Senator Calhoun is given credit for promoting the idea of secession. Even though he died almost a decade prior to the Secessions of 1860-61 his spirit was felt heavily in Charleston in December of 1860.

It is very probable that Calhoun would have been president had he not resigned the Vice-presidency. Many give Nullification Crisis as the reason he quit but I believe it to have been the general fall-out with Andrew Jackson over political and personal events like the Petticoat Affair. A big question is what would the history of the United States been had Calhoun been elected president? The man who followed Jackson was not Calhoun as it naturally would have been but Martin Van Buren, who I believe to be a promoter of the two party system, a system that brought on the popularity of sectionalism, and party loyalty and radicalism to such a degree as to bring Americans to kill each other in the war it started in 1861.

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David Upton