Vice President, Senator, And Southern Nationalist

Early Life.

John Caldwell Calhoun was born on 18 March 1782 in the South Carolina uplands near the Savannah River in a settlement founded several decades earlier by his grandfather. He was the second youngest of five children. At the time of his birth the family was wealthy enough to own nearly forty slaves in a region relatively untouched by slavery. When he was fourteen he began to study law with a brother-in-law in Georgia, but he returned home in 1796 after his father's death. After helping run the family plantation, he went to Yale College and graduated in 1804. He then studied at the Litchfield Law School and was admitted to the bar in 1807. In 1811 he achieved a measure of financial independence by marrying Floride Calhoun, a distant cousin with a large inheritance. The couple had nine children.

Nationalist.

Calhoun's...