t CORNELL UNIVERSITY LIBRARY BOUGHT WITH THE INCOME OF THE SAGE ENDOWMENT FUND GIVEN IN 1891 BY HENRY WILLIAMS SAGE Date Dtie ^ 7 rniiip jp^^-r^ -BEC^ >v'^' Ti» "^5 PRINTED IN U. s. NO. 23233 Cornell University Library E 340.C15M51 '■^ The life of John Caldwel' Ca^ Cornell University Library The original of tiiis bool< is in tine Cornell University Library. There are no known copyright restrictions in the United States on the use of the text. http://www.archive.org/details/cu31924016840948 THE LIFE OF JOHN CALDWELL CALHOUN COMPLETE IN TWO VOLUMES VOLUME I mp^ei John C. Calhoun as a Young Man Frontispiece, Vol. I THE LIFE OF JOHN CALDWELL CALHOUN BY WILLIAM M. MEIGS Author of "The Life of Thomas Hart Benton," "The Life of Charles Jared IngersoU," "The Growth of the Constitution," and Other Works COMPLETE ra TWO VOLUMES VOLUME I THE NEALE PUBLISHING COMPANY 440 Fourth Avenue, New York 1917 Ci5^15V Copyright, 1917, by William M. Meigs It had pleased Providence, said Mr. Calhoun, to cast his lot in the slaveholding States. There were his hopes and all that was near and dear to him. His first duty was to them, and he held every other, even his obligations to this Govern- ment and the Union, as sacred as he regarded them, subordinate to their safety. He knew he would be assailed, both here and elsewhere, for this avowal ; but he had long been accustomed to such assaults. They had no terror for him. — " Works," Vol. HI. p. 178. CONTENTS VOLUME I CHAPTER I Preliminary page The Upper Country of South Carolina — Ancestry of John C. Calhoun 27 CHAPTER n Early Years Boyhood — Schooling — Youthful Pursuits and Influences — Conditions, Social and Political, in South Carolina — Slavery 48 CHAPTER HI Education The Turning Point — Waddel's School — College Life at Yale — Impressions 62 CHAPTER IV Further Training Studies Law — The Litchfield Law School — GroWth of Opinion 72 CHAPTER V Legal Career Completes Law Studies with Chancellor DeSaussure — Great Success at the Bar — Love and Marriage — Corre- spondence — Gives up the Law 88 1 ■ CHAPTER VI Entrance upon Public Affairs Legislature — Elected to House of Representatives — Per- sonal Glimpses 102 CONTENTS CHAPTER VII War with England page The House of Representatives in 1811— The " War- Hawks "— Committee on Foreign Relations — Declaration of War— T The Restrictive System and its Final Abandon- ment 115 CHAPTER VIII Activities in Congress Second Session of Twelfth Congress — The Thirteenth Congress — The Loan Bill — Bank of the United States Pro- posed -^ Death of Daughter 140 CHAPTER IX The Fourteenth Congress Circumstances of the Day — The Tariff of 1816 — Second Bank Established — The Salary Bill — Internal Improve- ments — Calhoun's Early Views 174 CHAPTER X In Monroe's Cabinet Secretary .of War — Internal Improvements — Cabinet Discussions — Missouri Compromise — Party Politics — Rip-Rap Contract Investigation — Political Calumny — The Tariff — South Carolina Politics — Calhoun's Home . . . 225 CHAPTER XI Adams and Calhoun Political Rivalry — The Presidential Election of 1824-25 — The Washington Republican — Troubles in the Republican Camp — Calhoun's Loss of Pennsylvania — Withdraws from Candidacy — Elected Vice-President — John Randolph — " Patrick Henry " and " Onslow " 287 CHAPTER XII The Growth of Sectional Hostility Calhoun's Change of View and Causes Leading Thereto — Champion of State Rights — The Missouri Struggle — Early Abolition Proposals — The Tariff 318 CONTENTS CHAPTER XIII Adams's Administration page Further Causes Leading to Calhoun's Change — Ran- dolph's Influence — A Solid South — Calhoun's New Politi- cal Faith — The Woolens Bill — Tariff Act of 1828 — South- em Outburst — South Carolina's Growing Isolation — Origin of Nullification — The " Exposition " 348 CHAPTER XIV The Widening Breach Presidential Campaign of 1828-29 — Jackson-Calhoun Ticket Chosen — The President's Cabinet — Calhoun's Rivalry with Van Buren — The Eaton Affair — Growing Tension with Jackson — Crawford — Jackson's Quarrel with Calhoun 386 CHAPTER XV The Drama of Nullification Defiance Discussed in South Carolina — Calhoun's Hesi- tations and Presidential Hopes — McDufifie's Speech of May 19, 1831 — Calhoun Declares Himself — The Tariff Act of 1832 — Letter to Governor Hamilton — The Nullification Convention — The Unionists — Elected to Senate — Death of Presidential Hopes 413 LIST OF ILLUSTRATIONS VOLUME I John C. Calhoun as a Young Man Frontispiece PAGE Fac-simile Signature of Patrick Calhoun 33 Stone Erected by Patrick Calhoun to the Memory of His Mother . -r — r— : — 38 LIST OF ILLUSTRATIONS PAGE The Litchfield Law Schools 7^ Fort Hill 282 Fac-similc of Letter of John C. Calhouh 432 PREFACE The following " Life of Calhoun " was undertaken a number of years ago and has, by the labor it has entailed, shown most convincingly to the writer the vast field that Calhoun covered. During nearly forty years of our earlier existence, there were few subjects of public importance on which he did not take a leading part. Many of these concerned the system of slavery and the protection of the then civilization bf our South, but the world , of his countrymen would make a great mistake to suppose, as many do, that his work was confined to this one point. In his later years that subject was of controlling importance to him, as to all Americans ; but the case was far otherwise during much of his public life. The fact, however, that he was the leader in the losing strug- gle of the South has centred public attention on this one phase of his life's work, and his fame, — so great in his day, — has suffered a marked eclipse. Modern man, with slavery as much gone as is the civilization of ancient Egypt, or Assyria, can hardly conceive how vital were the questions presented to the South by the growth of abolition sentiment and the evident likelihood that in no long course of years the slaves would be emancipated. To the Southerner this result was ever a nightmare, promising a terrible upheaval, the loss of his existing civilization, and even a reversion to some state of half-barbarism. These predictions of his have not been fully realized, but we must remember that the generation that lived during Abolition did go through a period not so different. Most of us probably realize to-day that the fundamental difficulties in a popular government of the existence side by side of the two races are still unsolved and are perhaps no nearer solution than they were fifty years ago. Calhoun said that the negroes, instead of being the slaves of the individual, would become the slaves of the community, and the tendency is, beyond doubt, away from actual equality and toward some other form of absolute control by the white race. All this adds to the difficulty of writing a Life of Calhoun; and perhaps we have here the reason why the task has not before II 12 PREFACE been attempted. The student of modem times studies with m- finite patience the inscriptions on bricks buried some thousands of years ago, and the cultivated public are interested in the re- sults; but the struggles from which has emerged our American civilization of to-day appeal to but few of our people. There is no adequate Life of Calhoun. Jenkins's " Life " (published soon after Calhoun died, and which is perhaps the one referred to by Cralle in his Note to the Oregon Negotiation "^ as " now being prepared for the press") is the most extensive, and there is no other even purporting to be full. There are several short ones, among which by far the best is that by Mr. Gaillard Hunt, admirable so far as it goes, but only intended to be a sketch. Von Hoist's " Life " must also not be forgotten, — a work much lauded by a certain class of our historians, whose chief purpose seems to be to write down everything concerning the South and resolutely to refuse to present or to realize the milieu in which the Southerner lived prior to 1861. Von Hoist almost says in his early pages that he cannot imagine himself walking and talking with Calhoun and, when he comes to present the State Rights view held by the subject of his book, he shows a lack of comprehension of fundamental points which is quite inexcusable in one who had undertaken to write the Life. He had either never read Calhoun's arguments, or had. not tried to understand them, for he could easily have done so; and it looks as if he had merely gulped down the partisan answers of Webster and others. To assert, as Von Hoist does,'' that Calhoun held that our Con- stitution was an agreement made between the States on the one part and the United States on the other is to misstate most grossly what the State Rights School maintained as to the nature of our Government. Nor was it necessary to wait until Calhoun's day to ascertain what that school did maintain on this point. The very history of the origin of our Government showed plainly that the several States were the only parties to the Constitution, and that the United States was the resultant or derivative or agent for certain purposes of the States, much as a partnership results from the agreement of its members among themselves. The Kentucky Resolutions of 1798-99 stated the matter most 1 Calhoun's " Works," Vol. V, pp. 414-15. 