ad done so in _his_ favor,
he seemed to place the General under obligations to him. By secretly
manifesting a preference for Mr. Adams (which he really felt) when the
election devolved upon the House of Representatives, he had gained
friends among the adherents of the successful candidate. His
withdrawal was accepted by the public as an evidence of modesty
becoming the youngest candidate. Finally he was actually
Vice-President, as John Adams had been, as Jefferson had been, before
their elevation to the highest place. True, Henry Clay, as Secretary
of State, was in the established line of succession; but, as time wore
on, it became very manifest that the re-election of Mr. Adams, upon
which Mr. Clay's hopes depended, was itself exceedingly doubtful; and
we accordingly find Mr. Calhoun numbered in the ranks of the
opposition. Toward the close of Mr. Adams's Presidency, the question
of real interest in the inner circle of politicians was, not who
should succeed John Quincy Adams in 1829, but who should succeed
Andrew Jackson in 1833; and already the choice was narrowing to two
men,--Martin Van Buren and John C. Calhoun.

During Mr. Calhoun's first term in the Vice-Presidency,--1825 to
1829,--a most important change took place in his political position,
which controlled all his future career. While he was Secretary of
War,--1817 to 1824,--he resided with his family in Washington, and
shared in the nationalizing influences of the place. When he was
elected Vice-President, he removed to a plantation called Fort Hill,
in the western part of South Carolina, where he was once more
subjected to the intense and narrow provincialism of the planting
States. And there was nothing in the character or in the acquirements
of his mind to counteract that influence. Mr. Calhoun was not a
student; he probed nothing to the bottom; his information on all
subjects was small in quantity, and second-hand in quality. Nor was he
a patient thinker. Any stray fact or notion that he met with in his
hasty desultory reading, which chanced to give apparent support to a
favorite theory or paradox of his own, he seized upon eagerly, paraded
it in triumph, but pondered it little; while the weightiest facts
which controverted his opinion he brushed aside without the slightest
consideration. His mind was as arrogant as his manners were courteous.
Every one who ever conversed with him must remember his positive,
peremptory, unanswerable "_Not at all, not at