John C. Calhoun's Speech to the United States Senate against the Compromise of 1850, 4 March 1850
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Description: Images of the original manuscript of his last Senate speech. From the American Memory project, Library of Congress.
John C. Calhoun's speech to the United States Senate against the Compromise of 1850, 4 March 1850. The famous South Carolinian John C. Calhoun (1782-1850) made his last Senate speech during the course of the great debate over the Compromise of 1850, a complicated and controversial set of resolutions sponsored by Henry Clay (1777-1852) of Kentucky. At age sixty-eight, emaciated and spectral in appearance, Calhoun was clearly a dying man as he was assisted to his desk on the Senate floor a few minutes past noon on 4 March 1850. A black cloak, which he had pulled around him, added to the drama of the scene. The tension that had been mounting between the North and the South had now brought the Union close to the breaking point, and Calhoun was present before crowded galleries to assert that the equilibrium that had long existed between the two sections had been destroyed. The elements of Clay's compromise calling for the abolition of slavery in the District of Columbia and the admission of California as a free state were not negotiable to Calhoun and his followers. In his view, the sovereignty of the states was at stake, and the slavery question was moved squarely to the forefront of the debate.
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