2 "Life," pp. 139-40. PREFACE 13 plainly, — " that to this compact each State acceded as a State, and is an integral party, — its co-States forming, as to itself, the other party." » The origin of Von Hoist's error is apparently Webster's final speech in the great debate with Hayne. The latter had stated the matter accurately, that " the Federal Constitution, therefore, is ... a compact by which each State, acting in its own sov- ereign capacity, has entered into an agreement with the other States, by which they have consented that certain designated powers shall be exercised by the United States " * but a little further on he made the slip of saying " when it is insisted by the gentleman that one of the parties [the Federal Government] ' has the power of deciding ultimately,' " etc., etc. And he later re- peats this error, which his opponent, the great orator and skillful advocate, fixed upon with the grip of death and held up to crushing ridicule in the last short speech, which closed the debate. The blunder is far more ridiculous in Von Hoist's mouth, and has not the excuse of inadvertence in a largely extempore discussion. The State Rights theories, whether right or not, were guilty of no such shortcomings as this. They were scientifically very accurate. All the elements fitted together and made a perfect whole, conclusion following from premise in a way that is fasci- nating to many minds. To the present writer, who was carried to them by mental conviction in impressionable youth after the Civil War, they still seem absolutely unanswerable, if we ap- proach the subject and discuss it in the way that our public men did down to 1861-65. I" ™y opinion, neither Webster nor any one else ever approached an answer to Calhoun, — I still mean on the basis on which they discussed the problem. The facts were plain, and the conclusion seemed to follow as day follows night. But was their method of approach the true one ? Are vast sub- jects, involving the welfare of millions upon millions, living and to be born, to be decided by the syllogism and the methods of the forum? Can faulty human logic be allowed to conclude ques- tions of such infinite magnitude? It has rarely done so in the long run, though the method is always used for make-weight and has doubtless controlled in some cases, but man has in vital ' Cited in Calhoun's " Discourse on the Constitution," etc., in " Works," Vol. I, p. 355, and see also the same in the " Massachusetts Remonstrance," Annals of Congress, Thirteenth Congress, 1813-14, Vol. I, pp. 350-351 and in many other authoritative statements of that day and later, * " Congressional Debates," Vol. VI, Part i, 1829-30, p. 86. 14 PREFACE matters thrown to the winds so frail a crutch as it affords. The " perils of the logical short-cut " in complex circumstances have been appreciated by some public men, even some who were logicians in a high degree.* Instances might be cited by the score in which the results of theory and the syllogism have not been and could not be adhered to in practical affairs. The Roman Catholic Church in Italy itself recognizes Uniat Priests and their wives. St. Augustine balked at the inevitable logic that demonstrates that the Deity pre- destined for millions that they would be damned. Calvin was of a different mettle and almost revelled in this result, but mod- em days have seen his followers eat away the essence of this article of their creed, — yet at the same time still claim to be Cal- vinists. The Catholics and the Christian Churches in general no longer follow out or want to follow out what is certainly the logical result of their beliefs, that they must destroy or at least silence such men as Darwin, Huxley, Tyndall and others, whose teachings have undoubtedly undermined the faith of centuries. And in the same general direction it may be mentioned that the most successful governments have been the most highly un- philosophical in history. Few laws have been passed in England or other countries governed by the parliamentary system, which have not been a hodge-podge of compromise. In the arguments which have been advanced in history and in some great law cases, we find again the like incompatibility between the conclusion of the syllogism and the result neces- sarily carried into effect in practice. The Attorney-General of England argued in 1624, on a quo warranto upon the charter of the Virginia Company, that the power conferred to carry the king's subjects to Virginia, if exercised without limitation, might result in the transfer across the seas of the whole population, and thus leave England a howling wilderness: whence he concluded that the power was too great to be bestowed on a private com- pany and therefore the charter ought to be revoked.' Most law- yers have heard arguments made in court not so dissimilar from this, based on some world-shaking cataclysm, which is, however, absolutely certain never to be realized in actual affairs. Nor were such arguments, or rather such absurdities, confined to one or two countries. The pages of the following Life show 5 Morley's " Gladstone," Vol. I, p. 309. « Fiske's " Old Virginia and Her Neighbors," p. 219. PREFACE IS a rich instance in an attempted demonstration, — scorned by Cal- houn, — that Texas was still a part of our Union in 1843, for the reason that the Federal Government had had no power to convey it away by the Treaty of 1819. So, in 1609, when it was desired in the German Empire to make the monarchical power stronger, a young jurist, whose mind was perhaps obsessed by the idea of The Holy Roman Empire, advanced the thesis that the monarchy was, in accordance with the terms of the never-repealed lex regia of ancient Rome, an absolute one, and others had to demonstrate the unsoundness of this argument based on a law forgotten under the dust of centuries and belonging to the history of an entirely different people/ Probably the following extract from Macaulay's review of Mill's " Essay on Government " sums up the truth as to such mental extravaganza as have been noticed : The fact is, that, when men, in treating of things which cannot be cir- cumscribed by precise definitions, adopt this mode of reasoning, when once they begin to talk of power, happiness, misery, pain, pleasure, mo- tives, objects of desire, as they talk of lines and numbers, there is no end to the contradictions and absurdities into which they fall. There is no proposition so monstrously untrue in morals or politics that we will not undertake to prove it, by something which shall sound like a logical demonstration, from admitted principles. Perhaps then, after all, Webster used the best weapons that could be used to bring about the birth of a nation. He could not meet the facts and the crystal clear deductions of Calhoun's logic from them, so he indulged at times in most barefaced assertions and appealed in splendid oratory to the