A Compendium of Irish Biography/Calhoun, Patrick
Calhoun, Patrick, an early American settler, was born in Ireland in 1727. He left Ireland with his parents in early life and settled in Virginia, and afterwards in the interior of South Carolina, then a wilderness. He and his family suffered severely during the war with the French and the Indians. Shortly after the peace of 1763 he was elected a member of the provincial legislature, and continued a member of that and afterwards of the state legislature (with the intermission of a single term) till his death in 1796. In the war of the Revolution he took an early, decided, and active part against the British. His son John Caldwell Calhoun (born in South Carolina in 1782, died at Washington 1850) was Vice-President of the United States from 1825 to 1833, and held other important offices, and was undoubtedly the ablest and most uncompromising champion of slavery and the slave power in his day. [1]
- Authorities