William Lowndes Yancey and the Coming of the Civil War

WILLIAM LOWNDES YANCEY v THE COMING OF THE CIVIL WAR

CIVIL WAR AMERICA Gary W. Gallagher, editor

Eric H. Walther

WILLIAM LOWNDES YANCEY vTHE COMING OF THE CIVIL WAR The University of North Carolina Press Chapel Hill

Disclaimer: Some images in the original version of this book are not available for inclusion in the eBook. ©  The University of North Carolina Press All rights reserved Designed by Jacquline Johnson Set in Bembo by Tseng Information Systems, Inc. Manufactured in the United States of America The paper in this book meets the guidelines for permanence and durability of the Committee on Production Guidelines for Book Longevity of the Council on Library Resources. Library of Congress Cataloging-in-Publication Data Walther, Eric H., – William Lowndes Yancey and the coming of the Civil War / Eric H. Walther. p. cm. — (Civil War America) Includes bibliographical references and index. -: ---- (cloth : alk. paper) -: --- (cloth : alk. paper) . Yancey, William Lowndes, –. . Legislators—Alabama—Biography. . Alabama—Politics and government—To . . Secession—Alabama. . Statesmen— Confederate States of America—Biography. . Confederate States of America—Politics and government. . Legislators—United States— Biography. . United States. Congress. House— Biography. . United States—History—Civil War, –—Causes. I. Title. II. Series. ..  .'—dc      

    

To my mother, Harriett Walther the memory of my father, Ralph Walther (–) and my brother, Dr. Joseph; my sister-in-law, Sandra; and my nephew, Benjamin Joseph Walther

This page intentionally left blank

C ONTENTS

                

Acknowledgments ix Introduction  Jordan’s Stormy Banks  Rebellion and Union  Flush Times and Bad Times in Alabama and South Carolina  Politician  Party and Honor  The Alabama Platform  Secessionist  Creating the ‘‘Leaven of Disunion’’  Public Man, Private Life  Yancey and the House Divided  Walker and Walker, the League and the Letter  The Conventions of   The Voice of the South  The Men and the Hours  In King Arthur’s Court  Journeys Home  The Main Pillar of the Confederacy  Legacy  Notes  Bibliography  Index  A section of illustrations follows page .

This page intentionally left blank

ACKNOWLED GMENTS

I could not have successfully undertaken this study without aid from scores of people. Among those to whom I am most indebted are Dr. Edwin Bridges and Dr. Norwood Kerr at the Alabama Department of Archives and History, as well as Ricki Bruner, Ken Tilley, Mark Palmer, and Debbie Pendleton; Richard Schrader at the Southern Historical Collection at the University of North Carolina at Chapel Hill; Janie Morris, Pat Webb, and Bill Erwin at the William R. Perkins Library, Duke University; William E. Lind and William H. Davis at the National Archives; Nelson Lankford, Frances Pollard, and Sarah Bearss at the Virginia Historical Society; Guy R. Swanson and Corrine P. Hudgins at the Museum of the Confederacy; Bev Powers at Auburn University; Mack Woodward and Eddie Parker at the Sam Houston Memorial Library, Huntsville, Texas; and skilled archivists and librarians at these and several other depositories. Edward Patillo, formerly curator of the Alabama Supreme Court Library, supplied me with vital information about William L. Yancey’s law practice, and Dudley Perry Jr. allowed me to visit his law office in Montgomery, Alabama— the same office used by Yancey for most of the s. The University of Houston supported me generously with a Research Initiation Grant, two semesters of Faculty Development leave to complete my writing, and a small grant award. A Mellon Fellowship from the Virginia Historical Society supported my research through their immense and invaluable collections. Several of my friends and colleagues deserve particular thanks. Greg Cantrell spotted the Dixon Hall Lewis Papers at the Sam Houston Memorial Library, a critical primary source. At the University of Houston, James K. Martin read the earliest drafts of my manuscript, and Joseph Glatthaar and James H. Jones helped me restructure and substantially revise the first half of the study, particularly by emphasizing the psychological background of Yancey, an essential element of this biography. J. Mills Thornton III has given encouragement, advice, and the best possible sounding board for me from nearly the start of my

research to its completion. Conversations on matters of honor with Bertram Wyatt-Brown were essential and enjoyable. John Boles and members of Rice University’s Houston Area Southern Historians provided both forums for me to test preliminary findings and very considered and constructive criticisms. Lynda Crist, Mary Seaton Dix, Kenneth Williams, and others at the Papers of Jefferson Davis at Rice University offered their expert and invaluable assistance in almost every phase of my research. I have profited immensely by friendship and no-holds-barred feedback from several people who read all or part of the evolving manuscript. Richard J. M. Blackett, Howard Jones, and William C. Davis (we’re done with fire-eaters now, right?) helped me sharpen my focus, watch my facts, and improve my writing, and they supplied both general and precise advice about cutting (and cutting, and cutting) the tome. George C. Rable spent tremendous time, energy, and thought in his painstakingly thorough reading of the manuscript. I am very grateful to Charles B. Dew for his reading of a later version of the work that further helped condense, sharpen, and refine it; his constructive comments gave me a big boost when I really needed one. Needless to say, despite the assistance of these and others, any errors of fact or interpretation are mine, and mine alone. I have thoroughly enjoyed my experiences with the professional and friendly people at the University of North Carolina Press. I have finally had a chance to work with my friend Gary Gallagher, whose faith in me and guiding hand have buoyed my spirits over many years and helped make this a better book. I have profited immensely from David Perry’s steady hand keeping me on course, from his bluntness when necessary, and from his reassuring grin and sense of humor at all times. David Hines, Kathleen Ketterman, Ron Maner, Eric Schramm, and many others at UNC Press have helped me mop up loose ends and made the final stage of this work flow smoothly. Thank you all. Several friends and acquaintances have provided useful information as well as interest and support that are greatly appreciated. I particularly wish to thank several Yancey descendants, particularly Dennis Yancey, Jim Rice, Sky Yancey, and her husband, Thomas J. Stipanowich. Michael Reynolds, Tim Kubaski, and Valerie J. Smith have frequently lent their ears and opinions and have also found some obscure but important primary sources. Scout Blum provided me with an invaluable opportunity to pull together and test my major theses at the first annual Chancellor’s Symposium on Southern History at Troy State University. Two of the most important people in my life have stood by my side through various phases of this work, and have given me their support in all things. I do x

n

Acknowledgments

not know the words to express my thanks and my gratitude for Helen Warwick, who has helped me from the start of my graduate career. Her hand still graces many of my ancient note cards, and I am forever grateful for her steadfast faith in me. Travis Dennington was by my side as I groaned through the final leg of this work, and now joins me in celebrating a happy ending. Without the love and support of my family, all my accomplishments and joy would ring hollow. My Houston-Scottsdale cousins, Ruth and Richard, Alejandro and Leslie, Andres Daniel, and Michael Benjamin Hirschfeld have truly made Houston home and are my biggest local fans. My love and thanks go out to my aunt Jackie Wissen; Paul, Eva, Shayna, and Rachel Dickstein; Louise, Barry, and Marissa Kohan; Erica, Phil, Alicia, and Erin Stillwell; Mindy Alper; and cousins too numerous to name, from Budapest to Buenos Aires and scattered throughout the United States of America. Frosty, Liz, and now Jack have literally been by my side throughout my writing, telling me to stop it and play ball with them instead. Good dogs. Of course, no one has been more important, loving, and supportive than my immediate family, to whom this book is dedicated.

Acknowledgments

n

xi

This page intentionally left blank

WILLIAM LOWNDES YANCEY v THE COMING OF THE CIVIL WAR

This page intentionally left blank

INTRODUCTION

William Lowndes Yancey ranks among the leading secessionists of the old South. Contemporaries knew him as one of the greatest public speakers in the country. One historian compared Yancey to Adolf Hitler for his ability to sway crowds through oratory.1 In his times and since, Yancey has been considered the arch-secessionist of the South—a ‘‘fire-eater,’’ in the language of his day. Through most of his life, Yancey was unalterably opposed to political compromise in any form or fashion. Often rash and reckless in both speech and actions, Yancey killed a relative in a street fight before entering Congress, where his first major speech resulted in a duel. He spent over a decade striving toward disunion and the creation of a slaveholding republic. He led the secession movement in his adopted state of Alabama, and nationally through his association with other fire-eaters. By the late s and especially in , Yancey riveted the attention of the national media. His bold insistence in  that the Democratic Party support the expansion of slavery into the national territories resulted in the rendering of that party into northern and southern sections, each with their own candidates. This helped ensure the election of Abraham Lincoln, which in turn served as the catalyst for secession. During that election season, Yancey launched an unprecedented speaking tour of much of the country, defending the expansion of slavery and promising northerners that all slaves were happy and content—unless northerners interfered with them. By helping other slave states to break the compact of the Union, William L. Yancey helped to propel the country into civil war. Early in , Yancey had the honor of welcoming President-elect Jefferson Davis to the new Confederate capital. Yancey then served his president as the leading Confederate diplomat to Great Britain and France, where he surprised critics through his tact and effectiveness. By the time of his election to the Confederate Senate in , Yancey balanced his concerns for the liberties of white Confederates with the obvious need to stand by his president and create a strong wartime government.

His life was both tumultuous and brief. He was born in Georgia in  and raised in New England by an emotionally unstable mother and fiery abolitionist stepfather. As a teenager Yancey defended the Union against the mighty John C. Calhoun of South Carolina. By age twenty-four he gained election to the Alabama assembly. Four years later he served in Congress and began to question his commitment to the Union. He emerged as a primary promoter of disunion in the s and served his new country as a diplomat and a senator, all before his death just weeks before turning forty-nine in . In  John W. DuBose wrote the first and heretofore only book-length biography of Yancey, The Life and Times of William Lowndes Yancey: A History of Political Parties in the United States, from  to ; Especially as to the Origin of the Confederate States. A major slaveholder, a Confederate veteran, and an oathbound member of the original Ku Klux Klan, DuBose consciously used Yancey as a vehicle to vindicate slaveholding and the Confederate experience. DuBose hoped the -page biography ‘‘is now condensed enough to read easily,’’ especially because there was so much more of Yancey he had wanted to say.2 Since then only a few authors have focused on Yancey.3 The key to understanding Yancey, as for most people, was his childhood. Much has been written about the perils of ‘‘psychohistory,’’ the dangers of imposing modern concepts of psychoanalysis on people and cultures long dead, of formulating hypotheses based on fragmentary documentary records and recollections and memories that are, at best, imperfect. And yet, as historian C. Vann Woodward noted, every biographer must and does make psychological judgments, even if they lack the formal training to do so or use the proper language or cite authoritative sources.4 I will not hesitate to make these evaluations. Fortunately for this study, a fairly abundant record of Yancey’s formative years survives, and modern psychological insights make clear to me how Yancey fit into his own culture and era. Yancey was raised in a dysfunctional family. Antebellum Americans would have called it ‘‘turbulent.’’ It was not common in the early s for parents and stepparents to repeatedly threaten and beat their children, for husbands to nail wives in closets, for wives to try to destroy their husband’s public reputations, or for stepchildren to assist in that effort, yet this was the environment Yancey confronted as a child and adolescent. Whether or not it was usual at this time for adult children to act as protector and provider for mothers who had failed to provide emotional or physical protection to those children, it was bound to make an impact on the child, especially if that mother later responded to her child with neglect, criticism, and contempt, as Yancey’s mother did. Chil

n

Introduction

dren who faced physical and emotional abuse often develop a low sense of selfesteem. And people who as children suffered from low self-esteem often have a very fragile sense of self-worth as adults; they commonly seek approval of others because they did not receive it from parents and do not have it within themselves.5 One of the few constants in Yancey’s life was his quest for public adulation, or at least attention. He devoted much of his life to rebelling against his hated stepfather and that man’s antislavery and unionist values. This very rebellion, which included affirmation of vague memories of Yancey’s deceased father and Yancey’s idealized vision of the South, drove him relentlessly to seek approval from his society. Those closest to him noted an odd combination of sincerity and shallowness in Yancey. He argued vociferously for the Union when he lived with unionists; he did the same for secession after his association with disunionists. He defended himself and his father’s name through dueling, as the culture of his region demanded. He only threatened other southerners with violence, as though he could personally purge his section of those who dishonored it. As for the North in general, he considered it a section whose population lacked honor. Yancey’s desire to be considered a good Christian and family provider ultimately created unresolvable conflicts with his sense of honor. He excelled in oratory, one of his culture’s most highly prized avocations, although in the heat of a diatribe he often blundered and had to issue public explanations or retractions. He sought the prestige of a public man, both as a politician and a lawyer; but he mastered neither art, only the outer trappings of each job.6 Yancey finally found his personal identity in the collective character of his native South, especially his adopted state, Alabama, and its people’s emphasis on freedom from government interference and the critical importance of white liberty and black slavery.7 And as the North more and more embodied the antagonistic values of Yancey’s stepfather-father, Yancey felt compelled to fight for the preservation of that peculiar southern society that had at last given him a sense of worth. That psychological struggle had fateful consequences for Yancey, the South, and for the history of the United States.

Introduction

n



CHAPTER ONE

Jordan’s Stormy Banks Nothing remains of the Bird family plantation on the shoals of the Ogeechee, a river that defines part of the western border of Warren County, Georgia. After two hundred years of settlement the site remains tranquil and secluded. Water babbling over rocks in the riverbed usually drowns out the noise of the occasional automobile that passes by on a bridge far overhead, a crossing almost obscured from the stream by dense foliage. On Sunday mornings the sound of music and song rises from African American parishioners of a small church set back from the only major intersection in the vicinity. A highway marker at that small crossroads community, now called Shoals, notes the site of the birthplace of William Lowndes Yancey on August , , at a nearby plantation owned by William Bird. Bird, a Revolutionary War veteran, had moved to Georgia in  with his wife, Catherine. His plantation gained the name ‘‘the Aviary’’ in part because a local army commander who visited often remarked on the beauty of the Birds’ six daughters.1 On December , , Caroline Bird married twenty-five-year-old Benjamin

Cudworth Yancey, a navy veteran and promising young lawyer from Abbeville, South Carolina. Benjamin Yancey had studied law in Baltimore under former Federalist congressman Robert Goodloe Harper and had begun his law practice sharing a tiny brick office with two other aspiring Carolina attorneys, Patrick Noble and his cousin John C. Calhoun, a man who would dominate southern politics for more than a generation. Benjamin Yancey served with some distinction in the state legislature, representing Abbeville from  to  and Charleston from  to . He chaired the House Judiciary Committee and acted as military aide to Governor Joseph Alston during the War of . In , he ran for reelection but was defeated by none other than Patrick Noble. This contributed to a growing schism between Yancey’s family and the Calhouns and Nobles. Benjamin Yancey’s legal talents, his notable service for South Carolina, and his pronounced nationalism brought him to the attention of Daniel E. Huger, a leading lawyer in the state. The two formed a partnership in Charleston after Yancey lost to Noble. In August , his wife, Caroline, three-year-old son William, and four-month-old Benjamin Cudworth Yancey Jr. joined him on a trip to the interior of the state to escape an outbreak of yellow fever around Charleston harbor. As the Yancey family trekked inland, high water detained them at the Edisto River swamp. There the young father contracted malaria, and after a few agonizing days of high fever and chills, Benjamin C. Yancey died on October , , in his thirty-fifth year.2 Mrs. Yancey, who returned to the Aviary with her children after her husband’s death, raised her boys on tales of their late father’s exploits not only in law and politics, but also his service on the  Constellation during the QuasiWar with France. This conflict stemmed from the Napoleonic wars in Europe; both France and Britain harassed and attacked American merchant vessels that dared trade with the other power, often kidnapping American sailors and forcing them into their respective navies. After failing to resolve this problem through diplomacy, President John Adams and his Federalist Party authorized the construction of several warships, less to attack the French than to protect American ships and crews on the high seas. Among these was the Constellation. Commodore Thomas Truxtun, a veteran of the American Revolution, commanded the Constellation, a frigate with thirty-eight guns and a crew of . Truxtun and his ship would score two remarkable victories in engagements with the French. The first came on February , , off the Caribbean island of Nevis, where Truxtun and the Constellation encountered the L’Insurgente, one of the fastest and most powerful warships in the French navy. The French capJordan’s Stormy Banks

n



tain tried to outrun the Americans, but the Constellation overtook her, pulling abreast only a hundred yards away and unleashing a deadly volley with fourteen of her guns, pouring twenty-four-pound balls into the L’Insurgente. After suffering twenty-nine deaths and injuries to forty-one more of her crew, the captain of the L’Insurgente surrendered to Truxtun, whose crew suffered only six losses. Midshipman Benjamin Yancey joined the now-celebrated Constellation a few weeks later, and would gain his own share of glory.3 Just days after reporting for duty, Benjamin Yancey participated in the capture of the French schooner Union, a Letter of Marque vessel—a pirate ship— with thirty-two men, near St. Christopher’s. A month later Yancey and his shipmates captured another Letter of Marque schooner, the Diligente, and its crew of thirty-four near Guadeloupe. Near that island, on February , , the Constellation encountered the La Vengeance. No small pirate ship, the La Vengeance was far larger and more powerful than the American vessel: though its crew was of equal size, it carried eighty additional military passengers and had fiftyfour guns. This time, even with new, lighter guns that enabled him to move with greater speed, Truxtun could not outmaneuver the French, but his men fired with more deadly accuracy. After about five hours’ continuous combat La Vengeance limped away into the evening. The Constellation suffered losses of eighteen dead and twenty-one wounded; the French captain reported twentyeight killed and forty wounded, but other reports listed nearly a hundred more casualties—half the crew.4 Benjamin Yancey thrived on excitement and chafed at tedium, qualities that his firstborn child would share. After the Quasi-War wound down, the Constellation ignobly ran aground and partially sunk in the Delaware River near the Philadelphia Naval Yard. Benjamin Yancey could scarcely tolerate the calm on the Delaware’s peaceful banks. He and two crew mates took to ‘‘living here in a discepated [sic] manner, and have never been near the Ship since,’’ their new captain reported ruefully to the Navy Department. After his exhilarating experiences in the tempest of war, peacetime life in the navy bored Yancey to excess. He would leave the navy in May  as part of a general and vast reduction of America’s military at the end of the Quasi-War, returning to civilian life, law, and politics.5 Growing up in the peaceful, landlocked farmland of northern Georgia, William and Ben Yancey Jr. must have thrilled to tales of their father’s exotic voyages and exciting experiences in the Caribbean. The father’s spirit and service to his country left a powerful imprint in the mind of William L. Yancey. His very name stood as a reminder of his father’s politics. William Lowndes (–) 

n

Jordan’s Stormy Banks

was a leading nationalist and ‘‘Federal Republican’’ politician in South Carolina. William Yancey himself, as a young adult, would briefly entertain the notion of joining the navy, and a generation later he proudly supported his own son and namesake, William E. Yancey, as he reported to the U.S. Naval Academy at Annapolis in  and trained aboard the  Constitution, sister ship to the Constellation. William Yancey also received quite a legacy of character and personality from his father. Eulogists extolled the senior Yancey’s oratorical skills, a prowess that stemmed largely from his ability to use ‘‘the weapons of invective and sarcasm,’’ and noted his ‘‘ardent, inflexible, decisive’’ manner. Decades later William Yancey would exemplify those same qualities.6 Virtually every member of the Bird family had a notorious temper. One of Caroline’s brothers, Fitzgerald Bird, launched a verbal assault on their brother Wilson after he insinuated publicly that Fitzgerald had moved to Sparta, Georgia, to escape creditors. In a card printed in a local newspaper, Fitzgerald Bird announced, ‘‘None other than a malevolent mind could have conceived such a machination, and none but a base, malicious heart would have connived at its currency. . . . I feel bound to refute, publicly, the foul slanders of his tongue; as a man, I put them at defiance; and as a brother, I spurn his relationship.’’ Louisa Bird, who married Robert Cunningham of Greenville, South Carolina, unleashed her venom often, but especially after learning that her son, John, had become engaged to the daughter of Patrick Noble. ‘‘He was fully aware it was planting poisoned daggers in my heart,’’ she complained to her nephew, Benjamin Cudworth Yancey Jr. ‘‘This family [the Nobles and Calhouns] has been the enemy of my race—they were the deadly foes of your father.’’ Family lore held that William Bird once remarked that if he were to make a raid on Hell he would select his daughter, Caroline, as first lieutenant. Caroline’s later confrontations and conflicts both in private and public confirmed her father’s assessment.7 Within the tumultuous Aviary, Caroline Bird Yancey served as her eldest son’s first teacher. His early instruction emphasized oratory, the art that would earn him both fame and infamy throughout the United States and in Europe. She made sure that he learned to enunciate clearly. Supposedly his favorite recitation was Samuel Stennett’s hymn, ‘‘On Jordan’s Stormy Banks I Stand.’’ After a while Caroline sent her son to the nearby Mt. Zion Academy in Hancock County, considered by many among the best schools of its kind in the nation. There mother and son came to know the founder and headmaster, Rev. Nathan Sydney Smith Beman, the man Caroline would soon marry.8 Jordan’s Stormy Banks

n



Nathan Beman was born November , , in New Lebanon, New York (now Vermont), son of Samuel and Silence Douglas Beman. Samuel Beman was obstinate and old fashioned. He persisted in wearing his hair and clothing in the colonial style (complete with knee breeches and knee buckles) until his death in . As orthodox Congregationalists the Bemans insisted on daily prayer, temperance, and cessation of every activity on the Sabbath that would divert one’s attention from God—no singing, no whistling, no games. On other days of the week the elder Beman expected his young son to perform all manner of tasks in and around the house before he could play. Later, although still a youth, Nathan joined his father in the fields for more strenuous work. Like most New England fathers of his day, Samuel Beman ran his home with authoritarian control. Conventional wisdom held that discipline was critical in child rearing. In fact, many parents likened raising boys to breaking horses, and cautioned that willful disobedience would come from children unless their parents remained ever vigilant against indulgence. In his adulthood Nathan Beman would demonstrate these same attitudes and adopt identical rules for his own children.9 One of Beman’s closest boyhood friends was Chittenden Lyon, son of U.S. senator Matthew Lyon. Senator Lyon was one of the few men actually imprisoned under the Sedition Act of  for criticizing President John Adams. The heady atmosphere of confrontational politics clearly excited young Beman. The Lyon boy, like his father and like Beman, easily angered and quarreled, so the two boys fought nearly as frequently as they played.10 No less than Yancey, Beman could boast of a patriotic family. His father had participated in the American Revolution. More notably, his uncle and namesake served as guide to Ethan Allen and his Green Mountain Boys in the renowned capture of Fort Ticonderoga. Although his family had a rich heritage, they did not have much money, and that hampered young Beman’s efforts to attain an advanced education. He attended Williams College in western Massachusetts in , but after less than one year his family’s financial troubles forced him to withdraw. By working odd jobs he financed the rest of his studies at Middlebury College in Vermont. In  Beman obtained his first job as a teacher at the Lincoln Academy in Maine. And doubtless influenced by his parents’ deep religious convictions, Beman went on to receive a license to preach in June .11 Beman left his parents’ Congregational Church for Presbyterianism and quickly became one of the leading clergymen of his day, despite a personality described by his biographer as hasty, reckless, arbitrary, rude, and ‘‘overbearingly intolerant.’’ Nearly from the start of his career Beman worked politics into his sermons, preaching against President Thomas Jefferson’s Embargo of France 

n

Jordan’s Stormy Banks

and Britain from  to  during the Napoleonic Wars, and against American participation in the War of . Although Beman would live until , during the early s he suffered from poor health. His doctor advised him to make a trip south to escape the cold of New England. He went to Georgia in  and returned there the next year to recover from tuberculosis. This ‘‘visit’’ lasted ten years. It was in  that Beman began Mt. Zion Academy, where he would meet the Yanceys.12 With his younger brother, Carlisle Beman, offering courses in classical studies at Mt. Zion, Rev. Beman exerted a profound influence on his adopted community beyond the confines of the academy. In the decade that he led Mt. Zion, Beman’s school produced more graduates than any other preparatory school in Georgia. In , with two business partners, Beman established a local newspaper, the Mt. Zion Missionary. Beman offered editorial comment on all sorts of issues. He complained that the proliferation of thespian societies and little theaters would continue until ‘‘every pin-feathered actor may flap his wings’’ and crow ‘‘majestically upon the pinnacle of his own dunghill.’’ He attacked the practice of ‘‘pitching dollars, shooting rifles, gouging, breaking sculls [sic], and biting off ears and noses’’ associated with taverns and gambling halls. He railed against dueling, drinking, and Sabbath breaking. And while targeting these issues with vitriolic language did not brand him as unique, it did gain him plenty of attention.13 The reverend’s outspokenness and his standing in Hancock County eventually brought him to the attention of Yancey’s widowed mother. Beman himself was a widower with two children, Henry and Eliza. After a brief courtship, Beman and Caroline Bird Yancey married on April , , at the Aviary.14 Sixyear-old William Yancey’s schoolmaster was now also his stepfather. Beman’s biographer claimed that the subsequent tumultuous marriage diminished the reverend’s influence on his stepson, but nothing was further from the truth. Although fathers dominated most American families of the period, Beman’s authoritarianism and brutality surpassed acceptable contemporary standards of patriarchy, and his evangelism rooted itself not in forgiveness and love, but in absolute submission of all to the will of God and of Beman’s family to his own tyrannical authority.15 Shortly after their marriage, Beman locked his wife in a closet following an argument. Several hours later, a house slave let Caroline out and she collapsed on her bed. Beman then supposedly thundered that if locks would not hold her perhaps nails would, and as he nailed shut her bedroom door Caroline cried for help through the window. According to another report Beman contended that Caroline had an impossible temper, one that somehow Jordan’s Stormy Banks

n



hastened the death of her first husband. ‘‘She wore his life out, and her father said that no man could live with her,’’ Beman alleged.16 William Yancey grew to despise his stepfather, to hate passionately both the man and his values. William, his younger brother, and even Samuel S. Beman, the first child of Caroline and Nathan Beman, banded together as best they could to protect themselves and their mother from the pastor, and eventually to strike back at a man they held in contempt. A key source of the turmoil in this stormy union involved Caroline’s slaves. When she and Beman married he became lawful owner and master of her three slaves, a mother and two small children. Most white southerners never possessed even one slave, and throughout the nineteenth century median slaveholding hovered between four and six slaves. As the new owner of three bond servants, therefore, Beman represented a fairly typical slaveowner even while he stood an important notch up on the southern social ladder. But this new status came at a cost. Slavery as an abstract question had been among the most important issues faced by the New England preacher since he moved to Georgia. The Presbyterian General Assembly in  passed a unanimous resolution condemning slavery as ‘‘utterly inconsistent with the law of God,’’ but rather than antagonize southern slaveholders, after several years the Assembly acknowledged that slavery was so fixed in state laws that no church could interfere with it.17 While he lived in the South, Beman never advocated abolition—that would come later. As a minister Beman believed that his primary concern lay in bringing Christianity to African Americans. ‘‘There are now,’’ he wrote in , ‘‘between one and two millions of , who, in point of religion, may be ranked with the pagan world; and yet little, or nothing, comparatively, is done for their salvation.’’ Like other ministers, Beman suggested that masters would receive a reward of more dutiful slaves if they brought the gospel to their human chattel. ‘‘Let the servant feel that he enjoys the distinction of the son of God,’’ he explained, ‘‘that he is the heir of the same glory to which patriarchs and apostles aspired, and he will cheerfully submit to the lot, though an humble and painful one, which has been appointed him here below.’’ Like other local Presbyterians, Beman hoped to use Christianity to ameliorate the harshest aspects of slavery without challenging the institution itself. In November , Beman served as temporary clerk at a synod of South Carolina and Georgia Presbyterians that met in Washington, Georgia. The assembly agreed that slaves who remarried after their masters forcibly separated them from their spouses may not be excluded from privileges of the church.18 

n

Jordan’s Stormy Banks

Beman’s position on slave trading also placed him within the mainstream of his profession and time, but it would have enormous consequences for his career, his marriage, and his relationship with his Yancey stepsons. Frequently Rev. Beman castigated those who engaged in ‘‘the crime of man-stealing,’’ men who ‘‘have made a traffick of human blood, bones and sinews,’’ especially those who had participated in the transatlantic slave trade. He called for a cessation of all ‘‘traffick in human flesh.’’ Although not yet calling for abolition, Beman encouraged masters to consider manumission and the return of former slaves to Africa under the auspices of the American Colonization Society, an organization founded in  under the leadership of such prominent slaveholders as the Speaker of the House of Representatives, Henry Clay, and former president James Madison.19 But the same pastor who denounced slave trading also accepted advertisements in his Missionary for slave sales. And on April , , Beman sold the slaves that he had acquired through marriage, a thirty-two-yearold slave woman, her four-year-old son, George, and infant daughter, Caroline, to a man in Savannah for .20 His stepsons would not let him forget his hypocrisy. In the fall of , the First Presbyterian Church of Troy, New York, invited Beman to fill a ministerial vacancy there. He accepted, and moved his family north in the spring of . During his interview for this position, church officials asked Beman about the veracity of rumors concerning trouble in his marriage. He denied that any trouble existed. The acrimony between Rev. and Mrs. Beman only increased, however, as they left Georgia, and worsened dramatically in New York. On the voyage from Savannah to New York the ship’s captain complained about Beman’s treatment of his wife, especially considering that she had to care for her young children while she was ill. After their arrival in Troy the Bemans abused each other with greater frequency and violence, often lashing out against everyone in the household. Cut off from family and friends in far-off Georgia and insulated in their household, both Caroline and the children faced physical and emotional attacks. Although most households—even sternly patriarchal ones —could count on the love and nurture of the mother to balance the power and authority of the father, such was not the case for the Bemans. Caroline used a walking stick to strike the head of her stepdaughter, Eliza, and often slapped her children or hit them with the heel of her shoe. Not even house servants were safe. In fact, by gaining the affection of the children and inadvertently undermining the authority of both parents, the servants’ mere presence might have further antagonized both Rev. and Mrs. Beman. Caroline raged at servant Jordan’s Stormy Banks

n



girls, called them ‘‘strumpet’’ and ‘‘bitch,’’ and threatened to beat them with fire wood and fire tongs. Rev. Beman, determined to save his children an eternity of damnation, seldom spared inflicting pain to force obedience to him and God. According to his wife, on one occasion Beman beat William and Ben until stripes showed on their backs. Contemporary commentators on child governance condemned such cruelty. ‘‘Parents, who govern well, never suffer children to arrive at such a pass, that nothing short of torture will coerce them,’’ wrote one evangelical author in . In fact, critics of the day condemned harsh words as much as physical attacks. For William Yancey, the specter and anticipation of violence and abuse must have been almost as bad as the abuse itself; watching helplessly as his parents struck his siblings added to his own trauma.21 Caroline herself likely received beatings from her husband. As an adult, Ben Yancey recorded a cryptic and ominous memory, either his own or his mother’s, that implied that Beman battered Caroline while William attended school, and warned her that no one would accept her word over his. By  the marriage had become so intolerable that Rev. Beman decided to seek a legal separation. At this time divorce required an act of state legislatures, and adultery constituted the sole ground for divorce in New York. Divorces were publicly humiliating and considered disgraceful, rare in all states (especially in the South) and legally impossible in South Carolina. Because of the public embarrassment from such proceedings, members of Beman’s congregation intervened before the matter reached court. They convinced the couple to reconcile, but the whole affair created a schism within Beman’s church, leaving a vocal minority determined to drive out their minister who literally appeared unable to practice what he preached.22 The tumult of the Beman household in odd ways paralleled the atmosphere of contemporary Troy and upstate New York. When the eight-year-old William Yancey arrived there, Troy had just begun an amazing transformation later characterized as part of America’s ‘‘market revolution.’’ The city in no way resembled pastoral Hancock County, Georgia. The completion of the Erie Canal in , almost simultaneous with the arrival of the Beman-Yancey family, brought with it amazing changes. Troy became a center of transportation, commerce, and industry because of its location as the eastern terminus of the great canal, where it connected with the Hudson River. Population exploded. From  to , it grew from , to ,. Even things that might have seemed familiar to Yancey were strangely transformed in Troy, especially slavery. That institution, common once to each of the original thirteen states, had not yet disappeared from the Empire State. 

