Touch the Elbow - Blogging the Civil War

This from John C. Calhoun, Secretary of War under James Madison, Vice President from 1825 to 1832 under John Quincy Adams and Andrew Jackson, U.S. Senator from South Carolina from 1832 until his death from tuberculosis in 1850, and in 1957 voted one of the five greatest Senators in U.S. history, speaking from the Senate floor on April 20, 1848:


Picture from www.old-picture.com

“There is but one question that can destroy this Union and our institutions, and that is this very slave question. The great institution of slavery [is the basis] upon which not only [Southern] prosperity, but its very existence depends.”