John Caldwell Calhoun (1782–1850) was born in the South Carolina upcountry, graduated from Yale in 1804 and studied law at Litchfield, Connecticut. Elected to Congress in 1810, he was a leader of the War Hawks, then served as Secretary of War under Monroe (1817–1825) and as Vice President under John Quincy Adams and Andrew Jackson (1825–1832). His anonymous South Carolina Exposition and Protest (1828) set out the doctrine of state nullification; he resigned the vice presidency in 1832 and sat in the Senate for most of the rest of his life, with a term as Secretary of State in 1844–1845. A slaveholding planter, he defended slavery in the Senate as a positive good and led the defence of Southern interests until his death in Washington in March 1850.
1849 (published 1851) · 19th Century · Political Theory
A Disquisition on Government is John C. Calhoun's general theory of constitutional government, completed in 1849 in the last year of his life and published in 1851 by his editor Richard K. Crallé as the first part of volume one of his Works. It was meant as the theoretical introduction to a companion study, A Discourse on the Constitution and Government of the United States, which the library text omits.