n

Jordan’s Stormy Banks

The ideals of liberty embodied in the American Revolution, however, influenced New Yorkers and most other northerners to repudiate slavery. The people of New York, in common with most other northern states, chose to slowly phase out the institution rather than abolish it instantly. Rensselaer County still counted  slaves in , as well as  ‘‘free colored.’’ The same year Hancock County, Georgia, had , slaves (compared to , whites) and only  free blacks. By  no slaves remained in Rensselaer County, but the freedmen generally stayed and increased the free black population to ,. These independent-minded freemen and women soon built several ‘‘colored’’ churches of their own in Troy, a development that Yancey could not have witnessed during his youth in Georgia, where few free blacks lived. But to Yancey yet another unfamiliar phenomenon appeared. Both replacing some slaves and joining freemen in industry and commerce were a wave of immigrants, swelling in number from  in Rennselaer County in  to , ten years later. When Yancey left Hancock County, only four residents there were of foreign birth.23 As a boy Yancey watched as blacks and whites, native born and foreign, poured into and through Troy and Watervliet (across the Hudson), bringing both welcome and unwelcome changes to that river’s agitated banks. Troy received about one-third of the traffic carried by the Erie Canal. Yancey could not have avoided contact with the rough and raucous men who labored along the shore of the canal. These ‘‘longshoremen’’ worked hard and played harder. Only a few years after the canal opened, approximately , grog shops lined its banks, about one for every quarter mile. Watervliet, the end of the line, had several drinking establishments. That area, plainly visible from Beman’s church, eventually became known as the ‘‘Barbary Coast of the East.’’ Saloons with such names as Black Rag and Tub of Blood became known for ‘‘a hundred fights a day, [and] a body a week found in the canal.’’ Coarseness and vice pervaded the place. Local folklore contends that once Watervliet authorities brought a drunken prostitute before a judge, who asked where she came from. She replied, ‘‘I slid down from Buffalo on a plank.’’ The judge sentenced her to six months in jail, supposedly admonishing her, ‘‘so you can pick the slivers out of your [ass]!’’ 24 Although Watervliet almost monopolized vice in the area, residents of Troy noted changes there, too. Profound transformations occurred in the character, tempo, and demographic profile of the burgeoning city. It had previously bustled with wagons and sleighs in winter, but quickly the city’s traffic almost vanished as business moved to the river and the wharves and warehouses on its front. Visitors commented on the odd quiet in the city, silence interrupted only Jordan’s Stormy Banks

n



by the construction of residential and commercial buildings that appeared with the new wealth enjoyed by city residents. The Beman home was no palace, but a handsome and comfortable three-story brick townhouse on  Third Street, just a few blocks from Beman’s church and six short city blocks east of the busy Hudson River. By  Beman’s First Presbyterian Church would be housed in a new, fashionable, and grand Greek-Revival building.25 With sudden, constant, dizzying changes all around and the specter of Sodom and Gomorrah upon them, no wonder zealots like Beman were determined to stamp out sin and convert sinners. And among the most important and profound ingredients of social change during this time were dramatic new developments in American Protestantism. Few places in the country had a greater impact on religious excitement and debate than the upstate New York of Yancey’s childhood and adolescence. The ongoing second Great Awakening—evangelical religious revivals—affected Beman’s church, congregants, and the minister’s own shifting views on slavery. Beman would emerge as a leader of the New School movement of the Presbyterian Church, and worked with Rev. Charles G. Finney and others to encourage greater emotionalism and increased participation by women in church activities. The New School style suited Beman’s rhetorical technique; he employed sarcasm, was occasionally rude and arbitrary, had a knack for quick retorts, but was also witty, relaxed, and informal, traits that his stepson later adopted in his own speech-making. Before his arrival in Troy, Beman’s congregants had already engaged in fierce and divisive debates over whether or not to install heating, a carpet, and an organ. From the pulpit Beman not only continued to blend politics with theology, but also attacked his own congregants, accusing them of losing faith and secretly hoping that their children would not become converted. He often singled out people by name to denounce them as wicked and evil, or to shout, ‘‘You lie, and you know it; you don’t want religion; and if you think you do, it is only a delusion of the devil.’’ 26 As Beman became involved with abolitionism during the s and worked closely with Theodore Dwight Weld and Lyman Beecher, his concern over slavery created yet another source of conflict with his wife. ‘‘Just before you left home, you had settled your mind from the Bible, as I heard you say, that slavery was morally wrong,’’ he reminded Caroline. ‘‘Now it seems to be a most holy thing, a gift from heaven.’’ 27 A schism had already begun to settle into the mind of the impressionable young William Yancey. The North, as personified by Beman, seemed cold, austere, forbidding, cruel, and hypocritical. Beman’s children had to have adopted some perception of northern society as wicked, sinful, vice-ridden, and tumul

n

Jordan’s Stormy Banks

tuous. In stark contrast, the South, less personified by Yancey’s mother than his vague notions of his late father, seemed warm, ordered, and safe, with a clearly defined place and role for all, black and white, slave and free, male and female, parent and child. As an adult in the s, Yancey would argue these very points. Ongoing strife doomed the Bemans’ marriage. In  Beman threatened again to obtain a legal separation, but the couple reconciled once more. The next year they came close to parting, and by  they informally agreed to separate. After staying with friends in Troy, Caroline left to spend a year and a half with her family in the South, with Beman agreeing to pay her expenses. When Beman learned that his wife had become quite friendly with two wives of his parishioners who had led the effort to oust him from his pulpit, he thundered: ‘‘You have scattered your stuff through the community—gone to members of other churches who hate me and joined with them to destroy my ministerial influence, endeavored to alienate the members of my own church so as to drive them into other congregations, become intimate with two of the slanderous women of this city . . . and they are spitting their venom all over the country.’’ 28 As tension mounted, Beman became both perplexed and infuriated at Caroline’s periodic expressions of good will. ‘‘You talk of burying the hatchet,’’ he wrote, ‘‘and of being willing to bear and forbear and of dividing the blame equally between us. . . . [Yet] you have for years pursued a course . . . which has destroyed my peace. It was not originally at me, but at domestics and children. When I have endeavored to pacify and quiet you you have made it a quarrell [sic] with me. . . . I have come to the conclusion that you are either deranged or you have lost your moral sense.’’ Later he added, ‘‘You know I wanted to have taken a legal remedy in . . . . But the matter has now come out, that you were only waiting for an opportunity to exculpate yourself, & ‘crush’ me! This is what you confided to me in  you had always a desire to do.’’ Caroline’s expression of continued affection for her estranged husband, despite their sad history, evoked another outburst. If her demeanor as a wife was affectionate, the minister rejoined, ‘‘I say ‘from affection, good Lord, deliver me!’ A very little more affection would actually kill me!’’ 29 The words Beman set to paper were severe enough; one can only imagine what young Yancey heard during the heat of an argument. Early in , while Caroline was in Alabama, Beman raised the stakes even higher. ‘‘You can’t return to the North,’’ he warned. ‘‘Should you be rash enough to do it, you will not find me; & the children will be beyond your reach.’’ Friends of Caroline’s confirmed the impossibility of her return and the seriousness of Beman’s threat involving her children. Nevertheless she tried, but for Jordan’s Stormy Banks

n



years got no closer than Rochester and could only contact her children through the mail. By  she managed a brief return to Troy, finding a boardinghouse on the same block where her estranged husband lived, across the street from his church.30 The stormy atmosphere of the Beman household had a long-lasting effect on the children. It forged quite a bond between William, Ben, and Samuel Beman, their half-brother. The three remained devoted to each other throughout their lives, despite later divisions caused by family, politics, secession, and war. Whenever Rev. Beman was late with financial support or negligent in any way, it evoked a powerful reaction from the Birds and Yanceys. In , Ben began to gather correspondence between his mother and stepfather and begged her to take him to court. Ben and William even sent to Georgia to obtain a certified copy of Beman’s slave sale from  in the hope of publishing a pamphlet for circulation in Troy to embarrass and perhaps destroy the now famous abolitionist. Although Caroline never ceased complaining about lack of financial support, she adamantly refused either to sue or to let her sons publish the damning documents.31 Among the charges the Bird family—especially Caroline’s brother William and her brother-in-law, Robert Cunningham—levied against Beman was that he squandered money set aside by their father for the schooling of young William and Ben.32 That accusation carried no merit. William undeniably enjoyed a superior education. He attended academies in Chittenango (Yates Polytechnic Institute) and Troy in New York, Bennington’s Brick Academy in Vermont, and the Lenox Academy in Lenox, Massachusetts. At both Bennington and Lenox, oratory and declamation constituted key portions in the curriculum, as well as standard topics such as classical languages, philosophy, and mathematics. In Yancey’s last year at Lenox, , he was one of  students (which included  girls). He was among the  pupils to concentrate studies in Greek and Latin. The most unusual feature of Yancey’s early education was his mobility; he attended four academies in seven years. This likely had nothing to do with Beman or money. Lenox Academy cost only  for a term of fourteen weeks, and from . to . a week for boarding, quite inexpensive for the day. Even Yancey’s family admitted that the frequent movement stemmed from William’s already troublesome personality. His aunt Louisa Cunningham once warned his brother, Ben, ‘‘Don’t you be led away by Williams wild notions, who could never rest satisfied in one place  months at a time.’’ Furthermore, the primitive condition of many of these academies did little to win a student’s loyalty. The head of the girls’ school at Lenox described it as ‘‘a bare and ugly little village, 

n

Jordan’s Stormy Banks

dismally bleak and uncouth, reached only after six miles of steep and rough driving’’ over the Berkshire Mountains.33 Beman’s dedication to education also raises doubts about claims of negligence. In  he would accept the presidency of Troy’s Rensselaer Polytechnic Institute and retain that post for twenty years. Under Beman’s leadership the institute grew from a faculty of three and a student body of twenty in  to eleven teachers and over a hundred pupils by . Beman governed the institute with the same discipline, expectations, and rigor that characterized his church and his home. No wonder that, although an effective administrator, when Beman taught classes in ‘‘Philosophy of the Mind,’’ he did not win the hearts of his students.34 By the end of summer , Yancey had turned sixteen and looked forward to attending college, if only to remain away from his troubled household. Nine years of fighting, arguing, and beatings had taken quite a toll. For most of his life Yancey would exhibit signs of low self-esteem and depression, unleash his own pent-up anger and rage, fiercely attack authority figures, and desperately try to defend his family and its good name—all classic consequences of childhood abuse. He would also seek to replace Beman with a mentor, a father figure, someone who matched young Yancey’s gauzy image of his late, heroic father. Another legacy of his childhood trauma revealed itself in Yancey’s overwhelming drive to fit into new social groups and gain their attention and approval, whether they were other family members, neighbors, or peers.35 Yancey’s college experience afforded him several opportunities. It offered him the prospect of yet another move to satisfy his restless spirit. It also gave him the chance to stay away from the shrill, chaotic, and turbulent household of his mother and stepfather that had inflicted so much emotional and physical damage and pain. And, in an era when even the shortest attendance in a college was exceptional, it promised to expand and to challenge his mind, to allow him to mix with other young men with great ambition and a sense of self-importance. In short, going to college promised a new beginning for a young man very ready to leave one life and move on to another, where he could emerge from his stepfather’s powerful, threatening shadow.

Jordan’s Stormy Banks

n



CHAPTER TWO

Rebellion and Union In the fall of  Yancey entered Williams College, as his stepfather had before him. On its surface Williamstown, in northwestern Massachusetts, a village of slightly more than , people where pigs and cows roamed the streets, offered little to excite new students. When Yancey enrolled, the student population hovered around , fewer than at Lenox Academy. Most students lived in spartan quarters within West College, the original building on campus that opened in . A handsome but unadorned brick structure, West College sat on a hill overlooking the town. It crammed students’ quarters, a mess hall, classrooms, and chapel into its four floors. Students were required to fetch their own firewood and to carry their own water from a college well. Once a year students contended with ‘‘Gravel Day,’’ a suspension of classes so that students could regravel the walkways on campus. But the college had a beautiful location, tucked in a valley within the Berkshire Mountains. The college also enjoyed vigor and growth after some lean years in the s, and the students Yancey encountered exhibited seriousness and energy.1

Yancey’s preparatory work enabled him to make a smooth transition to college life. Like all incoming students Yancey faced an entrance examination over Greek and Roman literature, geography, English grammar, and arithmetic. Yancey’s performance on the exam brought admission to the sophomore class; this course of study included geometry, logarithmics, plane trigonometry, surveying, logic, rhetoric and elocution, and history. Williams College clearly expected much of its pupils, but it also provided them with outstanding instruction. During Yancey’s first year the legendary professor Mark Hopkins began his career there.2 Another renowned member of the faculty was its president, Edward Dorr Griffin. President Griffin had a direct and powerful influence on young Yancey, but never proved a satisfactory mentor or father figure. In fact, Griffin was a close friend of Rev. Beman’s and a prominent evangelist in his own right. Religious intensity ran high during Yancey’s college years, and included several revivals in Williamstown led by Beman at Griffin’s invitation. Williams, like most colleges at the time—even state-sponsored ones—mandated morning and evening prayer services. The campus also had two temperance societies and was home to the Williams Anti-Slavery Society, among the first antislavery organizations in the state. And President Griffin himself—like Beman—combined religion and antislavery. Griffin once offered a sermon entitled ‘‘A Plea for Africa’’ in which he refuted the notion that African peoples were inferior to Europeans or Americans. Griffin insisted that all white Americans, whether in free or slave states, ‘‘owe a greater atonement than any other nation to bleeding Africa’’ for the perpetuation of slavery.3 Standing six feet three inches tall and weighing  pounds, Griffin’s physical presence reinforced his oratorical powers and skills. Despite his enormous size and strength, he demonstrated the effectiveness of softness and modulation (in contrast to Beman), qualities that later emerged as part of Yancey’s own style. But his sheer enormity and Beman-like severity gave him the reputation of an administrator whom parents could trust to tame their unruly sons, another factor, certainly, in Beman’s decision to send Yancey to Williams.4 Although Yancey met the school’s requirement for an ‘‘unblemished moral character’’ during his first six months, President Griffin and his faculty had to draw upon every disciplinary device at their disposal to control the antiauthoritarian Yancey and his new friends.5 Colleges in New England at this time had quite similar rules and each had a preponderance of clergymen on their faculties. These men all aspired to corral their charges by invoking rules and procedures better suited for children than Rebellion and Union

n



for young adults. Invariably their efforts proved counterproductive. Pranks, violence, and periodic student rebellions erupted regularly in New England’s colleges, and Williams was no exception.6 As strict a Sabbatarian as Beman’s father, Griffin mandated that on Sundays students must refrain from unnecessary walking and not shave or cut their hair (the fine stood at fifty cents per incident). During the week students risked twenty-five to fifty cent fines for missing morning or evening chapel. Professors monitored students in their rooms twice a day to enforce the hours set aside for study. Students could not initiate celebrations of any kind, nor form any college society; those fell under faculty purview. The college ‘‘laws’’ prohibited dueling, forgery, robbery, and blasphemy. No alcohol could enter student quarters without the president’s permission. The laws absolutely banned firearms. Students could not sing in their rooms during study hours or after : .., act in or attend plays or shows of any kind, or dance, except at commencement. Students could not engage in sexual intercourse, nor keep ‘‘indecent’’ pictures or ‘‘impious or irreligious books.’’ Curiously, college officials also specified that students could not wear ‘‘indecent apparel,’’ and ‘‘if he wear women’s apparel, he shall be liable to public admonition, suspension, or rustication.’’ 7 It did not take long for Yancey to test some of these rules. Faculty minutes record that on February , , Yancey and his fellow student and friend, Horace Clark, both left town without permission and that Yancey got drunk and used profane language. The faculty fined him a dollar and issued a stern warning. Neither did much good. On March  the faculty fined him five dollars for playing cards. A month later, Yancey and Clark again teamed up for some mischief, breaking glass windows on campus (a fifty cent fine). A week later Yancey acted more outrageously. He and his friend, Nathan Rosseter, along with several others, disrupted a Methodist prayer meeting at the home of one Daniel Evins by whispering, talking, laughing, and loudly shuffling their feet. Then, after congregants somehow finished their service and some stayed at Evins’s home to socialize, Yancey and his friends turned violent. They threw into Evins’s home a large cask of water and a brass kettle, both of which spilled all over the floor. The next day, whether out of smug satisfaction or remorse, Yancey got himself good and drunk. Evins reported the outrage to Williams College officials and demanded justice, and also hoped that civil authorities would act. The incident secured Yancey a suspension from the last few weeks of the spring term, but he incurred no criminal punishment. Evins gained some satisfaction when a newspaper from nearby Pittsfield reported the ‘‘Daring Outrage.’’ 8 

n

Rebellion and Union

Yancey’s punishment did not change him. On July , , Yancey, Clark, and others skipped religious services on campus in favor of celebrating their nation’s birth by breaking glass on campus. Yancey’s name appeared frequently thereafter in the faculty records, usually for skipping prayers. In the summer of  he, Rosseter, and five others each received a dollar fine for some public disturbance in the nearby town of Adams.9 Yancey almost went too far in challenging school authority in the late summer of . Despite explicit instructions to the contrary, he left town in August, ‘‘with an intention not to return,’’ the faculty believed. They therefore expelled him from the institution. Months later, on October , , the faculty received a petition from a contrite Yancey begging for readmission. Whatever he wrote proved persuasive. The faculty decided to readmit Yancey, but put him on probation. This mysterious episode almost changed Yancey, now eighteen years old. He faced but one more fine—again, for missing prayers— for the rest of his time at Williams College.10 Yancey’s rebelliousness neither marked him as unique nor proved a liability later in life. In fact, some of his fellow pranksters and upstarts, Horace Clark and Nathan Rosseter in particular, remained friends for many years. And Clark, along with James Dixon (a frequent prayer-skipper), like Yancey went on to serve in the U.S. Congress. Nathan Rosseter became a district court judge in New York.11 Despite his rowdy behavior, Yancey proved a quite capable student. His interest in public speaking drew him to Williams’s Philotechnian Society, a group that met for debate and oratory on philosophical, religious, and political issues of the day. Yancey entered the society on October , , and had an immediate impact on his peers; the society’s secretary commented on the unusual spirit of that meeting. Yancey, though, did not take an active role until the summer of . Debate topics ranged broadly. Such subjects as capital punishment and tariffs vied with ‘‘Is the love of Fame the greatest incentive to action?’’ and ‘‘Does Religious disputation tend to advance the cause of Christ?’’ or ‘‘Do the works of Nature excite more interest than those of art?’’ The breadth of subjects allowed Yancey and others to hone their speaking skills and their logic. Yancey relished the attention he got, both through attempts at persuasion and displays of humor.12 Regular classroom work proved too passive and its rules ridiculous. For Yancey, oratory quickly seemed the way to attention, camaraderie, distinction, even power and triumph—the very things he craved. A milestone occurred for Yancey in the fall of  when the Philologicians sponsored a debate on the question, ‘‘Would the Election of General Jackson Rebellion and Union

n



tend to destroy the Union?’’ Yancey argued the negative, likely in part because of his stepfather’s opposite views. Although Yancey lost this campus debate, his efforts captured the attention of local Democrats. Needing an outspoken champion in Whiggish New England, they asked him to stump for Ebenezer Emmons, a Williams College professor and candidate for the state legislature. Whether because of or despite the eighteen-year-old’s efforts, Emmons won.13 The experience proved exhilarating for Yancey, and marked the beginning of an extraordinary career in politics and public speaking. The previous year saw Yancey dabble in politics through his editorial work on a short-lived campus newspaper, the Adelphi. An eight-page periodical published on alternate Thursdays, the Adelphi mostly consisted of articles reprinted from other sources, especially poetry and humor from literary journals, as well as both foreign and domestic news. In his inaugural issue the youthful editor boasted of himself as a protector of the fourth estate. ‘‘No mountain is too formidable to be surmounted, no glen too remote to be penetrated by these [periodicals’] humble, but ever vigilant safeguards of a nation’s rights.’’ This bravado also led Yancey to announce, ‘‘With respect to politics, we intend to take a firm stand on the ground of neutrality.’’ 14 Usually, in fact, Yancey revealed at least a subtle partisan edge. As the dispute grew over tariffs and sovereignty between President Jackson and South Carolina’s John C. Calhoun, Yancey’s Adelphi simply reported in September , ‘‘Our limits prohibit our saying much upon the complex affairs of the United States. An exposition of Mr. Calhoun’s sentiments in regard to the Tariff and Nullification can be seen in most of the papers.’’ A few months later, Yancey offered a brief, favorable comment on Jackson’s message to Congress. He clearly favored a strong nationalist position in this dispute with Calhoun, the man his aunt called ‘‘the enemy of my race.’’ His most vehement political editorial also concerned the relationship between state and federal powers, and again Yancey stood boldly on the nationalist side of the debate. In , Governor George M. Troup began a survey of Creek Indian lands in Georgia for the purpose of redistribution to whites. Troup was wary of Calhoun but also favored tariff reform and believed that states had a constitutional right to secede. The administration of John Quincy Adams had objected that the matter lay under federal, not state, jurisdiction. Troup threatened armed confrontation, citing state sovereignty, and challenged the president by announcing, ‘‘From the first decisive act of hostility, you will be treated as a public enemy.’’ In , when the next governor of Georgia allowed white settlers to swarm into Creek and Cherokee lands and steal their 

n

Rebellion and Union

homes and property, Yancey bristled at this defiance of federal authority and power. ‘‘It will be the duty of the Marshal of the United States for that district to summon to his aid a posse comitatus, and of the President of the United States, if necessary, to place the Army and militia of the United States at the service of civil authority,’’ the young editor demanded.15 No one could know in  that Yancey would soon become involved in questions of state sovereignty, or that his own position on that issue would eventually change from nationalism and far surpass the most extreme utterances of men such as Troup or Calhoun. Yancey did not confine political discourse of the Adelphi to national issues. He also joined a statewide discussion in Massachusetts concerning education reform. Throughout his life he remained dedicated to universal public education, at least for all white boys and girls. But in , he strenuously objected to those who called for the inclusion of the very young in common schools. If public schools had to educate children under four years old, Yancey argued, older children would suffer because inordinate attention would go to the younger ones. Yancey did not oppose infant education, but instead emerged as a champion of separate ‘‘Infant schools,’’ or kindergartens, as they would be called. He explained, ‘‘Here under proper instruction every faculty of the mind as soon as it is developed may be put into immediate exercise and directed into the right channel.’’ In his support for broad, state-supported primary education, Yancey stood resolutely behind New England reformers such as Horace Mann, Lyman Beecher, and his stepfather, Rev. Beman.16 Mostly, though, politics took a back seat to lighter issues in Yancey’s Adelphi. The editor was particularly fond of novelist James Fenimore Cooper and enthusiastically noted his new works, as well as those by Washington Irving and William Cullen Bryant.17 Yancey displayed good humor by reprinting a notice by a rival college paper, the Collegian, whose editor facetiously praised the Adelphi ‘‘as we do with all other juvenile productions.’’ A piece by Yancey titled ‘‘Vacation’’ in May  revealed that despite his periodic outbursts the young man’s college days were generally pleasant and tranquil. He lamented the loneliness of the coming summer break, one that would separate him from his friends and leave him with ‘‘a sense of loneliness and desertion.’’ The adopted Yankee added, ‘‘The mind after a short period of relaxation, begins to grow vacant, and desires again to return to the scene of its labors.’’ 18 In July , Yancey announced the final issue of the Adelphi. He jokingly proclaimed his gratitude that he had not been ‘‘prosecuted for publishing libels or caned for expressing freely our opinions.’’ He laid the blame for the demise of his paper on his fellow students. Yancey wrote that he often had to sweep Rebellion and Union

n



over the campus ‘‘with a drag net’’ to find contributors, and that he did not have time enough for his own studies while also creating original pieces and editing and condensing reprinted items. In his final utterance to his peers, he pleaded that if subscribers had not yet paid their annual dollar they should do so immediately, a common complaint of editors of the day.19 The final year Yancey spent at Williams began auspiciously but ended prematurely and a bit mysteriously. Named Senior Orator by his class and First Orator by the Adelphic Union, Yancey had obviously established himself as the leading student speaker at his school. He finished his coursework six weeks prior to commencement and qualified for a degree, but did not stay to take it and never returned for it. This was not terribly unusual. In fact, more rare in the s was the student with a college degree. The sixty-two colleges in the United States in  produced only  graduates. Contemporaries drew very different explanations for Yancey’s failure to graduate. His uncle William Bird blamed it on Beman. ‘‘This man has spent many dollars of your father’s estate for his [own] children,’’ Bird complained to Ben Yancey. Beman’s biographer claimed that family financial burdens, particularly the education of Yancey’s younger siblings, placed undue strain on Beman and that Yancey himself looked forward to earning his own income. This explanation, however, belies the value that Beman placed on education, his investment in Yancey, and his involvement with Williams College. Another explanation had credibility mostly because of Yancey’s character and conduct later in life. Years later, after he began to gain a national reputation for violence, two newspapers, the Boston Atlas and the Troy Whig, ran a story asserting that Yancey’s premature departure from college resulted from disciplinary action for his tossing a pickle barrel through the window of a local church. The kernel of truth here doubtless came from the incident in  when Yancey and others threw a cask of water into a Methodist meeting. Yancey would soon enough rebel against his stepfather (represented here both by the church and by failing to take a degree from Beman’s favorite college). Whatever the reasons for his departure, in the spring of  Yancey suddenly left the North for a return to his native section and the start of his adult life.20 Most of Yancey’s college career had given him pleasure. After his return south, Yancey extolled both the college and the town as superior to Harvard and Yale.21 But the tumultuousness of his life in the Beman household vastly overwhelmed those pleasant college days. The strife between Beman and Yancey’s mother continued until her death in . For most of her life Yancey felt compelled to act as protector and provider in her ongoing struggle against a man 

n

Rebellion and Union

they both despised. And yet this role proved emotionally wrenching. Yancey’s mother, after all, had been unable to protect him either physically or emotionally during his childhood, and as an adult Yancey found himself compelled to act as a parent toward his mother. Furthermore, his efforts to support and to love her were often met by indifference or criticism.22 The result was an outwardly bold, brash, confident young man, unafraid to speak in public, but deep down a person with low self-esteem, a man craving approval and attention and working assiduously to gain the plaudits of those around him. When those efforts failed, he rebelled with reckless vigor. Yancey’s youth also equipped him with the tools to challenge his stepfather and to attack the things Beman most valued. True, Edward Dorr Griffin exerted a powerful influence on Yancey and his oratorical skills, and Lyman Beecher and Charles Finney also made an impact. But no speaker affected Yancey more than Beman. The stepson emulated the preacher’s habit of preparing carefully yet speaking extemporaneously from brief written notes, with abundant spaces left for last-minute additions or changes. Both published their speeches from memory and their own notes. They had virtually identical mannerisms in front of audiences; they moved little, and worked to captivate a crowd with clearly spoken words and ideas, rather than through performance. They tended to rely on calm, cool, intensity but were equally quick with a spontaneous retort and biting sarcasm.23 Yancey certainly learned much from Beman about zealousness and principle. While Yancey was still in college, Beman found himself under attack by his church for a lack of orthodoxy. He reminded his critics that when the Apostles were ‘‘forbidden by the decree of councils to preach the gospel, their reply was ‘We ought to obey God rather than men.’’’ One of Beman’s congregants complained that the minister always insisted on ‘‘Victory or Death,’’ and that, according to Beman, it was ‘‘his extraordinary purity that had drawn down upon him the opposition which he was now called upon to repel.’’ 24 For a few years after the two parted, Beman obviously cared more for Yancey than the stepson did for the minister. But as Beman grew more vociferous in his abolitionism, as Yancey’s travails with his mother continued, and as the southerner’s proslavery and secession doctrines grew more pronounced, the alienation for each became absolute. Yancey never spoke publicly about Beman. He only occasionally referred with contempt to ‘‘mighty preachers of the gospel’’ who spread the ‘‘mental poison’’ that ‘‘slavery was a moral leprosy fastened upon the land.’’ And only once did Beman publicly refer to his stepson, in a Thanksgiving Day sermon in , criticizing Yancey’s conduct in England while he Rebellion and Union

