John C. Calhoun

John C. Calhoun (1782-1850) was a Southern politician in the United States before the War of Secession. As a Senator from South Carolina and as Vice President of the United States, he fought fiercely for the extension of slavery into new territories and other issues of interest to the South such as tariff reform. He also championed an idea he called Nullification, by which a state government could refuse to comply with a duly passed Federal law it found distasteful, effectively subordinating the Federal government to the states. Though he died nearly twelve years before the Confederate States was created by the secession of eleven US states in 1862, the secession of the CS's founding states is a direct descendant of his nullification doctrine, and Calhoun is therefore seen as a founding father of the Confederacy.

However, it is extremely likely that Calhoun would have been horrified when, in 1937, Confederate President Jake Featherston assassinated Louisiana governor Huey Long for resisting the Freedom Party platform, which was dominating the national agenda at the time, and imposing martial law on the state.

The town of Calhoun, Kentucky was named in Calhoun's honor.