LAD#11- Calhoun

John C. Calhoun, a senator from South Carolina and the preeminent spokesperson for Southern exclusionism, was so ill at the time of this speech he had to ask someone else to deliver it. He died in Washington on March 31, 1850. Here he offers his version of “the nature and character of the cause by which the Union is endangered.” Calhoun asserts that the South’s long-standing “almost universal discontent” over the “agitation of the slavery question” is only one of the causes that have endangered the unity of the nation. The “great and primary cause” is a sort of Original Sin, the North’s deliberate destruction of the balance of power between the two regions enshrined in the Constitution at the nation’s birth. With that equilibrium gone, the South is left weak and vulnerable and cannot “with honor and safety” remain in the Union. in the speech he starts to discuse the differences that the two major political parties and how that they need to come together to realize the problems facing the nation before a national disaster will occur.