n



served as a special commissioner seeking diplomatic recognition for the Confederate States of America.25 All that lay far in the future. When Yancey left college in  he returned to Georgia, near the Aviary and the Ogeechee, and settled briefly in Sparta. There he began to read law in the office of attorney Nathan Sayre, an acquaintance of his step-uncle, Carlisle Beman. The nineteen-year-old chafed at Sayre’s strict rules, just as he had in college. Like Nathan Beman, Sayre was a temperance advocate and strict Sabbatarian (Yancey’s mother later wondered how William could have ever ‘‘reconcil’d to his mind, to ride on the Sabbath’’). Yancey quickly reestablished ties with his extended family, especially his aunt Louisa Bird Cunningham and her relatives in Greenville, South Carolina. But yet again, Yancey felt that he did not receive enough attention and became restless. Louisa wrote to her nephew Ben that William ‘‘complains dreadfully of not hearing [enough] from us,’’ and that despite his mentor’s rules and restrictions, William remained ‘‘as lively as ever.’’ When William urged Ben to join him in Sparta over summer vacation from school, Louisa Cunningham cautioned, ‘‘Don’t you be led away by Williams wild notions, who never could rest satisfied in one place  months at a time.’’ One brief absence led concerned relatives to fear that Yancey had run off to enlist in the navy, as his father had done before him. But instead, a few months later Yancey decided to move to Greenville.26 Family, professional opportunities, and the promise of a more stimulating environment than sleepy Sparta all drew Yancey to his father’s home state. He had an opportunity to continue his legal training under one of the state’s leading attorneys, Benjamin Franklin Perry. Greenville was a bustling upcountry town, inhabited by , whites and over , slaves. Yancey had already received considerable financial and emotional support from his uncle and aunt in Greenville, Robert and Louisa Cunningham. Robert Cunningham was master of Rosemont Plantation, one of the grandest in the district. In  he owned  slaves, placing him in an elite category, even among slaveholders; by the time of his death in , he owned  slaves, appraised at over ,, in addition to his home, land, and considerable livestock holding. To earn his keep, Yancey attended to bookkeeping and other paperwork that his uncle disdained. Rosemont served as Yancey’s new home and reinforced in his mind the southern plantation ideal of structure, patriarchy, and harmony, all resting upon the base of slavery, the institution that his stepfather now labored to destroy.27 South Carolina provided considerably more excitement in  than did Georgia because the Palmetto State still grappled with the consequences of the great nullification crisis of –. The protective tariff of  had been de

n

Rebellion and Union

signed to encourage industrialization and to diversify the national economy in order to make the United States more economically independent. In so doing, the tariff directly aided the economic development of the northeastern states, where most of these fledgling enterprises concentrated, while it drove up prices on manufactured goods everywhere. The South, therefore, saw no immediate benefit from the tariff and many there believed that northerners had effectively taxed southerners on the North’s behalf. John C. Calhoun attempted to create a mechanism through which white southerners could protect their rights and interests within a Union that saw a northern majority growing both in numbers and in antipathy toward slavery. Calhoun and others feared that if they could not prevent the federal government from passing a law they considered unconstitutional (in this case, a protective tariff ), then subsequently they might not be able to stop northerners from using their sheer numbers to pass legislation that affected slavery. This was a particularly horrifying prospect for liberty-loving white Carolinians. The statewide presence of a subjugated slave majority both reinforced and dramatized white peoples’ concept of their own freedom and independence. Congress tried to appease South Carolina by lowering the tariff in , but Carolinians met in convention and defied federal authority by declaring the new tariff unconstitutional. They announced that the tariff would be null and void in the state after February , , and thereby inaugurated the nullification crisis. That winter President Jackson mobilized both Congress and federal military forces to execute the law in South Carolina while simultaneously working to come up with another lower, compromise tariff. As Carolinians divided themselves into nullifiers and unionists and formed militia groups according to these loyalties, civil war seemed possible either within the state or as soon as federal forces arrived. A compromise tariff passed Congress in  that averted hostilities and allowed most Carolinians an honorable way out of their solitary defiance of federal power. A new convention met and revoked the ordinance of nullification, although it never renounced the right to nullify or retracted assertions of state sovereignty. The same convention nullified the federal law that allowed Jackson to use armed force to execute the law. Uncharacteristically, Jackson simply ignored this challenge.28 The end of the confrontation with the Jackson administration did not quiet affairs in South Carolina. The nullification drama spawned a small but determined secession movement within the state. Radicals such as Thomas Cooper, president of South Carolina College, urged Carolinians to consider whether or not the Union continued to have value. By , Robert Barnwell Rhett conRebellion and Union

n



cluded that it did not. He advocated immediate disunion and emerged as the leading secessionist in his state. Men like Rhett were disgusted that other Carolinians acquiesced to the Compromise Tariff. Rhett’s group and many less radical nullifiers continued the struggle for their principles within their state even after the national crisis had passed. In , the test oath controversy began. Before the adjournment of the state convention of that year, its members recommended that all state officials, upon taking office, swear an oath of allegiance to their state that bound them to disobey federal authority in case of any future national conflict. A heated debate continued for the next two years between unionists and nullifiers.29 Yancey enthusiastically leaped into the fray, casting his lot with the unionists. There was really not much choice for him. His father had been a unionist and he was named for William Lowndes, a prominent nationalist. His father’s old law partner, Daniel Huger, worked with Charleston’s James Louis Petigru to rally tidewater unionists during the nullification crisis. His new legal mentor in Greenville, Benjamin F. Perry, ranked as the leading upcountry unionist. Robert Cunningham served as a division officer of one of the dozens of Washington Societies, para-military units formed to challenge nullifiers and backed tacitly by President Jackson. Yancey served as a captain under his uncle’s command. Even though the Carolina court of appeals struck down the test oath on June , , hostilities within the state continued to simmer, in part because Cunningham did not hide his willingness to use violence if the court verdict had not satisfied him.30 For a while the radical press in Charleston ridiculed the ‘‘silly effort to get up an excitement’’ in Greenville, but changed its tone after intercepting a letter by Cunningham in which he claimed that his arsenal included battle-axes and butcher knives. At least one nullifier grumbled that Cunningham ‘‘should have been made a head shorter.’’ 31 Shortly after his arrival in Greenville, Yancey decided to participate in the highly political July  celebrations in Abbeville District. Not yet twenty years old, he felt ready both to defend the federal union and to launch a verbal assault on the leading politician in his state, his father’s old legal and political adversary, John C. Calhoun. Yancey’s speech at Lodi—the first major public address for the man who later gained fame for his oratory—displayed such great zeal and passion for the Union cause that it stood in ironic contrast to his own subsequent career as a secessionist. Yancey began typically and unremarkably by reciting the great deeds of the founding fathers, but quickly moved onto the current controversy. He warned that all the accomplishments of the prior two generations ‘‘can all be blasted 

n

Rebellion and Union

and withered, in a much shorter time than it has taken to rise, by that evil genius of our land, Disunion.’’ He interpreted the test oath as part of a plot to brand unionists as traitors, tories, and cowards and to undermine obedience to the Union. He denied that any inconsistency or conflict existed between love of state and love of country.32 As he hit his stride, Yancey leveled his sights both on Calhoun and the more extreme secessionists of his state: Listen, not then, my countrymen, to the voice which whispers, (for as yet, it dares not raise itself above a whisper) that Americans, who have been knit together by so many cords of affection, can no longer be mutual worshipers at the shrine of Freedom—no longer can exist together, citizens of the same Republic. . . . And yet, it has become a common thing to hear the Union spoken of as a disagreeable league. Designing men have, indeed, effectually destroyed, in the minds of but too many in our State, the charm which has, until of late, invested our Federal Union. But can any one view the course taken by some of the most talented and influential men in our State and country, for the last few years, and not see the evident tendency of their proceedings to be disunion and a Southern Confederacy? Yancey also called attention to the continuing display of state troops parading in defiance of federal authority, warning that these men would be beaten back by unionists, ‘‘if needs be, [with] the sword and the musket.’’ In his defense of the Union, Yancey used the same bloodcurdling rhetoric that he would adopt when he became a secessionist himself. Not only did Yancey equate nullification with the test oath, disunion, and treason, but he also predicted that all these acts of resistance would lead unavoidably to chaos and destruction. The infant nation, he argued, gained respect from abroad only because its states stood united. If split into twenty-four individual confederacies he predicted that nothing would bind together any group of states longer than one month, and the separate states would face ‘‘contempt and outrage from abroad, and . . . contentions and wars from each petty neighbor.’’ His spirited oration at Lodi earned the affection and support of Ben Perry, his mentor in both unionist politics and law. Although after the Civil War Perry blamed Yancey for starting the conflict, on a personal level Perry claimed to have ‘‘loved him most affectionately.’’ Perry recalled that Yancey ‘‘was too much devoted to politics & literature to make great progress in his legal studies.’’ Despite failing to finish preparations for the bar, Yancey nevertheless charmed his teacher. Perry thought that Yancey possessed ‘‘many noble qualities of both Rebellion and Union

n



head and heart,’’ including ‘‘genius and talent,’’ especially in oratory. He remembered, ‘‘In disposition [Yancey] was kind and affectionate, warm and generous, devoted to his friends. He was a very handsome young man, with a bright cheerful face, ever inspiring confidence and good feeling. He was rather under ordinary height and well proportioned, with great activity and strength. His manners were not only pleasing and polished, but really fascinating, and no one could be in company with him without feeling kindly towards him.’’ Privately, Perry noted that Yancey ‘‘was fond of society & the company of ladies.’’ But, Perry added, while publicly Yancey usually appeared happy and outgoing, in private ‘‘gloom and despondency’’ frequently overwhelmed him.33 Perry also observed that ‘‘with all his talents, attractions, and brilliancy,’’ Yancey exhibited little wisdom, judgment, or stability. Instead, strong feelings and impulses ‘‘generally controlled his action and judgment.’’ Yancey’s ‘‘high spirit and dauntless courage’’ enabled him to challenge leading nullifiers, but also led to physical confrontations. One day when Yancey and fellow student Thomas F. Gantt were supposed to be reading law, the young men fell into a heated political argument. After only a few moments they each drew pistols. Perry and a friend had to intervene quickly to prevent bloodshed. Gantt himself later recalled the same incident in a distinctly different and more sympathetic light. He contradicted Perry’s assertion that Yancey was unduly passionate. Gantt considered Yancey quite amiable. Of his brief acquaintance with Yancey, Gantt—the potential victim of a shooting—recollected that Yancey’s temper never biased his judgment and that while Yancey was always ready and prompt to respond to an insult, he remained just as ready to make peace if he wounded the feelings of someone else. Despite their brief scuffle, Gantt remembered Yancey as a friend, which suggests either a remarkable willingness to bury the hatchet or that Perry’s later disappointment with his protégé colored the unionist’s memories.34 Yancey’s fiery temper and his zeal for the cause of the Union convinced O. H. Wells, editor and owner of the unionist Greenville Mountaineer, to ask Yancey to take over as editor in November . As Ben Perry later recalled, Yancey ‘‘wielded a fierce and terrible pen against Nullification and disunion.’’ 35 Yancey immediately assailed his opponents. His first editorial labeled Calhoun ‘‘a great and distinguished metaphysician.’’ In an uncharacteristic tactic by Yancey, and one out of step with the celebration of the common person in Jacksonian America, he castigated Calhoun’s typical supporter as a ‘‘perfectly imperturbable and satisfied votary of Mr. Calhoun, casting a jet of tobacco juice from his mouth . . . proud that he is a freeman, and yet perfectly prepared to be made a 

n

Rebellion and Union

slave by the very man whom he thinks almost a god, or to be made a tool of, in his hands, to enslave his fellow citizens!’’ In the editorial plural, Yancey announced, ‘‘We will oppose every thing savoring of Nullification and Disunion; for we do not believe that any State has the right to Nullify an Act of Congress.’’ He repeated his stand against test oaths and proclaimed unequivocally that no state had a right to secede. Like President Jackson, Yancey considered nullification the same as disunion, because both positions assumed that sovereignty lay in the states. And—at this early point in his life—Yancey proclaimed, ‘‘We do not believe that South Carolina is a sovereign.’’ He blamed Calhoun for all attempts to undermine the authority of the federal government ( just as Perry would blame Yancey a generation later), attributing Calhoun’s political philosophy to the senator’s inability to win the presidency. Yancey condemned Calhoun’s theories as ‘‘the loathsome offspring of foiled Ambition—of Discontent, and of Revenge.’’ He concluded that Calhoun was like Aaron Burr, ‘‘two fallen archangels—who have made efforts to tear down the battlements and safeguards of our country, that they might rule, the Demons of the Storm.’’ 36 Yancey’s editorials in the Mountaineer ranged across the political landscape, but invariably returned to affairs in Carolina and his nemesis, Calhoun. Yancey also condemned Congressman John Quincy Adams when the former president retracted a recent speech he had made on relations with France after he learned that most Bostonians opposed it. Yancey termed Adams’s backpedaling ‘‘cowardly’’ and insisted, ‘‘He draws merited contempt and pity. . . . What can be said in justification of this grey headed dotard?’’ His editorials urged support for Martin Van Buren’s presidential candidacy in , attacked the congressional franking privilege, and favored penal reform, especially the establishment of a penitentiary system. Only the force of nature could silence the young editor; in early February , he had to suspend publishing because dampness and below-zero temperatures froze his printing paper.37 Not even the chill of winter, however, could cool Yancey’s anger toward Calhoun. He blamed Calhoun for creating such great upheaval that local colleges could not attract top scholars from outside the state. When he learned that Calhoun would not seek the presidency in , he gloated, ‘‘It must be a hard thing for one of Mr. C.’s inordinate and grasping ambition, to give up all hopes of ever obtaining the object for which he has sacrificed so much, and for which he would even have sacrificed his country.’’ Yancey asked sarcastically why Calhoun would have ever desired ‘‘so inferior a station as that of ‘President of a mere branch of the government of South Carolina.’’’ Again he warned that the logical outcome of Calhoun’s political philosophy was disunion and civil war. ‘‘These Rebellion and Union

n



are openly avowed by this political madman,’’ Yancey exclaimed. After a trip to Charleston early in , Yancey sarcastically reported that, ‘‘strange to tell, the Tariff laws still exist, and   still administers our government!— How can these circumstances be reconciled with the patriotic denunciations and predictions of the Nullies!’’ 38 Politics, however, did not absorb all the attention of this energetic young man. One of the main reasons for his trip to Charleston was to attend the horse races there. Unable to pursue this passion while under Beman’s control, Yancey soon developed a love of the sport. His lifelong adoration of race horses was genuine, but also served as a means to mix with the political elite in the South, a long-standing tradition especially in tidewater South Carolina and Virginia. He used his editorial columns in a successful effort to create a Jockey Club in Greenville.39 Part of his journey to Charleston was itself newsworthy; after all, few Americans had yet experienced a railroad ride, and many of Yancey’s readers must have been tantalized by the account of his breakneck, seventeen mile per hour adventure.40 But judging by the length of column space, the editor was most interested in the social life in Greenville. The bachelor-journalist reported that the young ladies of Greenville requested his attendance at their May Day celebration in , a dance that featured seventy-five women wearing white dresses and wildflowers in their hair. He facetiously complained about how hard it was to choose, then boasted, ‘‘A little knowledge of physiognomy,’’ the study of facial appearances to determine one’s inner character, ‘‘helped us through this crisis.’’ 41 Whether through pseudo-science, fate, or luck, Yancey soon made the acquaintance of Sarah Caroline Earle, daughter of Washington and Elizabeth Earle of Greenville. The Earles were a wealthy and politically active family almost from the arrival of their ancestors in colonial Maryland in . Yancey profited from this wealth; when he married Sarah his wedding dowry of thirtyfive slaves instantly elevated him to the planter class. Yancey most likely proposed to Sarah some time after resigning his editorial position on the Mountaineer on May , . The marriage took place on August , just three days after Yancey’s twenty-first birthday. A large group of family and friends attended, mostly young people the couple’s age. Ben Perry, one of the older guests, observed in his diary, ‘‘This wedding is proof that there is no accounting for love. Yancey is one of the handsomest young men I ever saw,’’ but Perry feared that after ‘‘his love fit is over’’ Yancey’s ‘‘passion may turn into disgust.’’ His aunt Louisa Cunningham agreed: ‘‘Yancey is fickle & wayward.’’ But Perry and Cunningham were wrong. Sarah and William Yancey 

n

Rebellion and Union

proved a good match, and their marriage provided Yancey with the domestic tranquility that he never knew as a child and that he would depend upon as his public career unfolded.42 Unfortunately, only a few lines of Sarah Yancey’s correspondence have survived. Glimpses, though, suggest that she exerted a calming and reflective influence over her emotional husband, and that she could hold her own when he did lose his temper. As a friend prepared to marry, Yancey offered his advice after eight years of matrimony, counsel that doubtless reflected his own experiences with Sarah. ‘‘A perfectly bred man should never swear,’’ he began, then admitted, ‘‘I do not teach by example you will say, ’tis true,’’ but counseled: You are entering upon a new sphere, a holier and happier one, than you have heretofore moved in. . . . Restrain . . . your hasty temperament. . . . When disposed to show it, think ever, as deliberately as you can, the cause of it, and my life upon it, four times out of five you will say, it is foolish and then— say no more. . . . In a married life you must find more crosses and vexations than you have ever dreamed of, or that you can imagine. . . . Above all, beware of the first jar of feeling between you. Even if you should be assured that your wife is wrong, yet a perfect forbearance from reproach will be the best corrective and will ensure a longer happiness and a deeper esteem upon her part. Whenever you are wrong, and you first become sensible of it, fail not to confess to her. Such conduct insures a sweet confidence which the world can never disturb.43 The marital union of William and Sarah survived many ‘‘crosses and vexations,’’ indeed. Yancey’s determination to base his marriage on affection, companionship, and the happiness of both partners reflected the growth of the romantic era of early-nineteenth-century America.44 The calm support and mutual love of Yancey’s marriage stood in sharp contrast to his mother’s second marriage. In fact, Yancey’s reaction against Beman’s treatment of his mother and her property manifested itself not only in a determination to make himself a loving and caring husband, but also in his advocacy of legal protection for married women. For Yancey, the combination of the egalitarian mood of the day, his personal experiences with his mother’s marriage to Beman, and his southern sensibilities produced a distinct vision of what a wife’s role should be.45 Like many contemporaries, Yancey noted the peculiarity that adult single women had virtually the same legal property rights as men, but married women did not. If they remained single, American women had many of the same rights Rebellion and Union

n



as men; they could possess and control property, make decisions about their children, choose to seek a wage-paying job, and sign legal contracts. Once married, however, they lost their legal power over property and children, required their husbands’ signature for contracts, and, if employed, their income belonged to their husbands. Of course no women could vote. Three years before women and men met at Seneca Falls, New York, to demand equal rights for women, Yancey had developed a vision that placed him squarely with the most progressive social reformers of his day.46 In an address to a girl’s school in , Yancey explained that no reason existed to prohibit women from taking care of their own property. ‘‘The law, as it now stands admits her privilege and ability to do so, if unmarried. Can the fact of marriage change that ability!’’ Yancey adhered to the idea that societies created government to preserve life, liberty, and property. But in most states marriage instantly deprived women of the latter.47 Why, he asked, ‘‘when woman is giving her richest treasure, her heart, forever beyond recall, to the favored of a whole world, why choose that moment to rob her of her purse’’? The only answers Yancey could fathom were men’s lust for power and greed, or that through ‘‘morbid veneration for Antiquity,’’ by ‘‘listlessly acquiescing in whatever is handed down to us, by a preceding generation, we have become so familiarized to this act of injustice, as not only to look upon it as right but to defend it by sophistry.’’ 48 Like most Americans, Yancey viewed women as the custodians of morality both in the home and the republic.49 For Yancey, this belief simply reinforced his opinion that married women ought to have legal protection for their property. Perhaps referring to his own stepfather, Yancey argued that ‘‘the misfortunes and bad management’’ of many husbands often had dire results for their wives and children. But more ominously, Yancey added, in countless instances, fortunes obtained by husbands had ‘‘been soon sunk in trade—lost at the gaming table—spent in riot—or squandered in wild and visionary speculation,’’ with innocent wives and children driven into poverty and even crime as a result. Possibly shocking his young, female audience, Yancey described even more graphically the depraved husband who spent his wife’s fortune ‘‘treating the debauched companions of his drunken orgies. The noble and heartbroken mother, instead of being protected . . . is actually thus robbed under sanction of the law, and drunkenness and brutality encouraged in their sensual career.’’ 50 In stark contrast, women, he argued, unlike men, ‘‘advise no gambling—encourage no dissipation—get up no bacchanalian orgies.’’ 51 

n

Rebellion and Union

Ironically, Yancey shared with several abolitionists and women’s rights advocates the conviction that the plight of married white women resembled that of slaves.52 Like concepts of honor and dishonor, most southerners of Yancey’s time viewed liberty and slavery as absolute conditions. And for Yancey, if not for all white southern men, submission and dependency were proper attributes for men and women of African origin, but not for his wife and the mother of his children.53 In remarkable language for a slaveholder, Yancey explained, ‘‘Liberty is the mother of virtue; and if woman, is by the very constitution of law a slave, and not allowed to breath the sharp invigorating air of freedom— domestic, as well as civil, she must languish like an exotic, and be reckoned but a beautiful flaw in nature.’’ 54 Yancey described accurately how most states’ laws passed all legal control of the wife to the husband. If a woman left her husband, like the master of a fugitive slave, ‘‘he can reclaim her; and he is so permitted to imprison her,’’ like Beman did by nailing closed his mother’s bedroom door.55 Again drawing from his own experiences, Yancey further noted and objected that, like children of slaves, after marriage a woman’s children fell exclusively under the legal power of her husband, her master.56 To Yancey, the ideal marriage embodied a rough equality between the sexes. He conceded that many marriages might appear calm, ‘‘but it is more often the stillness and deadness of the atmosphere, which precedes the storm, than that healthy repose, which can alone be relied upon for serenity. Equality of power can alone be conducive to content and peace.’’ Yancey argued that Americans, more than any other people because of their reverence for independence, must recognize ‘‘the great truth, that Equal Rights, in both the political and domestic world, can alone ensure permanent tranquility.’’ 57 Again tapping the language and imagery of slavery versus freedom, Yancey concluded, ‘‘Let men but snap the chains of woman, and be content with rational fellowship in place of slavish obedience, and they will have better daughters—more affectionate sisters—more reasonable mothers—and more loving wives.’’ Once liberated, he believed, ‘‘Pleasure would no longer be the only business of womans life. . . . She would be educated as one to bear an equal part in the great drama of life.’’ 58 Yancey quickly pointed out that men need not worry about their roles changing too dramatically simply because they ought to allow their wives ‘‘to walk a little more erect in the conjugal temple.’’ He clearly separated himself from the handful of radical reformers and utopian theorists who called for absolute equality. When it came to ‘‘wearing the pants that we lords of creation deem to belong to us, our exclusive prerogative,’’ Yancey drew the line. Otherwise, as Rebellion and Union

n



a companion in his life, ‘‘the partner of his joys, and cares, and sorrows, I would have her placed upon an equality with him . . . and not upon her powerless submission to his despotic will.’’ 59 Although Yancey’s marriage embodied most of the ideals that he professed, it suffered tremendously from the strain placed upon it by his mother. Her combination of interference, criticism, and neglect took their steady toll. In her wanderings across the South she often descended on her eldest son, and always instigated problems. After an early encounter with her daughter-in-law, she concluded that Sarah was ‘‘no house keeper.’’ Caroline Beman frequently curtailed her stays, much to the astonishment of her estranged husband. ‘‘I could not have the remotest idea of your spending but three weeks with William when you had given me the impression that you were going to spend the principal part of your time with him,’’ Rev. Beman scolded. Considering that during most of these truncated intrusions Caroline Beman criticized her son and his wife yet simultaneously expected him to help her pressure Beman to send her money (and in the meantime lived off her son’s largesse), surely Yancey had mixed feelings about welcoming her to his home. Subsequent visits would only exacerbate the situation, but the dutiful son seldom complained and would never bar her from his house.60 Yancey’s brother Ben, however, provided a constant source of happiness. After completing his initial education in the Academy School in Troy, Ben, with financial support from Robert Cunningham, also chose to return south. He attended the University of Georgia, only a few days’ journey from Greenville. William and their mother attended his graduation in August . It proved bittersweet for William on several levels. He was proud of his brother, who was also his best friend, but must have been upset to see him emerging as their mother’s clear favorite. Ben almost immediately proved a greater financial success than his older brother, so their mother turned to him more often, both for attention and money. And although happy to see his brother accomplished and ambitious, William could not have been pleased that after so brief a stay in the South Ben elected to return to New England to attend Yale Law School.61 In the brief interval between graduation and law school, Ben proved his Yancey blood by participating in an affair of honor, one of many to involve the brothers over the next fifteen years. The circumstances of this one remain murky. Ben received a challenge to a duel by a man named George O. White, in response to some comment Ben made about a friend of White’s. Ben’s friend Francis Barlow agreed that White was ‘‘selfish and weak,’’ but outlined Ben’s unpleasant options: ‘‘If you fight & either of you are killed they will be open 

n

Rebellion and Union

mouthed against you—if you come off scatheless [sic]—they will applaud your spirit—if [you do] not fight—they will damn you for cowar[dice].’’ Likely at Ben Yancey’s request, a board of honor convened to settle the affair, a common procedure in these matters. It found insufficient grounds for an appeal to arms, and concluded that Yancey’s remarks were neither deliberate nor purposeful, but simply a casual utterance. White withdrew his challenge. The board of honor included prominent Georgians such as a former judge, a congressman, Senator John M. Berrien, as well as John C. Calhoun, who, at least in this instance, did not appear to be an enemy of the Yancey ‘‘race’’ after all.62 Law school proved an easier challenge for the younger Yancey. He entered Yale in March , and met several of his older brother’s friends as he made his way north and after he settled down in New Haven. From school Ben worked with his brother to keep relentless pressure on Beman for financial support for their mother, and it was later in  that the brothers tried to convince their mother to publish the truth about Beman’s slaveholding. These distractions did not prevent Ben from graduating quickly. In the winter of  he completed his studies and prepared to rejoin his brother.63 During Ben’s last year in the North, William Yancey enjoyed the good life in Greenville. He indulged in a variety of social activities that summer and reported them with great relish to his studious brother. Balls and parties ruled the day—‘‘Even rides, by moonlight, after supper. Romance in its purity has taken up its abode in our beautiful town.’’ And when romance would not do, Yancey could look forward to the horse races at nearby Pendleton and Pickens. One of the only threats to Yancey’s happiness was the possibility that he might have to serve in the second Seminole War, raging in Florida. But even that seemed intriguing and romantic to the young ‘‘southron.’’ He told Ben that volunteers would likely fill the requisite number of men required from his district and, although Yancey himself would not enlist, he made a trip to Augusta, Georgia, to equip himself for a cavalry unit in case the need arose (it never did). Yancey thoroughly enjoyed his new status as a planter. Some of his slaves remained with Sarah’s parents, some he brought with him to Rosemont, and he believed that all of them responded to him well and productively.64 But this was the same Yancey who, according to his aunt, had trouble staying put anywhere very long. The lure of migration to the Southwest proved irresistible. The ideal of creating his own plantation combined quickly with the attraction of the frontier, and Yancey would soon leave the comforts of the settled East for the opportunity of the West.65 Rebellion and Union

n



CHAPTER THREE

Flush Times and Bad Times in Alabama and South Carolina A huge wave of migration swept into the southwestern frontier in the s, and the allure of this region overcame Yancey’s satisfaction with his life in South Carolina. He had already expressed interest in this westward movement while editor of the Mountaineer, especially the town of Wetumpka, Alabama, and noted its transformation from wilderness in  to thriving cotton district by . In November , he and his brother had made an exploratory journey to Cahaba, the capital of Alabama from –, to investigate firsthand the prospects of establishing a plantation and to induce Ben to join him there once he finished his legal studies. Ben had already received a report from one of the Yanceys’ contacts in Wetumpka promising that ‘‘prospects, as a place of business, were never brighter,’’ that the soil was fertile, and that with a population of almost , Wetumpka ranked as the second largest town in the state. Most exciting to Ben was his friend’s observation that the frenetic effort by settlers to grab cheap land produced ‘‘a great deal of litigation,’’ and that although many lawyers had already moved there, few were very good and all

