You can best judge a person by the company he keeps; and in Clyde Wilson's case he has been keeping very good company indeed.

In this book, the editor of the papers of John Calhoun tells the story of one of the defenders of Calhoun's principles, James Johnston Pettigrew. The portrait is of a man who is engaging and noble.

When you visit Gettysburg, stand at the North Carolina monument and gaze across the field at the copse of trees; you will be standing at the spot where Pettigrew and his men began their march to glory. As Wilson's portrait of Pettigrew makes clear, and as any serious and honest student of the struggle for Southern independence should know, these were men who fought for a variety of reasons. In Pettigrew's case, it was to preserve a substantial measure of the world that America had inherited from Europe against a foe bent on destroying that world in the name of an abstract principle.

These were not, in short and contrary to the simplistic explanations of the conflict that dominate public discourse today, men who marched into the cannon's mouth with dreams of masters whipping slaves in their hearts. On the contrary, they were men who believed fervently that they were resisting the tyranny of a government that was fighting to keep them where they would rather not be; and in this, they, not Lincoln and his generals, were the real heirs of the American Revolution.

It is through reading the work of scholars like Professor Wilson that we can honestly approximate the reasons for this last (on the Confederate side) just as well as necessary war in America's story. For unlike this rather partisan review, the book is soberly written and the story unfolds in the measured tones of a man who has absorbed the lessons of his heroes.

One of the most overlooked sons of the South,whose early death is overshadowed his brilliant career, and what could have been, some said he could have been president ,nothing was impossible, this little book gives a good impression of a man worthy of much more attention than been given, i can only recommend it, and hope that you will bring it home and treasure it for many years to come.Christian (Denmark)