ce.

John Caldwell Calhoun--born in 1782, the youngest but one in a family
of five children--was eighteen years old before he had a thought of
being anything but a farmer. His father had been dead five years. His
only sister was married to that famous Mr. Waddell, clergyman and
schoolmaster, whose academy in North Carolina was for so many years a
great light in a dark place. One of his brothers was a clerk in a
mercantile house at Charleston; another was settled on a farm near by;
another was still a boy. His mother lived upon the paternal farm; and
with her lived her son John, who ploughed, hunted, fished, and rode,
in the manner of the farmers' sons in that country. At eighteen he
could read, write, and cipher; he had read Rollin, Robertson,
Voltaire's Charles XII., Brown's Essays, Captain Cook, and parts of
Locke. This, according to his own account, was the sum of his
knowledge, except that he had fully imbibed his father's decided
republican opinions. He shared to some degree his father's prejudice,
and the general prejudice of the upper country, against lawyers;
although a cousin, John Ewing Calhoun, had risen high in that
profession, had long served in the Legislature of South Carolina, and
was about to be elected United States Senator on the Jeffersonian
side. As late as May 1800, when he was past eighteen, preference and
necessity appeared to fix him In the vocation of farmer. The family
had never been rich. Indeed, the great Nullifier himself was a
comparatively poor man all his life, the number of his slaves never
much exceeding thirty; which is equivalent to a working force of
fifteen hands or less.

In May, 1800, Calhoun's elder brother came home from Charleston to
spend the summer, bringing with him his city notions. He awoke the
dormant ambition of the youth, urged him to go to school and become a
professional man. But how could he leave his mother alone on the farm?
and how could the money be raised to pay for a seven years' education?
His mother and his brother conferred upon these points, and satisfied
him upon both; and in June, 1800, he made his way to the academy of
his brother-in-law, Waddell, which was then in Columbia County,
Georgia, fifty miles from the home of the Calhouns. In two years and a
quarter from the day he first opened a Latin grammar, he entered the
Junior Class of Yale College. This was quick work. Teachers, however,
are aware that late beginners, who have spent their boyhood in