Product Review

John C. Calhoun was a life-long politician who was also a profound political philosopher. Within 10 years of being orphaned as a teenager he had become a Yale graduate, a lawyer, a former state legislator and a congressman-elect prepared to help James Madison lead America into the war of 1812. In 1824, he was easily elected vice-president under John Quincy Adams and Andrew Jackson and in the 1830s and 1840s was a dominant presence in the Senate of the United States. In this biography, Irving Bartlett explains the cultural and psychological forces that shaped Calhoun's political career.