John C. Calhoun: American Portrait
by Margaret Louise Coit
Summary
Margaret Coit spent nine years researching John C. Calhoun before she finished this biography, and the book follows a genuine political transformation: Calhoun won election to Congress in 1810 and took his seat in 1811 as one of the era's most committed nationalists, a young War Hawk who pushed for war against Britain and later, as secretary of war, championed a strong military and federally funded roads and canals, then spent his later decades becoming the country's most articulate defender of states rights and, ultimately, of slavery itself.
Coit follows Calhoun through the vice presidency, a post he held under two different presidents, John Quincy Adams and then Andrew Jackson, a distinction that made him only the second man to serve two presidents in that office, and into the break with Jackson that defined the rest of his career. The book gives full weight to the nullification crisis of 1832, when Calhoun's home state of South Carolina, acting on doctrine he had anonymously written into the South Carolina Exposition and Protest, declared a federal tariff null and void within its borders, prompting Jackson to threaten military force before Calhoun himself helped negotiate the compromise tariff that defused the standoff, even as South Carolina symbolically nullified the federal Force Bill anyway.
Coit does not soften Calhoun's later turn toward defending slavery outright as what he called a positive good rather than a necessary evil, or his 1844 letter linking the annexation of Texas explicitly to the expansion of slavery, treating this as the logical endpoint of the same states rights doctrine that had made him famous over the tariff a decade earlier. Reading the book means watching political conviction harden across four decades into a defense of an institution history has since thoroughly condemned, and it suits a reader who wants Calhoun's full intellectual arc, nationalist to nullifier to slavery's most articulate defender, traced by a biographer who does not let her evident admiration for his rhetorical skill excuse where that skill was ultimately deployed.
Historical Context & Significance
John C. Calhoun: American Portrait won the 1951 Pulitzer Prize for Biography for Margaret Coit, who had spent nine years researching the book after finishing college in 1941 and working briefly as a newspaper reporter in Massachusetts. Houghton Mifflin published the biography in 1950 to strong reviews.
The book's success launched Coit into an academic career, teaching at Fairleigh Dickinson University from 1950, first as a visiting writer in English and later as a professor of social science, and she went on to write a biography of financier Bernard Baruch in 1957 as well as children's histories, including a later book on Andrew Jackson, the president Calhoun served as vice president before their bitter falling out. Calhoun's reputation has only grown more contested since Coit wrote, as later historians have placed his defense of slavery, rather than his states rights theorizing alone, at the center of how he is remembered.