He served two years in the Legislature, and in the intervals between the sessions practised law at Abbeville.  At once he took a leading position in the Legislature.  He had been in his seat but a few days when the Republican members, as the custom then was, met in caucus to nominate a President and Vice-President of the United States.  For Mr. Madison the caucus was unanimous, but there was a difference with regard to the Vice-Presidency, then filled by the aged George Clinton of New York, who represented the anti-Virginian wing of the party in power.  Mr. Calhoun, in a set speech, opposed the renomination of Governor Clinton, on the ground that in the imminency of a war with England the Republican party ought to present an unbroken front.  He suggested the nomination of John Langdon of New Hampshire for the second office.  At this late day we cannot determine whether this suggestion was original with Mr. Calhoun.  We only know that the caucus affirmed it, and that the nomination was afterwards tendered to Mr. Langdon by the Republican party, and declined by him.  Mr. Calhoun’s speech on this occasion was the expression of Southern opinions as to the foreign policy of the country.  The South was then nearly ready for war with England, while Northern Republicans still favored Mr. Jefferson’s non-intercourse policy.  In this instance, as in so many others, we find the Slave States, which used to plume themselves upon being the conservative element in an else unrestrainable democracy, ready for war first, though far from being the worst sufferers from England’s piracy’s.  We should have had no war from 1782 to 1865, but for them.  We also find Mr. Calhoun, in this his first utterance as a public man, the mouthpiece of his “section.”  He has been styled the most inconsistent of our statesmen; but beneath the palpable contradictions of his speeches, there is to be noticed a deeper consistency.  Whatever opinion, whatever policy, he may have advocated, he always spoke the sense of what Mr. Sumner used to call the Southern oligarchy.  If it changed, he changed.  If he appeared sometimes to lead it, it was by leading it in the direction in which it wanted to go.  He was doubtless as sincere in this as any great special pleader is in a cause in which all his powers are enlisted.  Calhoun’s mind was narrow and provincial.  He could not have been the citizen of a large place.  As a statesman he was naturally the advocate of something special and sectional, something not the whole.

Distinguished in the Legislature, he was elected, late in 1810, by a very great majority, to represent his district in Congress.  In May, 1811, he was married to a second-cousin, Floride Calhoun, who brought a considerable accession to his slender estate.  November 4, 1811, he took his seat in the House of Representatives.  Thus, at the early age of twenty-nine, he was fairly launched into public life, with the advantage, usually enjoyed then by Southern members,