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John C. Calhoun (March 18, 1782 – March 31, 1850) was a prominent United States politician from South Carolina during the first half of the 19th century.

Although he died a decade before the American Civil War broke out between the North and the South, Calhoun was the primary intellectual architect of what would become the short-lived Confederate States of America. Nicknamed the "cast-iron man" for his staunch determination to defend the causes in which he believed, Calhoun pushed the theory of nullification, an extreme states' rights view under which states could declare null and void any federal law they deemed to be unconstitutional. He was an outspoken proponent of the institution of slavery, which he defended as a "positive good" rather than as a necessary evil. His rhetorical defense of slavery was partially responsible for escalating Southern threats of secession in the face of mounting abolitionist sentiment in the North.

This legacy ties Calhoun to the South Carolina-led Southern rebellion against the federal government, but he spent his entire career working for that government in a variety of high offices in Washington, DC. Calhoun served as the seventh Vice President of the United States, first under John Quincy Adams (1825-1829) and then under Andrew Jackson (1829-1832), but resigned the Vice Presidency to enter the United States Senate, where he had more power. He also served in the United States House of Representatives (1810-1817) and was both Secretary of War (1817-1824) and Secretary of State (1844-1845).

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John Calhoun was the son of Scot-Irish immigrant Patrick Calhoun. When his father became ill when John was 14, the boy quit school to manage the family farm in South Carolina. But he eventually returned to his studies, earning a degree from Yale College in 1804.

In 1810 Calhoun was elected to Congress, and became one of the War Hawks who, led by Henry Clay, agitated for what became the War of 1812. After the war, he proposed a Bonus Bill for public works. In 1817, President James Monroe appointed Calhoun to be Secretary of War. In the disputed election of 1824, which had to be resolved by the House of Representatives, Calhoun forged an alliance between factions that made John Quincy Adams president and Calhoun the vice president. But he soon broke with Adams, whom he believed unfairly favored Northern interests.

Calhoun became Andrew Jackson's running mate in the election of 1828, and again was vice president. But once again a rift between Northern and Southern views drove a wedge between Calhoun and his president.

Calhoun supported the theory of nullification—that individual states could override federal legislation they deemed unconstitutional. Nullification traced back to arguments by Thomas Jefferson and James Madison in passing the Kentucky and Virginia Resolutions of 1798, which nullified the Alien and Sedition Acts. Jackson, who believed in a strong federal government, opposed the idea of nullification.

In 1832, the states rights theory was put to the test in the Nullification Crisis after South Carolina passed an ordinance that claimed to nullify federal tariffs. The tariffs favored Northern manufacturing interests over Southern agricultural concerns, and the South Carolina legislature declared them to be unconstitutional.

In response Congress passed the Force Bill, which empowered the president to use military power to force states to obey all federal laws, and Jackson sent US Navy warships to Charleston Harbor. South Carolina then nullified the Force Bill. But tensions cooled after both sides agreed to the Compromise of 1833, a proposal by Senator Henry Clay to change the tariff law in a manner which satisifed Calhoun, who by then was in the Senate.

During the Nullification Crisis, President Jackson said in a famous toast, "Our federal Union—it must and shall be preserved." In Vice President Calhoun's toast, he replied, "The Union; next to our liberty most dear!" The break between Jackson and Calhoun was complete, and in 1832 Calhoun ran for the Senate rather than remaining as Jackson's running mate.

The state v. federal power issue receded for a generation until the run-up to the Civil War in 1860, when the election of Abraham Lincoln prompted Southern leaders to claim that they could nullify any attempt by the North to outlaw slavery. By then, Calhoun had been dead for a decade.

On December 28, 1832 Calhoun accepted election to the United States Senate from his native South Carolina, becoming the first Vice President to resign from office in U.S. history. He would achieve his greatest influence and most lasting fame as a senator.

Calhoun led the pro-slavery faction in the Senate in the 1830s and 1840s, opposing both abolitionism, and attempts to limit the expansion of slavery into the western territories. Where other Southern politicians had excused slavery as a necessary evil, in a famous February 1837 speech on the Senate floor, Calhoun went further, defending slavery as a "positive good." He rooted this claim on two grounds—white supremacy and paternalism. All societies, Calhoun claimed, are ruled by an elite group which enjoys the fruits of the labor of a less-privileged group. But unlike in the North and Europe, in which the laboring classes were cast aside to die in poverty by the business elite when they became too old or sick to work, in the South slaves were cared for even when no longer useful:

dlI may say with truth, that in few countries so much is left to the share of the laborer, and so little exacted from him, or where there is more kind attention paid to him in sickness or infirmities of age. Compare his condition with the tenants of the poor houses in the more civilized portions of Europe—look at the sick, and the old and infirm slave, on one hand, in the midst of his family and friends, under the kind superintending care of his master and mistress, and compare it with the forlorn and wretched condition of the pauper in the poorhouse.

Calhoun couched his defense of Southern states' right to preserve the institution of slavery in terms of liberty and self-determination; critics accuse him of hypocrisy because he paid no mind to slaves' autonomy.

Calhoun's fierce defense of slavery and determination to advance the slave states' cause politically played a major role in deepening the growing divide between the Northern and Southern states on this issue, wielding the threat of Southern secession to back slave-state demands. He was a major advocate of the Fugitive Slave Law, which enforced the co-operation of Free States in returning escaping slaves. Slavery as an issue was also to split both the Methodist and Baptist churches in America along north-south lines, divisions in which Calhoun had a significant influence.

Calhoun returned to the Senate in 1845, participating in the epic Senate struggle over the expansion of slavery in the Western states that produced the Compromise of 1850. But his health deteriorated and he died on March 31, 1850, of tuberculosis in Washington, DC, at the age of 68, and was buried in St. Phillips Churchyard in Charleston, South Carolina.

Calhoun received many honors by subsequent generations after his death, but his legacy as one of the leading defenders of slavery in American history has also rendered him a highly controversial figure.

During the Civil War, the Confederate government honored Calhoun on a one-cent postage stamp, which was printed but never officially released.

Calhoun was also honored by his alma mater, Yale, which named one of its undergraduate residence halls "Calhoun College." The university also erected a statue of Calhoun in Harkness Tower, a prominent campus landmark. In recent years, some students have called for altering the name of Calhoun College—either by changing it entirely or hyphenating it with the name of a civil rights figure—in protest of Calhoun's support for slavery.

Indirectly, Clemson University is also part of Calhoun's legacy. The campus sits on Calhoun's Fort Hill plantation, which he bequeathed to his son-in-law, Thomas Green Clemson. Clemson's chief claim to fame, prior to founding the university in his will, was having served as ambassador to Belgium. (He obtained the post through the influence of his father-in-law, who was Secretary of State at the time of the appointment.) In 1888, Clemson bequeathed his father-in-law's former estate to South Carolina on the condition that it be used for an agricultural university which would be named "Clemson," not "Calhoun."

In 1957, United States Senators honored Calhoun as one of the "five greatest senators of all time." A 2000 Senate resolution named him one of the "seven greatest" of all time.