John C Calhoun
About John C Calhoun
The seventh Vice President and leading theorist of states rights and slavery. Calhoun served as vice president under John Quincy Adams and Andrew Jackson, resigning in protest. He was the foremost defender of slavery as a positive good and developed the theory of nullification, arguing states could void federal laws. Calhoun was a brilliant political theorist whose ideas on concurrent majority and interposition influenced secessionist ideology. He died in 1850, just as the compromise he opposed was being debated. His ideas laid the intellectual groundwork for the Civil War.
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