Calhoun seems to been born in Pennsylvania, and educated in France. He started his career as an apprentice to Philadelphia financier
Stephen Girard. He did business at the port of La Havre, France at one time. In May 1834, in Natchez,
Adams County, Mississippi, he married Mary Taylor. He signed his name
Colhoun but "years of tradition" have made Calhoun the common spelling. Calhoun and his wife Mary Taylor Calhoun inherited her paternal grandfather's land and slaves in Alabama and Louisiana. As retold by the
Historical Records Survey history of
Grant Parish (1940), "The Calhoun lands, formerly owned by
Judge William Smith, consisted of thirteen thousand acres. The estate contained four plantation quarters, still known today as Smithfield, Farenzi, Mirabeau, and Meredith. These plantations were well improved, with enormous barns, stables, mills, gins, and highly cultivated. One of the largest sugar mills in the State, erected at a cost of $100,000 was located at Farenzi. Meredith Calhoun owned one thousand slaves, and other planters, the Baldwins opposite Cotile Landing, the Lassards, the Gillards, and Thomas and Peter Hickman owned nearly as many." The crop on Firenze was sugar, the others were cotton land, with Smithfield also growing corn for subsistence. The plantations ran for seven miles along and three miles back from the riverbank. Each plantation had its own slave quarters, with the cabins clustered in groups of 12. Calhoun played a major role in the inter-regional slave trade of the
American South, acting as a broker for the purchase and sale of thousands of enslaved persons. The Louisiana property, on the right bank of the Rigolette Du Bon Dieu, had a steamboat landing that became known as Calhoun's Landing and eventually, during
Reconstruction, became the site of Colfax, Grant Parish, the parish seat of a newly organized parish named for vice president
Schuyler Colfax and president
Ulysses S. Grant. In 1836 an enslaved man in his 30s named Ransom, who had formerly been legally owned by the
John Taylor estate, had gone missing and was thought to be "perhaps now lurking about Judge Wm. Smith's or Mr. Meredith Calhoon's plantations in
Dallas or
Autauga county." In 1840 Calhoun placed a runaway slave ad in a
Huntsville newspaper seeking to recover Charles, "an excellent plasterer," about 30 years old, with notices also placed in
Tuscaloosa,
Louisville, and
Nashville papers. While trying to sell the south Alabama plantations of his late grandfather-in-law, former U.S. Senator Smith, in 1842, he stated that he lived in Huntsville during the summer and
New Orleans in the winter. Calhoun moved some of his land and slaves into sugar agriculture and production in the 1840s, with local newspaper reporting, "Several planters of the parish of Rapides are now in successful operation in the manufacture of sugar, which is pronounced by competent judges to be equal to the sugar of the Mississippi coast or lower Louisiana, both in quality and yield. The highest plantation engaged in its culture on Red River is at its confluence with the Bon Dieu, that of Meredith Calhoun, Esq., who has erected a most magnificent brick house and purgery more than long, and will this year make some 200
hhds. of sugar. We understand he is preparing seed extensively for the next season, when it is contemplated that his plantation alone will turn out from 700 to 1000 hhds. Thus a new agricultural era will arise on Red River." In 1847 New Orleans papers reported that Calhoun's slaves in Rapides Parish had planted 1,000 acres of
sugarcane that year and that Calhoun owned "one of the largest
sugar houses in the state." The same year Calhoun bought a large number of enslaved people who had illegally been imported to the United States from Africa. According to
Huntsville, Alabama historian Linda Bayer, "By the 1850s, they had established the practice of spending most of their time in foreign travel, returning to Huntsville only occasionally to look after their varied financial interests. They were reputed to own a luxurious traveling coach in which they journeyed through Europe, indulging a taste for collecting European paintings and sculpture which were shipped to Huntsville and displayed in the gallery of the Calhoun house." In 1850, Calhoun held 719 enslaved people in
Natchitoches and
Rapides Parishes. In 1851, a
cholera outbreak killed 10 percent of the 700 people enslaved by Calhoun on four plantations in the
Red River district of Louisiana. In addition to nearly 70 slaves, the doctor and an overseer died. According to a history of the Natchitoches area, "At the mouth of
Cane river, lived Madame Boulard, the strong woman, who kept a store there. She was possessed of prodigious strength, and it is related of her that she could catch a whisky barrel by the chimes, place her knees against it, and put it up on the counter. No ordinary man could withstand her strength. Meredith Calhoun, who had a sugar plantation on the opposite bank of the river, accused her of selling whiskey to his hands, and buying surreptitiously sugar and molasses from them. He sent his overseer to her with a number of his negroes, stripped her naked, and turned her loose in a
flatboat. It took nine negroes to do this. She sued him, got judgment against him, and it cost his heirs Smithfield plantation, 1,000 acres of land, to satisfy the judgment." Another version of this incident reads, "Grant's Point is the modern name given to the point at the mouth of Cane River. Frank Beaudry established a store here in 1865, as successor of the old ante-bellum French store of Madame Boulard. Owing to some difficulty with the people she was driven out. This action led to a suit against several persons in Grant Parish, and this suit led to a verdict for $5,000 damages against Meredith Calhoun." Testimony at the 1858 trial demonstrated that Calhoun had opposed the
vigilantism and tried to talk the overseers out of it, but fruitlessly, and under the slave code of the era, he was entirely liable for the actions of his slaves in the attack on Antoinette Boulard because Calhoun's slaves had no legal personhood or autonomy. According to historian Charles Lane, by 1860, Meredith Calhoun's slaves, overseers, soil, machinery, and the
Red River of the South were producing worth of cotton annually. His land and slaves were said to be worth $1.1 million. The Calhouns were exceptionally wealthy. As retold by an Alabama newspaper in 1911, "In those days when millionaires were not so plentiful, the fortune of the Calhouns was considered enormous. They became patrons of art, spending most of their time in foreign travel, journeying in their own traveling coach, one of the most luxurious of that age before Pullman cars were in use. For twenty-five years or more, except for occasional visits to their American home to look after large interests in Alabama and Louisiana, the Calhouns resided abroad." == American Civil War ==