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A Traitor and a Scoundrel: Benjamin Hedrick and the Cost of Dissent
by Michael Thomas Smith
ISBN: 0-87413-841-8
Published in 2003
$45.00
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Historians mostly remember Benjamin Hedrick of North Carolina for his 1856 dismissal from the faculty of the University of North Carolina for publicly proclaiming his antislavery views, if they remember him at all. This event has long been recognized as a defining moment in the Old South's movement toward becoming a closed society on the issue of slavery, and the foremost example of the region's lack of academic freedom. Michael Thomas Smith's new biography�the first full-length examination of this important but neglected figure�explores these and other aspects of Hedrick's career that warrant further examination. This vigorous Southern dissenter also played an active role in the Southern agricultural reform movement, Civil War Unionism, Reconstruction, and administrative reform in the U.S. Patent Office, where he worked for the last twenty-five years of his stormy life. His story, which reveals much about the limits and costs of nineteenth-century Southern dissent, is here fully explored for the first time. Michael Thomas Smith is a lecturer in history at Penn State University.
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