been, as Jefferson had been, before their elevation to the highest place.  True, Henry Clay, as Secretary of State, was in the established line of succession; but, as time wore on, it became very manifest that the re-election of Mr. Adams, upon which Mr. Clay’s hopes depended, was itself exceedingly doubtful; and we accordingly find Mr. Calhoun numbered in the ranks of the opposition.  Toward the close of Mr. Adams’s Presidency, the question of real interest in the inner circle of politicians was, not who should succeed John Quincy Adams in 1829, but who should succeed Andrew Jackson in 1833; and already the choice was narrowing to two men,—­Martin Van Buren and John C. Calhoun.

During Mr. Calhoun’s first term in the Vice-Presidency,—­1825 to 1829,—­a most important change took place in his political position, which controlled all his future career.  While he was Secretary of War,—­1817 to 1824,—­he resided with his family in Washington, and shared in the nationalizing influences of the place.  When he was elected Vice-President, he removed to a plantation called Fort Hill, in the western part of South Carolina, where he was once more subjected to the intense and narrow provincialism of the planting States.  And there was nothing in the character or in the acquirements of his mind to counteract that influence.  Mr. Calhoun was not a student; he probed nothing to the bottom; his information on all subjects was small in quantity, and second-hand in quality.  Nor was he a patient thinker.  Any stray fact or notion that he met with in his hasty desultory reading, which chanced to give apparent support to a favorite theory or paradox of his own, he seized upon eagerly, paraded it in triumph, but pondered it little; while the weightiest facts which controverted his opinion he brushed aside without the slightest consideration.  His mind was as arrogant as his manners were courteous.  Every one who ever conversed with him must remember his positive, peremptory, unanswerable “Not at all, not at all” whenever one of his favorite positions was assailed.  He was wholly a special pleader; he never summed up the testimony.  We find in his works no evidence that he had read the masters in political economy; not even Adam Smith, whose reputation was at its height during the’ first half of his public life.  In history he was the merest smatterer, though it was his favorite reading, and he was always talking about Sparta, Athens, and Rome.  The slenderness of his far tune prevented his travelling.  He never saw Europe; and if he ever visited the Northern States, after leaving college, his stay was short.  The little that he knew of life was gathered in three places, all of which were of an exceptional and artificial character,—­the city of Washington, the up-country of South Carolina, and the luxurious, reactionary city of Charleston.  His mind, naturally narrow and intense, became, by revolving always in this narrow sphere and breathing a close and tainted atmosphere, more and more fixed in its narrowness and more intense in its operations.