pride and glory of our past and the promise of our future, moving his earlier opponent Hayne to an open acknowledgment of this feature of the won- derful orations of 1830. Nor could Webster then speak of what students since the Civil War, groping for an answer to the State Rights view, have called the historical growth of our nationalism. Such a process was then not recognized, was but in embryo, and any one who advanced it would certainly have been met by the cry of usurpa- tion and wrong. As a matter of fact, we can see to-day that, not only since 1789, but almost since our colonies were founded, the seeds of an American Nation were in existence. Slowly and ^"Deutsche Geschichte" von Karl Lamprecht. Zweite Abtheilung. Prster Band. Zweite Haelfte, s. 486. i6 PREFACE insensibly they grew and spread, adding in time even new mean- ing to the written words of the Constitution, and not infrequently (it must be admitted) in the teeth of them, until by i860 many mystic cords bound us together, while the material bonds of the vast and ever increasing network of iron rails and the constant intercourse between the parts added other nationalistic elements of vast power. This whole subject was well presented by Lamar in his oration in Charleston in 1887 on the unveiling of the Monument erected by the Ladies' Calhoun Monument Association, and the orator intimated very plainly to his Southern audience the opinion that Calhoun had entirely neglected to take into view essential matters in our history, which were entitled to great weight against his theories. It was a bold and manly view for a man of the South to present to so highly Southern a community, but it seems to have been well received. Charles Francis Adams and others have since presented much the same view, and it is a curious fact that Calhoun himself recognized the like historical growth in England.^ It is an interstitial process, very gradual and ad- vancing by insensible steps, and perhaps offers the best mode of escape from the irresistible logic of Calhoun and the State Rights School. What were these views, — now so nearly forgotten ? They are nowhere consecutively stated as a whole by Calhoun, but the reader interested in the subject will find much of them in the early portions of his " Discourse on the Constitution " ' and in his " Letter to Governor Hamilton." ^" In the former he bears weight on the fact, — which was in 1789 undoubtedly in general recognized, — that our States were originally nations, small and of little power, it is true, but larger than some in Europe, and at the same time without any union at all among themselves. They created the Congress of the Revolution, voted as units in it, and gave their agency so little power that the Congress was obliged even to appeal to the States to pass laws which it had no power to pass. The name of the central body moreover was then and ever has been Congress, a word meaning a meeting to- gether of nations. The next central power, — the Confederation, — was palpably 8 " Discourse on the Constitution," etc., in " Works," Vol. I p. 304. » " Works," Vol. I, p. Ill, et seq. 10 "Works," Vol. VI, pp. 144-193. PREFACE 17 a mere union of States, and each State expressly reserved its sovereignty. Nor was the present constitution adopted for the whole country by a vote of the majority of its people, as it would of course have been, if we had been one nation. No one seri- ously proposed such a plan. Each State adopted for itself, alone and as to the people of any State the instrument was void and of no effect, until that State should ratify. North Carolina and Rhode Island remained out of the Union for eight and fourteen months respectively, after it was put into operation and there was no serious contention that they had not the right so to do or were willy-nilly a part of the United States. On the other hand, an opposing minority in any State, as for instance in the upper country of South Carolina, was at once swept into the Union against its will as a part of the State by the affirmative action of that particular State. Some writers have sought to draw far-reaching conclusions from the language of certain of the commissions issued to dele- gates to the Constitutional Convention. They forget that these commissions conferred no power but to mould a draft, as com- mittees are appointed to suggest a form of contract or settlement. The form of Constitution proposed in May, 1787, was a mere sketch like an unsigned deed or contract, and was of no force or effect whatsoever, until the breath of life was breathed into it. And this vital spark was only derived from the later action of nine States, approving quite separately and each for itself alone. Under this newr Constitution, as well as by the terms of the Confederation, there was no merger of the States. Each remained an existing sovereignty. Rights and powers were reserved to them, and their continued maintenance was essential to the very existence of the government established. " We, the people," on which frail phrase the nationalistic school sought to build so much, was plainly of no real weight. Not only did the preamble, until nearly the end of the Convention, go on and list the thirteen States nofninatim, but palpably the change was made for the simple reason that it was impossible to know in advance which of the thirteen would ratify. And more than this, a later clause of the instrument already provided that ratification by any nine States should be sufficient to establish the constitution among the States so ratifying. How could the preamble be left to read that we, the people of thirteen enumerated States ordain a con- stitution, the ratification of which by any nine States (the same 1 8 PREFACE instrument went on) was to be sufficient to establish it among the nine only? The Union formed in 1789 was then still a Union of States, and no consolidation. It was a more perfect union than the Articles of Confederation, and the new government was to act directly on individuals ; but the States did no act whatsoever from which a surrender or merger of their sovereignty (their very existence) could be inferred, and some of the ratifications con- tained assertions plainly negativing such an idea. To-day, when the subject has lost its importance, I think the student will gen- erally admit all this, and that the overwhelming sentiment in 1789 and for a number of years afterward admitted and insisted on the continuing existence of the sovereignty of the States. Had those jealous Uttle entities dreamed in 1787 and 1788 that it would be asserted that they were to cease to exist and to become merged into one nation, few of them would have ratified the instru- ment. Massachusetts did not want to sink her existence and merge with South Carolina and the rest of her little known sisters, any more than did South Carolina. They were quite too far apart and too diverse to have consented knowingly to such a course. To meet this difficulty, the nationalistic school took up the idea of divided sovereignty. The States were, it said, sovereign in some departments, but the United States equally so in others. It is quite true that the function to carry out certain powers was delegated to the United States and that relating to others reserved to the States, but this was merely a question of the exercise of these powers and did not touch sovereignty. The latter is by its very nature as incapable of division as is life or personality, and must rest as a whole somewhere. It had rested with the States at the time of the Treaty of Peace with Great Britain, no act or series of acts of theirs can be shown by which they gave it up, and therefore it still remained to them. With the Union then a union between sovereign States, what was to be done, if the agencies of the Union should assume powers not granted and oppress one or more States? When some members of a partnership violate the articles, the suffering member goes to court for redress ; but a sovereign State cannot do this. What is then its remedy? It was contended by the