The definite break between Calhoun and Jackson was one of the most dramatic and far-reaching in its political effects of any similar quarrel in American history. It furnished Clay with new material for the building of his party. It decisively committed the party of Jackson to the defense of the Union. It eliminated Calhoun from the list of presidential possibilities, dropped the curtain on the South Carolinian that the Nation had known for two decades, and raised it on another with whom the world is well acquainted. It divided his life into two distinct parts. It made Martin Van Buren President. The Calhoun who was to become one of Clay’s most vituperative and intemperate lieutenants in the fight against the Administration differs as radically from the ambitious politician who had intrigued for the election of Jackson as the Webster of the Great Debate differed from the Webster of the Rockingham Resolutions. The greatest biographer of the Carolinian[228] fixes the time that he became the personification of the slavery cause as 1830--the date of the quarrel--and says that “up to that time he is, in spite of his uncommonly brilliant career, only an able politician of the higher and nobler order, having many peers and even a considerable number of superiors.” Of the three great figures, Clay, Webster, and Calhoun, he was admittedly the strongest intellectually, and the one most unmistakably touched with genius. Nature made him a statesman. Swept into Congress on the wave of patriotic enthusiasm following the attack on the Chesapeake, his audacity, independent thinking, militancy, and genius combined to place him in the very lead of the party of Young America that clamored for the War of 1812. He sounded the first clear official war note in his report on that part of Madison’s Message dealing with our relations with England; and after the delivery of his first war speech one of the leading editors of the day hailed “this young Carolinian as one of the master spirits who stamp their names upon the age in which they live.”[229] In his haughty assumption of equality with the oldest and most experienced members of the Congress, he suggests the younger Pitt. His war speeches were classics of argumentation, sober, and yet pulsating with patriotic passion. If any sectional thought crossed his mind then, it never touched his tongue. He was a superb Nationalist--one of the most splendid figures of his time. Summoned into Monroe’s Cabinet as Secretary of War, he disclosed a high order of executive as well as legislative ability. Finding the department in confusion, he brought order out of chaos, and established system. A former officer of the great Napoleon was impressed with the resemblance between Calhoun’s plan of army organization and that of the Corsican.[230] Even his friends were agreeably astonished at his aptitude for organzation and general executive duties. And this furthered his presidential plans, and a strong party in the Congress