James Chesnut Jr.

James Chesnut Jr. (January 18, 1815 – February 1, 1885) was an American lawyer and politician, and a Confederate functionary.

Chesnut, a lawyer prominent in South Carolina state politics, served as a Democratic senator in 1858–60, where he proved moderate on the slavery question. But on Lincoln's election in 1860, Chesnut resigned from the U.S. Senate and took part in the South Carolina secession convention, later helping to draft the Confederate States Constitution. He was Deputy from South Carolina to the Provisional Congress of the Confederate States from 1861 to 1862. He also served as a senior officer of the Confederate States Army in the Eastern Theater of the American Civil War.

As aide to General P.G.T. Beauregard, he ordered the firing on Fort Sumter and served at First Manassas. Later he was aide to Jefferson Davis and promoted to Brigadier-General. Chesnut returned to law practice after the war.

His wife was Mary Boykin Chesnut, whose published diaries reflect the Chesnuts' busy social life and prominent friends such as John Bell Hood, Louis T. Wigfall, Wade Hampton III, and Jefferson Davis.

James Chesnut Jr., was born the youngest of fourteen children and the only (surviving) son of James Chesnut Sr. (1773–1866) and his wife, Mary Cox (1775–1864) on Mulberry Plantation near Camden, South Carolina. Chesnut Sr. was one of the wealthiest planters in the South, who owned 448 slaves and many large plantations totaling nearly five square miles before the outbreak of the Civil War. Chesnut Jr. graduated from the law department of the College of New Jersey (now Princeton University) in 1835, and initially rose to prominence in South Carolina state politics.

Admitted to the bar in 1837, Chesnut Jr. commenced practice that year in Camden. He was later elected as a member of the South Carolina House of Representatives (1840–52) and the South Carolina Senate (1852–58, serving as its president 1856–58). He was a delegate to the southern convention at Nashville, Tennessee, in 1850.

In 1858 Chesnut was elected by the South Carolina Legislature to the U.S. Senate as a Democrat to replace Josiah J. Evans. He served there for two years alongside Senator James Henry Hammond of South Carolina. Although a defender of slavery and states' rights, Chesnut opposed the re-opening of the African slave trade and was not as staunch a secessionist as most of the South Carolinian politicians. Moderate in his political views, he believed in extending protections for slavery's westward expansion while remaining within the Union.

But the political atmosphere tightened towards the Presidential Election of 1860, since the Republican Party and its presidential candidate, Abraham Lincoln, opposed slavery. After the results of the election were known, Chesnut decided that he could no longer stay in his office in the Senate. Shortly after Lincoln's election, he was the first Southern senator to withdraw from the Senate. He submitted a one-sentence note, stating his resignation, which was read before the South Carolina Senate on November 10, 1860. (He was expelled in absentia from the Senate the next year.)