James L. Petigru

James Louis Petigru (May 10, 1789-March 9, 1863) was a lawyer and politician in South Carolina. He was born in the Abbeville District of South Carolina in 1789 to William and Louise Gibert Pettigrew, daughter of the Reverend Jean Louis Gibert, who founded the Huguenot colony of New Bordeaux in the 1760's.

He graduated from South Carolina College in 1809. He was admitted to the South Carolina bar in 1812. In 1816, he married Jane Postell and was elected as the solicitor of Abbeville County, South Carolina. He became the attorney general of South Carolina in 1822. In 1830, after having lost a bid for a seat in the South Carolina Senate, he was elected to fill a vacant seat in the South Carolina House of Representatives. He was the leader of the anti-nullificationists in that body. After South Carolina seceded in 1860, Petigru famously remarked, "South Carolina is too small for a republic and too large for an insane asylum." He died in Charleston, South Carolina, in 1863, and is buried in St. Michael's Churchyard.

Petigru's three sons died in childhood or early adulthood. His two daughters, however, lived to maturity and were accomplished in the arts. Petigru's elder daughter, Jane Caroline (Petigru) Carson (1820-1892), a noted portrait artist and watercolorist, fled Charleston at the start of the Civil War, first to New York City for several years and ultimately to Rome, where she lived among other American expatriates and died in 1892. His younger daughter, Susan DuPont (Petigru) King Bowen, made a name for herself as a novelist and is now coming into critical attention. "Busy Moments of an Idle Woman" (New York: Appleton, 1854); "Crimes Which the Law Does Not Reach" (New York: Derby & Jackson, 1859); "Gerald Gray's Wife" (New York: Stockton & Co., 1864); "Lily" (New York: Harper, 1855); and "Sylvia's World" (New York: Derby & Jackson, 1859) are her most significant works.

References

*"Who Was Who in America, Historical Volume, 1607-1896." Chicago: Marquis Who's Who, 1963.