There are historical figures whose lives, it seems, are cut far too short, figures who offered hints of significant future contributions to society, which their passing prevented. And always we wonder what might have been if they had lived longer.In the antebellum Carolinas, on the cusp of the tragic and brutal War Between the States, such a man was the polyglot James Johnston Pettigrew. Born into eastern North Carolina plantation aristocracy, “Johnston” (as he was called familiarly) was from an old Episcopalian family. A genuine prodigy, he entered the University of North Carolina at the age of 14 where he excelled academically in mathematics and foreign languages, even gaining the notice of President James K. Polk, who appointed him a professor at the United States Naval Observatory while only in his early twenties. After a short stint in academia, he travelled to Europe in 1850 and studied law at the University of Berlin in Prussia, then joining the law practice of his uncle in Charleston, South Carolina, from where he was elected to the South Carolina House of Representatives (1855). There he sponsored legislation to prohibit the reintroduction of the slave trade.He was just 27.He returned to Europe in 1859 where, like other Southern men of his generation and social class, he made the “grand tour” and left behind one of the most remarkable books ever authored by an American, a volume of his impressions of that tour, Notes on Spain and the Spaniards (1861). Its vibrant and deeply thoughtful descriptions rival the most brilliant of philosophical “travelogues,” and compare favorably with Hilaire Belloc’s The Path to Rome. For Pettigrew, Notes on Spain became a vehicle for a not-so-veiled, favorable comparison of Spanish customs and culture with those of his own Southland, and even more importantly, a searing critique of the idea that economic and political liberalism was the new salvation for mankind. His defense of orthodox revealed religion and his unparalleled put down of 19th century rationalism remain, by any standard, impressive. [Note: There is a 2010 University of South Carolina Press reprint of the original; and Professor Clyde Wilson’s biography of Pettigrew, Carolina Cavalier, published by the University of Georgia Press in 1990, is an excellent introduction to Pettigrew and his life.]But Pettigrew’s career as an author and social critic was abruptly cut short by war.For Southerners, certainly for men such as Johnston Pettigrew, the impending conflict with the Northern states would not be a “civil war,” that is, it would not be a war between two aggrieved parties within the American nation. Rather, it would be a war between two ideas of government, and, in reality, between two ideas of history and the very nature of the American nation. For the North, which now controlled the Federal government, the conflict would be to suppress what was seen as a rebellion against constituted national authority and an impediment to the triumph of industrial capitalism. For the states of the Southern Confederacy, it would be a defense of their inherited rights under the old Constitution of 1787, rights which had never been ceded to the Federal government, as well as of their conception of society, which the late Richard Weaver termed a combination of “communitarian individualism” and eighteenth-century aristocratic values. [Wilson, 219]Pettigrew had noticed the widening division as early as 1851: “The political aspect of our unfortunate Country gives also the greatest concern. Precipices around us on all sides, and amid the universal decline of principle among the politicians, it is difficult to say whether there be more danger in resistance or submission.” [Pettigrew to his brother William, January 3, 1851; Pettigrew Papers, University of North Carolina, Southern Historical Collection, Chapel Hill, North Carolina; quoted by Wilson, p. 110]In the antebellum federal Union the largely agricultural, plantation-based South had acted as a kind of counterweight to the North and its developing capitalist vision of history. Certainly, there were notable Southerners who shared the growing economic and political liberalism of their fellow citizens north of the Mason-Dixon Line (e.g., DeBow’s Review). Yet, increasingly in the late antebellum period, voices like that of Pettigrew echoed a kind of vision somewhat reminiscent of the serious critiques being made in Europe by counter-revolutionaries who stoutly opposed the advances of liberalism.The historian Louis Hartz once commented (in Liberalism in America, 1955) that the antebellum South, particularly during the 1840s and 1850s, had experienced what he termed a “reactionary Enlightenment.” The great novels of Sir Walter Scott dominated in Southern libraries; Chateaubriand and the works of the writers of Romanticism were devoured by the reading public (which was quite large). The Oxford “High Church” Movement (1840s and beyond) found many devotees and converts. Many scions of Southern families were sent to