John C. Calhoun

In 1811, John Calhoun married Floride Bonneau Calhoun, one of his cousins. The couple had 10 children together, out of which three died in infancy.

John Calhoun died on March 31, 1850 in Washington, D.C., after contracting tuberculosis, at the age of 68. He was buried at the St. Philip's Churchyard in Charleston, South Carolina.

John Caldwell Calhoun was born on March 18, 1782, in Abbeville District, South Carolina, U.S., to Patrick Calhoun, a Scots-Irish farmer, and his wife, Martha Caldwell. John was the fourth child of his parents who were migrants from Pennsylvania to the Carolina Piedmont.

At the age of 17, due to his father’s illness, John dropped out from school and started working on the family farm. Later, he decided to complete his studies and obtained a degree from Yale College, in 1804.

Afterwards, he studied law at the Tapping Reeve Law School, and was admitted to the South Carolina bar in 1807. Later, John abandoned his practice upon marrying and became a planter-statesman.

In 1808, Calhoun was elected to South Carolina’s state legislature, where he served for a year.

In 1811, he was appointed as a Democratic-Republican to the United States House of Representatives, a position he retained until 1817. He chaired the House Foreign Relations Committee and worked as a main lieutenant of Speaker Henry Clay.

A nationalist at the start of his political career, Calhoun was one of the leading War Hawks who played a major role in steering the unprepared United States into war with Great Britain.In 1812, Calhoun introduced the declaration of war against Britain.

From December 1817 to March 1825, Calhoun served as Secretary of War under President James Monroe. During his term, Calhoun reorganized and modernized the National Military Academy.

In 1824,Calhoun ran for the President of United States along with four other candidates but later withdrew himself from the race. Subsequently, with Andrew Jackson’s support, he ran unopposed for vice presidency and in March 1825, Calhoun was inaugurated as the 7th Vice President of the United States, under John Quincy Adams.

After the War of 1812, during his term as a U.S. Congressman, Calhoun helped in establishment of the Second Bank of the United States. He served as chairman of the committees which introduced Bills for a permanent road system, a standing army and modern navy.

Calhoun protested against the Tariff of Abominations of 1828 and stressed on the fact that the tariff was being unfairly assessed on the agrarian South benefitting the industrializing North.Thus, he drafted his ‘South Carolina Exposition and Protest’ and proposed the theory of a concurrent majority through the doctrine of nullification.