The Bonfire

by Marc Wortman

  Less than two years later, his mother, Rebecca, followed her husband to the grave. That set James free. He determined to act on his conviction that something better awaited him out there, off the farm. He would go west into the Georgia frontier.

  BUT IF JAMES HOPED to find a new and better life than he had so far led on the family farm, he knew the path toward his future also carried him back to a harsher past, a time of terrible tragedy indelibly etched in the memory of every Calhoun. The family’s pioneering history placed them at the heart of conflicts between white settlers and native tribes, whose country the whites had long sought to claim.

  FOR GOING-ON THREE CENTURIES nearly unbroken, European settlers in the American Southeast and one or more of the region’s many Indian tribes had been at each other’s throats. The violence between white and red started at the very beginning, when the Spaniard Hernando de Soto first explored the region for the queen of Spain in the early 1540s, passing through what would one day be Georgia and South Carolina. His conquistador army laid waste to numerous Indian villages, some dating back more than a thousand years. The arrival of the English brought waves of new emigrants, who quickly plunged inland, hungry for land to farm away from the teeming coastal cities, and established lowland plantations.

  While the Spanish, French, and British vied for control of the New World, native tribes entered into a series of shifting alliances with the white nations. Despite the occasional conflicts over the upcountry land between the newcomers and the native Cherokee, Indian and white traders out of Charleston carried on a lucrative fur trade. Following their deeply rutted trading roads, settlers arrived to homestead on Indian hunting and fishing grounds under the protection of the British garrison at nearby Fort Augusta in Georgia. It was not far from there, in February 1756, that the earliest Calhouns arrived. James, William, Ezekiel, and Patrick Calhoun, four brothers still speaking in the brogue of their native Donegal County, Ireland, moved from the Old Dominion, where they had been farmers and road builders, to more than a thousand well-drained acres of loam, loosely rooted cane towering up to twenty feet high, and tangles of pea vines, which brother Patrick had surveyed for them along the western bank of Long Cane Creek. That tributary fed the Little River and from there flowed to the broad Savannah River running between South Carolina and Georgia to the ocean.

  The brothers brought the large extended Calhoun clan with them, including a sister, their young wives, multitudinous children, and their seventy-two-year-old mother, Catherine. This would be the last in her life’s long series of perilous journeys. Born in Scotland, she had been driven to Ireland as part of a forced migration by the British Crown to establish a Protestant presence within the belligerent Catholic land. From that unhappy place, she crossed the Atlantic to farm a tract in Pennsylvania before uprooting for Virginia. Now, she hoped to find a permanent home awaiting her in this rich, fertile Southern land.

  The Calhouns and other Virginians coming into the Carolina and Georgia piedmont frontier came to Long Cane not just for its fertile wilderness. They came for peace. The area seemed a safe haven from the violence pressing in on their former home. The war between the French and English raging in Ohio, western Pennsylvania, and elsewhere in the upper colonies put all Northern frontier settlements at risk of sudden, brutal attack—by French armies and by their Indian allies. Every mile they jostled about in their wagons bouncing southwards, they believed, would carry them farther away from war and deeper into safety.

  They were wrong. War followed hard on their heels. These Virginians could not have chosen a worse moment to accept the promise of the Southern frontier.

  The French and Indian conflict with the English and their own native proxy armies followed the Calhoun party southward. As a sideshow to the far greater global war, later known as the Seven Years’ War, between the English and French nations and their European allies, the ongoing collision between the natives and the new settlers in traditional Cherokee hunting grounds—as local a skirmish as could be imagined—played right into the needs of the European world powers and the vanity of a petty territorial ruler.