Na- tionalists that, under certain clauses of the Constitution, the fed- eral judiciary was to decide this problem. That is to say, one mere department of the agency which the States had created, was PREFACE J9 to pass judgment on questions as to the authorities that the creators had conferred on the central Government, even when one or many of the creating States denied the existence of the power. A vast function, indeed, and unlimited, — the like of which was surely never before conferred upon one department of an agency or derivative government ! Nor had the judiciary ever in history been meant to decide questions of national power, of sovereignty, and to conclude the whole world. Their function is to decide, — and of course finally decide, — suits between par- ties; but this does not extend to deciding Who is the King, or what the ultimate nature of the United States Government, or any other question of a political nature. So it is infinitely unlikely that this idea, so foreign to the highly educated publicists of the Convention, was in their minds; and their language is absolutely satisfied by supposing it to mean sim- ply that the judiciary was to settle and conclude suits between parties. To these decisions would be attached the weight that belonged to precedents in Anglo-Saxon countries, but this had not extended to concluding Parliament or the Commons on a question of power. There Is little reason to suppose that our founders meant to give far greater influence to the judiciary they were creating, and authorize them to settle finally what was the extent of the powers conferred by the States on the Central Government and in so doing to conclude not only the rights of the parties to the suit but the rights of the creating States. The question then recurs: How were disputes as to the ex- istence or non-existence of a power to be settled? The States, it has been already said, were different from the members of a partnership. The latter had a superior over them, could appeal in an orderly way to a civil court and thus obtain and easily enforce a decision. But the States, with their proud attribute of sovereignty knew no superior, and had only the remedies in- cident to sovereignty. It was here that Nullification or State In- terposition was brought in, first threatened and barely sketched in the rough in 1798-99 and its details worked out to completeness under Calhoun's inspiration in 1828-33. The claim was that any one of our States had, — as a nation voluntarily united in a league with others,— the right to decide for itself as to the extent of the powers it had conferred on the central agency, and to prevent the enforcement within its limits of any Congressional statute which it held was unauthorized. This is what South 20 PREFACE Carolina did in 1832, and this the basis of reasoning on which was rested her action. To-day it seems absurd to almost every American, but at its date there was a large sprinkling throughout the country of men of brilliant intellect and of the highest character, to whom every step in the argument, — and the conclusion as well, — was as plain as Holy Writ ; while in our earlier history under the present Constitution, hosts of our public men would hardly have had a doubt upon the question. But the results of Nullification, as applied in practice, were most extraordinary. Let us consider the one concrete instance. Tariff laws, partly intended for protection, were nullified under the claim that the power to pass such laws was palpably not con- ferred, yet in the first session of the First Congress under our present Constitution, protection was discussed to no little extent, and the very second law on the statute books recited as one rea- son for its passage the necessity for " the encouragement and protection of manufacturers that duties be laid on goods." Cal- houn, too, who was the chief advocate of the Nullification in 1832, had voted for the Act of 1816 and numbers of his utter- ances are quoted in this Life, which show that he was to no little extent inspired in his earlier public life with the desire to have Congress pass laws for protection. And, besides this, he and numbers of the leaders standing shoulder to shoulder with him in the contest of 1828-33 had only too recently been strong nation- alists, spuming the State Rights views of Cooper and others. In the face of this record, it was a mere paper limitation that Calhoun built when he wrote in his " Discourse " ^' that nulli- fication was only to be exercised in case of " a clear and palpable infraction of the instrument" [the Constitution].. The instance is one more example of how in such arguments each party ever assumes that its side will act in an orderly way and not go an inch beyond the perpendicular. In reality it always is and was in this case too plain for discussion that the asserted right was almost certain to be exercised for getting rid of any course of legislation a particular State might seriously dislike, no matter how slight the injury or how little the unconstitutionality might be palpable. And it furnished an almost certain device to undo the law; for the claim of the theory was that, when one State interposed its sovereign voice against a particular statute, that ""Works," Vol. I, p. 280. PREFACE 21 statute was at once to cease to be of eifect within its limits, and the power it was based on was to be finally decided not to exist at all, unless, by a process similar to that of amendment, three quarters of the States should affirmatively decide that the power did exist. An easy way indeed for a very small minority to control a very large majority and to re-write the terms of the constitution ! Perhaps, there is some evidence that Calhoun felt these diffi- culties of the impracticability of " the high prerogative remedy," and hence conceded the necessity of a justification for nullifying, as well as elaborated the idea that, after nullification by one State, the others should call upon the amending process, and to this added that the nullifying State must then submit to the result, and should the power be affirmed to exist, must either cease its objection or withdraw from the Union.^^ Clearly needed though some such corollary was to the decent administration of affairs, I, at least, can see nothing in the theories of sovereignty that leads to or even permits the corollary and the control of the States' sover- eignty by such an outside influence. Sovereignty never has been controlled by such means, did not need a justification, and it looks like an addition devised in order to make the central theory work- able and avoid a confusion worse confounded. It was probably the like feeling that led Calhoun to object to the term Nullifi- cation and long to use instead that of State Interposition, which pointed to this corollary devised by him. Such was Nullification. And even in those early days, when Nationalism was a new-born babe or an embryo, so striking were the incongruities sure to flow from nullification that as sturdy a State-Rights man as Nathaniel Macon refused to accept it, at the same time* that he asserted to the full the right of any State to secede at will from the Union.^^ The right of secession concerns us less intimately here, but would have received pretty general, — or at least very frequent,— recog- nition in 1789 and for numbers of years later. It was an ever- present dread of our earlier statesmen, as may be seen from a thousand of their utterances. As a recent author has summed the matter up:^* "Both [North and South] alike, when inde- pendence was declared, and even when the Constitution was 1^ Letter to Governor Hamilton, Jenkins' " Life,'' pp. 214, 222. 13 Wm. E. Dodd's " Nathaniel Macon," p. 385. 1* Garrison's "Westward Extension," p. 12. 