Such, as it seems to our very imperfect judgment, was Daniel Webster,
one of the largest and one of the weakest of men, of admirable genius
and deplorable character; who began life well and served his-country
well and often, but held not out faithful to the end. American
statesmen are called to a higher vocation than those of other
countries, and there is nothing in the politics of America which _can_
reward a man of eminent ability for public service. If such a person
feels that his country's happiness and greatness will not be a
satisfying recompense for anything he can do for her, let him, as he
values his peace 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.
Public-domain text, read in full here on John Shaqi.
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