Calhoun argued the Constitution never established majority rule, directly contradicting Madison

Evidence

To Calhoun, this wasn’t just compatible with the Constitution, it was the realization of the founding vision for the American republic. In his view, and against the arguments of James Madison and other key framers, the Constitution did not establish the principle of majority rule. Instead, as the historian Robert Elder noted in the biography Calhoun: American Heretic, Calhoun believed that it established a system in which power was vested in “the whole—the entire people—to make it in truth and reality the Government of the people, instead of a Government of a dominant over a subject part.” — Nikole Hannah-Jones et al., The 1619 Project, 638

Categorization

• XREF: Core to the reader’s case study: Calhoun’s claim about what the founding established is a live dispute over the origin story, exactly parallel to the Revolutionary-War-cause dispute and the founding-date reframing.
• QUESTION: Worth noting how Calhoun can claim the whole-people interpretation while defending slavery — the internal tension of his ‘concurrent majority’ as a cover for protection of slaveholders.