Kentucky's Last Cavalier: General William Preston, 1816-1887

William Preston -- politician, diplomat, and Confederate general -- was the epitome of the antebellum southern landed aristocracy. Born to a well-to-do, well-connected Louisville family, the son of a Revolutionary War veteran, he was educated at Yale and Harvard and married the daughter of Kentucky's largest slaveholder. Preston established a successful law practice in Louisville and at age thirty went to war in Mexico, considerably enhancing his political prospects by rising to lieutenant colonel of the Fourth Kentucky Volunteers. Noblesse oblige drew him to public service, initially as a Whig, and he ascended quickly in political circles, from delegate to the 1849 state constitutional convention, through the state house and senate, and into the U.S. House by 1852. As the Whig Party disintegrated, Preston became a proslavery Democrat, nominating his cousin John C. Breckinridge for the vice presidency in 1856. James Buchanan appointed Preston as U.S. minister to Spain in 1858, and in that post he tried to negotiate the purchase of Cuba and protested Spanish intervention in Santo Domingo.

A Louisville native, Peter J. Sehlinger received his undergraduate degree from the University of the South, his M.A. from Tulane University, and his Ph.D. from the University of Kentucky. He is professor emeritus of Latin American and United States history at Indiana University, Indianapolis. He is coauthor with Holman Hamilton of Spokesman for Democracy; Claude G. Bowers, 1878-1958 and coeditor with James C. Klotter of Kentucky Profiles: Essays in Honor of Holman Hamilton. He has published a guide to Chilean archives and libraries and has written numerous articles in U.S. and Latin American history journals, as well as those in Chile and Peru.