could make money. The southwestern frontier humorist Joseph G. Baldwin later captured this spirit, describing one fictional eastern lawyer’s trek to the Southwest and its ‘‘most cheerful and exhilarating prospects of fussing, quarreling, murdering, violation of contracts, and the whole catalogue of crimea falsi— in fine, of a flush tide of litigation in all of its departments, civil and criminal.’’ Art and life reflected each other in this ‘‘legal Utopia, peopled by a race of eager litigants, only waiting for the lawyers to come and divide out to them the shells of a bountiful system of squabbling.’’ The ‘‘flush times’’ seemed real and tantalizing. The Yancey brothers caught ‘‘Alabama Fever.’’ 1 Sadly for Yancey, boom times had already come and gone in Cahaba. Situated on a bluff on the western bank of the Alabama River in Dallas County, Cahaba’s prosperity depended both on commerce along the waterway and the influx of people and money that had gone with being the state capital. In fact, the focal point of Cahaba was not the capitol building but instead its large warehouse on Arch Street, named literally for its curved slope rising from and falling back toward the river, a contour that allowed wagon teams to haul cargo up to the town from the ferry landing below. Located in the heart of what people would soon call the Black Belt of Alabama—a curved swath of extremely fertile land running from the Mississippi border across the state to Georgia—Cahaba and Dallas County both grew quickly. The county’s population exploded from , in  to , in , with slaves barely outnumbering whites by the latter year; by , whites numbered , while the black population skyrocketed to ,. But as the county continued to prosper with cotton cultivation, Cahaba declined abruptly after the state government moved again, to Huntsville, in .2 In  Cahaba remained important and large enough so that the Yancey brothers would not find themselves isolated in some frontier wilderness. A large proportion of early Alabama immigrants, naturally enough, moved from neighboring Georgia, Yancey’s home state. Like many southerners who joined this migration, Yancey had extended—and affluent—family members already there.3 Jesse Beene, a cousin of the Bird family, had moved to Dallas County in . Beene had established himself as a planter in Cahaba and owned thirty slaves by . He also sat in the lower house of the Alabama assembly in  and in the state senate from  to , and was president of the senate in his final year. Beene was a nephew of William E. Bird, one of Caroline Bird Yancey Beman’s brothers, and himself an early settler in Dallas County. Bird, a lawyer, became judge of the Dallas County Court in .4 William Yancey made several trips to Jesse Beene’s plantation in  and  Flush Times and Bad Times

n



to make the move as smooth as possible. He brought eight of his field hands there and arranged to take most of the rest and to leave the remainder with his mother-in-law in Greenville. The Yancey’s first child, Benjamin Cunningham Yancey, was born in Greenville July , , so it was too soon for the infant and Sarah to go west for a while.5 All seemed well. The new father left South Carolina sure that the unionists’ cause there was safe. His status as a planter gave him a sense of prestige and security. Yancey was proud that soon he would be able to take in his brother and help him begin his own career. But all was not well. From Greenville he noted that although his slaves in Cahaba ‘‘have enjoyed good health & are making a splendid crop,’’ his cotton sold only at five to ten cents a pound; cotton had sold for fifteen cents a pound in  and thirteen cents in .6 Yancey and his family found themselves dragged under by the Panic of , the worst economic depression in the country’s history to that time. Financial disaster, however, would prove among the least of Yancey’s woes over the next two years, and a series of misfortunes began to shake some of his most fundamental values and ideals. Yancey’s first friends and associates in Cahaba not only helped him establish himself, but also began to reshape his political philosophy. Besides his relatives, other early settlers of Cahaba—men like Joseph Mays, Ethelbert W. Saunders, John Gayle, Joel E. Matthews, and many of their family members—formed a core of devoted friends and confidants. They and Jesse Beene were all devout states’ rights men. This group would remain steadfastly loyal to Yancey when he entered the political arena. Jesse Beene shared his law practice with William W. Fambro, who also served on the board of directors of the Cahaba and Marion Rail Road Company and, with G. W. Clark, edited the local newspaper, the Cahaba Southern Democrat. When Fambro left the Democrat in January , Yancey bought his share of the paper and joined Clark as editor on January ; he became the sole proprietor after April , .7 Yancey’s next priority was to reunite with his wife, child, and brother in his new home. Shortly after assuming his editorial position Yancey went back to Greenville, ‘‘fortunate enough to escape free of casualties’’ on still perilous frontier roads. He made plans to return in summer and took pains to make his wife’s trip west as comfortable as possible: Sarah was pregnant again and was due to give birth in February. Yancey mildly scolded Ben for his plans to leave New Haven before completing his legal studies, but was glad when his brother came to Alabama and formed a partnership with Jesse Beene.8 Despite the steadily worsening economy, the most immediate threat to Yan

n

Flush Times and Bad Times

cey’s happiness and self-esteem came, as usual, from his mother. Proud of his new station in the bustling West, Yancey sent an issue of his newspaper to Caroline, who was then attempting one of her unauthorized visits to Troy. Luckily for William, his cold and critical mother confined her reaction to a letter to Ben. ‘‘William is Editor of the Southern Democrat,’’ she observed blandly. ‘‘It contains very little that will interest me.’’ She went on to tell Ben that if he earned a good living in Alabama, ‘‘I shall feel no delicacy in living with you that I now do in living with William.’’ Although doubtless ignorant of the economic vicissitudes of the times, Caroline complained that William ‘‘has diminished instead of improving Sarah’s property.’’ 9 Financial woes certainly took their toll on Yancey, whether caused by the panic or by Yancey himself. In need of extra income after the birth of his second son, George Earle, Yancey began in March to advertise the custom printing of business cards, announcements, pamphlets, bank notes—virtually anything—offering plain or ornamental type, ‘‘fancy colored ink and gold, silver, and bronze’’ produced by ‘‘nearly new’’ equipment. A few weeks later, he advertised the sale of two mules. Although doubtless a year before, at the tail end of the ‘‘Flush Times,’’ he could have easily sold them, in depression-ravished Alabama of  he had no takers for months. The local economy also forced him to temporarily reduce the size of the Southern Democrat from a full to a half sheet in April when his supplier in Mobile could not furnish enough paper.10 Early in , two columns addressed to readers of the Southern Democrat delineated the political and ideological positions of the editorial team. Yancey and Clark kept Fambro’s motto, ‘‘ and ,’’ but added the same sense of urgency and drama that characterized editorials in Yancey’s Greenville Mountaineer, as well as the apocalyptic tone of Rev. Beman’s sermons. The new proprietors announced that throughout the republic raged ‘‘so fearful a struggle for political and personal preeminence as to endanger . . . the very existence of the Union.’’ With his senior colleague, the twenty-three-year-old junior editor promised to stand by their ‘‘righteous cause’’ with ‘‘unwearied zeal,—the most sacred regard for truth, and an unflinching determination to pursue that course alone which honor and reason approve of.’’ 11 But from the start, Yancey’s editorials revealed that his political philosophy was changing. In his introductory piece, Yancey placed tremendous emphasis on the defense of slavery. Faced with mounting abolition attacks, the young planter now had a personal stake in the peculiar institution. Yancey championed the Democratic Party as the bulwark of slaveholders’ rights. He applauded President Martin Van Buren for his defense of southern interests as well as for his attack on national Flush Times and Bad Times

n



banks, which in Yancey’s mind were forged into a single ‘‘struggle of Justice— Equal Rights—and . . . our existence as a great nation, against Power, Aristocracy and Fraud.’’ Like a growing number of southerners, Yancey began to link supporters of a national bank with those who tried to expand federal power into a previously unimaginable realm, southern slavery. Now Yancey combined his old contempt toward disunionists with a thorough condemnation of all opponents of the Democracy, ‘‘that curious mass of Nullifiers—Federalists and United States Bankites, amalgamated and termed Whigism.’’ 12 Yancey had not yet abandoned his youthful nationalism, but he had begun to temper it when it came into conflict with issues connected to slavery and federal power. In an editorial supporting internal improvements he explained, ‘‘None, but the man whose affections are so narrow and groveling, that he can love only the spot on which he lives and moves,’’ would wish to oppose these projects that tend to ‘‘unite different interests; to subdue sectional and provincial jealousies.’’ 13 But soon Yancey would add advocates of federally sponsored internal improvements to national bank supporters and opponents of slavery. Nothing proved more telling or ironic during this transitional period than Yancey’s sudden reappraisal of John C. Calhoun. Citizens of Vermont sent the Senate two petitions early in  calling on Congress to abolish slavery in the District of Columbia. Calhoun rose immediately to challenge the reception of these petitions, attempting to implement a similar procedure to the lower house’s twenty-first rule, or ‘‘Gag Rule,’’ that prevented the very discussion in Congress of all antislavery issues. The South Carolina senator announced that he had ‘‘foreseen and predicted this state of things three years ago, as a legitimate result of the force bill.’’ 14 Yancey now agreed and joined the swelling number of southerners who applauded Calhoun’s efforts to prevent a national debate on slavery. Yancey admitted that he now saw Calhoun in a different light. ‘‘Widely as we have differed, and still differ with that distinguished statesman on some points,’’ on the defense of slavery Yancey and Calhoun were closing ranks. As abolition petitions—spurred on in part by the efforts of Rev. Beman—continued to make their way to Congress, Yancey relied on Alabama senator William R. King to work with Calhoun in Washington while he did his best to fan the flames of southern resistance at home. Yancey warned that abolitionists—‘‘deluded fanatics’’—acted out of malevolence. He claimed, ‘‘They well know that they have no right to free our Slaves, or in any manner meddle with our rights.’’ Like Calhoun, Yancey feared that abolitionists’ true aim was to stir slave rebellion. The young editor also warned that regardless of their small numbers, abolitionists 

n

Flush Times and Bad Times

might tip the scales between the two largest political parties, the Whigs and Democrats, and thereby subject white southerners ‘‘to a despotism appalling in the extreme.’’ 15 By the summer of , Yancey lauded Calhoun as ‘‘one of the most distinguished statesmen of the republic,’’ quite an improvement from the ‘‘Aaron Burr’’ and ‘‘political madman’’ of only three years before.16 His defense of slavery led Yancey to ever more extreme attacks on the Whig Party and its leaders. Like southerners of any political affiliation, Yancey strove to position himself as the strongest advocate and defender of southern interests in national politics, and cast his opponents—in this case, the party of his stepfather, the Whigs—as unsound on slave questions.17 He charged presidential candidate William H. Harrison with seeking to use the federal budget surplus to purchase southerners’ slaves. He tagged the moderate Daniel Webster as ‘‘quite orthodox’’ in his abolition principles and implied that he had supported secession at the old Federalist Hartford Convention in –, where extremists considered abandoning the Union during the War of .18 Yancey reserved special censure for the Whig leader, Senator Henry Clay. Sounding ever more like Calhoun, Yancey blasted the Kentuckian for supporting tariffs that would seize ‘‘the money of the South to build up manufacturers in the North.’’ But the most egregious defect in Clay’s nature, according to Yancey, was his membership in the American Colonization Society. ‘‘Is it not one of the first principles of that society to free, and then colonize the blacks, either on this continent or some other?’’ he emphasized. Yancey warned his readers that the Colonization Society would soon plant ‘‘an enemy on our borders.’’ Yancey dismissed as impossible the stated mission of this society, to help purchase slaves and colonize them abroad. Not enough money in the world existed to accomplish this, he wrote; the true aim of this group was simply abolition. To Yancey, Clay was evil personified. He described Clay and his ‘‘national system’’ as ‘‘the protective system advocate—the runaway slave advocate—the Emancipation officer—the opposer of slavery in every form—the advocate of a high price for public lands—the mere office seeker.’’ 19 For Yancey, Clay’s willingness to support congressman John Quincy Adams’s efforts to end the Gag Rule proved that Clay courted abolitionists in his efforts to supplant Daniel Webster, who Yancey wrongly saw as the master of the Whig Party.20 Few issues pertaining to slavery escaped Yancey’s gaze. In March , when Congress voted on whether to rescind the Gag Rule, Yancey noted the virtual solidarity of his Democratic Party in upholding the procedure. Of sixty-two House Democrats from free states, only nine voted to rescind, but all sixty-four northern Whigs voted to resume debate on slavery. Yancey duly noted that the Flush Times and Bad Times

n



only two southerners who voted to rescind the Gag Rule were Whigs from Kentucky and Tennessee.21 Also in March , Yancey announced that he had come into the possession of a pamphlet purporting to be the narrative of James Williams, a runaway slave who escaped from a plantation in Alabama. Williams claimed that after an overseer had gratuitously shot and whipped to death a half dozen slaves, another—a runaway—was apprehended by dogs, stripped naked, bound to a tree, and whipped severely by two overseers who then bathed the fresh wounds in a salt and pepper solution. In fact, James Williams escaped from this scene in  and made his way to New York, where abolitionists sent him to England for safety. Yancey pronounced the pamphlet ‘‘a dirty falsehood, [one] we have seldom seen equalled, and never surpassed.’’ He reached this conclusion without investigation, stating blandly, ‘‘From our knowledge of the manner in which slaves are treated in Alabama, we know that the narrative is false, from beginning to end.’’ 22 At times invention and even paranoia took over. Yancey devoted many columns to an alleged conspiracy between National Bank supporters and abolitionists. As chair of an Anti-Bank meeting in Dallas County in June , Yancey reported resolutions denouncing Henry Clay as ‘‘the Candidate of the Federalists, Whigs, Bankists, and Abolitionist[s],’’ whose antislavery supporters ‘‘would smile at the conflagration of our homes, and exult in the murder of our citizens’’ in a slave uprising. To forestall this horrible drama, Yancey called for the appointment of a twenty-one-man vigilance committee.23 Besides national news, as editor of a local newspaper Yancey also discussed various community and state affairs. Almost any traveling entertainment caught the attention of the twenty-three-year-old pioneer. He encouraged attendance of musical and theatrical productions ‘‘to break the dull monotony which has long pervaded our town.’’ 24 And Yancey stood firmly within the mainstream of America’s new passion for territorial expansion. Chafing at joint occupation of the Oregon Country with the British, he called for sole American possession of the region, predicting that ‘‘thousands of citizens would rush into the country, and Asia in a short time would be on the West, what Europe is now on the East.’’ 25 Yancey’s weariness of financial institutions and dogged democratic ideals convinced him that the state bank of Alabama required reform. ‘‘There are too many directors,’’ he explained; ‘‘by the time they get all the money they want, there is none left for any other person.’’ He called for a new law prohibiting directors of the state bank from receiving loans from that institution.26 Yancey also used the newspaper to promote himself, his family, and friends. 

n

Flush Times and Bad Times

His repeated calls for the creation of a bi-partisan Press Association had far less to do with his concern for professionalization or good journalism than it did with his long-established difficulty in attracting subscribers and advertisers, a problem obviously exacerbated by the ongoing economic depression.27 He promoted his associate Fambro’s Cahaba and Marion Railroad, promising that passengers could soon speed between these two towns at over twenty miles per hour.28 When his brother returned to Cahaba, Yancey placed a prominent notice in the paper for the law firm of Jesse Beene and Benjamin C. Yancey. And when a civic committee appointed Yancey secretary of a meeting to make arrangements for local July  celebrations, the devoted older brother appointed Ben to give the official oration. Surely Yancey did this to promote his younger brother’s business, but perhaps he did it also to help Ben’s love life. As their friend Fambro had warned Ben, ‘‘There are more bachelors and fewer weddings here than in any town, city or village I have ever been in. . . . There are in our town thirty single gentlemen to one young Lady. So it frequently happens that the young ladies are so much puzzled to know which to choose, that they do not choose at all.’’ 29 One news item that both captured Yancey’s attention and provided great insight into his youthful mind was the fallout from a duel in Bladensburg, Maryland, on February , , where Congressmen William J. Graves of Kentucky killed Jonathan Cilley of Maine in an exchange of rifle shots at eighty yards. Reaction in the capital was swift and severe. Senator Samuel Prentiss of Vermont—who introduced the abolition resolutions so despised by Yancey— offered a bill on March  to prohibit dueling in the District of Columbia. It prescribed the death penalty for anyone whose actions in such an affair led to the death of another, and would have also established a jail sentence of five to ten years for simply issuing or accepting a challenge, and three to seven years for ‘‘assault, defamation, or abuse’’ of the person who refused a challenge. On March , Congressman William S. Morgan of Virginia offered a resolution to amend the Constitution to deny federal office—civil, postal, and military—to anyone who had ever sent or received a challenge.30 The only part of this saga that did not strike Yancey as utterly repugnant was the duel itself. To Yancey, as to so many southerners, it was as important to defend oneself and one’s family as it was to protect one’s honor. The violence of the southwestern frontier magnified this general southern ethos. Many considered it prudent, if not necessary, to carry a gun. Indian removal by state and federal authorities was never complete, and fears of Indian attacks persisted for some time. In fact, Ben Yancey served as first lieutenant of the Wetumpka Flush Times and Bad Times

n



Borderers in Coosa County as late as .31 Intraracial violence surpassed any Indian threat. A visitor to Phenix City in the s reported, ‘‘Scarcely a day passes without some human blood being shed.’’ Fights, duels, and pirating were almost daily rituals in Mobile. In , Huntsville, with only two thousand residents, endured five murders. And yet, juries—if any of these incidents reached a courtroom—tended to favor defendants almost any time they argued that their honor was involved. Although Alabama, like most southern states, had outlawed dueling (in ), white society never viewed affairs of honor the same as outright murder.32 Yancey maintained a dogged, even extreme adherence to the code of honor. Southern honor largely defined the conduct of men as adults, as fathers, and as sons, as demonstrated by the Yancey boys’ defense of their mother and her honor. Codes of honor, written and unwritten, also shaped behavioral norms for women.33 Defense of one’s honor pervaded virtually every level of southern society, regardless of class.34 The exaggerated manner in which Yancey shed the values of his New England upbringing and embraced these southern ideals arose from his determination to defend the good name of his father and his desperation to achieve social acceptance. The latter desire in turn grew out of his inability to receive the unconditional love and acceptance that every child seeks from their parents. When one student of Yancey’s youth blithely commented, ‘‘In his eagerness to be southern Yancey decidedly overdid it,’’ he came close to revealing the key to Yancey’s personal, social, and political behavior. Yancey did overdo things. In his zeal to attain the esteem of others, he embraced in the extreme the most valued characteristics of his adopted frontier society: slaveholding, oratory, public affairs, and manly, honorable conduct.35 His commitment to honor, combined with personal misfortunes in , led to the first of many notorious acts of violence perpetrated by the young Yancey. Like most Americans of his day, Yancey blamed himself for the financial woes of his family. Debts certainly did nothing to lift Yancey’s esteem in his community, but honorable efforts to persevere, and the company of thousands of others who shared his fate, helped mitigate that problem. After all, a lot of people were going broke. A personal tragedy exacerbated his distress: on August , , his sixmonth-old son George died. A brief death notice did not reveal the cause, but high infant mortality still plagued American families at this time. Among whites, about one in seven children died before their first birthday; one in five would not live to age twenty-one. However common the occurrence and whatever the cause of George’s death, Sarah and William suffered a tremen

n

Flush Times and Bad Times

dous emotional blow. They were loving parents and Yancey, as father and head of the household, was responsible for the health and welfare of his family, especially its weakest members. An infant’s death would be a blow to any head of a household, virtually anywhere, at any time. Yancey surely felt that he had failed, regardless of whether or not he could have prevented his son’s death. This misfortune, combined with his financial embarrassments, resulted in Yancey clinging ever more tenaciously to the defense of his good name and that of his family. At least in that he could exert some power over his life and strive for public approval.36 When the defensive and hypersensitive Yancey made another trip to Greenville, all these factors came into play with horrible consequences. On September  he attended a militia muster and heard a debate between congressional candidates Waddy Thompson and Joseph Witner. Thompson had sided with the nullifiers when Yancey lived in South Carolina, and Yancey did not forget that. After the debate, Yancey told a small gathering that Thompson was a ‘‘blackguard’’—a scoundrel. Seventeen-year-old Elias Earle overheard the remark. Earle was both a nephew of Thompson and was Sarah Earle Yancey’s first cousin. An honor-bound youth who cared tremendously for his family’s reputation and good name, Earle barged into Yancey’s group and called him a liar. Yancey slapped the boy’s face. He later explained, ‘‘I designed merely to chastise his insolence.’’ Earle retaliated by striking Yancey with his riding whip and calling him a damned liar. The scuffle ended abruptly. Yancey offered no apology, but regretted that it had been necessary to strike Earle.37 The next day Yancey visited Dr. Robinson Earle, the boy’s father, to explain the previous day’s events. After Yancey left, Elias Earle gave his father a different account. The two versions, combined with rumors (which Dr. Earle attributed to Yancey) about Elias apologizing to Yancey, enraged Dr. Earle. According to Yancey, the wife of Dr. Earle, ‘‘a violent tempered woman . . . abused him for not beating me . . . [and] he, henpecked as he was, poor man, remarked that it was not too late, yet, to beat me.’’ After stewing for two days, Robinson and Elias Earle came to Greenville looking for Yancey. Although no one seemed to know what the Earles had in mind, when Yancey’s friends learned that some sort of confrontation loomed they warned him to prepare for a fight.38 Armed—as usual since his move to frontier Alabama—with a pistol, large knife, and swordstick, Yancey encountered the elder Earle at a tavern in town. The doctor, a man whom Yancey estimated was six feet two inches tall and weighed  pounds, carried his own heavy walking stick and small knife. The two walked outside and toward a neighboring store, and engaged in what apFlush Times and Bad Times

n



peared to be a friendly discussion. But then Dr. Earle again called Yancey a damned liar. After a brief hesitation Yancey drew his gun and insisted, ‘‘Now call that back or take a shot.’’ The much larger Earle started menacingly toward Yancey. He raised his cane high in his left hand and seized Yancey with his right in an attempt to make Yancey drop his weapon. Each grabbed the other, with Yancey repeatedly warning the doctor to retract what he had just said. Earle did not. During this scuffle Yancey shot Earle, although he later called it an accident. Dr. Earle’s head slumped to the side but he staggered toward Yancey, who now deliberately and repeatedly hit Earle on the head with his spent pistol until the gun itself burst to pieces. Yancey later boasted, ‘‘Every blow brought blood copiously.’’ Still unable to halt his wounded opponent, Yancey then drew his sword from its sheath and lunged toward Earle’s stomach, but missed. Finally, witnesses separated the two. Earle died that evening.39 An unrepentant Yancey recounted his version of the story to Ben the next day. He admitted that his volatile temper had come into play; ‘‘If not so passionate, I might have used a cane only, & beaten him.’’ He expected to be found guilty of manslaughter and to receive a prison sentence of one or two years. Although he regretted the prospect of separation from his family and the inability to provide for them materially, Yancey focused on what he considered a tremendous accomplishment. ‘‘I have done my duty as a man, & he who grossly insulted me lies now, with the clod upon his bosom. . . . The blood of the only man who ever called me ‘a dd liar’ is now . . . a legacy to my son, & a warning to others who feel like browbeating a Yancey.’’ 40 Thomas Gantt, Yancey’s old friend and one-time adversary from Ben Perry’s law office, paid bail to get Yancey out of jail. Yancey returned to the safety of Rosemont, the Cunningham’s home in Greenville, where he awaited trial. The state charged him with felony murder, not criminal manslaughter, and set the trial in Greenville for October . His cousin Jesse Beene, in Augusta, Georgia, at the time, warned Yancey’s brother that many friends of the Earles wished to take matters into their own hands before the trial, but expressed confidence both in his safety at Rosemont and in the defense case underway by Yancey’s lawyers. Perhaps recalling Ben’s own hot temper and acute sense of honor, Beene asked Yancey’s brother to stay away until the trial so as not to further antagonize the Earle clan.41 The trial began on October , , and lasted a grueling seventeen hours. Yancey pleaded not guilty to the charge of murder. The state’s two attorneys brought four witnesses, including the young Elias Earle, who all testified that 

n

Flush Times and Bad Times

Yancey shot Dr. Earle. Yancey’s lawyers, David Wardlaw, Benjamin Perry, and future secessionist congressman Armistead Burt, moved for acquittal, claiming that Yancey fired his gun accidentally while defending himself from Earle’s assault. Their nine witnesses, including Thomas Gantt, all stressed the menacing attitude and size of Earle and the offensive nature of his remarks. One defense witness verified Yancey’s story that Mrs. Earle publicly chastised her husband for his initial failure to strike Yancey, and the doctor’s response that it was not too late, implying of course that Earle intended to harm Yancey and that selfdefense was in order. The jury took only a few moments to reach a verdict. They found Yancey guilty of manslaughter, not murder, and sentenced him to a year in jail and a fine of ,. Throughout the trial, a Greenville reporter for Yancey’s old paper, the Mountaineer, noted that Yancey sat ‘‘serene and gentlemanly.’’ But now he rose, wishing to make some remarks on his own behalf. The judge either did not notice, or, more likely, decided that two o’clock in the morning was no time for an oration. Instead, the judge himself briefly expressed his sympathy for Yancey and agreed that the killing was accidental. He also scolded Yancey, saying that his habit of carrying weapons was ‘‘reprehensible’’ and that while it might have been the habit in the wild west of Alabama, it most certainly was not all right in more civilized South Carolina. Yancey’s jail term started two days later, on October .42 Deprived of a courtroom venue, Yancey turned to the columns of his own newspaper for vindication. He had left the Southern Democrat under the care of Ben back in June when he had anticipated only a two-month absence. In November, from his jail cell, Yancey addressed the readers of Cahaba. ‘‘Reared with the spirit of a man in my bosom—and taught to preserve inviolate my honor—my character, and my person, I have acted as such a spirit dictated,’’ he began. Yancey acknowledged that his actions violated the law, so the honorbound young man pronounced that ‘‘it is now equally my duty to submit, with calmness, to the consequences, as it was an imperious duty to act as I did.’’ Yancey declared that spending a year in jail was infinitely better than having others consider him a ‘‘despised, an abject and a cowardly being.’’ Most of Yancey’s readers and friends agreed. One wrote to Ben, ‘‘I am now doubly proud of [our friendship], & when we meet again I shall press his hand with warmer admiration & redoubled cordiality.’’ 43 Considering the boost to his self-esteem and the relatively short period of incarceration, Yancey initially made an easy adjustment to prison. ‘‘Time goes rapidly with me,’’ he reported to Ben in early December. He befriended his Flush Times and Bad Times

n



jailers and settled into a routine of reading law until one o’clock each afternoon, and then engaging in ‘‘useful reading, conversation & chess, till  o’c. at night.’’ He read and critiqued the Southern Democrat, and praised Ben’s work on the paper. ‘‘You have polish’d your style very much,’’ he noted. ‘‘I like your editing, much.’’ Despite his confidence in his brother, Yancey asked Ben to keep an eye out for a suitable buyer for the paper. He only cautioned, ‘‘Let no one even suspect our bad sub[scription]. list.’’ Even before his trial, the true extent of Yancey’s debts began to emerge, as did his erratic and sloppy bookkeeping methods. Many southern planters rested their reputations less on their proficiency as managers than on their public behavior and carefully crafted public images. This was clearly the case for Yancey. He owed one man rent for the use of twenty-two acres of land, but that man owed Yancey for corn and fodder; the amounts could be found either in a scrapbook Yancey kept at his home or in the farm book he left at the plantation. He owed his overseer, a man named Leslie, around . Yancey had promised more if Leslie produced forty bales of cotton, but told Ben to check for his farm book (or scrapbook; he was not sure) for charges against Leslie. In addition to those deductions, Yancey carefully listed items that, apparently, he kept only in his head, including . for postage, . for salt; in all, .. Yancey had several debts in the  to  range, and at least four others of  or more each. The inventory was an accountant’s nightmare, littered with phrases like ‘‘a good deal’’ and ‘‘I believe.’’ As usual, Yancey turned to family for help, suggesting that Ben borrow  from Jesse Beene to tide him over.44 Financial concerns, however, did not consume Yancey’s attention while in prison. His aunt and uncle Cunningham visited, and Sarah and their son Ben moved back to Greenville so they could see each other daily. Yancey proudly observed, ‘‘Ben grows & improves as a fond father would desire.’’ Even his mother-in-law, whose brother Yancey had killed, was kind toward Yancey. The two gave each other gifts of town lots in Greenville with Yancey coming out ahead in the transaction by , worth of real estate. He observed the South Carolina governor’s race between Benjamin F. Elmore and Patrick Noble, commenting to his brother that Elmore was a son of one of their father’s closest friends. And from his jail cell Yancey directed a petition effort on his own behalf to beg the governor for a pardon; he received  signatures from tiny Lodi alone, the scene of his first major public speech four years before. In fact, Yancey’s only complaint for a while was that ‘‘I have not time enough’’ to do all he desired in his tiny prison cell.45 But as  came to an end, Yancey finally grew quite uncomfortable. ‘‘Christ

n

Flush Times and Bad Times

mas! with all its glorious accompaniments, cheerful fire-sides, congratulatory friendships, foaming egg-nog, & hot whiskey-punch, has ‘come again.’ . . . But who is grave on this day?—Perhaps none but the lone prisoner!’’ he finally complained to his brother. As Yancey caught stray glimpses of passing holiday revelers through his cell’s window, the twenty-four-year-old, who had always enjoyed parties, compared himself to a caged starling. He had a variety of activities to keep him occupied in prison, especially his legal studies, but his mind drifted back to the more pleasant days of college. Besides, he asked, how could he concentrate on Coke on Littleton when he learned of a new novel, published anonymously, called Richard Hurdis: A Tale of Alabama. Anxious to read anything about his adopted home, he devoured the work, but was gravely disappointed. He found it lacking in originality, described the plot as ‘‘confused & intricate,’’ the characters as ‘‘badly drawn & unnatural,’’ the dialogue ‘‘tedious & stiff.’’ But his most damning critique was that the author of Hurdis had obviously plagiarized from the great southern writer William Gilmore Simms.46 Of course, Simms had in fact written Hurdis; Yancey’s knowledge of the novelist’s style suggests that Yancey had become better versed with current fiction than with law. Yancey now felt sorry for himself and began to complain during the dark, cold days of late December. He had promised his brother an article on silk culture for the Cahaba Democrat, ‘‘but amidst the mass of legal, literary, political & sporting books & pamphlets which cumber my table,’’ he managed to misplace both the article and the scraps of information he had gathered for it. One wonders how anyone could do this within a small jail cell, but Yancey seems to have been no better organized there than he was with his farm and personal accounts in Alabama. A local newspaper article about resolutions in South Carolina’s assembly briefly put some fight back into Yancey. One representative moved to have the legislature determine the character of gentlemen. Yancey told Ben, ‘‘It will be a curious sea, in our legislative history, when railroads, canals, gentlemen &c are all fabricated at the seat of Gov[ernment]!’’ Certainly to Yancey, who believed that he had just earned his reputation as a gentleman through his conduct in the Earle affair and his deportment since, this ‘‘ignorant creature’’ had no true idea of what it meant to be a gentleman.47 A postscript to his Christmas missive showed that Yancey had not grown hopelessly despondent. He received the heartening news from Ben that advertisement columns in the Democrat had increased. ‘‘If it keeps on,’’ he wrote hopefully, ‘‘it will make the paper quite profitable, & I must hold on to it as it Flush Times and Bad Times

