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John Caldwell Calhoun (March 18, 1782 - March 31, 1850) was a leading United States Southern politician and political philosopher from South Carolina during the first half of the 19th century, at the center of the foreign policy and financial disputes of his age and best known as a spokesman for slavery, nullification, and against the rights of racial minorities. After a short stint in the South Carolina legislature, where he wrote legislation making South Carolina the first state to adopt white manhood suffrage, Calhoun began his federal career as a staunch nationalist, favoring war with Britain in 1812 and a federal program of internal improvements afterwards. He reversed course in the 1820s, when the "Corrupt Bargain" of 1825 led him to renounce nationalism in favor of States Rights of the sort Thomas Jefferson and James Madison had propounded in the Virginia and Kentucky Resolutions of 1798. Although he died a decade before the American Civil War broke out, Calhoun was a major inspiration to the secessionists who created 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, a states' rights theory under which states could declare null and void federal laws 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. He was part of the "Great Triumvirate", or the "Immortal Trio", along with his colleagues Daniel Webster and Henry Clay. Calhoun held several high federal-government offices. He 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 served in the United States House of Representatives (1810 - 1817) and was Secretary of War (1817 - 1824) under James Monroe and Secretary of State (1844 - 1845) under John Tyler.
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