ABSTRACT
John C. Calhoun was the most creative and influential American constitutional thinker since James Madison and Chief Justice John Marshall. In response to the argument that these doctrines were not explicitly in the text, Calhoun retorted that the basic doctrine of judicial review was also not in the Constitution, yet few argued that such power could not be implied from the structure and purposes of the Constitution. Wary of competition from either slaves or free blacks and imbued in their own racist ideologies, most of these whites wanted to create free, whites-only States. Dred Scott helped resolve that problem by laying the legal foundation for Southern slavery to expand more easily into the Caribbean and South America. The Lincoln-Douglas debates captured the Western dispute over the structure of the growing republic: does every Territory have an equal right to be admitted into the Union so long as it has a Republican form of government.
