support for the succession.  He advocated all the test measures of Mr. Van Buren’s administration, and finished by courting a personal reconciliation with the man whom he had a hundred times styled a fox and a political prostitute.  This design coming to naught, through the failure of Mr. Van Buren to reach a second term, he made a wild rush for the prize by again thrusting forward the Texas question.  Colonel Benton, who was the predetermined heir of Van Buren, has detailed the manner in which this was done in a very curious chapter of his “Thirty Years.”  The plot was successful, so far as plunging the country into a needless war was concerned; but it was Polk and Taylor, not Calhoun, who obtained the Presidency through it.  Mr. Calhoun’s struggles for a nomination in 1844 were truly pitiable, but they were not known to the public, who saw him, at a certain stage of the campaign, affecting to decline a nomination which there was not the slightest danger of his receiving.

We regret that we have not space to show how much the agitation of the slavery question, from 1835 to 1850, was the work of this one man.  The labors of Mr. Garrison and Mr. Wendell Phillips might have borne no fruit during their lifetime, if Calhoun had not made it his business to supply them with material.  “I mean to force the issue upon the North,” he once wrote; and he did force it.  On his return to South Carolina after the termination of the Nullification troubles, he said to his friends there, (so avers Colonel Benton, “Thirty Years,” Vol.  II. p. 786,)

“that the South could never be united against the North on the tariff question; that the sugar interest of Louisiana would keep her out; and that the basis of Southern union must be shifted to the slave question.”

Here we have the key to the mysteries of all his subsequent career.  The denial of the right of petition, the annexation of Texas, the forcing of slavery into the Territories,—­these were among the issues upon which he hoped to unite the South in his favor, while retaining enough strength at the North to secure his election.  Failing in all his schemes of personal advancement, he died in 1850, still protesting that slavery is divine, and that it must rule this country or ruin it.  This is really the sum and substance of that last speech to the Senate, which he had not strength enough left to deliver.

We have run rapidly over Mr. Calhoun’s career as a public man.  It remains for us to notice his claims as a teacher of political philosophy, a character in which he influenced his countrymen more powerfully after he was in his grave than he did while living among them.