control. In South Carolina, he implemented a new style of state government with centralized power that, the legal historian Laura Edwards explained, was “a radical departure from the past.” Under his leadership, South Carolina became the one state in antebellum America furthest from the ideal of government of, by, and for the people. Another leading southerner judged it a “despot’s democracy.”14 Far from expressing the original intentions of the Constitution’s framers, then, Calhoun and his allies conceived a novel reshuffling of authority in the pursuit of more power for their class.
