Calhoun’s Grave, Another View

For a dead man, Senator Calhoun certainly got around. After his death in Washington, he was temporarily interred there. After exhumation, his remains were transported to Charleston, site of a big funeral parade. He was reinterred in the western section of St. Philip’s in the “stranger’s graveyard”; in the 1760s the congregation had decided to set aside part of the churchyard for the burial of those non-Charlestonians who died in the city while visiting or on business. During the Civil War, when Federal capture of Charleston seemed imminent, Calhoun’s remains were dug up and reinterred in an unmarked grave in the eastern churchyard as a precaution against Union soldiers’ desecration of the gravesite. In 1884 all that was left of John C. Calhoun was reburied at the original site in the stranger’s cemetery.

This is the caption as printed in 100 Significant Civil War Photographs: Charleston in the War. It has not yet been through this site’s research and fact-checking pass.