"I believe in private life he is irreproachable. But I believe he will die a traitor or a madman. His whole aim, and the tendency of all his exertions of late, is to sow the seeds of dissension between the different parts of the Union, and thus to prepare the way for its dissolution. His little clique, distinguished more by activity and paradoxes than by numbers, is now busily endeavoring to propagate the notion that all the operations of the federal government, from the commencement, have been ruinous to the South, and aggrandizing to the North, This, although 40 years of the 48 during which the government has existed, have Southern men directed the course of public affairs!" -- Henry Clay, on John C. Calhoun, letter to Harrison Otis, June 26, 1838
