When the 1824 presidential election season commenced, Calhoun threw his hat into the ring. His rivals, Andrew Jackson, William Crawford, and Henry Clay, could claim broader political support than he. It soon became obvious that Calhoun could not win the nomination, but he was a consensus choice for the vice presidency. When the presidential election ended in a stalemate, the election went into the House of Representatives. John Quincy Adams, a Massachusetts man, emerged as the victor. Calhoun was his lieutenant.99
In a later era, presidential and vice presidential candidates ran as a single ticket, but in 1824 it was possible to have the chief executive and his secondary officer from different parties and political ideologies. Such was the case with Adams and Calhoun. They shared few, if any, political goals. They did not enjoy warm personal relations. Nothing suggested that these very different personalities would work well together, and they did not. Calhoun soon became disillusioned with the Adams administration, especially the president’s support for high tariffs and internal improvements.100
During these years, the South was becoming ever more isolated from the North as the slavery issue took center stage. Fearful that northern men would support policies to limit the extension of slavery into new territories, southern representations became ever more vocal in their support for state rights. Calhoun had voiced support for national laws, but he owed his political viability to the South. He could not afford to alienate his constituents. As the South moved away from supporting national policies, Calhoun followed along. Whether his political evolution was as principled as he argued is a matter of debate.
What is not disputed is Calhoun’s estrangement from the Adams administration. Anyone watching political developments during John Quincy Adams’s presidency clearly saw the animosity building among the Democrats who believed that their man Andrew Jackson had been denied his place in the executive mansion. Sensing the shifting political tides, in 1826 Calhoun wrote a letter to Jackson offering his support in the next presidential election. It was an audacious act for a sitting vice president to throw his allegiance to someone other than his chief, but, then again, John C. Calhoun was an audacious man.101
Just as Calhoun had never been close to Adams, he was not a thoroughgoing Jacksonian. The uneducated backwoodsman with the populist rhetoric was the antithesis of the Yale-educated South Carolinian and his well-developed sense of manners and propriety. A southern man with an aristocratic bent simply did not behave as Jackson did. Still, Calhoun understood how to practice politics as well as anyone. Jackson upheld southern values and state rights far better than Adams, who hailed from the antislavery North. Jackson owned slaves and was amenable to imposing his will on nonwhites. The opportunistic Calhoun believed, with some justification, that Jackson would offer a better deal than Adams. Their divergent opinions on nullification and the Union were some years in the future.102
In the election of 1828, Jackson won the presidency, resoundingly defeating Adams. Calhoun once again became vice president, making him only the second man in American history to serve as vice president under two separate presidents.103 If Calhoun had hoped to enjoy better relations with Jackson than he had with Adams, however, he was badly mistaken. From the outset, their relationship was strained, and it only grew worse with time.
It began with the so-called Petticoat Affair. Modern audiences may find the entire episode silly and hardly worthy of presidential attention or debate, but contemporaries viewed it differently. It was customary at the time for the wives of cabinet members to invite each other to Washington social events as a common courtesy. Calhoun’s wife, Floride, organized a group of cabinet wives to shun Peggy Eaton, the wife of incoming Secretary of War John Eaton. The young woman, known for her beauty and charm, had married John Eaton a few months after her husband, a sailor, had died at sea. Whispered rumors suggested that her husband had killed himself after discovering that his wife had been conducting an affair with Eaton. Perhaps jealous at Peggy Eaton’s propensity to turn men’s heads, Floride Calhoun and the other ladies of her circle professed their outrage at the woman’s “unladylike,” scandalous behavior.
Ordinarily, a president of the United States might have ignored what soon became known as the Petticoat Affair. Andrew Jackson, however, did not view the episode as ordinary. He was still grieving the sudden death of his beloved wife, Rachel, from heart disease a month after Jackson won the presidential election of 1828. He believed that Rachel had died owing to the stress of the campaign, when the general’s detractors had charged Rachel with adultery. She supposedly married Jackson before her marriage to her first husband had been dissolved. Jackson was incensed that Rachel had died because of scurrilous charges lodged against her good character. He viewed the charges against Peggy Eaton’s character as analogous to Rachel’s situation.104
The Petticoat Affair soured Jackson against Calhoun. The vice president had supported his wife even as Jackson supported the Eatons. Martin Van Buren, Jackson’s secretary of state, shrewdly recognized an opportunity to enter Jackson’s good graces. A widower who need not fear a wife’s disapproval, Van Buren vocally supported John and Peggy Eaton, winning the president’s approval. Later, Jackson threw his support to Van Buren to become his vice president and heir apparent, leaving Calhoun in the political wilderness.105
Jackson and Calhoun became further estranged in 1830 when the president learned that while Calhoun served as secretary of war, he had favored censuring Jackson for the general’s 1818 decision to invade Florida without presidential approval. Contemporaneous letters left little doubt that Calhoun had supported the censure despite his subsequent assurances to the contrary. The news enraged Jackson, who believed that his vice president had betrayed him. Their relationship never recovered from the revelation.106
The thinly veiled animosity between the president and vice president was illustrated by an otherwise minor incident that occurred during a formal dinner honoring Thomas Jefferson’s birthday held at the Indian Queen Hotel in Washington, DC, on April 13, 1830. As was the custom, political luminaries stood to offer toasts. They tended to be pro forma expressions of faith in the American republic and the speaker’s desire for the nation’s continued health and success in the days to follow. All eyes looked to President Jackson and he stood and lifted his wine glass. He said, much to the discomfort of the southern representatives, “Our Union—it must be preserved.” Jackson spoke only a few months after the debate between Robert Hayne and Daniel Webster on the nature of liberty and the Union. Everyone present understood what the seemingly trite comment meant in the context of the tariff debate. The president rejected all talk of nullification and secession.
Calhoun was not anxious to demonstrate infidelity to his superior officer, but he could not allow the remark to pass without comment. After Jackson sat, Calhoun rose and surveyed the room. “The Union—next to our liberty the most dear,” he toasted, clearly expressing the southern view that the Union was a means to an end, not an end in itself. He was not quite finished, though, adding a postscript lest anyone think him too obtuse. “May we all remember that it can only be preserved by respecting the rights of the States and distributing equally the benefit and burden of the Union.”107
The two men, never close, drifted further apart over time. Perhaps the last nail in the coffin occurred over the nullification crisis. As his career progressed, Calhoun came to see the push for protective tariffs, a central feature of Henry Clay’s legislative program, as detrimental to the South. Tariffs tended to assist northern manufacturers at the expense of southerners, who were seldom involved in manufacturing, but often supplied raw materials to both northern businesses and European companies. The tariffs helped northern manufacturers compete against European importers, but they also drove down demands for raw materials.108
As vice president under Adams, Calhoun was angry that an 1828 tariff had been pushed through Congress