n



is my chief means of support.’’ He reminded his brother, ‘‘Collect is however the secret of all profits in newspaper business.’’ 48 The new year promised a wonderful new beginning for Yancey. Several factors combined to win him a pardon and release from jail. The social reputation of a criminal had always helped mitigate punishment. Henry Shultz, for example, the founder of Hamburg, South Carolina, received a pardon in  after having been found guilty of murdering a young boy. The petition drive that Yancey orchestrated from jail certainly helped him prove his standing. And it did not hurt Yancey’s case when Governor Patrick Noble, that old Cunningham family nemesis, courted and eventually married a Cunningham. Besides, Governor Noble was so generous with pardons that he had to ask the state printer to supply him with more official forms. ‘‘I have daily calls for such things,’’ he explained. Not only was Yancey free by the end of January, but the state also returned , of his fine.49 Of course, Yancey’s unrepentant attitude, his conviction for manslaughter rather than murder, and his pardon all infuriated Elias Earle. For fifteen years the son continued to seek retribution for the killing of his father. He laid elaborate plans to murder Yancey, and only after protracted correspondents through Ben Yancey did he drop the matter. Nevertheless, the incident haunted Yancey the rest of his life.50 Yancey resumed his duties as editor of the Democrat in March , shortly after his return to Cahaba. Although his financial prospects improved for a while, his income from farm and press lagged behind his expenses, ‘‘the times being so damned hard,’’ as one of Ben’s friends moaned.51 In fact, Yancey continued to struggle, offering for sale two slaves, a wagon, and a horse to get some desperately needed cash. He now neglected the Cunningham family that had helped him so greatly during his recent ordeal in South Carolina. Yancey’s aunt Louisa complained that she had not received a letter from him in months, and were it not for his advertised sale of property in the Democrat, she chided Ben, ‘‘I might conclude he had been lost with all his family in the Cherokee country.’’ Finally, Yancey sold the Democrat to John F. Gilbert in May . About the same time Ben Yancey dissolved his law partnership with Jesse Beene. The brothers decided to move to Wetumpka, in Coosa County, and try their luck with planting there and editing the Argus and Commercial Advertiser.52 Wetumpka combined characteristics of many of Yancey’s previous domiciles. Situated at the end of the rapids of the Coosa River, the rocky outcroppings resembled the Shoals of the Ogeechee of Yancey’s childhood. Yet Wetumpka also somewhat resembled Troy, New York. Wetumpka served a wide area as 

n

Flush Times and Bad Times

a commercial hub. Although lacking a canal, dirt roads brought goods from Georgia and Tennessee for transfer by steamboat to Mobile and beyond. Hugging the riverbank was ‘‘Chicken Row,’’ Wetumpka’s equivalent to Watervliet, a center of corruption and vice. Like Troy, Wetumpka had an enterprising mentality. In  the town chartered the Wetumpka Bridge Company to span the river that separated the eastern, business-oriented part of town from the residential western part. A flood destroyed the bridge in , but a new, covered bridge went up the next year, designed and constructed by Horace King, a slave who belonged to John Godwin, the man who won the contract from the city. In  Daniel Pratt considered the area for its water power hoping to launch large-scale industry (in  he would locate north of Montgomery; Prattville became an industrial village similar to many in New England). In  town leaders envisioned a railroad that would link them to the Tennessee River and east toward Georgia. The Panic of  snuffed out the railroad project, killed the solitary bank there, and wiped out many cotton producers. Over the next several years drought and low water, floods and fires, besieged the town, but its industrious citizens always bounced back and remained optimistic about their future.53 Yancey and Wetumpka were a good fit. Once he fully settled in Wetumpka, Yancey’s prospects eventually improved, but during his move from Cahaba two more problems arose. The first was calamitous. In summer, while settling in near Wetumpka at a place called Harrowgate Springs, Yancey received urgent and horrible news about his slaves back in Dallas County. Yancey learned that his overseer, named Stone, and a neighbor’s overseer had been engaged in a long-running feud. One had resorted to poisoning the well from which Stone usually drank. But one day Stone took a different path back from the fields, and instead Yancey’s slaves stopped by that well for water. Most became ill immediately, two died, and most of the rest remained horribly weak for months. Some took two years to recover fully. Yancey quickly called for doctors and brought as many of the slaves as were ambulatory to Harrowgate Springs so that he could tend to them personally.54 The loss of life and the ongoing suffering of these people mortified Yancey. As far as the financial stability of his family and his status as a planter were concerned, this was devastating. Yancey’s crops—and therefore, farm income—lay wasted that fall. He lacked the cash to hire slaves or white laborers for the harvest. As some slaves regained their health, he sold them for whatever he could get. When that was not enough, Yancey also sold two prized thoroughbred horses and some household furniture. Despite this, delinquent accounts from the Democrat and his new investment in the Argus placed the twenty-five-yearFlush Times and Bad Times

n



old Yancey , in debt. Yancey spurned friends’ advice to take advantage of recently enacted state bankruptcy laws. He might have suddenly lost his planter status, but he embraced all the more emphatically his sense of honor. Finally, in , he decided to complete his legal studies and to pursue a career as an attorney, even while continuing his editorial work and refusing to give up the ideal of plantation ownership.55 Despite a series of misfortunes Yancey managed to maintain some amount of playfulness. In the spring he launched a facetious editorial attack on an old friend from Greenville, George B. Hayden, who now edited the Marengo Gazette, a Whig newspaper in Demopolis, Alabama. He recalled how the two of them used to spend their time playing billiards and engaged in ‘‘river side rambles,’’ or reading law, rather than engaging in political debates. Now, however, Hayden’s attacks on Democrats in general and Yancey in particular led to a challenge: Hayden dared Yancey to face him in Demopolis, armed with a cue, ‘‘distance twelve feet, the game to be fought, luckily not with leaden, but with ivory balls!’’ Yancey considered this challenge unfair, since Hayden knew that Yancey had never been able to beat him at billiards. Yancey countered by offering to meet his friend in a champagne-drinking contest. ‘‘Here we are his equal, and will show him so, by throwing him under the table.’’ With Hayden’s sudden retirement from the Gazette, Yancey ‘‘won.’’ ‘‘Dearly beloved—we’ve sold out and quit, good bye,’’ Yancey wrote in his newspaper on behalf of his friend. And closing with a joke that had a serious side, he added, ‘‘We are glad to see our friends at all times retiring from a public advocacy of so bankrupt a cause, as is that of .’’ 56 Yancey at this time was more concerned than ever with his public reputation, despite his ability to parody his own vaunted sense of gentlemanly demeanor. And that gave rise to another potentially fatal conflict. Due to the series of personal, financial, and legal blows he faced, his sense of honor had hair-trigger sensitivity. In the fall of  Yancey wrote an anonymous newspaper article, published in Cahaba, that targeted Hamilton Franklin Deas. Deas somehow discovered that Yancey was the author, and denounced him as a liar and a scoundrel. In Yancey’s absence (he was nursing his sick slaves), his uncle, Judge William E. Bird, confronted Deas after Bird himself denounced Deas as a liar and coward.57 The resulting confrontation might have been a chapter from Baldwin’s Flush Times (or a later western movie), except that it was horribly real. One evening Judge Bird stopped by a tavern on his way home from his office. Deas was there, with three friends and a brother-in-law named Davis. Deas leaped at Bird and swung at him with a club, but missed. Bird knocked 

n

Flush Times and Bad Times

down Deas and pinned him to the floor with a foot on the chest. Just as the judge readied himself to crush his foe’s skull with a hickory club, Deas’s friends grabbed both the club and Bird, and Davis struck Bird with a stick. Meanwhile, Deas had crawled away and rose to his feet with a pistol pointed at Judge Bird, who also managed to draw his gun on Deas. Friends of each decided to intervene and remove firearms, but all agreed to allow the scuffle to continue with sticks. Bird landed a crushing blow to Deas’s head, knocking him again to the floor and sending him crawling on all fours to the street and into hiding around a wagon, with Bird in angry pursuit. A friend of Bird named Earle (no relation to Yancey) stopped the judge from killing Deas, and Deas’s friends got him to safety and dressed his wounds. An hour later Earle saw Deas and five friends and asked if they were satisfied. ‘‘If not,’’ Earle said, ‘‘Bird would flail Deas again, & he would take any of his friends, who was not satisfied.’’ When Earle saw Davis in Deas’s quarters, he called him out as a ‘‘d—d cowardly ruffian.’’ According to Yancey, Davis waited until ‘‘the coast was clear,’’ and after leaving through a back door, fled town on a mule. Yancey entered Cahaba the next day and roamed the streets looking for Deas. ‘‘But the poor creature did not show his nose in the street.’’ 58 Bird, Beene, Earle, Fambro, and other friends of Yancey agreed that Deas ‘‘had acted so dastardly . . . in denouncing me & B[ird] when he knew we were absent,’’ and had proven himself a ‘‘miserable coward’’ and ‘‘was in so pitiable a condition, morally & physically, that it was not in the least incumbent upon me to notice him more than to appear in Cahawba.’’ Yancey offered a different, more confrontational response. He chose to publish a succinct account of the affair over his own name. Although he agreed that nothing compelled him to directly confront this man, Yancey did not like the nonviolent resolution to this affair. ‘‘Words, in the code of honour’s law, cannot satisfy words,’’ he erupted in a letter to Ben. ‘‘Insult cannot wipe out insult.’’ 59 Although a student of Yancey’s early life concluded that this reaction, on the heals of the Earle incident, demonstrated Yancey’s ‘‘empty ideas of chivalry,’’ and adherence to ‘‘an outlandish set of social attitudes,’’ 60 quite the opposite was true. Even though he did not pursue the Deas affair to a violent conclusion, surely Yancey believed that after losing money, planter status, and temporarily even his freedom, that his name and honor had to be defended at all costs. And although he had established his reputation for violence, he had also done much to win and to keep the public attention and approval that he so desperately needed. Indeed, his reputation for boldness, courage, and daring was about to help launch his political career. Flush Times and Bad Times

n



CHAPTER FOUR

Politician As the presidential election of  approached, William L. Yancey’s dedication to the Union remained intact, but his reservations about the power of the federal government increased dramatically. This stage of Yancey’s transition from unionist to secessionist occurred quickly, and manifested itself in two more journalistic ventures. In April , Yancey could still lecture the editor of the Wetumpka Courier, ‘‘Let not the advocacy of State rights drive our brothers of the ‘Courier’ from the support of National rights and National dignity; each is compatible with the other.’’ An ordinary citizen’s patriotism, he insisted, started at home and extended ‘‘to his Town, his Country, and his State, successively.’’ The statesman’s patriotism, however, ‘‘should expand and enlarge until it encircles in its devotion his whole country—his America.’’ 1 Less than one month later William and Benjamin Yancey produced their first edition of the Wetumpka Argus. He and Ben now counted themselves among the ‘‘Democratic Republican family,’’ supporters of the principles of Thomas Jefferson and James Madison. The Yanceys especially celebrated these founders for

writing the Virginia and Kentucky resolutions. Jefferson and Madison drew up their resolutions in  and  to protest the Federalists’ unconstitutional Alien and Sedition Acts. Federalists designed these laws to destroy the Democratic Republican opposition by undermining future voter support through discouraging immigration (at this time immigrants overwhelmingly voted Democratic Republican once they became citizens) and especially by stifling criticism of the federal government. Jefferson and Madison agreed that each state, by its own authority, could nullify acts of Congress they deemed unconstitutional. The Yancey brothers also attacked the ‘‘monied power’’ that favored extravagant federal internal improvements and high tariffs, and supported President Martin Van Buren in his reelection campaign in . More and more William Yancey found himself influenced by radical states’ rights advocates in Alabama, and as he emerged as a political candidate, so too did his new political philosophy.2 Yancey’s financial distress certainly contributed to his willingness to reassess his political philosophy. His standing in Cahaba made him a leading member of a drive to establish St. Luke’s Episcopal Church, but he could ill afford to contribute to the project. Early in  debts that accrued while he was still incarcerated in South Carolina forced a sheriff ’s sale of one of his slaves, Henry, his ostler and carriage driver. Accident compounded his misfortune; in May two of Yancey’s oxen strayed from his land. All the while he grumbled of delinquent subscriptions.3 Moving to Wetumpka did not immediately change his luck. From October to December he blamed low water levels in rivers for his inability to get enough paper from Mobile to publish a full, four-page edition of the Argus, and so had to cut back to two pages. After temperatures dropped late in the year Yancey complained of ‘‘wretched cold’’ but feared he could not afford to add fireplaces to his new home. He had to hire out several slaves for income. The census of  coldly reported his fall from the planter class: he possessed only six slaves; one male under ten years, one under twenty-five, one female under twentyfive, two under thirty-seven, and one under fifty-six.4 Like other Democrats, Yancey argued that it was absurd to blame the ongoing panic on President Van Buren. He explained that no American executive could be held responsible for an economic crisis that swept across the Atlantic to include Europe (overproduction of cotton and other agricultural commodities helped cause a collapse of prices on both sides of the Atlantic, causing devastation among farm and industrial interests alike). In any case, for Yancey the politics of slavery superseded all other considerations. He noted that when Van Buren was Andrew Jackson’s vice president it was Van Buren who cast the tiePolitician

n



breaking vote in the Senate to authorize postmasters to suppress the distribution of abolitionist literature in the South. Yancey had supported Van Buren’s candidacy in , over a year before his election. In  Yancey endorsed a straight Democratic ticket.5 Yancey’s efforts to support state and local politicians ultimately completed his conversion to states’ rights advocate. His uncle, Jesse Beene, an extremist in all things political, ran for Congress in . A few months before, he presided over a state Democratic convention. So violently and viciously did he attack the Whig Party that even his closest friends regretted it, and feared correctly that voters would focus on Beene’s viciousness rather than the Whigs’ alleged sins. Nevertheless, Beene maintained the editorial support of his nephew and, more important, the backing of the powerful leader of Alabama’s states’ rights Democrats, Dixon Hall Lewis.6 Lewis was truly a giant among men, at six feet tall and reportedly almost five hundred pounds. One Alabamian recalled that Lewis’s custom furniture would have easily seated three adults, and that he often brought a special chair with him in case visitors’ homes could not accommodate him. When he traveled he required a special vehicle, ‘‘a two-wheeled cart or gig with very stout wheels, shafts and springs,’’ with ‘‘a flight of very strong steps’’ leading from the back to the ground, which also helped provide balance to prevent him from tipping over. Lewis was twelve years Yancey’s senior, born in Hancock County, Georgia, in . He attended the local academy, Mt. Zion, under the direction of none other than Rev. Nathan Beman, Yancey’s future stepfather. Among his classmates were Absalom H. Chappell, later a member of Congress; Charles J. MacDonald, a future Georgia governor and state supreme court justice; Walter T. Colquitt, who would sit in both houses of Congress; and Robert Jemison, a man who, like Lewis, would make a political career in Alabama. Lewis moved to Alabama in  and served in the state assembly from  to . He won election to Congress in , remaining until  when the Alabama legislature sent him to the Senate.7 Lewis’s family and political ties quickly pulled in Yancey to Alabama’s states’ rights faction. Lewis and many of his associates had supported nullification which Yancey had so bitterly denounced, but Yancey had begun to reconsider the nullifiers, even their leader, Calhoun. Yancey’s uncle Jesse Beene and Lewis were friends and allies, which contributed profoundly to Yancey’s support for Lewis. In turn, Lewis worked frequently with Alabama nullifier James M. Calhoun, nephew of John C. Calhoun, and Lewis corresponded frequently with the Carolina Calhoun. Family ties did not end there. Lewis married Susan El

n

Politician

more, a daughter of General John A. Elmore of Autauga County, an old friend of Yancey’s father and Sarah Yancey’s grandfather. The general’s son, John A. Elmore, would become one of Yancey’s law partners. The Elmores in turn had extensive family ties in South Carolina, where several ranked among that state’s most radical states’ rights advocates. Another brother-in-law of Lewis, Benjamin Fitzpatrick, later served as governor of Alabama and joined Yancey in campaigning for secession. Lewis’s associates Thomas Mays, J. L. M. Curry, John A. Campbell, and John Gill Shorter also entered Yancey’s social and political circles and remained affiliated with him for many years.8 With the support and patronage of Lewis and Beene, Yancey and his brother launched a special weekly campaign newspaper in April  called the Southern Crisis, ‘‘issued at the very low price of one dollar, invariably in advance.’’ Published out of the same office that printed the Argus, Yancey devoted the Crisis exclusively to supporting Van Buren and denouncing the Whig presidential candidate, William Henry Harrison. As the title implied, Yancey now believed that while national issues such as tariffs or banking remained important, the place of ‘‘the peculiar institution’’ in federal affairs eclipsed all others.9 From the start the Yancey brothers intentionally blurred the lines between the new Whig and defunct Federalist parties, as did Democrats throughout the country. They referred to the ‘‘Federal Whig Press,’’ warning that a Whig administration would pass new Alien and Sedition Acts, higher protective tariffs, a corrupt national bank, and more taxes that would be inequitably distributed so that the North would use federal revenues to fund their own internal improvements. They predicted that victorious Whigs would make Harrison ‘‘King in all but name—and Washington a ‘St. Petersburg’—the centre of a vast, consolidated domain.’’ 10 Again following the lead of other Democrats—and in line with both parties’ raucous and audacious campaign strategies during the ‘‘hard cider campaign’’ —Yancey viciously and outrageously attacked Harrison. Whigs portrayed the head of their ticket as a friend of the common man, a frontiersman whose taste ran toward fermented cider rather than more expensive and refined drink. Yancey disagreed vehemently. One column titled ‘‘Hard Cider—the Enemy of Temperance’’ cited a Whig clergyman in Connecticut who warned that Harrison’s glorification of alcohol would create , new drunkards a year.11 And like other Democratic editors, Yancey challenged ‘‘Old Tippecanoe’s’’ military acumen. While others belittled the sixty-seven-year-old Harrison as ‘‘the petticoat general’’ or ‘‘Granny,’’ Yancey attacked him in his own unique way: ‘‘In , in the      With Great Britain, When rapine Politician

n



and conflagration were wasting the fairest portions of our country—when the blood of unoffending women and children was reeking from the hands of the  , and rolling its crimson tide over the land! . . . Gen. Harrison (whether from cowardice or private quarrels, is immaterial,)   ! and sought safety at home!’’ 12 Most damning—and most successful in Yancey’s county and state—were Democrats’ charges that Harrison was an abolitionist. Coosa County, a huge slaveholding area, was usually fertile ground for Whig politicians. When Yancey ran stories like ‘‘Tip, Tyler, Tariff,’’ they struck no fear into the hearts of local planters.13 But harping on slave issues did. That both major party candidates found it difficult to straddle slavery issues did not matter to Yancey. Van Buren’s consistent reassurances to southerners that they need not doubt his dedication to slavery brought condemnation from antislavery men in the North who called the president ‘‘a northern man with southern principles.’’ Yancey embraced that label as proof of Van Buren’s fidelity to the South. He joyfully reprinted a Cincinnati newspaper’s criticism of Van Buren’s administration; ‘‘The protection of slave-labor seems to be its controlling principle. . . . The aristocrats of the South give law to the Government, and Mr. Van Buren is their vassal-executive.’’ That southerners dominated Van Buren’s cabinet and constituted his only two Supreme Court appointments further proved his unworthiness to this northern newspaper, and to Yancey signaled safety for the South.14 Yancey relentlessly attacked Harrison on slavery. As early as  Yancey had mentioned Harrison’s alleged ‘‘abolition principles.’’ In  Yancey and other southern editors trumped up Harrison’s participation in a Virginia organization dedicated to the amelioration of conditions for slaves, casting that effort instead as an abolition society. Yancey claimed that Virginians hounded Harrison out of the state for the free northwest because he called slavery a ‘‘calumny.’’ Yancey even insinuated that abolitionist William Lloyd Garrison endorsed Harrison.15 Countless historians have written of white southerners’ heightened sense of their own freedom because it stood in stark contrast to the very tangible institution of black slavery. As one put it, ‘‘[White] Southerners knew slavery, and they sought above all else to avoid the condition.’’ 16 The most incredible and persistent attack by Yancey against Harrison took dead aim at white southerners’ greatest fear. Yancey condemned Harrison for supposedly backing a law in territorial Indiana and in the state of Ohio that would have sold white people into slavery. This charge first emerged in –, when Harrison favored a bill in Ohio that allowed those imprisoned for their inability to pay fines and court costs to cover those costs through the ‘‘public sale’’ of their labor. Dur

n

Politician

ing Harrison’s bid for the presidency in , the Washington National Intelligencer claimed he had supported ‘‘white slavery,’’ and several Democratic papers repeated the allegation in .17 The attacks were utterly demagogic, but Yancey seemed to believe them. Few accusers struck with the exuberance of Yancey’s Southern Crisis. Yancey aroused his liberty-loving readers with the specter of white men and women sold into slavery for debt and subjected to a whipping should they attempt to escape. But worse lay in store, according to Yancey. ‘‘If any other poor white man should knock down and kick some impudent free negro,’’ not only might this honorable white person be sold as a slave, but the highest bidder for his labor might be the very same free black. As a result, that black man could own a white ‘‘slave,’’ a scenario Yancey described as ‘‘revolting to every principle of humanity, and a disgrace to the age in which we live.’’ 18 If Yancey really believed what he wrote about Harrison, then clearly, as one historian put it, this Whig seemed as threatening as the worst of Federalist Alexander Hamilton and abolitionist William Lloyd Garrison combined.19 There is reason to believe that Yancey’s editorials contained something more substantial than election-year hyperbole and mud-slinging. Facing the possibility that a Harrison administration might replace his party in the seat of national power truly filled Yancey with dread and helped accelerate his philosophical conversion to the states’ rights school. No longer did he claim that the federal government was sovereign; he now agreed with Calhoun, Dixon Lewis, and their ilk that the Constitution was ‘‘made up of none but specific powers granted to it by the several Sovereign States.’’ His former fears of nullification and national weakness had disappeared. He now warned that Whigs would transform states into ‘‘tributaries to the powers of the General Government— enfeebling the sovereign powers of the states—rendering almost imperceptible the lines of State Sovereignty—in fact, forming us into a great consolidated nation, receiving all its impulses from the Federal Capitol.’’ Antislavery—real or imagined—finally made Yancey embrace ‘‘the State Rights Creed.’’ Like his old adversary and new hero, Calhoun, Yancey now sadly concluded that unless northerners stopped abolition ‘‘fanaticism,’’ then ‘‘a separation of the union must take place.’’ 20 He did not yet advocate disunion, but by the summer of  his unconditional unionism was dead forever. In the midst of all the campaign excitement, Yancey proved himself a stalwart and influential Democrat and grew more involved with politics. Although Harrison won the national election, Alabama joined Virginia, Arkansas, Missouri, and South Carolina as the only slave states in the Van Buren column. In Politician

n



Yancey’s Coosa County, Van Buren received  percent of the vote, better than his statewide  percent. Across Alabama in  the Whigs made their best showing ever in terms of the number of assemblymen elected, forty-nine to the Democrats’ fifty-one.21 Besides his journalistic efforts on behalf of his party, Yancey actively participated in local Democratic meetings. In December , he had attended a state party assembly as a delegate from Dallas County. His uncle Jesse Beene served as chair, so Yancey was guaranteed a conspicuous role. During the summer of  he attended another party function for Autauga and Coosa Counties and won election from his colleagues as a delegate to the state Democratic convention in Tuscaloosa in October , and within two months he attended the Democrats’ gubernatorial nominating convention.22 Yancey’s increased visibility did little to console him after Harrison’s election. In the Argus he lamented, ‘‘There’s no use in rubbing one’s eyes and blubbering over all ‘the ills that flesh is heir to.’—Red eyes, caused by anything but brandy, or its kindred, are scandalous looking affairs.’’ In April , unaware that the new president had died of pneumonia just thirty days after his inauguration, Yancey still warned that the administration promised a new round of alien and sedition acts and railed against ‘‘that body of Federalists and Abolitionists that nominated Harrison.’’ 23 With the national elections over and his local political involvement growing quickly, Yancey was ready to take the next logical step. In a letter to the voters of Coosa County in the Argus in April , he announced his candidacy for the lower house of the Alabama assembly. Yancey explained that voters could know his political creed from his editorials in the Greenville Mountaineer and the Cahaba Southern Democrat, ‘‘strict accordance with the true standard of the Democracy as acted upon by Jefferson, Jackson and Van Buren,’’ and he vowed to do what he could to oppose the Harrison administration.24 Although Yancey’s fear of national power continued to grow, at this point in his life and career he championed vigorous and imaginative activities undertaken by local and state governments. Citing the work of English utilitarian philosopher and reformer Jeremy Bentham, whose creed was that politics should promote ‘‘the greatest good of the greatest number,’’ Yancey outlined a thoughtful program of reform to cut wasteful spending, while at the same time advocating the expansion of state services to serve the needs of the masses. But Yancey also called for a ‘‘judicious plan of internal improvements’’ funded by the state. He reminded his readers that Alabama ‘‘has but just emerged from the wilderness . . . where hordes of savages have hitherto prevented its more rapid improvement.’’ The time had come, Yancey believed, for sweeping changes.25 

n

Politician

Benthamite ideals also influenced Yancey’s call for social reform guided by the state, reforms far more characteristic of northern society. He insisted that Alabamians reconsider the way they addressed crime and criminals. Yancey believed that if the punishment for a crime were too harsh and therefore seldom enforced, it would not serve as a deterrent. And he argued that Alabama’s penal code was far too severe: it still included the use of cropping, the pillory, the whipping post, and branding iron. He supported the creation of penitentiaries, stressing reform of prisoners and their return to a productive role in society. But for Yancey the best way to deter crime and to reform the individual was through education. Sounding the great Jeffersonian call for public education in a republic, Yancey supported free education for ‘‘the friendless poor.’’ Unafraid to tax and spend on issues he deemed vital for the public good, Yancey sought a ‘‘large sum wisely appropriated’’ for the education of every white child in Alabama.26 Yancey offered as a democratic measure a plan to elect U.S. congressmen on a ‘‘general ticket,’’ a proposal that would let voters in the state elect all the states’ representatives. The existing, traditional system divided voters and representatives into geographic congressional districts. In fact, the campaign for a general ticket rather than the district system was merely an attempt by Alabama Democrats to destroy the Whig stranglehold on key congressional districts. Yancey first embraced this scheme at the Democratic gubernatorial nominating convention in . Under the current system Whigs dominated in two south Alabama districts that had large numbers of plantations and slaves; Democrats held two northern districts inhabited mostly by small farmers. Yancey’s district —represented by Dixon H. Lewis—contained elements of both. Statewide, Democrats had just demonstrated their power, rolling up a ,-vote victory for Van Buren. Aware of their statewide majority, Yancey and the Democrats knew that if voters across the state could select all congressmen through a general ticket, Democrats would prevail despite the concentration of Whig votes in the south. Lewis, whose incumbency was threatened under the district system, turned to Yancey for help and in return threw his considerable support behind Yancey’s election to the assembly. Yancey both invoked principles of pure democracy and pitted yeomen farmers against planters—tactics that he would reverse soon enough—by announcing that the district system gave large slaveholders unfair power in the state. He reasoned that minorities ‘‘should submit to the genius of our institutions, founded as they are upon the right of a Constitutional majority to rule,’’ a peculiar position from a man who would soon advocate the ‘‘right’’ of a minority to secede. The assembly adopted the general ticket system in Politician

n



, and in special congressional elections later that year Democrats won all five seats. Yancey vowed to defend the system, despite howls of protests from Whigs about its gross unfairness and expressions of concern from south Alabama Democrats who worried about the disproportionate influence and power displayed by their brethren to the north.27 As spring turned to summer, Yancey’s campaign heated up as well. He briefly assumed a post as alderman on the Wetumpka city council, and with his increased visibility leaped into civic boosterism—always an astute move in an election year. Yancey served on a special committee to consider raising salaries for the officers of city council, and resolved to have abstracts of meetings published and distributed free in city newspapers. Because that measure did not pass, scant record exists about his other activities on council, even the date his service terminated. At July  celebrations, a fellow Democrat hailed Yancey as the champion of the local yeomanry. Yancey astutely responded by toasting the people of his county and attacking the supposedly aristocratic Whigs: ‘‘The plough: Its one share in the bank of earth, is worth ten in a bank of paper.’’ 28 Whigs organized to stop Yancey. Four Whigs challenged him for the legislative seat; doctors H. N. Morris and John H. Thomas, Wetumpka’s mayor, William S. Kyle, and Lewis Kennedy, a Wetumpka alderman. ‘‘They are all staunch Whigs,’’ Yancey reported, ‘‘and as conspicuous as any in the county in hurrahing for ‘Tip and Ty,’ ’’ and drinking hard cider. ‘‘We welcome them to the field, in which we have for some months been awaiting the onset of a Whig champion—little dreaming, however, that there would start from its moorings such a perfect avalanche of whiggery.’’ The two doctors withdrew before the election, and Yancey easily beat the others with  votes to Kyle’s  and Kennedy’s . But at the same time, Alabama voters, in a statewide referendum, voted to return to the district system. When Yancey took his seat in December , his continued support for the general ticket system proved futile.29 The Alabama assembly in the early s, in the words of one historian, consisted of ‘‘men of modest talents at best.’’ It did so largely because it reflected the fiercely democratic values of the electorate. Alabamians were quintessential Jacksonians. They cherished their liberties and resented and suspected power wielded by others, whether in the state capital or federal government. As a result, their legislature had few long-term incumbents. The average assemblyman sat for only two terms, and roughly half of all members of all sessions were new to the job. It is no surprise, therefore, to find that few members had much sense of parliamentary procedure or that sessions of the legislature were chaotic; fisticuffs were not uncommon.30 