  THE RICH UNDULATING LAND that the Calhouns rode into along Long Cane Creek lay within the canebrake that gave the region its name. By the time they had constructed their new log houses and cleared enough acreage to begin producing crops, friction flared into the threat of violence between British and Cherokee warriors—formerly allies against the French. Minor skirmishes raised fears of full-scale conflict. South Carolina’s royal governor, William Henry Lyttelton, anticipated the worst, a Cherokee alliance with France. He was also a pompous martinet keen for military glory. He sent his troops out to make a preemptive strike on the natives. The heavily armed infantry torched several Cherokee villages in the up-country. When the Redcoats marched out, nothing living remained in their wake. Native rage at the attacks sparked the very alliance with the French Lyttelton had feared.

  The Indians retaliated, attacking isolated frontier settlements and murdering their residents, often leaving the bodies horribly mutilated and sometimes stealing away women and children. The royal governor’s infantry forces answered barbarity in kind, sweeping through more native villages. With atrocities mounting on both sides, settlers in the Abbeville district lived in constant fear, kept armed guards posted, and demanded that the royal forces protect them.

  ALMOST PRECISELY FOUR YEARS after the first Calhoun families arrived, the alarm rang out from farm to farm through the settlement. Cherokee in war paint were seen crossing the Savannah River. On February 1, 1760, the settlement families collected their valuables and set off in fright in a train of heavily laden wagons south on the old Cherokee trading road for the safety of the fortified village of Augusta, Georgia: 110 settlement family members, mainly women and children, rode and walked alongside the wagons under the watchful guard of forty musket-toting militiamen from Fort Augusta.

  Just a few hours after the wagon train embarked, its wheels bogged down in the cane-shrouded mud lane. The men stowed their muskets and put their shoulders to freeing the wagons bellied into the muck.

  The traveling settlers should not have been surprised when the attack came—but they were. They had no chance to repel it. One hundred whooping, war-painted Cherokee horsemen swooped in on the crowd of men, women, and many children milling about the wagons. The warriors swung their sharpened tomahawks and fired their English-made muskets.

  The militiamen who didn’t fall in the first volley ran for their weapons, but few reached them before warriors were swinging axes and slashing knives in their midst. The whites ran screaming in terror into the surrounding canebrake and forest. The raiding party chased down women fleeing with their children. In half an hour, the blood-letting was over.

  When it ended, twenty-three of the Long Cane settlers lay dead in the muddy road—some versions of the story say as many as fifty—women and children in the main, “most inhumanely butchered,” reported Charleston’s South Carolina Gazette based on eyewitness accounts a few days later. Not only were there the dead; the Cherokee men spirited seventeen women and children away with them. Before their escape, the native raiders plundered and incinerated the wagons and set the surrounding canebrake on fire to flush out those who had cached themselves within the reedy fastness.

  WILLIAM CALHOUN, FUTURE GRANDFATHER of the wandering James, eventually reached the safety of Augusta. A few days later, he returned to the Long Cane attack site. He found the scalped remains of his mother, the Calhoun matriarch Catherine. She lay dead along with her mutilated son James and James’s wife. William searched the surrounding woods, fearing more losses, and his horror was not ended. Not only had the Indians brutally murdered his family members, but two of his own daughters and a niece, Rebecca, were among the missing. He finally found her, but there was no trace of his own girls, though the searchers came across large numbers of children wandering in shock through the canebrake, “some of them terribly cut with tomahawks and left for dead, and others scalp’d, yet alive.”


  Not having found his daughters on his first return to the massacre site, two weeks later he joined with a militia company to track the missing and seek revenge for the massacre. The Cherokee, though, found the search party first. In the ensuing fight, a musket ball tore through William’s hand. He was more fortunate than the regiment’s leader, Ulric Tobler. The Indians scalped him and “left a Hatchet sticking in his Neck on which were three old Notches and three newly cut.” So it was that the Calhouns first spilled their blood contesting the land of Georgia.

