w
Jackson in the White House, and re-elected Mr. Calhoun to the
Vice-Presidency. It was the year that terminated the honorable part of
Mr. Calhoun's career and began the dishonorable. His political
position in the canvass was utterly false, as he himself afterwards
confessed. On the one hand, he was supporting for the Presidency a man
committed to the policy of protection; and on the other, he became the
organ and mouthpiece of the Southern party, whose opposition to the
protective principle was tending to the point of armed resistance to
it. The tariff bill of 1828, which they termed the bill of
abominations, had excited the most heated opposition in the cotton
States, and especially in South Carolina. This act was passed in the
spring of the very year in which those States voted for a man who had
publicly endorsed the principle involved in it; and we see Mr. Calhoun
heading the party who were electioneering for Jackson, and the party
who were considering the policy of nullifying the act which he had
approved. His Presidential aspirations bound him to the support of
General Jackson; but the first, the fundamental necessity of his
position was to hold possession of South Carolina.

The burden of Mr. Calhoun's later speeches was the reconciliation of
the last part of his public life with the first. The task was
difficult, for there is not a leading proposition in his speeches
after 1830 which is not refuted by arguments to be found in his public
utterances before 1828. In his speech on the Force Bill, in 1834, he
volunteered an explanation of the apparent inconsistency between his
support of General Jackson in 1828, and his authorship of the "South
Carolina Exposition" in the same year. Falsehood and truth are
strangely interwoven in almost every sentence of his later writings;
and there is also that vagueness in them which comes of a superfluity
of words. He says, that for the strict-constructionist party to have
presented a candidate openly and fully identified with their opinions
would have been to court defeat; and thus they were obliged either to
abandon the contest, or to select a candidate "whose opinions were
intermediate or doubtful on the subject which divided the two
sections,"--a candidate "who, at best, was but a choice of evils."
Besides, General Jackson was a Southern man, and it was hoped that,
notwithstanding his want of experience, knowledge, and self-control,
the advisers whom he would invite to assis