A planter and slaveowner, he developed his Hopewell plantation on the east side of the Keowee River across from the Cherokee town of Isunigu (Seneca) in western South Carolina.But his paternal great-grandparents were ethnic French Huguenots: Robert Andrew Pickens (Robert André Picon) had migrated to England and Northern Ireland; his wife Esther-Jeanne, widow Bonneau, was from La Rochelle, France and had settled in South Carolina along with other Huguenot refugees fleeing religious persecution as Protestants.However, when the British defeated the Southern Continental Army in 1780 in the Siege of Charleston, Pickens surrendered a fort in the Ninety-Six District.After Tory raiders destroyed most of his property and frightened his family, he informed the British that they had violated the terms of parole.During this period, Pickens joined Francis Marion (known as the Swamp Fox) and Thomas Sumter as the most well-known partisan leaders in the Carolinas.His victorious campaign resulted in the Cherokee ceding significant portions of land between the Savannah and Chattahoochee rivers in the Long Swamp Treaty, signed in what is currently Pickens County, Georgia.Pickens was later elected to the Third Congress, served from 1793 to 1795 as an Anti-Administration member, opposing the policies of US Secretary of the Treasury Alexander Hamilton.Calhoun's home, Fort Hill, is now located on the campus of Clemson University in Pickens County, South Carolina.Pickens and his actions served as one of the models for the fictional character of Benjamin Martin in The Patriot, a motion picture released in 2000.