n

Politician

The assembly had distinctive trends. In ,  percent considered themselves farmers,  percent lawyers, and the rest were varied. Few were planters. Most assemblymen owned fewer than ten slaves. Whigs on average owned twice as many slaves as Democrats, and senators typically owned more than House members. Dozens owned none. Many early representatives came from Georgia or South Carolina. Although the typical legislator certainly had more wealth than the average voter, the assembly was fairly representative of the electorate.31 Yancey fit this mold. Alabamians cherished their autonomy and disliked professional politicians. They suspected great wealth and power, so expected their representatives to work quickly and conscientiously and then go home. The territorial assembly had been one of the best paid in the country, at five dollars per day. But after charges of extravagance, assemblymen voted to reduce their pay to four dollars a day, a figure that remained until the Civil War. Through the s, legislators met for three hours each morning, three each afternoon, and two more hours each night, six days a week, including Christmas.32 As it turned out, Yancey’s first campaign for public office lasted longer than his tenure. The assembly convened November  in Tuscaloosa, then the state capital. Yancey received appointments to committees on internal improvements, public printing, and the judiciary. For the most part he sat uncharacteristically silent as more seasoned members of the house took care of business. On November  he introduced his first bill, a simple procedural one fixing the time of holding courts in Coosa and Autauga Counties. It passed. On November  a bill came forward twice to repeal the General Ticket. Both times it passed; both times Yancey voted nay. On November  Yancey attempted to fulfill a campaign promise to support penitentiaries by introducing a bill to provide for payment for the commissioners of the state institution, state workers whose salary had been neglected by the assembly. After almost a month, his bill was referred to the Committee on Accounts, where frugal assemblymen first reduced compensation from five to three dollars per day, and then killed the bill altogether. These commissioners had to continue working without pay.33 Yancey’s most dramatic moment and notable speech came in a debate over bank reform. The Argus, edited in Yancey’s absence by J. W. Warren, reported Yancey’s call for an investigation of the state bank. Yet Yancey rose to oppose a reform bill proposed in the House because, he claimed, it would give an investigating committee power comparable to the ‘‘Star Chamber and Courts of High Commission in England.’’ Given a choice between defending the rights of his constituents and voting for this measure to reform the state bank, Yancey meloPolitician

n



dramatically declared that it was better ‘‘that your banks in ruins shall cover the earth, than that you should erect for their preservation an institution founded upon the broken fragments of your Constitution.’’ Yancey engaged in nothing else of note before the adjournment of the session on January , , and decided not to seek reelection.34 Although his brief experience in the assembly proved productive, he apparently satisfied himself, his constituents, and his political allies, and antagonized no one of importance. Not even a petition by citizens of Wetumpka urging Yancey to run for mayor tempted him to remain in politics. Mounting debt forced him to leave the newspaper business and to turn to the legal profession. By March  the Argus had almost , in accounts due, and Yancey sold the paper to J. W. Warren. In a final editorial, Yancey sounded a rare conciliatory note: ‘‘I may have unwittingly injured the feelings of many, and have borne too harshly upon the character of others. If so, I regret it.’’ 35 After completing his legal studies and gaining admission to the bar late the previous year, Yancey began to practice in the circuit and courts of Coosa, Autauga, and Montgomery Counties. Again, Yancey struggled to establish himself and to earn enough money to support his family. After going it alone for a few months, in June  he formed a partnership with Sampson W. Harris. The same age as Yancey and a fellow Georgian, Harris had begun his practice in . Like all Yancey’s future law partners, Harris had important political connections. In  the general assembly selected Harris as solicitor, a position he held until  when he won election to the state senate from Coosa and Autauga. Harris’s connections probably secured his new partner an appointment as commissioner for Coosa County for a newly established Bankruptcy Court, a post that brought Yancey no great fame but at least a little extra income. Not only did Yancey’s senior partner offer experience and invaluable political advantages, but also, through the marriage of Harris’s aunt to the Shorter clan, further increased Yancey’s connection to that radical, states’ rights family.36 But in a matter of months politics lured Yancey away from his new law practice. In the spring of  many residents of Autauga County asked Yancey to stand for election in the state senate district composed of Autauga and Coosa. After publishing a statement that he did not desire public office—standard fare for the time—and ascertaining that the incumbent, William W. Morris, would not seek reelection, Yancey agreed to run.37 The issue that drew Yancey back into politics was whether or not to count slaves in apportioning representatives in the General Assembly districts. Ala

n

Politician

bama did not do so at the time, but Whigs launched a drive for change to the ‘‘federal basis,’’ which counted slaves as three-fifths of a person both for purposes of taxation and representation. The founding fathers had agreed to this compromise at the Constitutional Convention in , when northern states had begun to end slavery within their borders. Southerners wanted slaves to count toward representation in Congress, demanding that property should count as people. Northerners reacted in disbelief, offering only to count slaves as people for purposes of federal taxation. Southerners, in turn, fumed that this discriminated against slaveholders; few northerners would face a slave tax and, obviously, the southern slaveholder would pay such a tax, not the slaves. In the end delegates quickly and mysteriously settled on a ratio of three-fifths of each slave for both representation and taxation, thus reducing by  percent the potential representation of the black population in the South, whereas in the North a free black counted as fully human. Nevertheless, in both the North and South most Americans quickly and mistakenly concluded that the federal basis had increased southern power in Congress. Whigs in Alabama (and the rest of the South) tended to own more slaves than Democrats. Because the state then counted only the white population for assembly districts, adding any proportion of the slave population, as in the federal basis, would augment slaveholders’ power, and therefore bolster the Whigs. Despite the fact that few white Alabamians balked at getting additional seats in Congress from their slave population, many—especially Democrats—correctly believed that within the state assembly such a reapportionment would give undue influence and power to large Whig slaveholders. These stalwart Jacksonian Democrats called for the ‘‘white basis’’ of representation. After Yancey announced his candidacy the incumbent, Morris, changed his mind and ran in support of the federal basis. ‘‘I attempt to represent the great mass of the people versus the aristocracy,’’ Yancey trumpeted. ‘‘You are to be lulled into security and ease. . . . If you remain quiet the active and vigilant tools of the wealthy will succeed at the ballot box [and] . . . commit to the hands of a slaveholding minority the whole power of the State.’’ 38 The campaign largely divided voters along class lines, and Yancey’s typical bravado helped increase the tension. ‘‘I am in the midst of an animated contest,’’ he reported to his brother. ‘‘How it will terminate, I cannot positively say, tho’ I think I shall beat him [Morris]  votes.’’ Several of the richest men in the two counties actively opposed Yancey, including Howell Rose, the wealthiest planter in Coosa. Dixon Hall, a nephew of Dixon Hall Lewis, stood among the Politician

n



few prominent men to endorse Yancey. But Yancey counted on both a strong turnout among the yeomanry and upon Morris’s ‘‘acknowledged inferiority on the stump.’’ 39 On that stump Yancey used dubious logic to defend the federal basis for national representation while simultaneously denouncing it within his state. The Constitution’s three-fifth’s clause, he explained, came about so the South could ‘‘counteract the overwhelming influence of the free population in the free States.’’ Obviously, this concern did not exist within slave states. According to Yancey, Morris and all those supporting the federal basis believed, ‘‘The owner of a hundred and fifty slaves . . . casts one vote as a ‘free person’ and ninety votes as a slave-holder—ninety being ‘three-fifths’ of one hundred and fifty.’’ Most of the egalitarian-minded voters of Yancey’s district agreed that such a ‘‘monstrous inequality’’ would be intolerable. They gave , votes to Yancey and , to Morris. The editor of the Jacksonville Republican in northern Alabama exclaimed, ‘‘The Federal or ‘Nigger’ Basis can never be sustained when such men as Yancey will go forth and expose its odious features before a free people.’’ 40 As a state senator Yancey fulfilled many of his campaign promises. He helped preserve the white basis of representation in the state and gave particular attention to the state penitentiary. Typical of most penitentiaries in the South at the time, Alabama’s was dark, stultifying, dispensed harsh punishment, produced high rates of illness and death, and was chronically underfunded. Located just north of Wetumpka, the penal institution obviously concerned Yancey and his constituents. Completed in  with a final cost nearly , over its , budget, the -cell facility took in its first inmate in , a man sentenced to twenty years for harboring a runaway slave. No separate facilities existed for free black or white female inmates, much to the shock of genteel, honorable white southerners. The costs of staffing—a warden, clerk, store keeper, turnkey, guards, a physician, and others—doubled the appropriations from the legislature. Often staff members, including the warden, threatened to resign unless they received back pay. The legislature, like others across the nation, preferred to make the penitentiary generate its own income rather than to tax their own constituents.41 As chair of the Senate Committee on the Penitentiary, Yancey acted thoughtfully and diligently. He moved to print copies of a report on the institution, ‘‘with a table annexed, showing the names, ages, crimes, &c. of the convicts, for the use of the Senate,’’ which resulted in annual state inspection reports. He worked with members of the lower house to appoint three inspectors for the penitentiary, and made sure that the assembly knew about the letters from con

n

Politician

victs requesting the assembly to reelect the current warden. Believing that the facility should generate revenue rather than deficits, Yancey pushed for inspectors to inquire about the costs of having convicts manufacture rope. Equally important to Yancey was the treatment of convicts. He advised that punishment of convicts be left to the discretion of the warden, physician, and inspectors, but sought to ban whipping. He moved that the senate respond to the recommendation of the inspectors and physicians to modify the cell doors; at the time they blocked all light and had six-inch-square apertures near the top for ventilation. Yancey called for the convicts themselves to construct new grated iron doors, a change that relieved some of the most inhumane aspects of penitentiary life.42 His zeal for reform also led Yancey to champion the cause of women’s rights. The issue of married women’s property rights had begun to sweep through statehouses across the country, and Yancey, sensitized to this issue because of the plight of his mother, stood ready to promote change in Alabama. The chair of the Judiciary Committee prepared a majority report for the senate stating that it was inexpedient at the time to pass a bill entitled ‘‘an act to regulate conjugal rights as regards property.’’ Yancey, a member of the committee, wanted to issue his own minority report. The senate used delaying tactics to prevent either side from airing their opinions, and the session ended with no action on the issue.43 Yancey’s record on other issues was inconsistent. Although he had campaigned for internal improvements by the state, in the senate he thwarted important measures to promote them. He successfully had the senate reconsider its vote to approve a loan at  percent interest to the Montgomery & West Point Railroad Company, and, distrustful of concentrations of wealth and power, he opposed a measure to incorporate another railroad company. Yet he shepherded a petition from his constituents to have the state fund roads in Autauga County. Fear of concentrations of power also made him wary of the state bank. Yancey opposed a measure to give the bank power to appoint agents empowered to serve notices, attachments, and executions to collect money due. Yancey’s own . debt to the bank on security of property worth , certainly piqued his interest in this measure.44 An international issue came to the attention of Alabama lawmakers in early January . All Americans watched anxiously as rumors spread of possible British or American acquisition of Texas. In either eventuality lay the possibility that nonslaveholders might determine the future of slavery in Texas. The Alabama assembly sent a joint resolution to Congress warning ‘‘that any interference upon the part of any foreign government with the question of slavery as it exists in Texas, is highly dangerous and unjustifiable,’’ and indicated a dePolitician

n



termination by such a foreign power ‘‘to affect the relation of master and slave in this Republic, with a design eventually, to effect the abolishment of slavery here.’’ 45 The senate adjourned thirteen days after issuing this missive, thus concluding Yancey’s assembly career. The next steps in his political life would include Texas, slavery, and western territories in general, and it would also provide the last leg of his journey from unionist to secessionist. Early in , President John Tyler appointed Senator William R. King of Alabama as minister to France. Governor Benjamin Fitzpatrick filled King’s place in the Senate with Dixon Hall Lewis. The congressional seat vacated by Lewis opened the way for Yancey’s first run at national office. Not yet thirty years old, Yancey had public support, the patronage of Lewis, and the selfconfidence to seek a congressional seat. But yet again, family and financial concerns nearly thwarted him.46 Yancey had long relied upon the largesse of his more successful younger brother, continually turning to Ben for money as well as advice. But Ben had become embroiled in his own troubles. Three years earlier he had moved to Hamburg, in the Edgefield district of South Carolina, to establish his own law practice, believing that the area offered him better prospects. A year after his move, at the age of twenty-four, Ben married nineteen-year-old Laura Hines, a native of Hancock County, Georgia. But then his fortunes suddenly changed. A series of insults and misunderstandings starting in the summer of  led to a challenge to a duel from Samuel McGowen. The dispute began over an insult to John ‘‘Jock’’ Cunningham, a cousin of the Yanceys, regarding an alleged ‘‘attempt upon the virtue of a lady.’’ 47 Jock Cunningham had a brutal streak in him. In  he would be indicted for rape. The woman in question in  supposedly wished to be Cunningham’s mistress and consented to an affair, but when she learned that he had no intention to support her she decided to seek a ‘‘true womans revenge.’’ 48 Meanwhile, Ben Yancey stood resolutely by the side of his cousin. Ben’s reactions were unusual. At first he seemed quite willing to risk his life in a duel. He sought counsel from Edgefield’s infamous duelists and emerging secessionists, Preston Brooks and Louis Wigfall. Both urged caution. Brooks advised Yancey to ‘‘avoid a collision by any means.’’ Wigfall agreed that the situation called for restraint. From first-hand experience in his own recent series of duels, Wigfall noted that all of Edgefield had grown sick of challenges, postings, and duels, but added, ‘‘I trust in God that you have been practicing [shooting] steadily.’’ 49 Ironically, a different tragedy ended the chance of an 

n

Politician

armed conflict. In the first days of , Laura Hines Yancey died of unspecified causes shortly before her twenty-second birthday. Intermediaries arranged an end to the potential duel out of respect for Ben’s grief.50 All this obviously distracted William Yancey, who worried for his brother’s safety and honor and mourned the loss of Laura. But he had other concerns as well. Once again William Yancey faced financial disaster. Politicking and public service had hardly advanced his fledgling law practice, and his run for Congress threatened to ruin him. Despite selling the Wetumpka Argus, he had debts of , and owed , to his law partner, Sampson Harris, secured by deed of trust on all nine of his slaves, Agrippa, Mary and her son, Jane and her child, Diana and her child, Joe, and Turner. The terms of the deed allowed Harris to sell any or all of these slaves at ten days’ notice, keeping Yancey ‘‘in dependence of Harris[’s] good will.’’ Yancey estimated the value of their law practice at ,, but because his partner was already wealthy, Yancey believed that Harris would not ‘‘nurse’’ the practice once Yancey left to take a seat in Congress. He therefore asked Ben to pick up Harris’s note on the slaves. ‘‘The property you see is  pr. ct. more than the amount due & is yearly increasing by births,  [of the slaves] being breeders!’’ William assured his brother that he could pay off the note within two years. Although the record is incomplete, it appears that Ben did as William asked.51 After Ben came to his rescue again, William returned his attention to the congressional campaign. In June a Democratic Party convention in the third district of Alabama selected Yancey as their party’s nominee, despite the protests of some that he was too young and that others had served the party longer.52 Yancey launched his campaign by pledging to visit all eight counties in the district, allowing him one week in each before the August election. He stumped the countryside and courted the votes of planter and yeoman alike, confirming his reputation as an orator through the nearly one hundred speeches he delivered. The hospitality of these people saved him from having to spend money on food and board; Yancey would later boast, ‘‘I was elected twice to Congress and my canvass did not cost me .’’ He announced that his editorials in the Cahaba Southern Democrat, the Wetumpka Argus, and the Southern Crisis, and his actions and remarks in the legislature, clarified his positions on the issues. If elected to Congress he vowed to oppose the power of the federal government embodied by Henry Clay and his call for protective tariffs, a new national bank, and internal improvements. He called for an independent treasury, low tariffs, ‘‘an economical administration of the general government—a strict and rigid Politician

n



construction of the federal constitution.’’ He also joined the swelling ranks of Americans—southerners in particular—in demanding the ‘‘re-annexation of Texas.’’ 53 An invitation by Georgia Democrats to speak at Macon marked Yancey’s growing reputation and influence. Unable to attend because of his promise to campaign vigorously in his district, he wrote an open letter to Georgia Democrats in which he blasted Whigs, Henry Clay, and nationalism. He urged fellow Democrats from his home state to oppose the ‘‘‘bastard system of Federal Republicanism,’ now advocated by the Whigs,’’ and to work to broaden ‘‘the area of constitutional freedom.’’ As he had begun to do only a few years before, Yancey hammered away on the politics of slavery. He asked rhetorically, ‘‘Will the people of a cotton growing and slave holding State sustain the cause of ‘Clay and Protection,’ . . . deny us Texas, because its annexation would ‘perpetuate slavery?’ ’’ Surely the people of Georgia did not truly believe that nationalistic Whigs would shield white southerners from the ‘‘blood hounds of Northern Abolition!’’ Yancey also struck a theme that would grow more and more central to his political strategy. He urged southern voters to ‘‘break the strong chain of party despotism,’’ to unite as southerners and to work together for the good of their region, or, as he put it, for principle. He singled out Congressman Absalom H. Chappell of Georgia, a Whig (and friend of Dixon Hall Lewis from their days at Mt. Zion Academy), as a stellar example of a southerner who stood for principle by defending the interests of the slave states. And in stark contrast to his prior opposition to nullification, Yancey now praised the defiant course of former governor George M. Troup of Georgia, who had disobeyed the administration of President John Quincy Adams by surveying and distributing Creek Indian land in his state on the grounds of state sovereignty. Yancey urged other Georgians to act as boldly.54 Yancey’s Whig opponent, Daniel E. Watrous, was a native of Vermont who had moved to Alabama in . Watrous sat in the state senate for sixteen years and had served with Yancey on both the Judiciary and Penitentiary Committees.55 Whigs sent a series of speakers to encounter Yancey early on, and Watrous only faced Yancey directly at the end of the eight-week campaign. Watrous at one point stunned Yancey by challenging the Democrat on his strong states’ rights positions by producing copies of the Greenville Mountaineer, a relic of Yancey’s unconditional unionism of nine years before. Yancey defused the situation with humor. He simply laughed and loudly asked, ‘‘Well, Watrous, where the devil did you get that old thing from?’’ In the end Yancey narrowly defeated Watrous, , votes to ,.56 

n

Politician

Notwithstanding the margin, Yancey boasted to his brother of a victory that came despite the opposition of some within his own party and the leading Whig planters and politicians in the district. He surely exaggerated when he reported that the Whigs ‘‘openly proclaimed that they would have given half the legislature to beat me!’’ 57 Yancey’s victory gained the attention and approval of the Charleston Mercury, already established as the voice of extreme states’ rights and organ of secessionist Robert Barnwell Rhett. The Mercury predicted a brilliant career for Yancey and proclaimed him an emerging political leader in Alabama.58 While Yancey now clearly stood as an advocate of states’ rights, he just as surely continued to denounce secession. He spurned the Bluffton movement of South Carolina in , when Barnwell Rhett threatened disunion over the repeal of the Gag Rule, the possibility of a new, higher tariff, or congressional inaction on Texas. Yancey was particularly dismayed to learn that his cousin Jock Cunningham had joined the ranks of the ‘‘Bluffton Boys’’ and urged secession. Just before his election to Congress he corresponded with his brother, who simultaneously sought (and won) election to the South Carolina assembly. As confident of Ben’s coming victory as he was of his own, the elder Yancey urged Ben to ‘‘put down the evil spirit of discord and nullification now attempting to rear its head in Carolina.’’ Yancey believed that men like Rhett had already done more harm to southern rights through their extremism than every Whig in the country had through their nationalism.59 So, as Yancey prepared to leave for the federal capital, he had staked out a precarious position. He stood ready to defend states’ rights but adamantly denied the right of secession. Anxious to stop runaway nationalism, he nevertheless supported vigorous federal efforts to annex Texas and thereby promote the interests of slave states. And Yancey’s success in embracing the southwestern version of honor, the importance of oratory, and the politics of slavery combined to prepare him to leap into existing conflict and controversy, as well as to cause a fair amount of both himself.

Politician

n



CHAPTER FIVE

Party and Honor When Yancey came to Washington, D.C., in , he arrived ready to talk. Quite contrary to the reserve that he had exhibited as a freshman assemblyman, the new congressman eagerly sought his first opportunity to speak. He stumbled, in his initial efforts, however. On December , he obtained the floor but yielded it quickly to a fellow Democrat. Given the honor of temporarily taking the Speaker’s chair, he declined, admitting his ‘‘entire want of acquaintance with the rules.’’ On December  he rose to speak about an independent treasury, but lost the floor before saying a word. It was not until the first days of  that Yancey gained his opportunity. Thomas Clingman, a Whig from North Carolina, denounced all Democrats for their extremism in demanding Texas annexation and accused John C. Calhoun of plotting destruction of the Union if Congress rejected Texas statehood, if it passed a new tariff bill, or most any excuse. On January , House Democrats selected Yancey to give their party’s response the next day.1 Yancey began his maiden speech by lamenting the baleful and divisive in-

fluence of political parties—standard stuff for all politicians of the era—but quickly proceeded to his primary target, Clingman. Yancey likened the Lone Star Republic to the star of Bethlehem, ‘‘appealing to us as freemen to forego our wranglings, and to accomplish in harmony the great destiny to which our principles devote us.’’ The Texas question, ‘‘by its towering greatness, overtops all minor issues—which is so well calculated to purify and elevate the national heart—to crush beneath its lofty patriotism and undoubted wisdom the contemptible machinations of the mere politician’’—meaning, of course, Clingman. Yancey asserted that the extension of slavery into Texas and the impact of slave expansion on existing slave states did not to matter to Clingman. Yancey explained that Alabamians looked upon Clingman as ‘‘one who has given a stab to the institutions of his own land, and wears the garb of its enemy.’’ When Clingman praised the repeal of Congress’s Gag Rule in , he had already proven himself dishonorable to Yancey.2 But Yancey was not finished. He quickly shifted his attack from South to North, aiming next at John Quincy Adams. Yancey had long despised the Whig congressman from Massachusetts and former president, particularly because Adams supported northern secession if Texas were to gain admission to the Union. Recalling the Federalist Hartford Convention of –, when some New England Federalists weighed disunion against continuing with their countrymen in the War of , Yancey blasted all of Massachusetts for so persistently threatening secession over their peculiar sectional interests.3 Continuing his theme of northern hostility to the South, Yancey referred to the major treaties negotiated by Adams, especially the Adams-Onís Treaty of  in which the United States forfeited its claim to Texas as part of the Louisiana Purchase. ‘‘Whenever the boundary lines of this Republic have been drawn in, and its territory clipt and circumscribed, it has invariably been under the auspices and peculiar direction of Massachusetts statesmen,’’ a result, Yancey charged, of ‘‘that old federal[ist] leaven which yet exists in the heart of the Commonwealth—which is ever prone to circumscribe the liberties of mankind.’’ He demanded Texas for the safety of the South, which had lost strength in Congress ever since ‘‘the fatal Missouri Compromise.’’ 4 These persistent northern attacks, Yancey explained, did not arise from mere political rivalry but instead from northern hostility to slavery. So Yancey defended slavery and attacked free society, letting loose a viciously racist salvo. He spoke of free blacks in the North, ‘‘with flat nose, thick lips . . . and skin redolent of rare odors’’ entering ‘‘the parlors of the proud Puritan . . . and even invited to the arms of, the fair-skinned, cherry-lipped, and graceful daughter Party and Honor

n



of that famed race,’’ unable nevertheless to assimilate into society, preferring to ‘‘revel in the brothel until imprisoned in a jail or penitentiary.’’ He recited familiar arguments about the supposed superiority of slave over free labor. When northerners ‘‘spoke of the effects of slavery on the southern character, and stigmatized the southern people as slavebreeders—as those who sold the image of Christ,’’ Yancey answered that they both exposed their ignorance and twisted facts. No doubt with Rev. Beman in mind, Yancey charged that abolitionists, ‘‘in the name of humanity and religion . . . steal our property, induce others to do so, and would aid England in her attempts to abolish the institution altogether and teach us ‘slave-breeders’ lessons of morality!’’ Besides the northerner’s superiority in ‘‘his hunt after lucre,’’ in what ways, Yancey asked, was he superior to ‘‘the sons of the sunny South?’’ But just as his diatribe grew more impassioned and less substantial, his time expired and the chair’s mallet fell.5 Yancey’s speech elicited only a passing reference in Adams’s diary, but drew quite a response from across the country. Yancey proudly clipped newspaper articles and editorials that lauded his stand for slavery, Texas, and the South. The Richmond Enquirer reported that Yancey’s speech ‘‘strikes like lightning from Heaven,’’ and predicted a great career for the Alabamian unless the attention he now received swelled his ego. Recalling the meteoric rise of the Democrat’s presidential candidate the year before, a little-known governor of Tennessee that the press labeled ‘‘Who is James K. Polk?’’ the Enquirer offered, ‘‘The question now is, Who is William L. Yancey?’’ In turn, the newspaper cited the Baltimore Sun, which compared Yancey to British statesman Charles James Fox, called him a ‘‘great friend of Calhoun,’’ and—Yancey must have either laughed or winced—reported that he was wealthy.6 The press accounts of  also offered the most accurate indications of Yancey’s appearance, as confirmed by later photographs. Newspapers described the young orator as quite ordinary in appearance. Of average height for the day, he stood five feet seven inches tall, was ‘‘rather stout,’’ with a round face and a forehead of ‘‘great expansion.’’ Contemporaries also noted his fair complexion and blue eyes.7 The reactions to Yancey’s Texas speech drew more than the attention or adulation from the press. It evoked a sharp retort from Thomas Clingman, whose honor Yancey had besmirched. During Yancey’s tirade Clingman had tried but failed to gain the floor. Yancey had tersely cut him off, saying, ‘‘I wish no explanation from the gentleman from North Carolina. Explanations elsewhere.’’ Later, Clingman sent Yancey a note asking if he meant that Clingman was ‘‘de

n

Party and Honor

ficient in integrity, honor or any other quality requisite to the character of a gentleman.’’ The next day Yancey replied, ‘‘Of the language I did use or of my motives, I have no explanation to make.’’ On January , two days after the speech, both men removed to Baltimore to escape the tense atmosphere in Washington. Yancey sought help from his late father’s former law partner, Daniel E. Huger, now a U.S. senator and his housemate in Washington. Senator Huger sent a relative, John M. Huger, to assist Yancey. Other aides included Congressman Armistead Burt of South Carolina, an ally of Robert Barnwell Rhett, and Senator James Buchanan of Pennsylvania, the future president and close friend of Alabama’s William R. King. Burt served as Yancey’s courier during an exchange of four notes with Clingman, who persisted in asking if Yancey’s words were deliberate or flowed from the heat of the moment. Twice Yancey replied, ‘‘I deem any explanation superfluous.’’ On January  Clingman decided the matter himself: ‘‘Having failed in all my efforts for an amicable adjustment of the difficulty between us, nothing remains for me but to demand of you the satisfaction usual among gentlemen.’’ Yancey immediately accepted the challenge to a duel.8 A buzz of excitement swept through the capital. Congressman Howell Cobb of Georgia, a Democrat, wrote to his wife that Yancey deserved ample praise for his speech, but concluded, ‘‘Our southern youths are too hot-headed. . . . I hope for his wife and childrens sakes that the matter may not end fatally—for either party.’’ Congressman John McCalla of North Carolina noted, ‘‘The act of Congress against dueling is very severe.’’ Both Yancey and Clingman knew that as well, so they agreed to meet in Beltsville, Maryland, twelve miles north of Washington, just south of the town of Bladensburg, site of the Cilley-Graves duel that Yancey so forcefully defended while editor of the Cahaba Democrat seven years before.9 The primaries, their seconds, and other supporters gathered on Sunday evening, January . Each combatant had a large entourage. John Huger served as Yancey’s second. Joining them were Armistead Burt, Alexander B. Meek of Alabama, Alabama congressmen James E. Belser and Reuben Chapman, North Carolina congressman Romulus M. Saunders, and two doctors, Gwynn and Tate, both friends of Yancey’s from Mississippi. Charles Lee Jones, a resident of Washington, served as Clingman’s second. These two were joined by two congressmen, Kenneth Rayner of North Carolina and John M. S. Cassin of Maryland, and a local physician named Gibson. The seconds selected a site and agreed to weapons and conditions: smooth bore pistols, with one ball in each, at only ten paces. The duelists had six seconds to fire.10 Party and Honor

n



Local authorities could not help knowing about the drama unfolding in their town. On the morning of the affair, police entered the hotel that housed Yancey and his party. Meek and Chapman intercepted the officers in the parlor, willing to have themselves arrested in order to buy time for the duelists. Yancey and Huger escaped from the second floor and rapidly made their way on foot to the dueling grounds. Back at the hotel, the police, unaware of Yancey’s escape, finally had enough of delays and set out to find him in town. Meek and Chapman then ran outside and ordered a carriage driver to ride quickly; Meek had the dueling pistols. Once all parties assembled Clingman and Yancey paced apart and Huger and Jones began to count six seconds. The police closed rapidly on Yancey just as Clingman fired. His ball flew over Yancey’s head. Yancey returned fire, hitting the ground a few feet in front of Clingman. Each later claimed that he intentionally shot to miss. Through their seconds, both finally agreed that they had intended their remarks to be political, not personal. The affair was over. Bowing to custom, the Beltsville authorities consigned criminal proceedings to Congress itself, where both principals took their seat the day after combat.11 The results of the duel were almost as dramatic as the affair itself. Congressman Preston King of New York immediately moved to create a committee to investigate the duel, yet he announced he had already determined to urge expulsion for both members. Congressman Adams noted, ‘‘A mock debate of two hours—Rayner and Causin [sic] for the bullies, and Hannibal Hamlin [of New York] for the Yankees.’’ William W. Payne of Alabama replied that if King had been one of the parties involved that ‘‘he would trample upon, yea, he would spit upon the act of expulsion.’’ Rayner considered King’s motion ‘‘tyranny.’’ The motion failed  to , and no further action took place.12 Public reaction, however, had just begun. The Whig press of Boston took particular interest in the story, devoting several long columns to denouncing Yancey. The Boston Atlas rebuked Yancey for hypocrisy. While attacking northerners who cried for disunion if Congress annexed Texas, Yancey failed to condemn southerners who demanded secession if Texas were not annexed ( just as Yancey predicted in a letter to Ben a few months before). The Atlas editors proved themselves as well versed as any southerner in the rhetoric of honor and manhood. With little regard for accuracy, they wrote, ‘‘Mr. Yancey is about twenty-six or twenty-seven years of age, extremely boyish both in appearance and manners.’’ An apt specimen of the South and the Southwest, the editors continued, Yancey lacked the social graces of ‘‘the polished society of the world.’’ They described him as ‘‘cadaverous, his face beardless, and his lips color

