By removing to Kentucky, he not only
exemplified the movement of national power, but freed himself from all
disadvantages of caste. The only aristocracy on the frontier was that
of worth. Calhoun came of equally humble birth and inherited his
individualistic principles. His father had been a country member of
the Virginia Convention and had opposed the adoption of the Federal
Constitution. Much of Calhoun's bias toward democracy was derived, as
he confessed, from an early conversation with the sage of Monticello.
Bred in the upland district of South Carolina, a region more akin to
Tennessee than to the seaboard, Calhoun may have had in mind the
massacre of his grandmother by the Indians as he arose in the war
session of Congress to make his report as chairman of the important
Committee of Foreign Affairs. He arraigned the British agents from
Canada circulating among the American Indians, and charged them with
the outrages committed on the American frontier. Members from the Ohio
valley did not hesitate to attribute the recent outbreak, culminating
in the battle of Tippecanoe, to intrigues of the British in Canada,
whereby the profitable fur trade would be diverted to their posts.
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