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.
