Jackson selected Calhoun for his Vice President, maybe as a result of the mistaken notion that Calhoun was an ally. Both Jackson and John C. Calhoun, started out as nationalists. John C. Calhoun started out as an ardent Nationalist and a champion of majority rule. He was a graduate of Yale and the Litchfield Law School. In 1812 he was one of the folks who was ardent for the US to enter the War with Britain. In 1817 he was James Madison's secretary of war and a leading proponant of nationalist causes. He was a believer in the sound notion that a lasting peace depends on having a sound Army.2 he favored a national bank because he felt that an unstable national currency would complicate war finance. He favored the construction of roads, the nationalization of the armed forces, and a protective tariff to protect nascent industries. All these positions were guided by general principles. As the author of "Prelude to Civil War" notes;
"the South Carolinians' plea for an active national government was not an unqualified demand for unlimited interference in the economy. It was always restricted by the patriotic and disinterested motives which inspired it. South Carolina planters had little financial interest in the nationalist program. South Carolina's road and canal projects, for example, were intrastate enterprises which required no federal aid. A system of national roads was unlikely to pass through South Carolina; thus federal appropriations would more directly invigorate the economy of other American States."
This meant that the general principles espoused by the Young Calhoun were not backed by self interest. By 1827 his ideas had changed radically.
When Andrew Jackson ran for the Presidency in 1827 he ran as a champion of all the ideas that Calhoun had articulated so well some 10 years earlier with the exception of his ideas on the National Bank. They both were champions of States Rights, but now they no longer agreed on other key issues. When Andrew Jackson was elected in 1828, he thought that John C. Calhoun was at his side, but the John C. Calhoun of 1828 was no longer the same man as the John C. Calhoun of 1818.
Jackson was a frontier General. In the War of 1812 he'd won the only non-naval clear victory of the war, routing an Army sent to New Orleans to spearhead a primary invasion up the Mississippi. In 1818 Jackson had pursued the Seminole Indians into Florida against the express orders of the war department. He never did defeat the Seminoles, who remained in the swamps until they finally signed a treaty some 150 years later, but he did provoke an international incident and a near war with Spain. The invasion also violated Calhoun's war department orders. Jackson claimed he had a letter from Monroe authorizing his action. Monroe remembered no such letter. At the time Calhoun attacked Jackson and demanded an investigation for insubordination. Secretary of State Adams (John Quincy Adams) rejected this plea, and the whole thing turned out amicably when the US purchased Florida from the Spanish and annexed it as a future State. But when Clay and Crawford attacked Calhoun and Jackson for their adventurism, Jackson got the idea that Calhoun had been on his side in the dispute. This turned out to be a mistake. And these old war issues would surface in time to become a symbol of a deeper ideological difference between the two.
By 1827 Calhoun was a champion of nullification, and no longer a believer in majority rule or the wisdom of the people. The depression of 1820 that lasted for a number of years. It also was afflicted by his acquisition of low lying Cotton country tended by slave labor had made him aware of self interest. Jackson still felt that the Tariff that had been imposed on imports in order to protect beginning industries in the US was constitutional and necessary. However, his Vice President was now adamantly against the Tariff. By 1827 Calhoun was about to become the leading proponant of the pernicious doctrine of "nullification" and someone whose behavior and ideas planted some of the dragon seeds which would spring up to fight in the Civil War. Self interest combined with the excesses of John Quincy Adams, who had tried to use Nationalism to quell dissent, had led to a change of views. He wrote to Littleton Walker Tazewell:
"The despotism founded on combined geographical interst, admits of but one effective remedy, a veto on the part of the local interest, or under our system, on the part of the states."3
Before nullification, in 1825, he had argued to one Mclean that "the principle of periodic elections would adequately safeguard the American Experiment in Self-Government. Representatives might be corrupt, but the people were incorruptible. As long as the population retained control over those who governed, democracy would remain the most viable form of Government."3
By 1827 he no longer had faith in the inherent wisdom and virtue of the people. Projecting his own treatment of the negro slave minority on his own people from his own state he said "Man, is so constituted, that his direct or individual feelings are stronger than his sympathetic or social feelings." As a result a group of men with similar interests are always more self-interested than disinterested. Therefore in a Democracy, if one portion of the community contains a numerical majority, it will "pervert its powers to oppress and plunder the other. If no one interest can muster a majority, a "combination will be formed between those whose interests are most alike." The author notes further that "the rule of the majority and the right of suffrage are good things, but they alone are not sufficient to guard liberty, as experience will teach us.4 He felt a system of minority (or state) veto would end the tyranny of numbers. In short he'd come to feel that a system, to be truly fair should rule by absolute consensus. Calhoun wouldn't openly express these feelings until 1831. To Calhoun nullification was the only real way to save the Union, because he felt that sooner or later slavery would be abolished unless the south was granted the right to nullify it's decrees. He hoped to prevent his vision of federal armies marching into South Carolina. His too was an accurate assessment of the situation as he saw it.
