JOHN C. CALHOUN.

CHAPTER I.

YOUTH.

LIFE is not only "stranger than fiction," but frequently also more tragical than any tragedy ever conceived by the most fervid imagination. Often in these tragedies of life there is not one drop of blood to make us shudder, nor a single event to compel the tears into the eye. A man endowed with an intellect far above the average, impelled by a high-soaring ambition, untainted by any petty or ignoble passion, and guided by a character of sterling firmness and more than common purity, yet, with fatal illusion, devoting all his mental powers, all his moral energy and the whole force of his iron will to the service of a doomed and unholy cause, and at last sinking into the grave in the very moment when, under the weight of the top-stone, the towering pillars of the temple of his impure idol are rent to their very base, - can anything more tragical be conceived?

That is, in a few lines, the story of the life of John C. Calhoun. In spite of his grand career, South Carolina's greatest son has had a more hapless fate than any other of the illustrious men in the history of the United States. With few exceptions it is probable that the readers of these pages will consider this a strange or even an absurd assertion, and thereby themselves will furnish another proof of its truth. Alexander Hamilton, America's greatest political genius, has been obliged to wait three quarters of a century to have a statue erected to his memory, and then it had to be done by his own offspring. Calhoun has not had to complain of the same neglect, though nobody could have been justly accused of ingratitude if this honor had not been vouchsafed to him; for he has no claims upon the gratitude of his country, although his name will forever remain one of the foremost in its records. But, in common with Alexander Hamilton, he is still waiting for the only monument worthy of his memory, a biography which does him full justice; and he will probably have to wait much longer for such a memorial, - ere perennius, - which indeed, it is not unlikely, may never be erected. As yet it is hardly possible to pass an unbiassed judg ment upon him, because the wounds of the terrible conflict, in which he was during the life

time of a whole generation the acknowledged leader, have not fully healed, and therefore those passions have not completely died away which were engendered by the catastrophe in which that conflict ended. Meanwhile, it becomes every day more difficult really to understand that struggle. Even the present generation, which has grown into manhood since the civil war, hardly realizes that it is not a soul-stirring romance, but sober history. The next generation will find it easier to form an adequate conception of the life of the ancient Indians and Egyptians than of that of their own grandfathers; for there is no other instance in all the history of the world, where the civilizations of two different ages, with their antagonistic principles and modes of thinking and feeling, have been so intricately interwoven as in the United States during the times of the slavery conflict. It is only the part played by Calhoun in this conflict which puts him into the very first rank of the men who have acted on the political stage of the United States, though he has done enough else to secure for his name a permanent place in the annals of his country.

As the years roll on, the fame of Danie! Webster and Henry Clay is gradually growing dimmer, while the name of Calhoun has yet lost hardly anything of the lurid intensity with

which it glowed on the political firmament of the United States towards the end of the first half of this century. Nor will it ever lose much of this. The fact is easily explained, though it may seem strange to the superficial student. The number of Calhoun's admirers in his later years was insignificant in comparison with the enthusiastic hosts who knew no more powerful charm than the captivating voice of the eloquent Kentuckian, and to-day it will not be seriously questioned that Webster was intellectually more than the peer of Calhoun. Neither of the three can lay claim to the name of a statesman in the highest acceptation of the term without more than one qualifying restriction, but Calhoun is certainly less entitled to it than either of his great rivals. Moreover, these had so many peculiar traits of character, habits, and fancies, that their lives are a rich source of pleasant anecdotes; and from the background of the general historical development, their figures spring forth in bold relief with a vividness equalling that of Washington, Jefferson, and John Adams. Of Calhoun the man, on the contrary, but very little is to be told. Even his contemporaries, with perhaps the exception of his nearest neighbors, did not know much of his doings as a private individual, or at least do not seem to have thought them of suffi