Status Updates From Calhoun: American Heretic

In 1800 about 25% of upcountry white families owned slaves. By 1820 that number was nearly 40%.

South Carolina's delegation soon made it clear that slavery's existence and protection was a non-negotiable condition of their participation in the new federal government.

Thomas Jefferson noted blacks possessed a "strong and disagreeable odor", produced he thought because "they secrete less by the kidneys and more by thr glands of the skin".

Benjamin Silliman bcame one of the fathers of American scientific education and would go on to found the American Journal of Science.

The first Federal Census shows that in 1790 Patrick Calhoun enslaved 31 people making him the 4th largest slaveholder in newly formed Abbeville County.

Calhoun's parents came over from Ireland to seek an opportunity to seek a better life with more political equality and economic opportunity but as it turned out that dream was rooted in the nightmares of enslaved Africans.

A radical critique of slavery and the slave trade had begun to emerge with Pennsylvania's Quaker community.

The biblical story of the curse of Ham in the book of Genesis had served to explain the inferiority and enslavement of Black Africans, among Jews, Muslims and Christians for several centuries.

During just the decade that the Calhoons arrived in Pennsylvania more than 50 thousand enslaved Africans were sold in ports up and down the Atlantic sea coast with 30 thousand of them going to Charleston.

There was only one group of "immigrants" to North America in the 18th century that outnumbered those from Ulster, enslaved Africans.

When his parents Patrick and Catherine emigrated from Ireland, their last name was spelled Calhoon.

In 1948 Richard Hofstadter dubbed Calhoun "The Marx of the Master Class", for his defense of slavery as a positive good.

John C Calhoun was born before the Union, in March of 1782. There was still no formal treaty between England and its former colonies.