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by Charlotte Allen Print this article John Caldwell Calhoun (1782-1850), the South Carolina senator who was slavery’s most vociferous defender (he called it a “positive good”) and whose espousal of state “nullification” of federal laws is said to have led directly to Southern secession and the Civil War, is probably today’s most canceled U.S. historical figure. A statue of Calhoun in downtown Charleston, erected by Confederacy sentimentalists during the late 19th century and standing 115 feet tall in its longest-lasting version, was one of the first of the many Confederate monuments in the South to be toppled during the race-related urban turmoil of the summer of 2020. Meanwhile, in 2017, Yale University, from which Calhoun graduated with high honors in 1804, renamed a residential college that had been named after him in 1933.