June 8, 2023
MY CORNER by Boyd
Cathey
A Birthday Salute to Dr. Clyde N Wilson –
On his 82nd Birthday
Friends,
On Sunday, June 11, 2023, my dear friend and a man who is
rightly called “the Dean of Southern Historians,” Dr. Clyde N. Wilson, will
celebrate his 82nd birthday. For some fruitful fifty-five of those
years he has been at the forefront of efforts to make the history of his native
region better known, and, as events and severe challenges to that history have
happened at a dizzying pace, he has stood, like one of his admired historical
figures, General Thomas J. Jackson, “as a stonewall” resisting the increasing
insanity and madness of our age.
His various books, including the published multi-volume complete
works of Southern statesman John C. Calhoun (University of South Carolina),
books of essays, edited volumes, annotated bibliographies, and hundreds of
articles give testimony to a tireless, indefatigable champion, intent on both
mining and revealing the richness of Southern history and also resolutely
defending it against powerful and virulent enemies, both nationally and amongst
us. Unlike far too many of his fellow Southerners, Dr. Wilson has understood
that the geographical region we call “the South” has had an important role not
just in the 350 year existence of the land we call “America,” but in a very
real sense in maintaining that Western Christian heritage inherited from
original settlers, to the point of going to war to defend that precious
patrimony.
I think it was when I was in grad school at the University of
Virginia in the early 1970s that I first came across articles and essays by
Clyde Wilson. I was already reading National Review and the quarterly, Modern
Age (long before they went over to Neoconservative/NeoReconstructionism).
Wilson, along with writers like Mel Bradford and Russell Kirk, for whom I
served as assistant the year after securing my MA in history, wrote fairly regularly
for what was called “conservative media.” Southerners were welcomed by such
publications back then. Indeed, Kirk dedicated an entire issue of Modern Age
(which he founded) to Southern conservatism (Fall 1958). Older Southern
writers, essayists, and poets associated with the Southern “Agrarians,” men of
stature like Donald Davidson, Andrew Lytle, and Cleanth Brooks, continued their
labors in their twilight years.
When I returned to the United States after earning a doctorate
at the University of Navarra, in Spain, and teaching for a while in Argentina
in 1981, I began to reacquaint myself with writers and the culture of my
homeland. Soon I was contributing essays to the Southern Partisan
magazine and renewing my friendships with Mel Bradford and Russell Kirk.
Then, in 1990 I came across a book which made a profound and
lasting impression on me: Carolina Cavalier: The Life and Mind of James
Johnston Pettigrew (University of Georgia, 1990), by Clyde N. Wilson. In
fact, the volume was an edited version of his Ph.D. dissertation presented at
the University of North Carolina-Chapel Hill in 1971. At that time UNC was
hospitable to more conservative and traditional scholarship; not only Professor
Wilson, but also former Chronicles editor Thomas Fleming, and my former
co-worker at the North Carolina State Archives, Wilson Angley, all finished
their graduate degrees there.
Pettigrew, a noted Confederate general who fell at Falling
Waters during the retreat from Gettysburg, like Wilson and myself was a North
Carolinian. Like most Southern boys who came of age during the “Civil War
Centennial” (1961-1965) and a Tar Heel born and bred, I had some idea of
Pettigrew’s exploits during the War. But I was unprepared for the wealth of
detail which Wilson revealed. For indeed James Johnston Pettigrew was a man
larger than life who, if he had lived, might have become one of the nation’s
finest essayists and writers. In Carolina
Cavalier Wilson discusses at length Pettigrew’s “travel book,” Notes on
Spain and the Spaniards (1861), which like English author Hilaire Belloc’s The
Path to Rome, is far more than a simple travelogue. Like Belloc forty years
later, Pettigrew possessed the ability to translate his observations into
meaningful and eloquently descriptive paragraphs which in a profound sense soar
above the printed page and in an impressionistic way speak of the continuity
and grandeur of our Western culture. His understanding of Spanish traditions
and religion have seldom, if ever, been matched by any American. And from a
certain perspective, is there not in his exquisitely expressed, philosophical
understanding and descriptions of Spanish society a veiled, analogous
comparison to his own Southland?
A few years after acquiring a copy of Carolina Cavalier
I was able to bring Clyde Wilson back to North Carolina. We had begun to
correspond, and since I was chairman of North Carolina’s Annual Confederate
Flag Day observances, I invited him to come to Raleigh and offer remarks in the
old Senate chamber of the historic 1840 State Capitol. He was one of the
distinguished guests of note we had over the years, including Don Livingston,
Sam Francis, Paul Gottfried, and North Carolina Chief Justice I. Beverly Lake,
Jr. And shortly afterwards, Pettigrew’s
volume which had been out-of-print for well over a century, was brought out in a
facsimile edition by the University of South Carolina Press (2010), with a new
introduction by Wilson.
Another significant work which Dr. Wilson produced was The
Essential Calhoun: Selections from Writings, Speeches, and Letters (2017),
with an introduction by Russell Kirk, a valuable primer for students of the
great South Carolinian who have been perhaps deterred by the daunting task of
searching through the edited twenty-eight volumes!
Additional works include his
several polemical volumes in “The Wilson Files”; his four books in the
“Southern Reader’s Guide” series; From Union
to Empire: Essays in the Jeffersonian Tradition; Defending Dixie: Essays in
Southern History and Culture, and several significant
published symposiums which he has edited. Dr. Wilson has also been the M. E.
Bradford Distinguished Chair at the Abbeville Institute, which specializes in
the online publication of Southern writers and holding seminars on Southern
themes. And he is the guiding spirit behind Shotwell Publishing in Columbia,
South Carolina, offering an outlet for Southern authors and their manuscripts.
During his thirty-two years as professor of history at the University of South
Carolina, Dr. Wilson taught a wide variety of courses in history and directed
sixteen doctoral dissertations. His legacy of scholarship and love for the
history of his native region, thus, is carried on by those—and other—students
who were privileged to study under him. And by many thousands more who have read his
books or attended his conferences, or been so fortunate as to call him a
friend.
Would that in the midst of today’s vicious offensive against
everything traditionally Southern there were more teachers and giants like
Clyde Wilson.
There is a memorable passage in Donald Davidson’s magnificent
poem, “Lee in the Mountains,” which in a way sums up Clyde Wilson’s resilience
and heroically staunch defense of his beloved Southland:
Young men, the God of your fathers
is a just
And merciful God Who in
this blood once shed
On your green altars
measures out all days,
And measures out the
grace
Whereby alone we live;
And in His might He
waits,
Brooding within the
certitude of time,
To bring this lost
forsaken valor
And the fierce faith
undying
And the love quenchless
To flower among the
hills to which we cleave,
To fruit upon the
mountains whither we flee,
Never forsaking, never
denying
His children and His
children’s children forever
Unto all generations of
the faithful heart.
Then, let us wish Clyde Wilson a most happy and blessed 82nd
birthday, and ad multos annos! May your critical labors go on and
continue to inspire us!
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