through the
failure of Mr. Van Buren to reach a second term, he made a wild rush
for the prize by again thrusting forward the Texas question. Colonel
Benton, who was the predetermined heir of Van Buren, has detailed the
manner in which this was done in a very curious chapter of his "Thirty
Years." The plot was successful, so far as plunging the country into a
needless war was concerned; but it was Polk and Taylor, not Calhoun,
who obtained the Presidency through it. Mr. Calhoun's struggles for a
nomination in 1844 were truly pitiable, but they were not known to the
public, who saw him, at a certain stage of the campaign, affecting to
decline a nomination which there was not the slightest danger of his
receiving.

We regret that we have not space to show how much the agitation of the
slavery question, from 1835 to 1850, was the work of this one man. The
labors of Mr. Garrison and Mr. Wendell Phillips might have borne no
fruit during their lifetime, if Calhoun had not made it his business
to supply them with material. "I mean to _force_ the issue upon the
North," he once wrote; and he did force it. On his return to South
Carolina after the termination of the Nullification troubles, he said
to his friends there, (so avers Colonel Benton, "Thirty Years," Vol.
II. p. 786,)

"that the South could never be united against the North on
the tariff question; that the sugar interest of Louisiana
would keep her out; and that the basis of Southern union
must be shifted to the slave question."

Here we have the key to the mysteries of all his subsequent career.
The denial of the right of petition, the annexation of Texas, the
forcing of slavery into the Territories,--these were among the issues
upon which he hoped to unite the South in his favor, while retaining
enough strength at the North to secure his election. Failing in all
his schemes of personal advancement, he died in 1850, still protesting
that slavery is divine, and that it must rule this country or ruin it.
This is really the sum and substance of that last speech to the
Senate, which he had not strength enough left to deliver.

We have run rapidly over Mr. Calhoun's career as a public man. It
remains for us to notice his claims as a teacher of political
philosophy, a character in which he influenced his countrymen more
powerfully after he was in his grave than he did while living among
them.

The work upon which his reputation as a thinker will r