According to Ernest McPherson Lander Jr. in his book The Calhoun Family and Thomas Green Clemson: The Decline of a Southern Patriarchy (Columbia: University of South Carolina Press, 1983), whereas James Edward Calhoun was “generous, dependable, and trustworthy,” his brother John Ewing Colhoun was “undependable, preferring gambling, drinking, and gadding about to devoting the necessary attention for the successful operation of his vast plantation” (p. 13). Lander writes,

As a consequence, he fell into serious financial difficulty in the early 1840s. His misconduct and possibly the manner of the division of his mother’s estate led to strained relations between himself and John C. Calhoun.

By March 1844, John E. Colhoun’s financial situation was so straitened that his creditors had the sheriff go to the Keowee Heights plantation and try to round up John E. Colhoun’s enslaved persons to sell them to satisfy Colhoun’s debts. Hearing of this occurrence, John C. Calhoun wrote James Edward to say (p. 65),

Your brother, is I am told, alone with two or three old negroes on the place only. His situation must be distressing. It is painful for me to think of it. Were it in my power, I would be happy to relieve him.

At this point, John C. Calhoun’s son-in-law Thomas Green Clemson stepped in, offering to buy thirty-three enslaved persons belonging to John E. Colhoun with money Clemson and John C. Calhoun gathered for that purpose. Commenting on this, Clemson’s wife Anna Maria, a daughter of John C. Calhoun, wrote her brother Patrick Calhoun to say, “Uncle John poor fellow! (or rather his poor family, for him I cannot pity much) is at last broken up” (ibid.).

With his agricultural operations at Keowee Heights stymied due to the loss of the labor of his enslaved people, John E. Colhoun then pinned his hopes on a gold mine he had purchased at Dahlonega, Georgia. The mine proved unproductive, a pipe dream, but this did not curb the expensive living of John and his family at Keowee Heights. Lander writes,

If his mine did not yield well, John Ewing Colhoun and his family lived as though it did. In late August Anna observed: “As to Cuddy [John E. Colhoun’s daughter Martha Maria] I never knew her so gay and the house at Twelve Mile is constantly full of company and uncle John and aunt Martha in the highest spirits. How they manage to do so I cant say” (pp. 65-6).