Benson J. Lossing, Pictorial Field Book of the Civil War. Volume 2.

1 Mr. Pettigru's boldness, and fidelity to principle while the terrible insanity of rebellion afflicted the people of his State, was most remarkable. lie never deviated a line, in word or act, from the high stand of opposition to the madmen, which he had taken at the beginning of the raving mania. And the respect which his courage and honesty wrung from those whose course he so pointedly condemned was quite as remarkable. The Legislature of South Carolina, during that period of wild tumult, elected him to the most important trust and the largest salary in their gift, namely, to codify the State laws.

William J. Grayson, a life-long friend of Pettigru, and who died during the siege of Charleston, at the age of seventy-five years, left, in manuscript, an interesting biographical study of his friend. Concerning Mr. Pettigru's action at the period we are considering, he wrote:

To induce the simple people to plunge into the volcanic fires of the revolution and war, they were told that the act of dissolution would produce no opposition of a serious nature; that not a drop of blood would be spilled; that no man's flocks, or herds, or negroes, or houses, or lands would be plundered or destroyed; that unbroken prosperity would follow the Ordinance of Secession; that cotton would control all Europe, and secure open ports and boundless commerce with the whole world for the Southern States. To such views Mr. Pettigru was unalterably opposed. He was convinced that war, anarchy, military despotism would inevitably follow a dissolution of the Union; that secession would impart to the abolition party a power over slavery that nothing else could give them — a power to make war on Southern institutions, to proclaim freedom to the negroes, to invoke and command the sympathy and aid of the whole world in carrying on a crusade on the Southern States.

“ Mr. Pettigru saw that bankruptcy would follow war; that public fraud would find advocates in Richmond as well as in Washington. He opposed these schemes of disorder which have desolated the South. Their projectors professed to protect her from possible evils, and involved her in present and terrible disasters. The people were discontented at seeing rats infesting the granaries of Southern industry, and were urged to set fire to the four corners of every Southern barn to get rid of the vermin. They were alarmed at attacks on slavery by such men as John Brown and his banditti, and proposed as a remedy to rush into war with the armed hordes of the whole world. For a bare future contingency, they proposed to encounter an enormous immediate evil.”