Historical reputation
Calhoun was despised by Jackson and his supporters for his alleged attempts to subvert the unity of the nation for his own political gain. On his deathbed, Jackson regretted that he had not had Calhoun executed for treason. "My country," he declared, "would have sustained me in the act, and his fate would have been a warning to traitors in all time to come." Even after his death, Calhoun's reputation among Jacksonians remained poor. They disparaged him by portraying him as a man thirsty for power, who when he failed to attain it, sought to tear down his country with him.
According to Parton, writing in 1860:
The old Jackson men of the inner set still speak of Mr. Calhoun in terms which show that they consider him at once the most wicked and the most despicable of American statesmen. He was a coward, conspirator, hypocrite, traitor, and fool, say they. He strove, schemed, dreamed, lived only for the presidency; and when he despaired of reaching that office through honorable means, he sought to rise upon the ruins of his country-thinking it better to reign in South Carolina than to serve in the United States. General Jackson lived and died in this opinion.
Writing more than thirty years after Calhoun's death, James G. Blaine portrayed him as a mix of personal integrity and wrongheaded ideology:
Deplorable as was the end to which his teachings led, he could not have acquired the influence he wielded over millions of men unless he had been gifted with acute intellect, distinguished by moral excellence, and inspired by the sincerest belief in the righteousness of his cause. History will adjudge him to have been single-hearted and honest in his political creed. It will equally adjudge him to have been wrong in his theory of the Federal Government, and dead to the awakened sentiment of Christendom in his views concerning the enslavement of man.
Charles E. Merriam said Calhoun should rank as one of America's strongest political theorists of the first half of the 19th century, with reasoning that was keen and strong, but also narrow and cramped. Calhoun was described as "the Marx of the master class" by historian Richard Hofstadter.
Calhoun is often remembered for his defense of minority rights, in the context of defending white Southern interests from perceived Northern threats, by use of the "concurrent majority". He is also noted and criticized for his strong defense of slavery. These positions played an enormous role in influencing Southern secessionist leaders by strengthening the trend of sectionalism, thus contributing to the Civil War.
Biographer Irving Bartlett wrote:
Posterity decided against Calhoun's argument for the indefinite protection of slavery more than 130 years ago. What he had to say about the need in popular governments like our own to protect the rights of minorities, about the importance of choosing leaders with character, talent, and the willingness to speak hard truths to the people, and about the enduring need, in a vast and various country like our own, for the people themselves to develop and sustain both the civic culture and the institutional structures which contribute to their lasting interest is as fresh and significant today as it was in 1850.
Calhoun has been held in regard by some Lost Cause of the Confederacy historians, who hold a romanticized view of the antebellum Southern way of life and its cause during the Civil War. Historians such as Charles M. Wiltse and Margaret Coit have, in their writings, portrayed Calhoun as a sympathetic or heroic figure.
John Niven paints a portrait of Calhoun that is both sympathetic and tragic. He says that Calhoun's ambition and personal desires "were often thwarted by lesser men than he". Niven identifies Calhoun as a "driven man and a tragic figure". He argues that Calhoun was motivated by the near-disaster of the War of 1812, of which he was a "thoughtless advocate," to work towards fighting for the freedoms and securities of the white Southern people against any kind of threat. Ultimately, Niven says, he "would overcompensate and in the end would more than any other individual destroy the culture he sought to preserve, perpetuating for several generations the very insecurity that had shaped his public career".
In 1957, a five-member "special" committee, led by Senator John F. Kennedy, selected Calhoun as one of the five senators to enter the newly created senatorial pantheon "hall of fame". This "hall of fame" was established to fill five vacant portrait spaces in the Senate Reception Room.
Recently, Calhoun's reputation has suffered particularly due to his defense of slavery. The racially motivated Charleston church shooting in South Carolina in June 2015 reinvigorated demands for the removal of monuments dedicated to prominent pro-slavery and Confederate States figures. That month, the monument to Calhoun in Charleston was found vandalized, with spray-painted denunciations of Calhoun as a racist and a defender of slavery. Later, in 2020, during the George Floyd protests in South Carolina, the monument was vandalized with signs and spray paint, with calls from the public demanding its removal, causing the city of Charleston to erect a chain-link fence around the statue to prevent the public from accessing it, before announcing on June 23, 2020, that the statue would be removed.
In response to decades of requests, Yale President Peter Salovey announced in 2017 that the university's Calhoun College would be renamed to honor Grace Hopper, a pioneering computer programmer, mathematician and Navy rear admiral who graduated from Yale. Calhoun is commemorated elsewhere on the campus, including the exterior of Harkness Tower, a prominent campus landmark, as one of Yale's "Eight Worthies".
