James Louis Petigru: Southern Conservative, Southern Dissenter (Studies in the Legal History of the South)

This is the first modern biography of James Louis Petigru (1789-1863), the dean of the South Carolina bar in the antebellum period and a major figure in the state's political and social development. As William H. Pease and Jane H. Pease explain Petigru the lawyer, the political persona, the private individual, and the family patriarch, they also illuminate the particulars of law practice in a nineteenth-century southern city and the processes of lawyering in the lower and appellate courts of both state and nation.
The theme to which the authors continually return is the ambiguity that characterized Petigru's life, for he embodied principles to which the North or the South, but rarely both regions, laid claim. Though loyal to his native South, Petigru was often critical of its politics and ambivalent about economics. Nonetheless, southerners prized his sense of honor, his idealism and personal independence, and his gracious dignity and patrician bearing. In the North, Petigru was venerated for his loyalty to Union, Constitution, and country.
This biography is replete with details about such aspects of Petigru's personal life as his rural upcountry childhood, his education, his marriage and friendships, and his financial travails stemming from disastrous land-speculation ventures. At the heart of the book, however, is the story of Petigru's political and legal career, which included service as South Carolina's attorney general and two terms as a state representative, and culminated in his codification of South Carolina law. Placing Petigru's frequent dissent from the political status quo in the context of South Carolina's radical sectionalism, the authors discuss such topics as Petigru's defense of Unionist interests during the nullification crisis and his work on the behalf of Northern clients against Confederate sequestration laws during the Civil War.
To this day, both conservative and liberal elements of southern politics claim Petigru as one of their own. Although Petigru represented wealthy heirs in probate cases as well as merchants and corporations in matters of debt or commercial law, he is also remembered as an advocate for the disadvantaged - among them, imprisoned paupers, free blacks facing reenslavement, and abused or defrauded women. Informing all aspects of his professional life were the premises that protection of property was fundamental to individual liberty and that the U.S. Constitution and the common law tradition provided the best assurance of justice