The Revolution abased the pride, lessened the
wealth, and improved the politics of the planters; a revised
Constitution, in 1790, gave preponderance to the up-country farmers in
the popular branch of the Legislature; and thenceforth South Carolina
was a sufficiently homogeneous commonwealth.
Looking merely to the public career of Calhoun, the special pleader of
the Southern aristocracy, we should expect to find him born and reared
among the planters of the low country. The Calhouns, on the contrary,
were up-country people,--farmers, Whigs, Presbyterians, men of
moderate means, who wielded the axe and held the plough with their own
hands, until enabled to buy a few "new negroes," cheap and savage;
called new, because fresh from Africa. A family party of them
(parents, four sons, and a daughter) emigrated from the North of
Ireland early in the last century, and settled first in Pennsylvania;
then removed to Western Virginia; whence the defeat of Braddock, in
1755, drove them southward, and they found a permanent abode in the
extreme west of South Carolina, then an unbroken wilderness.
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