The first critical biography of Quitman, May's study sheds light on such current historical controversies as whether antebellum southerners were particuliarly militaristic or "antibourgeois" and helps illuminate the slave-master relations, mobility, intraregional class and geographic friction, partisan politics, and family customs of the Old South.

Robert E. May is associate professor of history at Purdue University and the author of The Southern Dream of a Caribbean Empire, 1854-1861.