan payments. After dissolving the bank he then withdrew a whopping $11 million in federal funds that the bank had on deposit and distributed the money to various state banks.
  
  Jackson also believed in "hard money", arguing that paper money was meaningless, and that the only valid currency was "specie", i.e. raw gold and silver. Jackson and his followers started paying their bills and travel costs in gold and silver nuggets, referring to it as "Jackson money".
  
  Because of this Congress voted to censure Jackson in 1834. However it was pretty weak, since Jackson's action had wide-range support, and it was expunged from the Congressional record three years later.
  
  The new influx of money to state banks, and the disappearance of the previous conservative credit rules, caused banks to begin issuing easy credit and paper money like it grew on trees, which touched off dizzying land-speculation out West and increased inflation. Jackson issued his "Specie Circular" in 1836 which required people who purchased public land to pay in gold or silver, and not easily-issued paper money, which calmed things down a bit by drying up credit, but sewed the seeds for the Panic of 1837 that was to come under Jackson's successor.
  
  
• The Black Hawk War, in 1832. US soldiers fought and defeated the two Sac and Fox Indian tribes in Illinois and Wisconsin, led by Chief Black Hawk. Among the soldiers fighting the Indians was a 23 year-old militia captain named Abraham Lincoln.