A Character of Hugh Legare. By Michael O’Brien. (Knoxville: University of Tennessee Press, 1985. Pp. xiv + 356.)

In an era when nullifiers and secessionists dominated its history, South Carolina quietly enjoyed the mind and hopes of Hugh Legare. Michael O’Brien reintroduced this fascinating South Carolinian to a whole new generation of scholars when he wrote this monograph, essentially an intellectual biography of Hugh Legare. Shadows of time hid Legare’s contributions. He held political office sporadically, and only for a short time. He served as a congressman, South Carolina Attorney General, and eventually became the United States Attorney General in the Whig administration of John Tyler. O’Brien explores Legare’s politics, but not in depth. Legare famously faced down nullification in his home state, and earned a reputation for being an ardent southern unionist during an era when sectionalism and incipient secessionist sentiment first became a political issue. But O’Brien’s work engages Legare the literary man far more than Legare the politician, and its is Legare’s literary character that so interest O’Brien.

Hugh Legare’s life centered on his home city of Charleston, South Carolina. Legare, however, hailed from an old Huguenot family and thus lived in a social milleau just below the great Anglo planters that held power in South Carolina during the Early Republic. In character and temperament Legare shared nothing with his southern brethren. Shy, physically misshapen (his feet and legs were deformed), and given over to melancholy, Legare appeared the antithesis of the virile, violent southern male twentieth century scholars, from Phillips to Nevins, to Wyatt Brown, presented. Legare’s exemplary education allowed him to compensate for these perceived shortcomings. By 1830 he boasted perhaps the most cosmopolitan and erudite mind in the South. His reading interest reflected his childhood and his inhibitions. Legare’s loved the Romantics and contributed a great deal to that movement’s strength in the antebellum South. While Legare commented and wrote on classical and medieval figures, his adventurous exploration of Lord Byron and Sir Walter Scott proved more important for the history of his region.

While literature served as the focus of O’Brien’s work, he reminded the reader that Legare served first and foremost as an attorney. Legare’s mind literary obsessed about law. He studied at the University of Edinburgh and conceived legal systems as the most perfect articulations and manifestations of order human society might provide. Scholars familiar with O’Brien will recognize the beginnings of O’Brien’s magisterial Conjectures of Order in his treatment of Legare and the law. Legare’s most lasting and most tangible contribution to the literature and culture to South Carolina and the South generally remain his musings and his serious writings in the Southern Review. Among the earliest and most serious attempts to foster a literary high culture in the South, the Southern Review solicited works from major southern writers. Given the paucity of southern literary men, Legare necessarily exercised an outsized influence on the periodical’s editorial staff and on the content in general.

O’Brien’s work admittedly remained outside of the standard definition of biography. In the 1830s, Legare served in perhaps the most interesting political office of his life: the United States Charge d’Affaires to the newly created Kingdom of Belgium. Although O’Brien uses Legare’s time in Brussels to analyze Legare the literary figure, he missed an opportunity to broaden his conceptions of literature, especially as it interacted with the great political movements of the day such as sectionalism, republicanism versus monarchy, and revolutionary nationalism. Had Legare lived longer, it is likely he would have written more specifically on the subject, but his death in 1846 meant he missed the Liberal Revolutions of 1848.

O’Briens work is a brilliant and capable work of a cosmopolitan southern lawyer and man of letters, but scholars of the South and the antebellum United States will hopefully see the need for a fuller and perhaps more crisply written biography of a man who loved letters, but staked his life, his political reputation, and his social reputation not on his literary accomplishments but on the idea of the Union.

Miles Smith                                                                            Texas Christian University