Mr. Calhoun was born in the Abbeville District of South Carolina, on the 18th of March, 1782. His parents on both sides were of Irish extraction, who had first settled in Pennsylvania, and then in Virginia, whence they were driven by the Indians, at the time of Braddock's defeat, to South Carolina. The father appears to have been a man of the most resolute and energetic character, equally ready to defend his home against the incursions of the savages, and his rights as a citizen against legislative encroachments. On one occasion, he and his neighbors went down to within thirty miles of Charleston, armed, to assert a right of suffrage which was then disputed; and he always steadily opposed the Federal Constitution, because it allowed other people than those of South Carolina to tax the people of South Carolina. "We have heard his son say," writes a friend of the latter, "that among his earliest recollections was one of a conversation when he was nine years of age, in which his father maintained that government to be best, which allowed the largest amount of individual liberty compatible with social order and tranquillity, and insisted that the improvements in political science would be found to consist in throwing off many of the restraints then imposed by law, and deemed necessary to an organized society. It may well be supposed that his son John was an attentive and eager auditor, and such lessons as these must doubtless have served to encourage that free spirit of inquiry, and that intrepid zeal for truth, for which he has been since so distinguished. The mode of thinking which was thus encouraged may, perhaps, have compensated in some degree the want of those early advantages which are generally deemed indispensable to great intellectual progress. Of these he had comparatively few. But this was compensated by those natural gifts which give great minds the mastery over difficulties which the timid regard as insuperable. Indeed, we have here another of those rare instances in which the hardiness of natural genius is seen to defy all obstacles, and developes its flower and matures its fruit under circumstances apparently the most unpropitious.