Dictionary of National Biography, 1885-1900/Calhoun, Patrick
CALHOUN, PATRICK (1727–1796), American settler, was born in Ireland in 1727. His father emigrated in 1733 to Pennsylvania, and several years afterwards to the western part of Virginia. When that settlement, after the defeat of Braddock, was broken up by the Indians, the family removed to Long Cane, Abbeville, in the interior of South Carolina, on the confines of the Cherokee Indians. In the war of 1759 half of the settlement was destroyed, and the remnant retired to the older settlements, but on the conclusion of peace in 1763 Calhoun and others returned. Calhoun was appointed to the command of a body of rangers for the defence of the frontiers, in which he displayed great intrepidity and skill. He was the first member of the provincial legislature elected from the upper county of the state, and was afterwards elected to the state legislature, of which, with the intermission of a single term, he remained a member till his death. In the revolutionary war he took an active part on the patriot side. He died in 1796. By his wife, a Miss Caldwell, of Charlotte county, Va., he had several children, one of whom, John Caldwell Calhoun, became vice-president of the United States.
[Allen's American Biographical Dictionary; Von Holst's Life of John C. Calhoun (1882).]