This is John Bachelor, conversation with Professor Alan Taylor University of Virginia.

American Civil Wars is his new book about the simultaneously of disruption and challenge and civil war in Mexico in the United States and the

topsy-turvy change of allegiances in Canada. Here we discuss John C. Calhoun of South Carolina.

Professor makes an important distinction about what kind of National Calhoun was, his hesitation before the war and

leading to the war. Alan Taylor on John C. Calhoun, much more of this in the weeks to come.

Thank you.

Well, you could also smell intellect.

He is one of the smartest men to ever be in the US Senate.

And he had started out his career as a great nationalist in the 18-tings.

But as the South began to lag behind the Northern states in population and economic development.

That meant lagging behind in political power in the House of Representatives.

And Calhoun then became very concerned about a future in which the

northern states would be dominant and they might interfere in Southern society, and in particular with the defining

institution of Southern society, which was chattels slavery.

So Calhoun devoted his later career not to boosting the United States, but by trying to limit the

power of the federal government to do anything within the states.

He became a great champion of states rights.

Now he's a complex man in that he was not on board

with many other southerners who were trying to expand slave society

into Texas, Mexico, Cuba, Sano Domingo, in that he saw that as expanding the power of the federal government

and he thought the power of the federal government would eventually be applied to the southern states if

precedents were said for an active federal government.

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