and soul's health, cling to the safe obscurity of
private life.

JOHN C. CALHOUN

There were two ways of getting to South Carolina in Colonial times.
The first immigrants, many of whom were men of capital, landed at
Charleston, and, settling in the fertile low country along the coast,
became prosperous planters of rice, indigo, and corn, before a single
white inhabitant had found his way to the more salubrious upper
country in the western part of the Province. The settlers of the upper
country were plain, poorer people, who landed at Philadelphia or
Baltimore, and travelled southward along the base of the Alleghanies
to the inviting table-lands of the Carolinas. In the lower country,
the estates were large, the slaves numerous, the white inhabitants
few, idle, and profuse. The upper country was peopled by a sturdier
race, who possessed farms of moderate extent, hewn out of the
wilderness by their own strong arms, and tilled by themselves with the
aid of few slaves. Between the upper and the lower country there was a
waste region of sandy hills and rocky acclivities, uninhabited, almost
uninhabitable, which rendered the two sections of one Province
separate communities scarcely known to one another. Down almost to the
beginning of the Revolutionary War, the farmers of the upper country
were not represented in the Legislature of South Carolina, though they
were then as numerous as the planters of the lower country. Between
the people of the two sections there was little unity of feeling. The
lordly planters of the lower country regarded their Western
fellow-citizens as provincial or plebeian; the farmers of the upper
country had some contempt for the planters as effeminate,
aristocratic, and Tory. 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 fre