22 PREFACE adopted, regarded the Union as a confederacy from which any State might withdraw if it desired to do so." And other recent writers could be referred to who have reached very similar con- clusions,^' while such could be plainly shown to have been the be- lief of hosts of our earlier men." They often spoke in that day of their State as their country. But even here, so doubtful are such abstract questions as the rights of a sovereignty, so much are they perhaps bound up with the reciprocal rights of the others with whom a league or union has been formed, that possibly, after all, a justification is necessary for one or more members doing an act that the others regard as injurious to them. Plighted faith can hardly be denied all weight in the matter. It was evidently with this in mind that Gladstone, though at heart against the North, wrote to Cyrus Field in 1862: Your frightful conflict may be regarded from many points of view. The competency of the Southern States to secede: the rightfulness of their conduct in seceding (two matters wholly distinct and a great deal too much confounded). And again: There is last and (relatively to this subject-matter) best of all the strong instinct of national life, and the abhorrence of nature itself towards th« severance of an organized body.i^ It is impossible here to go at length into the question whether or not South Carolina had a sufficient justification in 1832, or the South in 1861. In the latter case laws by the score had been passed in the North in violation of plain promises contained in the Constitution, but they were defended under the claim of a " higher law." And then still another question arises whether the exist- ence of this higher law can be recognized. The question thus becomes nearly infinite in its ramifications. " See, for example, Claude H. Van Tyne's " Sovereignty in the Ameri- can Revolution " in Vol. XII, " American Historical Review," pp. 529-45, or his later " The American Revolution." I'See Wm. E. Dodd's "Life of Nathaniel Macon," p. 11, and same author's "Life of Jefferson Davis," p. 207; Pendleton's "Stephens," pp. 108, 117-120, 186 et seq.; R. T. Bennett's "Address at Raleigh, N. C, on May 22, 1894," in " Southern History Society Papers," Vol. XXII, p. 83. " Morley's " Gladstone," Vol. II, pp. 71, 72. PREFACE 23 In what way the heart was slowly and insensibly eaten out of the earlier view as to the powers and rights of the States could not possibly be traced. It never was abandoned in the South until after the Civil War; and numbers of leading men in the North asserted ultra State Rights views down to as late as 1861, whenever the interests of their section were severely pinched. The abolitionists, of course, ever railed at the Union, but far sounder minds did the same thing. The opposition in the North to the annexation of Texas squinted dreadfully toward Nullifi- cation, and John Quincy Adams urged resolutions that " any at- tempt to annex the Republic of Texas to this Union would be a violation of the Constitution, null and void, and to which the free States of the Union, and their people, ought not to submit." ^* Any munber of like opinions could be cited from others, and Seward's " higher law " was but Nullification viewed from another angle. But, despite these occasional instances, probably the North had come by 1861 to look upon our country as a Nation. The his- torical growth of our Nationalism was there recognized by that time. But the difficulty still remains that the other large and contiguous area of our country, — the South, — did not recognize it, but adhered consistently to the beliefs of 1789 and later. And how then the problem is to be settled and a satisfactory explana- tion to be formulated why one party was wrong in its constitu- tional contentions in 1861-65, and which party was the wrong one, must be for other pens. Our feelings, our universal present views as to the absolute ne- cessity of the result attained, lead us rapidly and instantly to a conclusion^ but the pale cast of thought is far from an aid. To view the obverse of this coin is but to bring in difficulties, — per- haps not doubts, — and, as with Milton's angels discussing " fixed fate, free will, foreknowledge absolute," the mind is soon " in wandering mazes lost." Probably a recent writer, quoted immediately above, has well put some truths in regard to the real essence of the matter. Con- trol, power, the virile desire to rule and even to exploit, lay back of much of the history. Mr. Garrison goes on, — directly after what has been quoted from him shortly above : ""Memoirs," Vol. XI, p. 330. 34 PREFACE And this view the South continued to hold afterwards — even to the extreme of secession and Civil War ; but the North, seeing the advantage of the national machinery provided by the Constitution for the support of its policy and the promotion of its interests, was gradually led to use its growing strength through that machinery and to adopt the nationalistic attitude. Under such circumstances, it was but natural for the weaker South, even if there had been far less historical justification for its attitude, to fall back on the defensive theory of State Rights. Here the problem must rest, so far as the present writer is concerned. Perhaps some day a mind with the analytical power that Calhoun possessed will grapple with the subject and point out to us the true conclusion of reason. And, when this is done, probably no great share of blame in a human sense will after all adhere to either of the great contestants in the monumental and inevitable struggle of 1861-65. My thanks are due to a great njany persons. Without the aid of the " Calhoun Correspondence," brought together by Professor Jameson, my task could not have been accomplished. Some few other collections of letters in manuscript and in print have come to my knowledge, and every assistance in going over those in manu- script has been rendered me by their owners, whose names are all mentioned in the text. To Mr. Gaillard Hunt, of the Manuscript Division of the Library of Congress, I am particularly in- debted for calling my attention to highly important letters in the Library and for aid in going over them and in solving some of the mysteries they present. From Miss FitzSimons, Li- brarian of the Charleston Library Society, I have received fre- quent aid in consulting the Society's very large collection of news- papers, and in efforts to unfathom various matters. Mr. Theo- dore D. Jervey, author of the " Life of Hayne," has most kindly aided me in many instances with his knowledge of the South Carolina law system, as well as in regard to matters of local his- tory and of geography, which I was unable to understand. Mr. Salley, head of the South Carolina Historical Commission, has aided me in an examination of some of the early legislative pro- ceedings of South Carolina, still in manuscript, and has also kindly allowed me to reproduce certain illustrations contained in his arti- cle on the Calhoun family mentioned early in my text. Mr. Edwin Calhoun of Abbeville, Mr. and Mrs. A. P. Calhoun of Atlanta, the authorities of Qemson College, and Mr. W. A. Clark, Presi- dent of the Carolina National Bank in Columbia, have all allowed me to have photographs made of various portraits owned either PREFACE 25 by them or their institution, and there are numbers of others who have aided me in different ways. Many of these are mentioned in the text, and my sincerest thanks are due and rendered to all. In regard to the illustrations contained in these volumes suf- ficient information is generally contained in the legends, but in some instances this is not the case. The frontispiece to the first volume is thought to be from the portrait owned by Mr. Patrick Calhoun and to have been painted at the time when Calhoun was Secretary of War. It was not possible to secure a copy of the original painting in time. The Reeve Law School Building was erected by Reeve in 1782 on the same lot on South Street on which his dwelling-house stood. It was later removed and used as a part of a dwelling, but was carefully restored by Dwight C. Kilbourn, and in 191 1 was removed to its present site on the grounds of the Litchfield His- torical Society. The Gould Building was erected by Gould in 1795 on the lot on North Street, where his residence stood, but was, after the giving up of the Law School, removed a mile west of the village, was there occupied for a time by a family of negroes, and was finally destroyed.