But was it a "principled" assessment?" On the surface it might have sounded principled. But his earlier beliefs had been guided by general principles. But the idea of nullification was not in defense of a noble minority. It was in the defense of an ignoble economic institution that shadowed all the high notions that the country rested on. That ignoble institution was slavery. And the real reason for supporting it was only one thing; self interest. Nullification thus wasn't an effort to guard liberty. It was an effort to safeguard a form of tyranny. Thus supporting nullification was really advancing a kind of lie, that somehow a form of tyranny could be justified because it allowed ordinary people to live as kings. He no longer stood for the things he once had articulated so forcefully. Like Thomas Jefferson he could rationalize his behavior, but only by telling lies. And like all such lies, the effort to tell lies to others requires that one lie to oneself.
There is a cost to such kinds of lies. The cost is in the loss of faith in real, shining, warm and happy visions that can flower in reality. The "belief" fostered in its stead is in effect unbelief. Unbelief is what fanaticism is. And when fanatics fight the "unbelievers" of the world, it is because they cannot see that such belief is itself 'unbelief." Real belief is based on the fact that at the core of every such faith is creation. The creation of a faith that over and across that desert is a "map" that takes one to a real river and a real paradise on the other side. Unbelief however takes one to dark places. It's lies inevitably lead the captain's and sailors both of such vessels to close their eyes to where they are going. Doggedly, determinedly they push on in their 'unbelief' to places that are not how they portray them. The fruit of such unbelief is almost always a hell. The 70 virgins they cry for turn into seventy tormentors carrying whips and goads.
The contortions required to justify slavery were such an unbelief. The only place they could possibly lead would be the graveyards at Gettysburg and Antietam and the graveyards of hundreds of thousands of innocent slaves and not so innocent slave-owners. Thus his support of nullification was actually a loss of faith in himself and a betrayal of the principles that had informed his youth. He, not Daniel Webster of the story, had figuratively sold his soul to the devil for a few thousand barrels of cotton. By 1828, Calhoun was in a sense a traitor to his country. This was long before the Civil war. But civil war had already started in the South. In 1820 Calhoun had been against Charles Pinkney, by 1827 he agreed with him. Pinkney had maintained that "Settling the Missouri dispute"...was "very unimportant" compared with "keeping the hands of the Congress from touching the question of slavery."6
Andrew Jackson sensed this in him very soon after his election. In 1829 he wrote to a supporter that he'd found Martin Van Buren to be "everything that I could desire him to be...not only deserving my confidence but the confidence of the Nation....I wish I could say as much for Calhoun."7 Jackson believed in States rights, but in the framework of a Nation state. For him nullification was the "ultimate heresy"8 "Jackson had spent a lifetime,...protecting American Democracy against Englishmen and Indians, and he could never approve a successor who might tear down Majority rule." He would summarize his disagreements as follows:9
Mr. Calhoun objects to the apportionment of surplus revenue among the several states, after the public debt is paid. He is also silent on the Bank Question, and is believed to have encouraged the introduction and adoption of the Resolutions in the South Carolina Legistlation relative to the Tariff.
The dispute between the two men, was thus not just over Calhoun and the "petticoat Brigade's" snubbing, defamation and criticism of first Jackson's wife and then later of Peggy O'Neal, but on real issues. The author summarizes the points he makes in quotes from a famous toast on "Jefferson day" in 1830. He recounts how several of the toasts from southern representatives seemed to celebrate the doctrine of minority veto. But Jackson toasted;
Our Federal Union -- it must be preserved."
Calhoun could only say:
The Union -- Next to our liberties the most dear."
George McDuffie:
"The memory of Patrick Henry: The first American Statesman who had the soul to feel, and the courage to declare, in the face of armed tyranny, that there is no treason in resisting oppression."
And of course all present had different notions of what those terms meant, but for McDuffie and Calhoun, secession was already in the mind. Their loyalty to the "Union" was second to loyalty to the repressive regime of slavery. And they wanted to use Nullification to protect that institution forever. Else they knew they'd have to leave the Union.10
The constitutional issue was already on it's way to being settled. Webster would debate Hayne the following year. And he would make the point that the constitution was clearly the supreme law of the land. It had been created after a united crusade for indepence, and once ratified, states could only leave by consent of the other states. By consenting to divided sovereignity, as Webster Argued, they no longer had the option of nullifying it or seceding. And Webster sealed his debate with a wonderful piece of oratry:
When my eyes shall be turned to behold, for the last time, the sun in heaven. May I not see him shining on the broken and dishonored fragments of a once glorious Union...Let their last feeble and lingering glance, behold the gorgeous ensign of the Republic...blazin in all it's ample folds, as they float over the sea and over the land....Liberty and Union, now and forever, one and inseperable.11
As Newt Gingrich notes when talking and writing about Grant in his new book. The only way to settle a conflict where both sides are completely intractable, is by determined use of force of arms. In 1820, slavery might have been ended peacefully [that is another essay]. By 1829 the road to civil war was already full of soldiers in training.