n

Party and Honor

less and thin.’’ They mistakenly reported that he had killed his brother-in-law in a street fight in Alabama (it was his wife’s uncle in South Carolina), and concluded that ‘‘the consequences of the deed have had a fatal effect on his happiness ever since that occurrence. It is no doubt owing to this circumstance, that his mind is perpetually racked with remorse, and that he would rather be rid of this world than not.’’ The Atlas editors characterized the speech that provoked Clingman as ‘‘made up of the most silly school boy trash, mingled with the vain glorious, coxcomb declamation of Southern chivalry. . . . This was doing tolerably well for a beardless boy, who probably had never twice been out of the confines of Alabama.’’ It was the same Boston Atlas that reproduced a blurb from the Troy Whig stating that Yancey was ‘‘noted for his disorderly and lawless conduct’’ while a student at Williams College and that his expulsion resulted from throwing a pickle barrel through the window of a Methodist meeting house.13 Reactions in the South were mixed. The Charleston Mercury lauded Yancey’s remarks. A Democrat friend of Howell Cobb lamented, ‘‘What a misfortune Yancey did not bore his man through,’’ and a Whig and family friend of Thomas Clingman called the entire episode ‘‘a rascally Democratic move to get Tom out of their way.’’ 14 Even some Alabamians castigated Yancey, especially the Mobile Register, a Whig organ. When Yancey sent a sharply worded reply, the editors printed the ‘‘testy letter . . . uncivil and unreasonable as it is,’’ but the Register, like the Boston Atlas, concluded that ‘‘a strange delusion which we cannot account for, has gotten possession of his mind and spoiled his temper.’’ When Yancey read an accusation in the Selma Free Press—a paper that had opposed his nomination to Congress—that he had spoken about dueling during his congressional canvass the previous summer, Yancey exploded. ‘‘I care not for the opinions of an anonymous scribbler, who may or may not be an honorable man,’’ but he felt compelled to respond to and refute this charge so that concerned readers would not ‘‘condemn me unheard.’’ Yancey’s reply so impressed the editor of the Free Press that he later endorsed Yancey for reelection.15 Yancey also stood in judgment by both state and church. Alabama law made dueling within the state a felony, and disqualified from public office any Alabamian who dueled elsewhere. Proud of the actions taken by Yancey to defend both the South and his own honor, when the assembly convened for its next session it quickly passed a bill exempting Yancey from legal punishment. Governor Joshua L. Martin—a Democrat—vetoed the bill. In his veto message he explained that the bill robbed judges and juries of the right to indict and try; in other words, that the legislature had usurped judicial power. ‘‘What other or better definition of tyranny have we than that it is a government in which the Party and Honor

n



authority which makes the laws, also ascertains the guilt of offenders, and administers or dispenses the punishment consequent to the offense,’’ he explained. Unconvinced, the assembly overwhelmingly overrode the veto in January . Yancey added newspaper clippings about this to his scrapbook without note or comment.16 A more complex and lasting problem arose for Yancey from a reprimand he received in the Marion Alabama Baptist. The editor spared nothing in condemning Yancey. ‘‘All dueling is murder,’’ he announced, even if one’s foe survived, ‘‘for it was his intention to kill his antagonist.’’ Yancey, he charged, ‘‘committed a highhanded outrage against the law of God, trampled on the laws of the State of Alabama, and betrayed the trust as a representative of the people of this District.’’ A few days later Yancey wrote a response. He confessed that his reply to Clingman ‘‘was ardent, indignant, severe,’’ but emphasized, ‘‘I was challenged.’’ Then suddenly Yancey changed tack. He acknowledged that an honorable man could extricate himself from a duel if he both professed and genuinely practiced Christianity. But since Yancey confessed that he did neither, he had no honorable excuse for declining the duel. A refusal, he wrote, would have shamed himself and his constituents. ‘‘Blame me not then for accepting this challenge, for not in that consists my offense, but for a far greater evil for not being a christian.’’ 17 Religion always remained an important part of Yancey’s life, despite his reaction against many of the values held by his minister-stepfather. While in Congress, Yancey acknowledged that temptations surrounded him in the federal capital. He attended weekly congressional prayer meetings with ‘‘some few praying spirits.’’ Nevertheless, he confessed to Rev. William Mitchell of Montgomery, ‘‘Knowing the right, I still the wrong pursue, relying upon prayer to save me.’’ During his youth, Rev. Beman had led his family in morning and evening worship at home every day, and a later acquaintance noted that Yancey liked seeing a Bible in his friends’ homes and enjoyed offering dinner prayers. But Yancey obviously understood the difference between outward trappings and Christian practice. His mother reported to Ben that Yancey often prayed for God’s help and once sent her a bible with a note inscribed promising that ‘‘he would be a Christian.’’ During a religious revival in Wetumpka in  William wrote to Ben in the hope that his brother ‘‘will be brought into the fold of the church.’’ 18 Earlier in life, Yancey’s faith in God, his responsibilities to his family, and his dedication to the southern code of honor had seemed to blend seamlessly together. But henceforth they would not. Southern honor concerned itself with community standards and perceptions, and therefore varied from one 

n

Party and Honor

community to another. As a young man who sought acceptance in a wild, untamed frontier Alabama, Yancey found that his natural touchiness and violence complemented prevailing social standards and helped win the praise and validation he craved. But as he matured and as his standing in a religious community meant more to him, matters grew complicated and contradictory.19 Most religious communities in the South condemned dueling, or at least called for restraint. In fact gentlemen could refuse to participate in a duel because of their religious convictions and keep their honor intact. Alabama Baptists typified the official stance of southern churches on dueling; most considered it tantamount to murder if only because it often entailed the intent to commit murder. Furthermore, dueling placed private gratification over the public good and violated civil law. The duelist, therefore, exhibited a contempt for law that might produce anarchy. Evangelical churches—especially Yancey’s Presbyterian Church—stressed discipline, social order, and community. Most found unacceptable the notion of ‘‘a solitary Christian.’’ True virtue and honor, according to evangelicals, came from submission to the laws of both God and man.20 Yancey only now became aware of the tension between these divergent community standards. The contradictions between the two ideals festered and reemerged years later, with Yancey still unsure how to reach a resolution. Yancey’s introspection was short lived. Other than his public expression of anguish, he not only remained unrepentant for his actions but reveled in the attention he received, which in turn emboldened his rhetoric and oratory. So many friends and acquaintances wanted to know all the details involved in his affair of honor that Yancey decided to collect the relevant correspondence and publish a memorandum of the incident. The young congressman also became part of the capital’s social circle. He enjoyed countless hours talking about his father with Daniel Huger, and he hosted a dinner party in Washington with Secretary of State designate James Buchanan, who was part of Yancey’s entourage before the duel. Speaking invitations began pouring in from across the eastern seaboard.21 Yancey seldom declined. Yancey did turn down an invitation to speak at Tammany Hall in New York because, he explained, he had to remain in Congress to fight for Texas annexation. But Yancey’s written response took his case north. Less than a year after criticizing the members of the Bluffton Movement, Yancey now saw the dangers they had divined in the combination of tariff increases, repeal of the Gag Rule, and especially the exclusion of Texas. ‘‘I can see in all this a deeply seated hostility to the south—a disposition to circumscribe it—to surround it with people and institutions hostile to it,’’ he began. The Missouri Compromise, he Party and Honor

n



reminded New Yorkers, gave the free states the bulk of western territories, enough to make twenty-six new states, according to his calculations. Once the Union admitted Florida as a slave state, Yancey pointed out that slaveholders had nowhere else to turn. And yet, the prospect of Texas annexation—with the possibility of dividing that region into five slave states—‘‘frighten[s] northern men out of their wits about the enormous preponderance which annexation will bring to the South!’’ So, he concluded, while Maine pressed her lumber interests in Congress, western states called for federal internal improvements, Pennsylvania and New England sought advantage for their industry and New York for commerce, ‘‘the South but urges annexation as a protection against assailants! Do you not see the difference?’’ And like so many other defenders of slavery, Yancey asserted that northerners would cut their own throats by harming the peculiar institution. It was the produce of slave labor, not free labor, Yancey claimed, that resulted in the commercial prosperity of New York. He appealed to northern racism by warning that the destruction of slavery would ‘‘cover our land with a plague of free negro labor worse than that of the frogs of Egypt,’’ and Yancey correctly noted that the Constitution’s three-fifths provision that many northerners blamed for increasing southern political power actually limited representation. If northerners forced the end of slavery, African Americans in the South would suddenly count as five-fifths of a person for determining representation in Congress.22 The Texas question reached resolution in February . President Tyler and members of Congress, aware that antislavery sentiment in the North would block the two-thirds vote necessary to annex the Republic of Texas by treaty, brought Texas into the Union by a joint resolution of Congress, where a simple majority sufficed. Although pleased with the result, Yancey remained convinced that anti-southern attitudes endured in the North. By now Yancey saw northern plots everywhere. A proposal to restructure postal rates alarmed him. A bill came to the House that proposed changing from a graduated rate based on weight to a set rate of five cents per letter. The Treasury Department would make up the shortfall, up to four and a half million dollars. Proponents rushed the bill through the House in two hours. Yancey objected that he and his colleague, Georgia’s Howell Cobb, knew of no public outcry for this change in the postal service. ‘‘Few questions . . . involved more important principles’’ than this bill, Yancey announced. He believed that he understood who wanted it, and why. The cities of the North stood to gain ‘‘at the expense of the great mass of the country.’’ Yancey argued that protective tariffs already favored the Northeast most by creating more jobs there, and 

n

Party and Honor

that the postal bill would have the same effect. Tariffs forced the South to pay more for their iron, woolens and cotton textiles, and other consumer goods, and now the northeastern states wanted the South to subsidize the correspondence of their brokers, merchants, and investors. Despite his efforts and his vote, the postal bill passed.23 Congress adjourned on March , , and the day after the inauguration of President Polk Yancey returned to Alabama. He spent most of the next several months with Sarah and their children, including Dalton Huger Yancey, born only weeks before his homecoming. He left them only occasionally, as the demands of his law practice necessitated. In late spring a Democratic Party convention in his congressional district met at Centreville in Bibb County and unanimously nominated Yancey for a second term.24 In his acceptance speech Yancey recalled his work for Texas annexation and his efforts to prevent tariffs and federally funded internal improvements. He then spoke of continued American territorial expansion, especially the prospect of exclusive American control over the Oregon Country. Reenforcing the spirit of Manifest Destiny that had helped bring Polk to the White House, Yancey prophesied that the United States would one day spread from the Atlantic to the Pacific, and from the Gulf of Mexico to Canada. In this vast territory, Yancey insisted, states’ rights would remain supreme. The people of the Union would find themselves regulated only by their state legislatures, with the federal government concerned only with foreign policy. The voters of his district liked what they heard. The usually competitive Whigs of his district did not even bother to field an opponent. Yancey received , votes, over  more than all votes cast in the previous election, clearly revealing that he had achieved strong bipartisan support.25 With James K. Polk, another southern Democrat as president, Dixon Hall Lewis saw an opportunity for the southern portion of that party to seize the reigns of national power. ‘‘I do not propose any separate Party organization,’’ he explained to Yancey, but rather hoped to purge the national party of Democrats who favored tariffs and federal internal improvements. Lewis called it ‘‘unwhigging the Party.’’ He asked Yancey to use his continued influence with the Wetumpka Argus to help orchestrate opposition to the pending McKay bill, a proposal to raise federal tariff rates again. Lewis promised the support of John A. Campbell of Mobile, who had access to the Register of that city, James E. Belser and John T. Walshe, proprietors of the Montgomery Advertiser, and several assemblymen from across the state. By flooding state newspapers with anti-tariff editorials, Lewis believed that other editors would follow suit and, aided by Party and Honor

n



Lewis’s political correspondence, produce ‘‘manifestos from each of the Southern states [that,] coming at once upon Congress, will be like a clap of thunder from a clear sky.’’ Lewis asked Yancey, ‘‘Will you draw your long claymore and throw away the scabbard, or shall I go into fight singlehanded[?]’’ 26 Yancey enthusiastically joined Lewis. Although immersed in his law practice Yancey penned an editorial for the Argus. Lewis’s plan did not fully materialize, but of greater importance for Yancey, Lewis’s efforts increased Yancey’s influence among southerners in Congress, especially John C. Calhoun. Lewis’s scheme also planted an idea for Yancey, that the Democratic Party must be made subservient to southerners’ particular demands.27 Because Calhoun already believed this, Yancey moved yet another step closer toward his old foe. When Yancey returned to Washington in December he resumed the conspicuous and caustic role that he had forged during the previous session. When a congressman from New York presented a memorial from his constituents urging the abolition of slavery in the federal capital, Yancey and a majority moved to have it tabled, showing that even without the Gag Rule southerners were determined and able to stifle attacks on slavery. Early in  Robert Barnwell Rhett—next to whom Yancey now sat on the House floor—disrupted the House by sparring with John Quincy Adams over Oregon and Adams’s role in the War of . It was Yancey, not the Speaker of the House, who shouted that Adams was out of order. On February  the House considered a resolution to recess for two days in honor of George Washington’s birthday. When a colleague objected, Yancey angrily demanded that the representative show his face. Orville Hungerford of New York, unafraid of the southern duelist, responded firmly, ‘‘I show my face, and I object. Are you satisfied?’’ During a debate over tariffs Yancey proclaimed that the early death of the first Whig president, William Henry Harrison, was divine providence. ‘‘The spoiler had hardly begun his career before the God of truth, of honor, and of justice, frowned upon him,’’ Yancey explained.28 During his first term Yancey had savaged Adams; in his second, he selected another Massachusetts giant, Daniel Webster, as a special target. Most of his contemporaries considered Webster the greatest orator of his day. With Clay and Calhoun, he dominated national politics for the first half of the nineteenth century. His five foot ten inch, -pound frame, dark hair and eyes, keen mind, and powerful voice combined in a formidable way; a poet of a later generation suggested that Webster could beat the devil before a jury. But Webster did not frighten the young Yancey. He focused his attack on the efforts of forty promi

n

Party and Honor

nent men in Massachusetts who raised , for Webster for ‘‘services which he was to render.’’ The subscribers saw their gift as compensation for what Webster would have earned as a lawyer. Yancey called it a bribe to support high tariffs and other commercial interests. But, as correctly pointed out by Yancey’s colleague and former college classmate James Dixon, a Whig from Connecticut, much of Yancey’s assault fell on the Whig Party rather than Webster.29 When Alabama Whig Henry Hilliard insisted that Webster ‘‘was respected, honored, and loved abroad, and that he was the proudest boast of every American,’’ Yancey snapped back that Hilliard ‘‘should despise himself as an American, if he could think so.’’ Yancey wondered what Webster had ever done to earn the respect of foreigners. He reminded the House of Webster’s stubborn opposition to the War of  and accused him of refusing to support American soldiers during the British attack on Washington, D.C., and asked if those were the reasons that the British loved him. Yancey asked sarcastically if British love for Webster stemmed from his accepting , from a British banking firm, Baring Brothers, for his legal opinion on American state debts. ‘‘Was it on this that my colleague based his estimate of Mr. Webster’s exalted character—an opinion given to a foreign Jew money-lender against his own countrymen?’’ As Yancey pounded away, searching for the supposed noble qualities that gave Webster the sobriquet ‘‘the God-like,’’ he concluded that Webster ‘‘has two characters, which, Proteus-like, he can assume, as his interests or necessities demand—the ‘God-like’ and the ‘Hell-like’—the ‘God-like Daniel,’ and ‘Black Dan!’ ’’ 30 Mundane matters occupied much of Yancey’s time. He presented constituents’ petitions for land claims, a request for a new mail route, and he tried to help friends find jobs in the government.31 He briefly demonstrated some of the same zeal for reform he had shown in Alabama. He supported a bill to set aside public land for sale to pay for the printing of books for the blind. His fiscal conservatism led him to call for a reduction of pay for Indian agents in the Oregon Territory from , a year to ,. That measure passed, but he failed to win a vote aimed at limiting the number of translators to four for the entire Oregon Territory.32 Yancey always had a knack for turning a dull matter into a diatribe. He turned a bland discussion over pension laws into a primer on both fiscal and political responsibility. He blasted fellow congressmen for voting to spend public money to print over , copies of these laws. ‘‘Let gentlemen go to the Library [of Congress], and there seek the information they require.’’ Or, if they needed more detail, they should have spoken to their constituents. But he did not think Party and Honor

n



that many would do that because if they were to ‘‘confess their ignorance before the people, the probability was, they would not have obtained their seats at all.’’ The House chose not to take his advice, and ordered the documents printed.33 Even more alarming to Yancey than wasteful spending were protective tariffs and internal improvements. In them he saw several dangers: the corruption of the Democratic Party, violations of the Constitution, and the possibility of a northern majority running roughshod over the South. Like Dixon Lewis, Yancey grew sickened at those northern and western Democrats who stood with Whigs on these issues. Reminding these colleagues that their party’s platform stood opposed to both, Yancey attacked these men—including Stephen A. Douglas of Illinois—as ‘‘pretended Democrats.’’ 34 ‘‘Party has no charms for me, if not based on principle,’’ he proclaimed. On March , Yancey spoke at length against federal funds for most internal improvements, arguing that the Constitution provided strict guidelines for these and that no clause existed specifying the collection of revenue for a general system of internal improvements. He also attacked the notion that such spending would bind together the Union. ‘‘Never was reasoning more absurd,’’ he explained, because a northern numerical majority would guarantee that they received a disproportionate share of these works and cited federal documents to show that the free states had in fact acquired a far greater share of these projects than slave states, despite the longer southern coastline and extent of major rivers. ‘‘Economy, low duties, a scrupulous regard for State rights, a non-exercise of doubtful powers,’’ Yancey offered, would do far more to perpetuate the Union than ‘‘the lavish expenditure of untold millions wrung from a discontented people.’’ Although neither Yancey in the House nor Calhoun in the Senate could stop northerners and westerners from passing an elaborate rivers and harbors bill, President Polk killed it with a veto. And while claiming to oppose most federal internal improvements, Yancey himself moved for , for the port of Mobile in his state, rationalizing, like many Democrats, that for national security these expenditures had constitutional sanction. That bill failed.35 Protective tariffs also proved menacing to Yancey’s vision of union. Like most Southern Democrats, he considered them a kind of tax imposed for the ‘‘sole benefit of one class of men,’’ the manufacturing interests of the Northeast. Again Yancey accused northerners of pressing their numerical advantage in Congress to make the laws they wanted, regardless of the Constitution. He bashed pro-tariff northern Democrats for betraying their party’s principles in an unholy alliance with northern Whigs. He singled out representatives from Ohio and Pennsylvania, although he commended David Wilmot of Pennsyl

n

Party and Honor

vania for boldly bucking that trend. The Walker Tariff of  neither reduced rates as much as Yancey and other free trade advocates desired, nor did it please the manufacturing interests of the northeast.36 Yet a further shift away from nationalism and toward extreme states’ rights ideology ran through his reasoning on both the tariff and internal improvements. In January , Yancey announced to the House, ‘‘Around me I see the representatives of several sovereign States.’’ 37 Sounding now almost precisely like John C. Calhoun, he declared that the Union was ‘‘a federative system for certain specified general purposes. It is a cluster of Governments, each of which has yielded certain powers to a federal head which are designated in the chart of union.’’ All other powers belonged to the states. ‘‘But even in a consolidated Government, covering so vast a space and such variety of climate, soil, and production as ours, such a system of legislation could not long endure, unless it is sustained by powerful standing armies.’’ When the central government adopted sectional issues like tariffs it excited sectional jealousies; but administered ‘‘correctly upon State-rights principles,’’ one federal government might include everyone ‘‘from the isthmus [of Panama] to the frozen regions of Hudson’s Bay.’’ 38 Yancey’s new dedication to state sovereignty brought him to the attention of Senator Calhoun. Calhoun took great interest in Dixon Lewis’s plan to unite and mobilize the press of Alabama. He wrote to his friend Joseph W. Lesesne, a South Carolinian who moved to Alabama in , encouraging Lesesne to join Democratic efforts to purchase the Mobile Register. When discussing a likely editor, Calhoun found no one better suited for the job than Yancey. The two met and discussed the prospect and Yancey agreed, provided that he receive a guaranteed income of , the first year. Although nothing came of the Register scheme, the new relationship between Yancey and Calhoun was remarkable. Calhoun considered Yancey unparalleled among junior members of the House and stated that ‘‘his loss would be very sensibly felt in Congress . . . his proper place,’’ but understood that Yancey’s financial concerns forced him to examine alternatives.39 In return, Yancey quickly warmed to his old enemy. When Yancey had attacked Webster, Congressman James Dixon insinuated that the Alabamian had been a nullifier. Yancey immediately interrupted and correctly stated that he had never supported their views. But now, after his own conversion to states’ rights principles and newfound admiration for Calhoun (and the even more radical Rhett), Yancey steadfastly defended them. ‘‘Though I did not belong to the Nullifiers, and though my party and theirs were arrayed in hostile battalParty and Honor

n



ions, and prepared for civil war, yet I will say of them, that a band of more honorable men never existed. They never forsook one of the great principles on which they had united.’’ As for his former opposition to these men, he dismissed it by chalking it up to youthful ignorance.40 Calhoun’s new influence even modified Yancey’s position on the Oregon question. As secretary of state under John Tyler, Calhoun had advised a policy of inaction, rather than confrontation, regarding Oregon. Yancey had supported a plank of the Democrats’ platform in  that called for an end to joint BritishAmerican possession of the vast territory, and expressed a willingness to go to war against Britain for the third time in seventy years if American claims were not acknowledged. Like Polk, Yancey first called for all of Oregon up to °'. After his inauguration, Polk began long, vacillating negotiations over the contested region, variously threatening war if Britain refused American demands and offering to split the territory at the th parallel that already established most of the American-Canadian border. Finally, in December  Polk asked Congress to give Britain the required one year’s notice to terminate the joint occupation treaty. Despite the surge of Manifest Destiny that swept the country and Congress at that moment, many in Congress—especially northeastern Whigs and some Deep South Democrats—feared that war would be devastating to the country and crippling to overseas trade.41 On January , Yancey rose to speak on the issue. ‘‘I, too, go for all of Oregon. I go for it up to °'.’’ But like Calhoun he urged caution, especially to those ‘‘whose hands itch to grasp the sword.’’ He noted that Britain had been at peace since the defeat of Napoleon, had expanded her empire and her military power, and now stood unchecked by any nation in the world. Meanwhile, American warships had become obsolete and fallen into disrepair, the coasts of the United States were largely indefensible, and that too few American soldiers or forts existed in or near Oregon to challenge the British there. ‘‘Not justice, but might, rules upon the blood-reeking battlefield,’’ Yancey emphasized, and armed with this knowledge responsible legislators had to prevent their country from plunging into a conflict ‘‘with nothing but the naked breasts and weaponless hands of her brave sons to maintain their cause.’’ Yancey advocated building up American arms, enlisting soldiers, encouraging migrants to settle in Oregon, constructing forts there and along the Oregon trail, and otherwise—as Calhoun advised—waiting. The Senate did not vote on the termination resolution until mid-April, by which time a British military buildup in Canada and the prospect of war with Mexico over the Texas border made compromise look at

n

Party and Honor

tractive both to Congress and to Polk. After a few more diplomatic exchanges, on June  both countries agreed to divide the region at the th parallel.42 The outbreak of hostilities on the Rio Grande in May and subsequent American declaration of war on Mexico found Yancey standing inflexibly by his president. Like most southern Democrats, Yancey considered it vital to defend slaveholding Texas at all costs. Plus, more and more southerners saw war as an opportunity not only to spread the domain of slavery, but also to prove to the North the superiority of a society based on slaveholding. Yancey had already gone on record asserting that the South was ‘‘strong in all the elements of government, her peculiar institutions . . . but strengthen her for a war.’’ 43 Many Whigs, however, including some prominent southern ones, questioned the legitimacy of Polk’s war aims and feared national political upheaval should military victory result in acquisition of new territories and a national debate over the fate of slavery in those lands.44 And so, just as the greatest confrontation during his first term involved a fellow southerner and Whig, Thomas Clingman, in  Yancey leveled his sights on another southern Whig, an opponent of war, Alexander Stephens of Georgia. Sickly and frail in appearance, ‘‘the face dead and the color of ashes,’’ according to one observer and ‘‘a malformed ill-shaped half finished thing’’ by his own account, Stephens stood five feet seven inches tall, but seldom weighed as much as a hundred pounds. A moderate Whig, Stephens had already made a national reputation for himself since entering Congress in . Despite his many accomplishments, Stephens frequently tried to compensate for his diminutive physique both by developing an aggressive oratorical style and by issuing challenges to duels to various opponents.45 Stephens and Yancey came close to blows. Yancey proudly reported to Ben about his latest ‘‘encounter of wits & spirit.’’ It occurred on the House floor on June , a week after Stephens questioned the causes of the war and the integrity of President Polk. With limited time to speak, Yancey ‘‘replied severely.’’ In his response, Stephens ‘‘exhibited no disposition to do me justice & in my own rejoinder I was mercilessly severe.’’ The Washington Intelligencer put it plainly: Yancey called Stephens a liar. Yancey himself did not know what to expect next, but reminded Ben that unless Stephens published his attack, ‘‘of course I cannot publish a reply to what is not before the public.’’ Another newspaper reporter feared, ‘‘One harsh word is sure to bring on another, and then comes visions of pistols, coffee, and Bladensburg,’’ referring to the early morning duel between Yancey and Clingman. Cooler heads intervened, and Yancey, at least, was satParty and Honor

n



isfied that Stephens ‘‘will never again make me a theme upon which to vent his spleen.’’ 46 The pattern, however, was set for Yancey. He never challenged a northerner to a duel or grappled with one in any form. His youthful impressions of the North, and especially of Rev. Beman, had convinced Yancey that the North as a section lacked honor, and duels represented affairs of honor between equals. But Yancey set high, idealized standards of honor for the South. For the rest of his life Yancey stood ready to defend the honor of his section and, whether through the formality of a duel or through more crude encounters like his killing of Dr. Earle, Yancey determined personally to purge the South of people he considered dishonorable. Although oratorical battles and official duties consumed most of his time, Yancey continued to enjoy the capital’s social life. In the spring of  he met a Mrs. Beale, daughter of Commodore Thomas Truxton, the man who commanded Yancey’s father on the Constellation during the Quasi-War with France in . She was a widow who boarded near Washington with a Mr. and Mrs. Morse of Louisiana. Mrs. Morse herself was a daughter of a lieutenant on the same ship, and reported that her father often spoke of Benjamin Yancey. William Yancey proudly described all this for his brother, but then came to his main point: Mrs. Beale had a nineteen-year-old daughter, ‘‘& what a girl! Of splendid figure & glowing complexion,’’ beautiful eyes, a graceful dancer, and ‘‘the boldest horsewoman, the heartiest, most loveable girl, I think I ever met with.’’ (Yancey did not except his wife.) He went on to call her ‘‘the ideal of every midshipman & the admired of grave senators!’’ Then he told his doubtless stupefied widowed brother, ‘‘And what do you think I have done. I ride . . . to see her & have courted her for you!’’ Notwithstanding his older brother’s generosity, Ben Yancey would find a new bride himself. In , two years after the death of his first wife, he married Sarah Hamilton of Athens, Georgia.47 Although Yancey enjoyed this interlude, he had grown quite weary of national politics. In his tariff speech, he explained that he viewed himself ‘‘as a watchman, set here by a portion of the people of the South.’’ After serving only two half-terms in Congress, he concluded that he must inform southerners ‘‘that they are but as sheep in the hands of the shearers.’’ They could not trust most northerners; they could not even trust all Democrats. He wondered how any southern Democrats could continue to meet in national conventions with those who placed party above principle and who so readily taxed southern money through tariffs and spent revenue for ‘‘wild and extravagant schemes of internal improvement.’’ In May, while in Baltimore to deliver an otherwise unremarkable oration on the life of the recently deceased Andrew Jackson, Yancey 

n

Party and Honor

again voiced his Benthamite creed, but modified it to correct for the South’s minority status in Congress: ‘‘The greatest good of the greatest number, consistent with the inalienable rights of the minority, is now the chief aim of legislation.’’ But he found Congress instead bowing ever more frequently to the raw power of majorities. Yancey decided not to yield, and sure that he was outnumbered, he decided that the only honorable option for him was to resign. And so he did in June , and never again campaigned for national political office.48 In a letter to his constituents explaining his resignation, Yancey cited loss of income from his law practice over his five-year career in public office and its impact on his family of six. But other reasons clearly influenced his decision. While boasting of his accomplishments—especially regarding Texas, Oregon, and fighting high tariffs and a new national bank—he complained of ‘‘licentious majorities of the more Northern States’’ and the inability of southerners to rely on most Democrats to make the party serve principle. He found only David Wilmot of Pennsylvania as a reliable northerner. In both his disgust with party politics and his refusal to diminish his independence and integrity by compromising, Yancey fit into the mainstream of southern politicians. More than their northern counterparts, Yancey and other southerners conspicuously resigned from office or switched party affiliation (or both) to demonstrate both their virtue and independence and to show deference and honor to their constituents.49 ‘‘With the fall of the [Speaker’s] hammer [cea]ses, perhaps forever, my political [li]fe,’’ Yancey wrote his brother in the summer of . ‘‘My mind receives a new spring energy, at the bare idea, and . . . my heart feels lighter & purer.’’ For the first time in years he found himself able to focus on those things he found most important, especially his children. He delighted them with gifts he brought from his mother and others or had purchased himself. He also planned to move his family to Montgomery before the end of summer, figuring that his law practice would thrive in the new state capital.50 Despite looking forward to political retirement, Yancey would soon discover that circumstances would continue to draw him into the political arena, if not to public office.

