Beacon Lights of History, Volume 12: American LeadersLord, John
History
Beacon Lights of History, Volume 12: American Leaders
Lord, John
History; United States -- Biography
The Works of Daniel Webster, in eight octavo volumes, including his
speeches, addresses, orations, and legal arguments; Life of Daniel
Webster, by G.T. Curtis; Private Correspondence, edited by F. Webster;
Private Life, by C. Lanman; C.W. March's Reminiscences of Congress;
Peter Harvey's Reminiscences and Anecdotes; Edward Everett's Oration on
the Unveiling of the Statue in Boston; R.C. Winthrop and Evarts, on the
same occasion in New York; Contemporaneous Lives of Clay, Calhoun, and
Benton; the great Oration on Webster by Rufus Choate at Dartmouth
College; J. Barnard's Life and Character of Daniel Webster; E.P.
Whipple's Essay on Webster; Eulogies on the Death of Webster, especially
those by G.S. Hillard, L. Woods, A. Taft, R.D. Hitchcock, and Theodore
Parker, also Addresses and Orations on the One Hundredth Anniversary of
Webster's Birth, too numerous to mention,---especially the address of
Senator Bayard at Dartmouth College. The complete and exhaustive Life of
Webster is yet to be written, although the most prominent of his
contemporaries have had something to say.
JOHN C. CALHOUN.
1782-1850.
THE SLAVERY QUESTION.
The extraordinary abilities of John C. Calhoun, the great influence he
exerted as the representative of Southern interests in the National
Legislature, and especially his connection with the Slavery Question,
make it necessary to include him among the statesmen who, for evil or
good, have powerfully affected the destinies of the United States. He is
a great historical character,--the peer of Webster and Clay in
congressional history, and more unsullied than either of them in the
virtues of private life. In South Carolina he was regarded as little
less than a demigod, and until the antislavery agitation began he was
viewed as among the foremost statesmen of the land. His elevation to
commanding influence in Congress was very rapid, and but for his
identification with partisan interests and a bad institution, there was
no office in the gift of the nation to which he could not reasonably
have aspired.
John Caldwell Calhoun was born in 1782, of highly respectable
Protestant-Irish descent, in the Abbeville District in South Carolina.
He was not a patrician, according to the ideas of rich planters. He had
but a slender school education in boyhood, but was prepared for college
by a Presbyterian clergyman, entered the Junior Class of Yale College in
1802, and was graduated with high honors. He chose the law for his
profession, studied laboriously for three years, spending eighteen
months at the then famous law school at Litchfield, Connecticut, and
gave great promise, in his remarkable logical powers, of becoming an
eminent lawyer.
Public-domain text, read in full here on John Shaqi.
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