Calhoun was the incarnation of Southern public opinion,—­bigoted, narrow, prejudiced, but intense in its delusions and loyal to its dogmas.  Hence he enslaved others as he was himself enslaved.  He was alike the idol and the leader of his State, impossible to be dethroned, as Webster was with the people of Massachusetts until he misrepresented their convictions.  The consistency of his career was marvellous,—­not that he did not change some of his opinions, for there is no intellectual progress to a man who does not.  How can a young man, however gifted, be infallible?  But whatever the changes through which his mind passed, they did not result from self-interest or ambition, but were the result of more enlightened views and enlarged experience.  Political wisdom is not a natural instinct, but a progressive growth, like that of Burke,—­the profoundest of all the intellects of his generation.

Calhoun made several great speeches in the Senate of the United States, besides those in reference to a banking system connected with the government, which, whether wise or erroneous, contained some important truths.  But the logical deduction of them all may be summed up in one idea,—­the supremacy of State rights in opposition to a central government.  This, from the time when the diverging interests of the North and the South made him feel the dangers in “the unchecked will of a majority of the whole,” was the dogma of his life, from which he never swerved, and which he pursued to all its legitimate conclusions.  Whatever measure tended to the consolidation of central power, whether in reference to the encroachments of the Executive or the usurpations of Congress, he denounced with terrible earnestness and sometimes with great eloquence.  This is the key to the significant portion of his political career.

In his speech on the Force Bill, in 1834, he says: 

“If we now raise our eyes and direct them towards that once beautiful system, with all its various, separate, and independent parts blended into one harmonious whole, we must be struck with the mighty change!  All have disappeared, gone,—­absorbed, concentrated, and consolidated in this government, which is left alone in the midst of the desolation of the system, the sole and unrestricted representative of an absolute and despotic majority....  In the place of their admirably contrived system, the act proposed to be repealed has erected our great Consolidated Government.  Can it be necessary for me to show what must be the inevitable consequences?...  It was clearly foreseen and foretold on the formation of the Constitution what these consequences would be.  All the calamities we have experienced, and those which are yet to come, are the result of the consolidating tendency of this government; and unless this tendency be arrested, all that has been foretold will certainly befall us,—­even to the pouring out of the last vial of wrath, military despotism.”