^' The portrait by Rembrandt Peale, forming the frontispiece to the second volume, was painted for Mrs. Armistead Burt, Cal- houn's niece. It is marked as having been painted in 1834, but it has had some serious vicissitudes, and in a letter to Armistead Burt, dated November 17, 1838, Calhoun writes : ^» My factor in Charleston writes me that he has received the Portrait from Mr. Peile [sic] and that the cost including the difference of ex- change is $103 25/100, which you will please pay my brother William on my account. I hope you will be pleased with it. The present owner is Mrs. Thomas Frost of Charleston, whose mother was brought up by Mr. and Mrs. Burt and often stayed also at Fort Hill, when going to school. Mrs. Frost has fre- quently heard her mother say that Calhoun thought this portrait the best ever painted of him. The War Department portrait reproduced at page 38 of Vol- ume II is said to have been found about 1870 by Secretary Bel- knap in an attic at West Point and to have been removed by him to the Department in Washington. 10 Dwight C. Kilbourn's " Bench and Bar of Litchfield County, Conn.," pp. 191, 195. Pamphlet " Presentation Exercises. The Litchfield Law School, 1911." 2« " Correspondence," pp. 416-17. 26 PREFACE The full-length portrait at page 374 of Volume II is from a painting at Clemson College which has on it a plate reading: "Details of likeness from Brady's Celebrated Daguerreotype. Painted by T. Hicks. Engraved by A. H. Ritchie. Published by R. A. Bachia, 12 Dey Street." Another copy hangs in the Carolina National Bank at Columbia and an engraving of the same is owned by Mr. Edwin Calhoun of Abbeville. The por- trait seems to be the original from which has been made, with several minor variations, the head and shoulders of Calhoun re- produced in Davis's " Rise and Fall," Stephens's " War between the States," and many other works. These reproductions are often spoken of as " the DeBloch " portrait, but are in reality quite different. Mrs. A. P. Calhoun, the granddaughter of Mrs. Clemson, has kindly loaned me a copy of De Bloch's portrait, three copies of which were made in Belgium from a miniature in a bracelet, but which was not liked (so Mrs. Calhoun informs me) by the family. It differs in many respects from the ordinary cut. Capt. John C. Calhoun of New York owns a second copy of the De Bloch portrait. William M. Meigs. Philadelphia. THE LIFE OF JOHN C. CALHOUN CHAPTER I PRELIMINARY The Upper Country of South Carolina — Ancestry of John C. Calhoun. The settlement of America has been full of romance. The resistless power of the colonists pushing on across the conti- nent and forever subduing new regions to their control re- sembles the action of one of the forces of nature in its in- tensity and persistent pressure. Halted and dammed up here and there for a time, the wave of humanity has always ere long broken over the barrier and kept on upon its course, until finally the shores of the Western Ocean itself were reached. Men, the petty pawns of the social forces, have been worn out and sacrificed by the thousand on the crest of this torrent- like surge of humanity; but a vast destiny has thereby been opened up to our branch of the human race. The frontier, that outward edge of civilization beyond which lay only wild nature, has been pushed steadily on, and now for some years we have had no frontier-town in the American sense. From ocean to ocean, the whole of our territory has been harnessed to civilization. The history of few regions concerned in this growth ofifers so much of stirring interest as does that of the foot-hills and easternmost valleys of the long Appalachian chain of moun- tains. It is true that the first comers to Virginia and Massa- chusetts found terrible difficulties to overcome, but in general the settlers in what are now our Middle and upper Southern States had a comparatively easy task in filling the coastal plains and the fertile river valleys. They and their immediate suc- 27 38 LIFE OF JOHN C. CALHOUN cessors spread rapidly over the rich country to the westward, and in a remarkably short course of years created a series ^f separate colonies lying along the shores of the Atlantic and reaching inward nearly to the mountains, each colony with its own customs and with systems of law materially different the one from the other. But the great Appalachian chain of mountains once reached, the story was very different. Those towering hills were not to be passed by ordinary men. The mere barrier of nature was almost insuperable under the then conditions and would alone have long delayed settlement ; but, besides this, entrance upon the frowning mountain region meant also bloody con- flict with the French, the powerful rivals of the English in America. Many years elapsed before these hindrances began to be solved, and a new race had to enter upon the scene in order to overcome the obstruction. Neither the Quaker of Pennsylvania, the Dutch of New York, the Catholic of Mary- land, nor the Cavalier of Virginia was alone competent to the task. The Scotch-Irish was therace that in the main accomplished this labor of Hercules. That strange people, made up of qualities so diverse, with a large dash of evil and so much good in its character, and of such unlimited pluck and en- durance, forced its way almost inch by inch over the rough foot-hills and lesser spurs of the mountains and ere long found itself in a rich region of smiling and fertile valleys. And these valleys did not run inland as did those of the coastal plains, toward the interior of the continent, but extended in a southwesterly direction, roughly parallel to the shores of the ocean as well as to the great chain of mountains. Down along the course of these valleys these Scotch-Irish and their descendants swept on, with numbers augmented by adventurous spirits from many other sources, until they had reduced to possession a long strip of territory lying inland from the older settlements and stretching from Western Penn- sylvania southwestw&rdly down the troughs of the mountain valleys to Tennessee and the Carolinas, where the mountains give out and end in a rich and rolling country." Constituting PRELIMINARY 29 the " backwoodsmen " of Pennsylvania, they were generally known in Virginia as the " dwellers in the back country," while in the region we have to do with their section was usually called " the upper country." In all this long tongue of territory occupied by them and ly- ing to the west of the coastal plains they had a fairly uniform civilization of their own and were not greatly influenced either by the Quakers of Pennsylvania or by any of the other races with which they came in contact. And despite the long course of years now elapsed since they came into the region, one may still see to-day in many of the inhabitants the bolt upright hair and other lineaments of the old type, as pure as it was in the days of Calhoun, of Jackson, or of their ancestors. This is not the place to record the ceaseless struggle that this virile people had with nature and with that terrible enemy, the American Indian. Some instances, indeed, of these fea- tures will come out later in the lives of early Calhouns, but no extended sketch of that branch of history belongs here. SufHce it merely to call the reader's attention to this element in that people's life, and to remind him that by virtue of their position the settlers in the Appalachian valleys and in the upper country of South Carolina were the pickets and outlying forces to ward off Indian attack. They were thus almost cer- tain to be scattered and ruined before the dwellers in the more settled regions would even know that the savages were on the war-path. To this Scotch-Irish race of such strange contrasts of char- acter belonged, on both his father's side and his mother's, the ancestors of John Caldwell Calhoun. In