It was Sunday, March 3, 1850. Word had come down to the Senate floor that the great Southern statesman, John C. Calhoun, would address the Senate, perhaps for the last time. They all knew that Calhoun was desperately ill. He had spent the previous sessions wrapped in a blanket, and he had fainted three times in the Senate chambers during the previous year.

      An expectant crowd filled the Senate galleries and floor. At the appointed time, the doors opened, and Senators and spectators saw the massive, leonine head of the South's leading spokesman who had been called the "moral and intellectual colossus of the age."

      He moved slowly to his seat, and then, with all eyes upon him, he stood. In a clear, ringing voice, he thanked his colleagues in the Senate for the chance to appear before them, and he told them that an associate, James Mason of Virginia, would read his response to the on-going debate in the Senate.

      Then Calhoun took his seat, wrapped his long, black cloak around his emaciated body, and watched as Mason rose to speak his words.

      Mason spoke of the South's discontent. He spoke of the dangers of political and industrial power being concentrated in the North. He decried the "agitation of the slave question" and the lack of equal rights in the newly-forming territories, and he talked of the smoldering resentment of Southerners wishing to recover their fugitive slaves given shelter in the territories and Northern states.

      He questioned the constitutionality of anti-slavery initiatives, and he argued that democracy would have failed if "fifty-one percent of the people have the moral right to coerce forty-nine percent."

      If popular majority became the ultimate law of the land, he argued, the Constitution would become so much scrap paper.

      It was to be the Southern statesman's last appearance in the Senate. Four weeks later, on March 31, 1850, John C. Calhoun died. He was buried in Charleston, South Carolina.

      Fifteen years later, during the sack of Charleston, Union soldiers left his tomb undisturbed.