Europe for education. Not just Pettigrew, but other notable writers such as George Fitzhugh, George Frederick Holmes, James Henley Thornwell, and Robert Lewis Dabney (who wrote his most devastating criticism of the industrialist “New South Creed” after the war), questioned the liberal narrative and defended the innate conservatism of Southern society.Yale University historian Rollin Osterweis recounted this popular intellectual turn in his Romanticism and Nationalism in the Old South (1949). And above all, the late historians Eugene and Elizabeth Fox-Genovese have detailed this flowering of what can be termed Southern counter-revolutionary thought in their exhaustive study The Mind of the Master Class: History and Faith in the Southern Slaveholders’ Worldview (2005), and in other volumes.Pettigrew’s descriptions of Spanish life and belief in Notes on Spain and the Spaniards not only offer an acute critique of 19th century economic and political liberalism (indirectly aimed back at America), but do so in a finely crafted and elegantly expressed manner.It is no exaggeration to state that Pettigrew fell in love with Spain, its traditions, and its inhabitants. As Professor Wilson points out in his biography, “All the qualities of life he valued as a southerner he found in pure form in Andalusia.” [Wilson, p.59]In a passage describing life in a Spanish village Pettigrew defends regionalism and communitarianism, and what he terms “enlightened prejudice.” Certainly, he was also thinking of his own native Southland when he muses:“Local attachments are pronounced, by the modern school of social philosophers, to be relics of barbarism, ignorance and prejudice, forgetting that prejudices are given us by the all-wise Deity, as well as reasoning faculties, and equally for some beneficent purpose. The time may come when prejudices will disappear, when one’s country will have no claim upon him than China or Hindostan, and the sufferings of the Bushmen will arouse as lively a feeling of sympathy as those of his fellow citizens. But this millennium has not yet reached Spain. Patriotism, an attachment to, a preference for one’s own home, is still a virtue prolific of measureless good, and for its foundation rests upon enlightened prejudice.” [Notes, p. 55]Such language is reminiscent of that great English conservative, Edmund Burke, and for Pettigrew was applicable equally to Spain and to his beloved Southland.Throughout Notes Johnston Pettigrew comments admiringly on the deeply religious character of the Spanish people and the impressive monuments which they have constructed to illustrate their faith. In such instances, he defends that faith with passionate intensity.At the Cathedral of Our Lady of Pilar, in Zaragoza, Pettigrew offers one of his most memorable passages. After an almost poetic recounting of his entry into the edifice and his dawning sense of awe and reverie, he offers a defense of revelation and traditional religion against the current dominance of a rationalist materialism. His words bespeak what Russell Kirk termed moral imagination:“Every revealed system [of religious belief] must rest for its foundation upon either reason or faith. The former decides upon evidence, scrutinized by the light of a critical intellect; the latter seeks its ‘evidence of things unseen’ only in the heart. How many of us have intelligence, learning or leisure to investigate the grounds of our belief in even the simplest article of faith? What immense erudition is requisite to decide whether the gospels containing a narrative of the Saviour’s life be forgeries, revelations or mere histories? How often do sects split upon the mere literal rendering of a Greek sentence? And if the learned, who have devoted their whole lives to this alone, be so feeble, how shall we expect strength of wisdom from the mass of mankind, who have not the first element of critical science? We believe in the existence of a Saviour, and denounce as infidels and horrible monsters all who refuse assent to our faith. And why do we thus believe? Because we have been told so in our youth by persons of learning and probity, in whom we have confidence, and whose better judgment in this matter we substitute for our own…. Even for the earth we need something more than morality, something apart from and higher than humanity or its virtues…. I have knelt before the Elevation of the Host and bowed my head on the Paseo at the solemn peal of the Angelus, without feeling myself the worse therefor, and some of the pleasantest recollections of my life are these Spanish cathedrals, where the somber grandeur of the architecture and the devotion of the congregation harmonized in elevating me above the mere materiality of existence.” [Notes, pp. 77-79]For Johnston Pettigrew, just as for Henry Adams a half century later in his volume, Mont Saint Michel and Chartres (1904), the grand cathedrals of Christendom were not only architectural marvels, but as well, living symbols in stone of the popular belief system which