He was, of course, soon involved in a snarl of contradictions, from which he never could disentangle himself.  Let us pass to the year 1828, a most important one in the history of the country and of Mr. Calhoun; for then occurred the first of the long series of events which terminated with the surrender of the last Rebel army in 1865.  The first act directly tending to a war between the South and the United States bears date December 6, 1828; and it was the act of John C. Calhoun.

It was the year of that Presidential election which placed Andrew Jackson in the White House, and re-elected Mr. Calhoun to the Vice-Presidency.  It was the year that terminated the honorable part of Mr. Calhoun’s career and began the dishonorable.  His political position in the canvass was utterly false, as he himself afterwards confessed.  On the one hand, he was supporting for the Presidency a man committed to the policy of protection; and on the other, he became the organ and mouthpiece of the Southern party, whose opposition to the protective principle was tending to the point of armed resistance to it.  The tariff bill of 1828, which they termed the bill of abominations, had excited the most heated opposition in the cotton States, and especially in South Carolina.  This act was passed in the spring of the very year in which those States voted for a man who had publicly endorsed the principle involved in it; and we see Mr. Calhoun heading the party who were electioneering for Jackson, and the party who were considering the policy of nullifying the act which he had approved.  His Presidential aspirations bound him to the support of General Jackson; but the first, the fundamental necessity of his position was to hold possession of South Carolina.

The burden of Mr. Calhoun’s later speeches was the reconciliation of the last part of his public life with the first.  The task was difficult, for there is not a leading proposition in his speeches after 1830 which is not refuted by arguments to be found in his public utterances before 1828.  In his speech on the Force Bill, in 1834, he volunteered an explanation of the apparent inconsistency between his support of General Jackson in 1828, and his authorship of the “South Carolina Exposition” in the same year.  Falsehood and truth are strangely interwoven in almost every sentence of his later writings; and there is also that vagueness in them which comes of a superfluity of words.  He says, that for the strict-constructionist party to have presented a candidate openly and fully identified with their opinions would have been to court defeat; and thus they were obliged either to abandon the contest, or to select a candidate “whose opinions were intermediate or doubtful on the subject which divided the two sections,”—­a candidate “who, at best, was but a choice of evils.”  Besides, General Jackson was a Southern man, and it was hoped that, notwithstanding his want of experience, knowledge, and self-control,