  THE LONG CANE ATTACK SEEMED to spend the native and white fury in South Carolina. Lyttelton’s failure to contain the violence and his self-aggrandizing tactics soon brought him reassignment. With his departure and the end of the French and Indian War, the British reached an accord in 1763 with the Cherokee and other Indian nations. The Crown’s negotiators laid the groundwork for several years of peace by discouraging further Colonial incursions beyond the Appalachians, a council of several Indian tribes having ceded all claim to the fertile piedmont region of the Carolinas and Georgia in return for native control of the land beyond the Ogeechee River. The Calhouns and the other up-country settlers enjoyed a period of relative tranquility with their native neighbors.

  Although the fight for the Calhoun Settlement died away, the surviving Calhouns did not forget that terrifying day’s violence or the many other tragedies that befell their kinfolk in their confrontation with the Indians. One of the surviving brothers, Patrick, placed a stone marker to memorialize the Long Cane massacre. Generations of Calhoun children and grandchildren were almost certainly directed to pay their respects there.

  They and others passing by on their journey west toward the next frontier saw its blunt inscription: “In memory of Mrs. Catherine Calhoun aged 76 years who with 22 others was here murdered by the Indians the first of Feb 1760.” For the generations who came to know the story of the terrible human price paid for the conquest of the land, the words would gnaw like an aching hunger, a goad to greater conquest and a boundless hole in their gut.

  THOUGH LASTING JUST A few short years, the resolution of the Indian-English boundary dispute enabled thousands more settlers to flood the region. The frontier families took advantage of the peace to build out their farms and expand their crops, first mainly tobacco to go with their subsistence needs. The surviving Calhoun brothers gradually built thriving farms for which they acquired slaves—Patrick eventually owned thirty-one. That left them with relatively moderate wealth compared to the large coastal plantation owners, whose slaves numbered in the hundreds, but they were still among the richest in the up-country. The advent of Eli Whitney’s cotton gin in the early 1800s suddenly made it possible to grow the more valuable cash crop beyond the coastal plains. Piedmont farming became far more profitable. Northern and English mills took as much cotton as they could produce. More and more farmers acquired slaves, and many of the Virginians soon enjoyed luxuries formerly available only to the great planters they once worked for—including fortune-building steps like sending their most promising sons off the land for their educations.

  Liberty from some of the daily toil of farm life brought by cotton profits and slaves also permitted another family tradition to commence, public service. John C. Calhoun’s father, Patrick, was the first of the family to serve in the Colonial legislature. When the colonies rebelled against the British, he, like most frontiersmen of the age, sided with the rebellion. Independence offered the swelling populace the likeliest way to further its advance into the frontier. For the colonists, the prospect of independence meant new land for settlement and access to the lucrative fur trade, now governed by a Crown monopoly. The wealthy Tory planters of the coast shared the royal governor’s opposition to further incursions into the frontier, which could only disrupt the valuable fur trade and create more Indian troubles for the island empire, which already had many far-flung problems on its hands.

  Patrick won a seat in the newly formed Provincial Congress in 1775. In the next and glorious year of 1776, he became a member of the freshly independent state’s first general assembly. He would be reelected continuously until his death in 1796, by which time he was known as “the patriarch of the upper country” and widely revered as South Carolina’s most powerful legislator—that is, until his son’s incomparable rise to political power.

  JOHN C. CALHOUN, PATRICK’S AMBITIOUS son, had not been much older than James was when he left the Calhoun Settlement for Yale College in New Haven. After graduating, he had continued on to law school in Litchfield, Connecticut, and from there, the spellbinding orator and ingenious political philosopher began his meteoric rise to the very pinnacle of national power, where he helped rule an entire nation feeling its way to the greatness of its land’s promise. The teenaged James barely recalled his few meetings in the settlement with his forty-seven-year-old cousin, who was now the nation’s seventh vice president, the first born in the United States and not in a colony under British rule.

