'I HAVE HAD BUT LITTLE SPIRIT to write to my friends,' Calhoun con-
fessed to Littleton Tazewell early in 1836. His view of the future was
'hopeless'; he could see only the eventual 'overthrow of our system.' All
was coming to a head; and 'the vice, folly, and corruption of this the
most vicious, mad . . . administration that ever disgraced the govern-
ment is about to recoil on the country with fearful disaster.' ¹

Never, before or later, did Calhoun reveal such bitterness. He was so
despondent that to him every move of the Chief Executive seemed 'fatal'
to the country, and throughout Jackson's second term this mood of depres-
sion hung over him. Undoubtedly his personal frustrations tainted his
thinking: as John Quincy Adams, studying him across the dinner table,
put it: ' Calhoun looks like a man racked with furious passions and stung
with disappointed ambition, as undoubtedly he is.' ² Fifty-four now, at
the prime of his intellectual powers, Calhoun was goaded with the con-
viction that his hopes both for himself and the country were doomed to
extinction. Peace, health, and rest had become almost impossible to him.' ³

Yet his despair was not for himself alone, and history would prove how
genuine was the basis for his fears. In the tragedy of his baffled ambi-
tions lay baffled also infinite possibilities for the working of American
democracy.

The concentration of power in the hands of the Executive he recognized
as one of the most disturbing aspects of the Force Bill. Nor was this bill
more than one example of Jackson's 'general tendency.' Calhoun clearly
saw that Executive authority strong enough to curb the business interest
could, in other hands, be united with this same interest, to govern the na-
tion. If Executive authority were recognized as superior to state authority,
even for the states' benefit, that same power could be used at another
time to work the states' subordination. None knew better than he how
powerful were the precedents that the Jackson Administration had al-
ready laid down. 'No one,' Calhoun wrote David Hoffman, 'can look with
greater alarm than I do, on the attempt of the Chief Magistrate to ap-
point his successor' ( Martin Van Buren). 'Should it succeed . . . resting
. . . on the avowed subserviency of the nominee to the will of the Presi-

-259-