d as little
less than a demigod, and until the antislavery agitation began he was
viewed as among the foremost statesmen of the land. His elevation to
commanding influence in Congress was very rapid, and but for his
identification with partisan interests and a bad institution, there was
no office in the gift of the nation to which he could not reasonably
have aspired.

John Caldwell Calhoun was born in 1782, of highly respectable
Protestant-Irish descent, in the Abbeville District in South Carolina.
He was not a patrician, according to the ideas of rich planters. He had
but a slender school education in boyhood, but was prepared for college
by a Presbyterian clergyman, entered the Junior Class of Yale College in
1802, and was graduated with high honors. He chose the law for his
profession, studied laboriously for three years, spending eighteen
months at the then famous law school at Litchfield, Connecticut, and
gave great promise, in his remarkable logical powers, of becoming an
eminent lawyer.

Whatever abilities Mr. Calhoun may have had for the law, it does not
appear that he practised it long, or to any great extent. His taste and
his genius inclined him to politics. And, having married a lady with
some fortune, he had sufficient means to live without professional
drudgery. After serving a short time in the State Legislature of South
Carolina, he was elected a member of Congress, and took his seat in the
House of Representatives in 1811, at the age of twenty-nine. From the
very first his voice was heard. He made a speech in favor of raising ten
thousand additional men to our army to resist the encroachments of Great
Britain and prepare for hostilities should the country drift into war.
It was an able speech for a young man, and its scornful repudiation of
reckoning the costs of war against insult and violated rights had a
chivalric ring about it: "Sir, I here enter my solemn protest against a
low and calculating avarice entering this hall of legislation. It is
only fit for shops and counting-houses.... It is a compromising spirit,
always ready to yield a part to save the residue." Here at an early date
we hear the key-note of his life,--hatred of compromises and
half-measures. If it were necessary to go to war at all, he would fight
regardless of expense.

Thus Calhoun began his public career as an advocate of war with Great
Britain. The old Revolutionary sores had not yet had time to heal, and
there was general