CALHOUN was born into the system of slavery. Patrick Calhoun had fixed
the destiny of his sons the day that he rode back from a legislative session
in Charleston, with Adam, the first Negro ever seen in the Carolina up-
country, straddling his horse behind. Black and white faces together had
hovered over the baby Calhoun's cradle. All his life his memory would
go back to the woman who had nursed him, to Adam's son, Sawney, who
had hunted and fished with him. John Calhoun grew up to know the
Negroes, not as abstractions, but as only a farmer could know them who
had plowed in the 'brilin' sun,' with the black man at his side.

Memories of the system were woven into the fabrics of his day-to-day
living. Mornings with Sawney in the spring, when the wind was soft and
the fishing rods light in their hands. Frantic, last-minute notes from
Floride, reminding him to bring shoes and medicine for the Negroes-a
hectic, last-minute search over Washington, swinging himself up into the
stage at last, with the bulky package under his arm. A Christmas morning
at Fort Hill, when he had called young Cato in to dance, the shaking
head, the feet slapping against the floor -- and at the end, the bewildered,
almost frightened look on the child's face, when Calhoun had handed him
a shining, new fifty-cent piece, the first coin he had ever seen. ¹

His bewilderment when the black, sleepy-eyed Hector, the coachman, ran
away 'under the seduction . . . of . . . free blacks'; and his anger when
' Alick,' the only male house-servant on the place, gave them 'the slip'
when Floride threatened him with a whipping. ² And never would he forget
that swift, stabbing moment of terror when he had broken the wax on a
letter in Floride's small, cramped hand, and had read the most dreaded
words that any Southern husband and planter far from home could receive:
that the Negroes had been 'disorderly,' and that measures must be taken
to bring them into subjection. ³

Details of the system that so horrified outsiders were as natural to Cal-
houn as his own breathing. Even in the isolated up-country of his youth,
he might occasionally have seen the tragic spectacle of Virginia Negroes
being herded South for sale: a cart of five or six children, almost 'broiled

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