Devoid of imagination and of humor, a hard-headed, eager politician, he brought up his boy upon politics.  This was sorry nourishment for a child’s mind, but he had little else to give him.  Gambling, hunting, whiskey, and politics were all there was to relieve the monotony of life in a Southern back settlement; and the best men naturally threw themselves upon politics.  Calhoun told Miss Martineau that he could remember standing between his father’s knees, when he was only five years old, and listening to political conversation.  He told Duff Green that he had a distinct recollection of hearing his father say, when he was only nine, that that government is best which allows to each individual the largest liberty compatible with order and tranquillity, and that improvements in political science consist in throwing off needless restraints.  It was a strange child that could remember such a remark.  As Patrick Calhoun died in 1795, when his son was thirteen years old, the boy must have been very young when he heard it, even if he were mistaken as to the time.  Whether Patrick Calhoun ever touched upon the subject of slavery in his conversations with his children, is not reported.  We only know that, late in the career of Mr. Calhoun, he used to be taunted by his opponents in South Carolina with having once held that slavery was good and justifiable only so far as it was preparatory to freedom.  He was accused of having committed the crime of saying, in a public speech, that slavery was like the “scaffolding” of an edifice, which, after having served its temporary purpose, would be taken down, of course.  We presume he said this; because everything in his later speeches is flatly contradicted in those of his earlier public life.  Patrick Calhoun was a man to give a reason for everything.  He was an habitual theorizer and generalize!’, without possessing the knowledge requisite for safe generalization.  It is very probable that this apology for slavery was part of his son’s slender inheritance.

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