Meredith Calhoun

Meredith Calhoun (c. 1805 – March 14, 1869) was an American landowner and slaveholder, known for owning some of the largest plantations in the Red River area north of Alexandria, Louisiana. His workers were enslaved African Americans. Exceptionally wealthy, thanks in part to an inheritance from Calhoun's wife's grandfather U.S. Senator William Smith, the Calhouns were absentee owners and spent most of their time traveling in Europe while overseers managed the commercial-scale production of cotton and sugar. When Frederick Law Olmsted did his journalistic tour of the slave states in the 1850s, the only slave whipping he witnessed was at a Calhoun plantation in Louisiana. The family also owned a grand house in Huntsville and other plantations in Alabama. During Reconstruction the old Calhoun plantations were the site of the Colfax massacre of black freedmen by anti-progressive white supremacists.