had created and annealed European culture and society for fifteen hundred years. And despite the revolutions and upheavals in Europe, Spain was most resistant to those changes.Here, entering into the Cathedral of Seville, he once again describes the intimate relationship between faith and its expression architecturally:“… A faint gleam of light, struggling through the painted windows of the dome, fell upon the lofty crucifix, and seemed to point to the life of purity beyond. At such a time, one cannot but feel that there is an ethereal spirit within, a spark of the Divine essence, which would fain cast off its prison house of mortality and flee to the Eternal existence that gave it birth. This edifice is one of few creations of man that realizes expectation. Morning, noon, and night, none can enter without acknowledging that he stands on holy ground. The accessories, the trembling swell of the organs, the sweet odor of incense, the beautiful works of art, which elsewhere distract the attention, here combine in universality of grandeur to establish that harmony of the soul so conducive to devotion; and if the excellence of the architecture consist in the accomplishment of the rational purpose assigned, to this must the palm be awarded. Political economists may reason that such an expenditure in unproductive stone withdraws from the general circulation a sensible capital; the severe reformer may preach against the adoration of saints and images; but their remonstrance will fall pointless upon the heart. There are occasions when humanity rises above the earthly rules of logic; and acknowledges obedience only to those hidden laws which govern the divine portion of our nature, and whose sequence is beyond the reach of human intellect.” [Notes, pp. 186-187]Pettigrew, as did other contemporary Southern men of culture and intellect, recognized stark differences between his beloved South and an increasingly industrialized North. He sums that belief up in Notes on Spain when leaving France and entering Spain:“Adieu to a civilization which reduces men to machines, which sacrifices half that is stalwart and individual in humanity to the false glitter of centralization, and to the luxurious enjoyments of a manufacturing, money age! Welcome, dura tellus Iberiae! Welcome to your sunny plains, your naked mountains, your hardy sons and your beautiful daughters! “ [Notes, p. 51]On the outbreak of War Between the States in 1861, James Johnston Pettigrew was elected colonel of the 22nd Infantry Regiment, North Carolina Troops. Confederate President Jefferson Davis urged him to assume a higher command, but at first Pettigrew deferred due to his own lack of military experience. Nevertheless, Davis appointed him brigadier general after his excellent performance during the Peninsula Campaign outside the gates of Richmond in 1862.At Gettysburg, when Confederate Major General Henry Heth was seriously wounded on the first day of battle, July 1, 1863, Pettigrew, whose brigade formed part of Heth’s division, assumed command of Heth’s troops. And it was Pettigrew who led the left wing of what would be called famously “Pickett’s Charge” on that fateful July 3 of 1863.There is a scene in the director’s cut of the film “Gettysburg” (1993) when on the field of battle Pettigrew presents a copy of Notes on Spain to General James Longstreet. Although I cannot find a specific reference to whether that actually occurred, Pettigrew’s literary fame was well-known in the South. Men of his renown and the image of the Southern Cavalier attracted international sympathy and support from conservative classes (as I have detailed Neapolitan and Spanish Carlist support for the Southern Cause; see, “The Universality of the Southern Cause,” LewRockwell, February 23, 2023.On the Confederate retreat back into Virginia Pettigrew was mortally wounded leading his command on foot near the community of Falling Waters (now part of West Virgina) on April 14, dying on April 17.His death occasioned mourning throughout the South, most especially in his native North Carolina. General Lee commented, “the army has lost a brave soldier and the Confederacy a brave officer.” [U.S. War Department. The War of the Rebellion. Official Records, 1880-1901. Series 1; v. 27, part 3, p. 1016] His body was returned to North Carolina, lay in state in the historic State Capitol building, and then was buried at his family plantation, “Bonarva” (now part of Pettigrew State Park).At Appomattox in April 1865 were set into motion momentous events which would shape the future of the reconstituted American nation. As Pettigrew had artfully intimated, with the restraints on industrial capitalism and liberalism removed the road to centralized governmental power and the dominance of international capitalism was cleared.Johnston Pettigrew would not live to see those changes. His eloquent voice would be missed in the post-war.The post Remembering General James Johnston Pettigrew: A Life Cut Far Too Short appeared first on LewRockwell.