personal appearance he bore clearly enough the marks of his ancestry; but I, at least, am unable to see the prevalence of the type in his mental make-up. The human mind is too subtle to allow us to trace with any clearness the origin of its peculiarities, and possibly we must be contented to suppose that the mind of this great American statesman was somewhat in the nature of what the thought of modern times calls a sport, or perhaps that his race was in the uncertain equilibrium of the mutants of some thinkers. In his father we shall find some of his qualities, but. 30 LIFE OF JOHN C. CALHOUN so far as we know, none of that cold and relentless reason- ing, clear as the waters of the Gulf Stream and as crushing and resistless as fate, which so distinguished the son. And surely in the probable history of the families in their old home, we cannot imagine much that might go to develop a profound thinker and overwhelming logician. As we go backward in history, toward the beginnings of things, it is not usually long before a period of mist and un- certainty is reached, where one gropes in darkness, able to do little better than guess from supposed probabilities. So it is in a marked degree with the origin of families; and I do not think the case is different with the clan of Calhoun. One member of the family, however, writes that its history " has been distinctly traced back to the reign of Gregory the Great, and connected with the Earl of Lexon in Dumbartonshire, Scotland, and one of the younger sons of King Conock of Ireland, who came to the same region at that period. The name of Conock soon became corrupted into Colquohoun, Colquhoun, Colchoun and finally Calhoun. The first ances- tor who obtained the barony of Colquhoun in Dumbarton- shire was Umphredies, who lived in the time of Alexander the Second." 1 Another writer * undertakes to fix the date of ancient oc- * " The National Register of the Society Sons of the American Revolu- tion," sub "Capt. John Caldwell Calhoun" (a grandson of the Senator), pp. 721-723. Captain Calhoun gives no authorities. The curious may turn, too, to the sketch of the Calhoun family given in Charles Croslegh's " Descent and Alliances of Croslegh, &c.," (of which there is a copy in the Library of the University of South Carolina, at Columbia). This begins with Umfridis (b. 1190), and has a Rev. Alexander (b. 1662), the eighteenth in descent from him, whose son James married Catherine Mont- gomery and came out to America, with his brothers, Ezekiel and Patrick. Mr. Croslegh doubts the accuracy of this account, which had been sent him. 2 Col. W. Pinkney Starke in his " Account of Calhoun's Early Life," as abridged in " Correspondence of John C. Calhoun," edited by Prof. J. Franklin Jameson (published in Annual Report of the American His- torical Association for 1899), pp. 65-89. Col. Starke's account has been severely criticised, and certainly with justice in many particulars, in the "South Carolina Historical and Genealogical Magazine" Vol. II (1901), pp. 158-163; 248, 249; but there are many statements in his sketch for which he cites either local knowledge or reminiscences given him by nearly related members of the family. The difficulty is, of course, to determine what statements do and what do not rest on such authority. PRELIMINARY 31 currences with a minuteness that unavoidably leads one to doubt his accuracy. He tells us that " among the emigrants from Scotland to North Ireland who crossed the channel early in the eighteenth century was a family of Colquohouns and another of Caldwells [the family name of Calhoun's mother]. The Gaelic clan Colquhoun is said to have been very respectable in numbers. The Caldwells were Lowlanders from the Frith of Solway." He continues that owing to bad crops in the north of Ireland in 1727-28-29, the Calhouns, who had settled in county Donegal, concluded to remove to Amer- ica. Three brothers Calhoun, he goes on, emigrated in 1733 and arrived in New York, but soon removed to the western part of Pennsylvania and later to Virginia. One of these three brothers was James, who with Catherine, his wife, and four sons, James, William, Patrick and Ezekiel, thus ventured to take their chances in the New World. Many of these statements are borne out by an authority,^ which may be fully relied upon as reproducing at least what Calhoun himself believed in regard to the origin of his family. And whether the Caldwells were Lowlanders, or the Col- quhouns left Scotland for Ireland at about the date asserted by Col. Starke or not, it is at least clear from all the authorities that Calhoun's mother, Martha Caldwell, as well as his father, ^ " Life of John C. Calhoun,'' printed anonymously in 1843 as a cam- paign biography. This publication was always attributed to Robert M. T. Hunter, until Mr. Gaillard Hunt found in the Cralle papers a letter of R. B. Rhett to Cralle, dated in i8S4, in which Rhett says that it was almost entirely written by Calhoun himself. Rhett was asked at the time to let it be published under his name, but refused to appear as the author of what he had not written. Hunter was then selected, and Rhett and Hunter read it over at Rhett's house. Rhett says that Hunter " inserted about a page and a half and became the putative author." See Mr. Hunt's Article in "American Historical Review," Vol. XUI, p. 311, and resume in his "Life of Calhoun," pp. 250-251. Calhoun wrote of the publication at the time to his daughter, saying merely that Hunter had " re-written most of the [sketch] so much so as to be fairly entitled to the authorship," while a letter to his brother-in-law speaks of transmitting by mail " a sketch of my life, prepared by some of my friends here," " Correspond- ence," pp. 524-525. Still more indicative of the real authorship is, per- haps, a letter dated October 25, 184^, to Calhoun from Joseph A. Scoville, later his clerk and a political supporter. Scoville writes : " As soon as possible, I would advise your sending me the proposed life, etc. I have seen the publishers, and they will wait very willingly. I will select some one here to edit it" " Correspondence," pp. 855, 856. 32 LIFE OF JOHN C. CALHOUN Patrick Calhoun, was Irish. There seems to be no clear proof as to exactly where the family landed in America, but Cal- houn says in his "Autobiography" that they were first in Pennsylvania, " where they remained some years," and then moved to the western part of Virginia. Further, as Patrick Calhoun died on February 15, 1 796,* in the sixty-ninth year of his age, and as the family is posi- tively found in Virginia in 1746, after having been some years in Pennsylvania, we may assume that Col. Starke's fixing of 1733 as the date of their emigration is not far wrong. At least, it cannot have been more than a few years later. It is equally clear that Patrick Calhoun must have been brought out as a child, or at most a youth. I know of no evidence from public records that the family lived in Pennsylvania, and the statement to that effect in the " Autobiography " is probably based on information derived by Calhoun from his father. But from this time on we stand on firmer ground.