The Partisan Leader

The Partisan Leader; A Tale of The Future is a political novel by the antebellum Virginia author and jurist Nathaniel Beverley Tucker. A two-volume work published in 1836 in New York City and in 1837 in Washington, D.C. under the pen-name "Edward William Sydney," the novel is set thirteen years into the future, in 1849, and imagines a world where a corrupt Martin Van Buren is serving his fourth term as president, and the American states south of Virginia (South Carolina, North Carolina, Georgia, Louisiana, Texas, Arkansas, Mississippi, and Florida) have seceded from the Union. The story traces the formation of a band of Virginia insurgents who seek to free their state from federal control and adjoin it to the independent Southern Confederacy.

Ever since the Southern states actually withdrew from the Union in 1861, the work has been viewed as a window into the development of secessionist thought, and, in some ways, a preview of the American Civil War. In 1861, it was reprinted in New York City with the title A Key to the Disunion Conspiracy. A Confederate edition was published in Richmond in 1862.

The novel was noted for its uncharacteristically negative depiction of the Supreme Court of the United States for its time, depicting Van Buren as using "the servile Judge Baker of the Supreme Court" as a tool through which to exercise power.