  He was also the lower South’s preeminent spokesman and, many believed, the man destined to become the nation’s next president. He was one political leader whose words in defense of the lower states’ minority in Washington had the power to break the fragile union in two—or keep it from splitting asunder. A nationalist, but one who believed that protecting sectional rights was the only way to keep the union of the states intact, he had emerged as the philosophical voice for the individual states’ ultimate power to nullify federal laws they considered unconstitutional. A state had a veto power that, he declared, enabled its confederation with the others into a national whole. In particular, his present fame as a so-called nullifier rested on his opposition to what he called the “Tariff of Abominations,” enacted the previous year, 1828.

  That bill designed by a Northern and Western (when the West still reached only to the banks of the Mississippi River) majority in Congress to protect their emerging industries’ manufactured goods had raised duties on raw materials to fully 50 percent. The tariff threatened already hard-hit Southern planters, dependent on fields of cotton and their millions of slaves, with ruin. It also raised the specter of Northern abolitionists’ using the protectionist levers of federal power to undermine the South’s “peculiar institution,” its centuries-long heritage of eternal human bondage based on race, the muscle and backbone of its agrarian economy.

  As vice president under President Andrew Jackson, the populist centralizer of national power, Calhoun anonymously penned a pamphlet urging his home state to refuse to collect the import duties, defining what he saw as a first principle of the Union in the rights of any state to veto a law its own constitutional convention deemed unconstitutional. He even went so far as to suggest that states might consider seceding from the young union should a congressional majority unfairly impose its will to overreach constitutional limits on its authority. “The despotism founded on combined geographical interest,” Calhoun wrote to Virginia’s senator Littleton Walker Tazewell, “admits of but one effectual remedy, a veto on the part of the local interest, or under our system, on the part of the states.” This, he implied, applied equally to any attempt to legislate against Southerners’ right to own slaves, bring their slaves wherever they chose within their country, and protect their property from flight outside slaveholding territory to lay claim to freedom. He argued that only if constitutional authority rested with the individual state could a congressional majority be held in check and kept from enacting legislation that amounted to an unhaltable overreaching of the limits placed upon its power. Calhoun had laid the grounds for the South’s challenge to the authority of the federal government to limit the South’s economic behavior, including slaveholding.

  The nullifiers’ threat to battle the tariff placed economic issues at the center of the table. Southern fears of Northern dominance and the growing abolitionist movement threatened to turn the table over. Calhoun declared prophetically that his fellow South Carolinians were ready to fight to the death to keep the tariff
from being collected. “Death,” he avowed, “is not the greatest calamity: there are others still more terrible to the free and brave, and among them may be placed the loss of liberty and honor. There are thousands of her brave sons who, if need be, are prepared cheerfully to lay down their lives in defence of the State and the great principles of constitutional liberty for which she is contending.” Though he aligned himself with the most radical elements of the South, he privately believed that without a veto right for the states, the Union would inevitably break apart. He viewed himself as a defender of the American democratic experiment, even as many so-called “fire-eaters” in the South hoped, and prepared themselves, for its dissolution.

  President Andrew Jackson did not distinguish by faction. He also personally despised Calhoun. They had common Southern origins and shared party affiliation, a similar racist ideology, and slaveholder status, but Jackson prided himself on being the common man in the White House. He believed in the common man’s equality within a popular democracy. Calhoun, the plantation owner, saw little in the common man he liked; he belonged to a Jeffersonian elite fulfilling its duty to govern the general rabble.

  In the face of the nullifiers, Jackson mounted a military force and muttered a threat to “hang every leader . . . of that infatuated people,” his own vice president included, for treason. At a Washington Jefferson Day dinner on April 13, 1830, designed to bring the Democrats’ fractious and increasingly embittered pro- and antitariff factions together under a shared set of principals, Calhoun made clear their differences. “The Union, next to our liberty, the most dear,” he declared in a riposte to Jackson’s attempt to preserve the party—and the Party—around his toast’s thematic proclamation, “Our Union, it must be preserved.” Little wonder that two years on, Calhoun became the first man to resign the vice presidency. Another 140 years would pass before a second vice president resigned.