^ About the middle of the XVIII cen- tury, there are authentic records of the presence of four brothers Calhoun, — ^James, Ezekiel, William, and Patrick, — in the western parts of Virginia. And they were there as set- tlers, taking up land and remaining some ten years. Their mother,® too, Catherine by name, was with them later, if not then, and a sister, Mary Noble, either the wife or the widow '' of John Noble. At least three other members of the Calhoun family are also mentioned : one George, who lived in the Reed * This positively fixes the year of his birth as 1727 or early in 1728, and not 1723, as stated by Col. Starke. ' An admirable sketch of " The Calhoun Family in America " by A. S. Salley, Jr., is to be found in the " South Carolina Historical and Genea- logical Magazine," Vol. VII (1906), pp. 81-98; 153-169. It is based on public records, newspaper notices, and other such evidence of unquestion- able character. I have used it largely, and -with entire reliance. The facts following in the text in regard to the early history of the family are based on it, unless other authority is given. ' There is no doubt at all as to the presence in America of this one member of the generation preceding that of the four brothers, but I know of no evidence tending to bear out Col. Starke's statement that her hus- band's name vras James and that James emigrated, accompanied by two brothers, as well as by his own immediate family. ^ Mr. Salley makes her out a widow, while a letter of Calhoun, printed in the " Gulf States Historical Magazine," Vol. I, pp. 439-441, speaks of her husband as having removed with the Calhoun family to South Carolina. PRELIMINARY 33 Creek region in 1746, while Hugh Calhoun lived in 1777 in South Carolina, near the other members of the family, and described himself in his will, executed in 1792, as formerly of " Fawney Co. Tyrone," and one John is described in a death notice as formerly of " Bushfield, L. Derry." * Patrick Calhoun, the one of the four brothers who is of special interest to us as the father of John Caldwell Calhoun, was born in County Donegal, Ireland, in the year 1727, or in 1728, as has just been shown. He was the youngest of the four brothers and was undoubtedly a minor and probably a child at the time of the emigration. Col. Starke writes that, " owing to an injury in childhood," he had had only six months at school in Ireland, and that he never had received Reproduced by permission from Mr. A. S. Salley, Jr.'s, article on the Calhoun family mentioned in the text. * Mr. Salley is my authority for George Calhoun, " The Calhoun Family," ut supra, Vol. VII, p. 8i. The facts as to Hugh and John are derived from the notice of Jameson's " Correspondence of John C. Calhoun " in the " South Carolina Historical and Genealogical Magazine," Vol. I, pp. 45, 134. 13s, 160, 186, 187. Fawney is in Ireland, but I have been unable to learn where Bushfield was. 34 LIFE OF JOHN C. CALHOUN any more school education in this country, and the statement is very likely true, though it does not seem to have been made by any other writer. He and his three brothers were in Vir- ginia in November, 1746, from which date their names often appear in the public records. Thus Patrick and several others were at that date appointed to lay out a road; and grants of land on Reed Creek near Wytheville, in what is now Wythe County, Virginia, were made to various members of the family. On March 5, 1749, a tract of one hundred and fifty-nine acres on the waters of Reed Creek,® " near to where he lives," was surveyed for Patrick Calhoun. This was close to the time of his majority. There is evidence that the members of the family were not devoid of that pugnacity and dogged tendency to insist upon the rights they claimed, even when of little actual value, which is thought by some to characterize their race. In 1746 the four brothers Calhoun were charged by one James Patton with being " divulgers of false news," and were ordered to answer at the next court. This contest seems to have been easily composed; but only a few years later, in 1752, James Patton became involved in a bitter controversy with James Calhoun. This suit dragged on for a year and a half, and was apparently heard more than once by the same jury, de- spite their wish to be discharged. There was at least one mandamus obtained in the matter from the General Court, and finally the case seems to have been submitted to arbitra- tion. The action was for slander, the plaintiff asserting that Calhoun " had said in 1750 that Patton made over all his es- tate to his children to defraud his creditors, and that he had no title to the lands he offered for sale on Roanoke and New Rivers." Either in this suit or another one between the same per- sons an abstruse legal point bitterly contested was as to which party should pay a certain fee to the governor. Patton had contracted to deliver to Calhoun two patents for land at a • Calhoun visited this region in 1846 and saw the identical place where his father had lived nearly a century earlier, "Correspondence," pp. 706, 707. PRELIMINARY 35 time when no fee was payable to the governor on issuing pat- ents, but since then a law had been enacted requiring a fee. Who should pay this new charge? The point was evidently one of bitter controversy and was finally settled, possibly with less of law than of horse-sense calculated to appease the con- testants by an order that each should pay the fee for one patent. In another case in 1752, it is to be presumed that this same James Calhoun, who was the oldest of the four brothers, had boldly taken the law into his own hands, for the records tell us that on November 20 of that year he was " bound to keep the peace towards James McCall." While these petty contests were going on in the then wilds of what is now Wythe County, Virginia, events of far greater moment were enacting on a wider stage. The early moves in the final contest between France and England for the mastery of the New World were made at this time. And, as has hap- pened more than once in the world's history, the power whose comparative democracy was destined to succeed in the end was at the outstart overwhelmed with disaster by its rival. Braddock met with his crushing defeat near Fort Duquesne on July 9, 1755- This was an event of awful import to the settlers on the borders of Pennsylvania, Maryland, and Virginia. They were at once exposed to the inroads of the French and Indians, and many soon turned their thoughts to removal further South. In this same year, too. Governor Glenn of South Carolina made a treaty with the Indians by which much of the upper part of that State was ceded to the King of Great Britain. Here was a strong inducement to settle in the new region, and the Calhouns were among those to make this move. All the four brothers, — James, Ezekiel, William, and Patrick, — and their sister Mary Noble and mother Catherine Calhoun made the long and difficult journey. There is evi- dence that in their migration to Carolina they passed by the Waxhaws, where the family of Andrew Jackson had lived, and one writer ^^ says that they were induced to fix upon the 1" John H. Logan's " History of the Upper Country of South Carolina," Vol. I, p. 150. See also Col. Starke's " Sketch," p. 66. 36 LIFE OF JOHN C. CALHOUN site they actually selected for their home in South Carolina by the description of its loveliness and fertility that they had heard from a band of hunters at the Waxhaws. Long Cane Creek was the region that they selected, and in a few years it came to be known as " The Long Canes Settle- ment." Situated in what was originally Granville County and later the district of Ninety-six, it is now included in Abbeville County, some eight miles from the town of Abbeville. The settlement was very new, having been begun only in 1750, and early in 1756 the whole number of settlers scarcely exceeded twenty.^^ John C. Calhoun wrote ^'^ nearly a century later that the family arrived in February, 1756, and settled in a group in what came to be known as Calhoun's Settlement, at the fork of two streams of that name, not far from where their waters empty into Little River. Patrick Calhoun se- lected either at the time of settlement or later a tract of slightly rising ground on the north side of the South Fork of Calhoun Creek, not far from its union with the North Fork. Long Cane Creek, from which the settlement took its name, lay a few miles to the eastward.^' It is doubtless hardly an exaggeration, when Col. Starke writes that, as the Calhouns neared this new home, " they worked their way along wagon-roads and foot-trails until the compass was perhaps their only guide." The following from Calhoun's just-quoted letter is also worthy of reproduction: — " The region composing the District was in a virgin state, new and beautiful, without underwood and all the fertile por- tion covered by a dense cane-brake, and hence the name of Long Cane. It ha