Party and Honor

n



CHAPTER SIX

The Alabama Platform A few weeks after his thirty-second birthday, former congressman Yancey moved the short distance from Wetumpka to Montgomery. It was a huge change. He wanted to begin a new life and to escape the duplicity and corruption of national politics. This move not only took him out of his old congressional district, but also brought him to the new state capital, a town with an odd past and destined to have an auspicious future, thanks in large part to Yancey. Montgomery occupied an old Creek Indian site. By , the year of Yancey’s birth, when white people arrived, only Indian burial mounds remained. Located on bluffs over a hairpin curve of the Alabama River about a hundred miles upstream from Mobile, the area seemed to town founders Arthur Moore and Andrew Dexter a perfect place for a capital city. Of course, nearby Cahaba served as the territorial capital, and Tuscaloosa as the first capital after statehood, so ‘‘New Philadelphia,’’ laid out on humbly named Goat Hill, languished for many years. But with the explosion of cotton cultivation in the s and s and the arrival of the first steamboat in , several local vil-

lages sprang up. In December  the villages were incorporated as the city of Montgomery, named for Lemuel Purnell Montgomery, who died in  at the nearby battle of Horseshoe Bend, under the command of General Andrew Jackson.1 Before Montgomery became the capital it had already emerged as the hub of slavery and cotton in Alabama. In Montgomery County slaves outnumbered whites nearly two to one. The rich soil of Alabama’s ‘‘Black Belt’’ yielded enormous harvests of cotton, much of which moved through Montgomery. Over , bales—more than six million pounds of the light-weight fiber—flowed through the city in peak years, headed for markets in the North and in Europe. By  residents in the county owned over  million in real estate, making the area one of the richest per capita in the South.2 But for all its wealth, Montgomery retained raw, frontier characteristics for many years, intermingled with modern, urban innovations. Its streets remained mostly unpaved. Heavy rains produced torrents of water that rushed down Goat Hill, and mud accumulated knee deep in low-lying parts of town. The city was among the first in the country to install gas lighting (if only to illuminate its muddy streets). Montgomery Hall, a hotel built in , could accommodate  guests, but that could not meet demands for lodging. In  the Exchange Hotel was built. With a capacity of over  guests in its three upper floors, the Exchange ranked among the largest hotels in the country. Its restaurant, wine cellar, bar, billiard parlor, reading and smoking rooms, and assorted shops and stores offered guests and city residents truly fine cuisine and amenities. Montgomery boasted several taverns, restaurants, clothing stores, dentists, newspapers, and even a gymnasium and a photographer. There were also a few brothels. One, the Macon House, lay only a few blocks from the capitol building. The rough-and-tumble nature of the frontier affected it, too; once the mayor’s office had to investigate two ‘‘fair, frail, fat and fancy’’ prostitutes for plotting the death of a third.3 Yancey had his old home from Harrowgate Springs in Wetumpka brought downriver by flatboat and moved to a site on Mt. Meigs Road, about five miles east of Montgomery, while he and his family waited on the construction of an impressive new dwelling on Perry Street, the avenue of choice for the civic elite.4 His home sat just five blocks from the state capitol. In  he attached a new wing to the home, adding an extra bedroom, dressing room, and bathroom. With his income and his family both growing in , Yancey made substantial changes and improvements. He tore down the original small kitchen and replaced it with two storage buildings, each twenty feet square and each The Alabama Platform

n



with Venetian blinds. One served as the new kitchen and had an extra room for a house slave. The other he designed exclusively as a slave quarter, divided into small rooms, each with a bath and washroom, for Agrippa, James, and Mary Douglas. Yancey’s town lot sloped downhill to the west. He instructed a carpenter—probably a free black man—to construct a huge dining room under the back of the house, measuring seventeen by twenty-seven feet, and a spacious bedroom, seventeen by sixteen feet. To reach the dining room he had workers cut a staircase from the entry hall. And to accommodate future changes and expansion, Yancey bought an additional fifty foot width on the lot south of his home, giving him a total -foot front.5 Visitors to the Yancey home saw evidence of its owner’s prosperity, but nothing ostentatious. By the late s the frugal Yancey had accumulated two clocks, three pocket watches and chains, and a carriage valued at . He spent more freely on his wife, Sarah, who owned , worth of jewelry. Yancey kept  in an interest-bearing savings account—money he would desperately need during a bout of bad health.6 Whenever possible he bought both land and slaves, investments that proved quite profitable. He would have had at least several hundred more dollars had he not continually given money to his mother and loaned more to his beloved half-brother, Samuel Beman. Shortly after his arrival in Montgomery, Yancey also bought a twenty-acre dairy and produce farm north of town. Yancey built an ‘‘unpretending cottage Home,’’ a two-room ‘‘dogtrot,’’ with an office on one side and living quarters on the other. By  he proudly reported to his brother, ‘‘My little farm has just commenced to yield.’’ It pleased him greatly to provide his brother and sisterin-law with several hundred strawberry plants after learning of their fondness for that fruit. Yancey sold an average of two dollars a day worth of milk (at thirty cents a gallon), one to two dollars a day worth of vegetables, and had fifty hens laying eggs. In  he told Ben that he would clear ,, ‘‘besides paying for hire of the negroes.’’ Although less glamorous than cotton plantations, Yancey realized how valuable this venture proved in a new and growing urban center. Shunning get-rich-quick endeavors, Yancey once boasted to a friend, ‘‘Twelve years of my life spent among New England farms were not thrown away. . . . Come and see what a Yankee I am around my cattle sheds.’’ 7 Before leaving Wetumpka, Yancey had made his first professional contacts with a prominent lawyer in Montgomery, John A. Elmore, son of Yancey’s father’s friend, General John J. Elmore. John A. Elmore came from a distinguished and politically powerful family in South Carolina. He had moved to Alabama in  and soon made his mark through his service in the Creek War 

n

The Alabama Platform

of  and later as a state senator. Like Jesse Beene and Dixon H. Lewis, Elmore stood foursquare behind states’ rights. His brother, Franklin H. Elmore, remained in South Carolina and forged a political clique with Robert Barnwell Rhett that supported John C. Calhoun.8 Elmore and Yancey formed a partnership in  with their office on Washington Street, just five blocks south of the capitol and a few blocks from Yancey’s home. Although this arrangement kept Yancey closely tied to the political network that he had just left, for the time his law practice remained his only professional concern. As the workload grew, the firm took on Elmore’s brother, Rush, as a partner. Their practice encompassed chancery and circuit courts in several counties, as well as the state supreme court.9 Yancey barely settled into a routine before his devotion to family inadvertently drew him back into politics. In the fall of  a special election was held to fill Yancey’s old seat. Among Democrats, James L. Cottrell beat out challenges from James M. Calhoun, nephew of the great Carolinian, and Sampson Harris, Yancey’s first law partner. Samuel S. Beman, Yancey’s half-brother, ran as the Whig candidate. Although Yancey claimed dedication to his Democratic Party—provided, of course, that it defended southern interests, or ‘‘principles,’’ as he put it—he stood by his brother, whom he had already guided through his legal studies and briefly practiced law with. Yancey bragged to a friend that Beman ‘‘will trouble’’ Cottrell’s efforts.10 Although determined to avoid participating in this contest and circumvent a choice between party and kin, an incident in Centreville brought Yancey back into the heat of political battle. Yancey happened to be at the courthouse on legal business as Cottrell prepared to speak. Yancey told the Democrat he had read accounts that Cottrell called Beman a blackguard and a drunk. The latter probably had some truth to it; Samuel Beman’s drinking infuriated his temperance-minded father, and Rev. Beman finally forced his son to give up alcohol in . But the charge of blackguard was always a serious one to honorbound southerners. Besides, a childhood accident and illness had stunted Beman’s growth and left his spinal column permanently misshapen, and Yancey was always highly protective about his brother. Yancey announced to Cottrell that ‘‘Beman was my brother [and] was dearer to me on account of his physical misfortunes.’’ Cottrell denied disparaging his opponent’s character, but when pressed again admitted that he might have said those things in confidence to a friend. Yancey replied, ‘‘If you said it at all, it was improper.’’ He then insisted that Cottrell make that declaration publicly. Cottrell refused. Yancey pressed again for a public disavowal, but again Cottrell declined. Yancey then offered The Alabama Platform

n



to make such a statement for Cottrell, and immediately stood before the audience that had assembled to hear the candidate. Yancey explained the entire conversation that had just occurred, demanded that Cottrell discuss only political issues, and not attack his opponent. Then he declared that if he still resided in this congressional district he would vote for Cottrell only if the candidate based his campaign on Democratic Party principles. But ‘‘if he abandoned the democratic platform to become the retailer of low and petty slanders—he . . . became unworthy [of ] the support of good men.’’ 11 The encounter produced mixed results. Cottrell never made the retraction Yancey insisted upon, but Yancey dropped the matter. The local press generally criticized Yancey. The Montgomery Flag and Advertiser denounced him for betraying the party that ‘‘brought him forward and heaped honors on his head,’’ although it admitted that Yancey was ‘‘not the less interesting for a slight touch of the impracticable.’’ Another editor praised Yancey for standing by the character of his brother, but surmised that ‘‘warmed up by the cause, he went farther than was necessary.’’ Although Yancey’s efforts did not help his brother win the election, the Democrat beat him by only  votes, , to Beman’s ,.12 After the election Yancey managed to steer clear of politics for a while. In the spring of  Yancey’s only public act (besides his law practice) was to rally support for the establishment of a female seminary in Montgomery. Otherwise, he focused on law and his growing family.13 Yet again his mother, Caroline Yancey Beman, made sure her sons knew that she wanted more money and that she suffered horrible living conditions and loneliness in her apartment in Baltimore.14 Because of Yancey’s constant concerns about money and his concerns for mortality (after the deaths of two of his six children), he secured a life insurance policy through the New York office of an English company.15 As Yancey avoided politics, other Alabamians devoted increasing attention to the Mexican War and the Wilmot Proviso. David Wilmot, the representative from Pennsylvania whom Yancey had singled out as one of the few northern Democrats to stand on principle, offered a rider on August , , to a bill that funded the war. The Proviso would have prohibited slavery in any and all lands acquired from Mexico. Although a northern majority in the House adopted the measure, one northerner in the Senate, John Davis of Massachusetts, voted with a solid block of southerners and killed the measure. Wilmot’s Proviso would never become law, but it came up repeatedly in Congress in various forms, signaling that the northern people and their representatives were growing more and more hostile to slavery. And this, of course, alarmed white southerners. John C. Calhoun, as expected, led the protest. Alabamians watched with great 

n

The Alabama Platform

interest as he attacked Wilmot and called for southerners to close ranks regardless of partisan divisions and fight together to stop the spirit of antislavery.16 Initially white southern reaction to the Proviso was restrained. After all, the measure had failed and the ongoing war in Mexico excited more Americans than bickering in Congress over territory the nation did not yet possess. Days after the introduction of the Proviso, a Mobile newspaper dismissed it as ‘‘a piece of superfluity, if not official mischievousness.’’ 17 But soon white southerners began to perceive that something deeper, more dangerous, and immediate lay just beneath the surface of the proposal. As one advocate of the Proviso himself put it, the bill said to white southerners, ‘‘You are not my equal and hence are to be excluded’’ from national territories. And to people who lived in a world of slavery and saw daily examples of inequality and subordination, white southerners cringed at the insult they saw directed at them in Wilmot’s proposal. They steeled themselves to defend their honor and their equality with northerners, no less than their political and economic interests.18 Alabamians were especially sensitive to such attacks on honor and political challenges. Historian J. Mills Thornton has shown that even under calmer circumstances Alabama politicians had ‘‘galvanized the electorate into action by transmitting to the ordinary voter a sense that the issues under debate possessed apocalyptic significance.’’ Yancey, of course, had already mastered that technique. The first official response to the Proviso in Alabama came when Democrats held a state convention on May , . Yancey served as president pro tem and sat on the most important committee, which drafted official resolutions. Resolution number eleven concurred with one passed by the Virginia legislature, stating that Congress had no constitutional authority to touch slavery in the federal territories; in other words, the Wilmot Proviso was unconstitutional.19 Others echoed this position. A ‘‘Great Southern Meeting’’ assembled at Cahaba, making the same declaration and calling for bipartisan southern resistance to the North. This group went further, insisting that in the next presidential election Alabamians refuse to cast ballots for either presidential or vice presidential candidates unless they promised not to touch slavery in the federal territories. Among those assembled in Cahaba were Yancey’s friends James M. Calhoun and George W. Gayle, and his uncle, Judge William Bird.20 These two ideas—defending slavery in the federal territories and denying votes to presidential candidates who thought otherwise—dominated political discussions. The Montgomery Flag and Advertiser, which had already noted that James Buchanan of Pennsylvania had voted against the dreaded Wilmot Proviso, endorsed a ticket of Buchanan and Dixon Hall Lewis. That newspaper The Alabama Platform

n



also found acceptable Supreme Court Justice Levi Woodbury of New Hampshire, whose son, Charles, was a friend and onetime neighbor of Lewis as well as a friend of Yancey. Calhoun, too, had publicly announced the viability of Buchanan and Woodbury, as well as James K. Polk’s vice president, George M. Dallas, and Senator Daniel S. Dickinson of New York. And in June  Georgia Democrats also vowed to oppose any presidential candidate ‘‘who does not unconditionally, clearly, and unequivocally declare his opposition to the principles and provisions of the Wilmot Proviso.’’ 21 Yancey saw a new source of hope for creating a bipartisan southern political bloc in the summer of  at a barbecue given to honor Henry Washington Hilliard at Mt. Meigs, near Montgomery. A Whig congressmen with an independent streak and a future rival of Yancey’s, Hilliard ran unopposed in a district known as ‘‘the Gibraltar of the whig Party’’ in Alabama. The previous summer Yancey had noted gleefully that Hilliard’s vote for the Walker Tariff of , in defiance of his party, made Hilliard ‘‘a lost politician’’ and predicted that he would become a Democrat.22 Although that never happened, the growing southern concern over the Proviso resulted in a new spirit of political unity, almost regardless of party. Another opportunity Yancey saw came in the swelling support for Zachary Taylor’s presidential nomination. Already a well-known military figure, General Taylor catapulted himself to hero status with his exploits on Mexican battlefields. Late in  there had already been a move by congressional Whigs to support a Taylor candidacy. Led by Alexander H. Stephens of Georgia, the socalled ‘‘Young Indians’’ consisted of six other southerners and two northerners, including freshman congressman Abraham Lincoln. These and other Whigs hoped that Taylor’s lifetime of military service and clean political slate would propel him past the controversial Henry Clay and enable their party to capture the presidency for only the second time. Southern Whigs stressed that Taylor made his home in Louisiana, and owned over one hundred slaves. With only brief reassurances to the party faithful, Taylor’s supporters appealed to the broadest possible spectrum of voters by deemphasizing partisanship and instead presenting their man as a national hero. Their strategy seemed to work. Calhoun and his followers, long champions of southern political unity, also rallied behind ‘‘Old Rough and Ready.’’ 23 Yancey, pleased by Henry W. Hilliard’s independence and encouraged by the possibility of a Taylor candidacy, leaped at an invitation to speak at the Mt. Meigs barbecue. After extolling the accomplishments of the Polk administration, Yancey began praising Hilliard. By defying his party in his votes for the 

n

The Alabama Platform

Walker Tariff and against the Rivers and Harbors Bill that Yancey himself had so vehemently condemned, Yancey explained that Hilliard had shown ‘‘in forgetting that he was a whig, he remembered that he was a southron.’’ And previously, ‘‘when England and France and Mexico, and northern fanatic hordes combined to drive young Texas from a place in our Union,’’ Hilliard had again stood up for the South, voting for annexation even when some other southern Whigs did not.24 Then Yancey sang the praises of General Taylor, but issued an imperative word of caution regarding a Taylor presidential candidacy. Unlike Hilliard, Yancey would not commit himself to Taylor ‘‘sink or swim, live or die, right or wrong,’’ but only if Taylor refused to endorse the Wilmot Proviso or any congressional bill that would ban slavery from the territories. He reminded his audience that people across the South wanted presidential candidates to make a clear pledge against the Proviso before they cast their votes. If Taylor in fact proved to be an ‘‘anti-Wilmot-proviso-man,’’ and especially if he were opposed by a ‘‘Wilmot proviso candidate,’’ even a Democratic one, Yancey announced that Taylor would get his vote. While hoping to get an unequivocal assurance that Taylor opposed the Proviso, Yancey hailed the ‘‘manliness evinced by him in rebuking the miserable attempt made to make him a mere Party candidate.’’ Yancey chafed at an earlier remark at the barbecue that Taylor’s ‘‘affinities are altogether whig.’’ Yancey pointed to Taylor’s vote for Andrew Jackson many years before to suggest that Taylor’s ‘‘political sympathies are, in the main, democratic.’’ But Yancey quickly returned to his message of bipartisan cooperation, and did so with a vengeance. ‘‘I have lost all spirit of partizanship since I took a peep behind the scenes in Washington,’’ he explained. Yancey repeated his condemnation of fellow Democrats, especially those from the North and West, who were ‘‘intent upon squandering the public money at their own doors—intent upon using the taxing power for individual benefit—intent upon crippling the South.’’ He concluded that too many northerners now found their interests ‘‘inimical to the South,’’ making it imperative to forge southern political unity. Yancey concluded, ‘‘If this foul spell of Party which thus binds and divides and distracts the South can be broken, hail to him who shall do it! If he shall be, as I fondly hope, Zachary Taylor, honored be his name!’’ 25 Just as interparty cooperation gained momentum in Alabama, elections for the U.S. Senate threatened to rip apart not only a Whig-Democrat coalition but also the state’s Democratic Party itself. Democrats in Alabama frequently squabbled both along sectional lines and among leading personalities. South The Alabama Platform

n



Alabama Democrats called their northern colleagues ‘‘Hunkers,’’ a label used nationally to identify Democrats beholden to the Polk administration. These Democrats responded by calling southern associates ‘‘the Chivalry,’’ implying elitism, Whiggishness, and a lack of a popular following. And then there was a ‘‘Calhounite’’ faction, largely independent of both major parties, men such as Dixon Lewis and his brother-in-law John A. Elmore, Yancey’s law partner. Ideological differences between these factions tended, in fact, to be minimal. But as Lewis campaigned for reelection to the Senate against both William Rufus King, a Hunker, and the Whig Arthur Francis Hopkins, these schisms threatened to disrupt what had appeared to be growing political harmony.26 In November, Dixon Lewis again appealed to Yancey after reading an article in the Mobile Register, edited by Thaddeus Sanford, a Hunker. Lewis feared that Sanford wanted to use the senate election to break up the state Democratic Party. ‘‘If not so,’’ Lewis asked Yancey, ‘‘why does he revive the old divisions— which all but the enemies of the Party—have forgotten and are willing to forget. . . . Hunker and Chivalry, Unionists and Nullifiers[?]’’ Editorials signed ‘‘Chambers’’ by Johnson J. Hooper, a Whig and editor of the Montgomery Alabama Journal, matched those of Sanford’s so precisely, Lewis believed, that any reader could see ‘‘that either Hooper moves Sandford [sic] or Sandford moves Hooper in a strait line to the same point—to divide the Democracy into Hunkers and Chivalry.’’ Lewis feared that Hooper and Sanford conspired to defeat him. Lewis asked Yancey to write an editorial that would ‘‘break every bone in Sandford’s Hunker skin [and] . . . throw a blaze of light on his dark designs—which would sear his eyeballs.’’ Meanwhile, Lewis would remain aloof, beyond the fray.27 Apparently Yancey did not write such an article. Lewis, though, began doing the very thing for which he had blasted Sanford and Hooper: playing on various factions to win the election. He forged an alliance between several leading members of the Chivalry and some Montgomery Calhounites, led by John A. Elmore. Supporters of King, the Hunker candidate, called this alliance the ‘‘Montgomery Regency.’’ Whigs stood behind their leader, Arthur F. Hopkins. Each candidate scrambled to influence state legislators who would elect a U.S. senator in December . Lewis led King and Hopkins on the first ballot, but did not have the majority required to win. The two Democrats scrambled for information and support and both began making various promises to assemblymen. Lewis made the most important ones. In writing to James E. Saunders and a group of Hunkers, Lewis committed himself to a slate of issues: he refused to support John C. Calhoun for either the presidency or vice presidency; he swore to support for president whomever the Democrats selected at the up

n

The Alabama Platform

coming national convention; and he announced his full support of the Polk administration, including a vigorous prosecution of the war in Mexico. On the eighteenth ballot, Lewis finally won a majority.28 Lewis’s election intrigue sent waves of discontent through the Democratic Party. South Alabama members of the Chivalry especially disliked Lewis’s pledges to Hunkers, who generally resided in the northern part of the state. Calhoun lost confidence in his old ally. ‘‘Lewis appears ashamed of his course,’’ Calhoun concluded, ‘‘as he ought to be; but I do not see how he can ever disentangle himself from his new association, or how he can ever recover the confidence of those he has forsaken.’’ 29 But Lewis’s wheeling and dealing succeeded; he was back in power. The momentum for a nonpartisan Taylor candidacy continued into . In February many prominent Alabama Whigs called on the state party to keep away from their national convention and instead support a nonpartisan Taylor nomination. Simultaneously, however, Taylor himself began slowly edging toward a formal Whig candidacy, and that aroused suspicion from Democrats, especially Calhounites who had hoped to end partisanship for the sake of southern unity. When Taylor publicly called himself a Whig and accepted the party’s nomination in  without publicly vowing to oppose the Proviso, many Democrats abandoned him.30 In December  a leading Democratic contender, Lewis Cass of Michigan, announced his support for ‘‘popular sovereignty,’’ the idea that the people of each territory should decide for themselves whether or not to allow slavery. Because Cass never specified when or how settlers in territories would make such a decision, many northerners believed that the first territorial legislature could vote to exclude slavery. Most southern Democrats believed that voting on slavery was an act of sovereignty and therefore would have to wait for statehood; meanwhile, however, slavery could flourish. Dixon Lewis and many in the Chivalry, though, supported Levi Woodbury. But because Lewis had promised to support whomever the state party nominated, he and many of the Chivalry tried to keep the state Democratic convention from endorsing anyone and hoped to secure a Woodbury nomination at the national party convention.31 A key man in all this would be William L. Yancey. Yancey’s prominence grew in December  as two heroes of the Mexican War stopped in Montgomery. Local dignitaries asked Yancey to speak at the official receptions for General James Shields on December  and for General John Quitman, leader of Mississippi’s states’ rights faction, on December . Yancey delivered stirring addresses, vividly describing each soldiers’ heroics The Alabama Platform

n



and detailing scenes of battle, a feat all the more extraordinary because Yancey ducked out of his only opportunity to see combat during the Seminole War in . Nevertheless, each of these efforts bolstered his visibility and reputation and kept him closely tied to other political leaders with whom he shared a stage or banquet hall.32 While keeping himself in the public eye and consciousness, Yancey worked with Lewis behind the scenes to promote a Woodbury candidacy. Yancey corresponded with Woodbury and gained his approval to let the Alabama Democrats work for his nomination. Yancey believed that if Woodbury issued a statement irrevocably opposing the Wilmot Proviso that he could gain the state party’s support, but because of Justice Woodbury’s current position on the Supreme Court, Yancey understood that he did not want to issue any political statements. But Yancey agreed with Lewis that an uncommitted delegation might end up backing Woodbury. As long as Alabamian William R. King received the endorsement of the state party for vice president, even Hunkers such as James E. Saunders, who had brokered the deal with Lewis for his senate reelection, eventually agreed to leave delegates ‘‘untrammeled’’ at the national convention. Meanwhile, Yancey, Lewis, and John A. Campbell would begin work on a platform proposal designed to force their party’s nominee to oppose the Proviso, but also, they hoped, stop Cass and orchestrate a Woodbury nomination.33 The Alabama Platform, then, combined rigid principle with political intrigue. Yancey and Campbell drafted a four-plank platform. The first assaulted directly the spirit and intent of the Wilmot Proviso. It declared that the federal government had no authority to prohibit slavery in the territories. Ever since the Missouri Compromise of , when Congress had limited slavery in the Louisiana territory, southerners had regarded such action as unconstitutional.34 The next plank took direct aim at Lewis Cass and popular sovereignty. It stated that the people of a territory could not vote to exclude slavery until delegates met in a constitutional convention to petition Congress for statehood. Yancey and Campbell based their argument on the idea that territorial governments represented an arm of the federal government, and, as stated in the first plank, the federal government could not legally ban slavery from the territories. Only states could ban slavery as ‘‘sovereign’’ units of the federal union.35 Plank number three provided enforcement of sorts for the first two. It instructed Alabama delegates to withhold support for any candidate who supported either the Proviso or popular sovereignty. Several state and local Democratic organizations throughout the South had already adopted this strategy; 

n

The Alabama Platform

the Alabama Platform sought to make it binding. Yancey definitely intended it as such.36 In the final plank Yancey and Campbell confronted the insistence of many northerners, especially Democrats from New York, that Mexican laws prohibiting slavery must apply to any territorial cession to the United States ( just as French laws permitting slavery had applied to the Louisiana Purchase in ). Yancey and Campbell, however, called for the federal government to actively establish and protect slavery in any of the territories acquired from Mexico. Although John Campbell wrote this plank, he had grave doubts about its efficacy. An annexation treaty or an act of Congress could provide such protection, but Campbell believed that neither federal laws nor the Constitution established a right to take slaves into federal territories. Campbell wrote this plank out of his fear that too great a territorial acquisition would superheat the national debate over slavery and lead to civil war.37 Yancey had no such fears or doubts. He was certain that the Constitution gave Congress power only to protect slavery in the territories; Yancey never conceded the implication that whatever Congress could create it could also destroy. He would never abandon this feature of the Alabama Platform, and eventually most other white southerners would agree with him. The Alabama Democratic convention met in Montgomery in February  and the squabbling between Hunkers and the Chivalry reappeared. Hunkers nominated Nathaniel Terry for chairman of the assembly, but a member of the Chivalry raised the point of order that the convention had been set to convene at : ..; it was :. As Hunkers fumed and fussed, the Chivalry remained composed enough to get their man nominated and elected to the chair moments later. Hunkers managed to control procedures for selecting delegates to the national convention, and delegates adjourned for the day. The next evening, the platform committee presented resolutions that Alabama would support no candidate who endorsed the Wilmot Proviso, a position all agreed to, Hunkers and Chivalry alike. It was then, late at night, that Yancey rose to offer an amendment. In fact, he proposed the resolutions that would become the Alabama Platform. They passed unanimously. William R. King also received a unanimous vote for a vice presidential nomination. The convention adjourned.38 A weary but exulted Yancey wrote at once about his triumph to Dixon Lewis. After speaking for an hour Yancey had persuaded his colleagues to forego nominating a candidate and to stand instead on his resolutions. Lewis’s plan had worked. Under the Alabama Platform, Yancey trumpeted, no one could The Alabama Platform

n



have ‘‘even the remotest idea that any one but Woodbury can receive our vote.’’ Yancey bragged about striking a blow against Cass and his old friend Buchanan. The resolutions included instructions that bound delegates to a firm course of action. Even better, his associates selected Yancey as one of two at-large delegates to the Baltimore convention. ‘‘All is right—if it could be possible—dubly [sic] right. J A. Campbell, clapped his hands and shouted with joy!’’ Even weeks later the exultant Yancey bragged to Lewis, ‘‘I carried out all you desired, successfully.’’ 39 Initial press reaction endorsed the Platform. After all, it boldly affirmed sentiments already expressed by indignant southerners about slavery in the territories. The South Carolina Telegraph and the Rhett family’s Charleston Mercury fully backed the Platform, with the latter calling for an ‘‘uncompromising stand.’’ From Georgia, the Macon Telegraph concurred, as did newspapers across Alabama. The Montgomery Flag & Advertiser reprinted other papers’ reactions, added its own endorsement, and ran articles supporting Levi Woodbury for the Democratic nomination.40 Yet Lewis, Yancey, and Campbell fooled few about their true purpose. Days after the convention John Bragg wrote to a fellow Hunker, ‘‘Yancey’s Resolutions were intended to head off Cass & Buchanan—he is for Woodbury.’’ Thaddeus Sanford, editor of the Mobile Register, approached Yancey the day after the Platform’s adoption and explained that he endorsed Yancey’s eloquent speech, not the Platform itself. State legislator Felix G. Norman offered a more penetrating and scathing critique. He believed that in Yancey’s determination to build a platform that would exclude any nominee but Woodbury, Yancey inadvertently acknowledged that the federal government had jurisdiction over slavery in the territories. Over the next few weeks others repudiated the Platform. Meanwhile, treaty negotiations with a defeated Mexico grabbed the attention of Yancey and Lewis.41 American and Mexican officials met at the town of Guadalupe Hidalgo, near Mexico City, to negotiate a treaty to formally end the war. A thoroughly defeated Mexican army, Americans’ insatiable desire for new lands, and the necessity of dealing with slavery in newly acquired territory produced heated reactions, just as Calhoun had feared. American commissioners sent the U.S. Senate a treaty for ratification that included a cession of over , square miles of northern Mexico to the United States (all of modern-day California, Nevada, and Utah, most of Arizona and New Mexico, and parts of Wyoming and Colorado). In exchange, to compensate Mexican landowners, the United States would pay fifteen million dollars.42 Many southerners worried that the 

n

The Alabama Platform

aridity of these lands would prevent slave expansion there; some insisted that annexation must include more southerly, tropical portions of Mexico, areas better suited to plantation agriculture. As Yancey read about the negotiations and resulting treaty he grew alarmed. Guadalupe-Hidalgo, he told Senator Lewis, ‘‘will give very little to the South. . . . It is not a fair divide.’’ Among the first southerners to protest the treaty was David Yulee of Florida, a Democrat. Yancey urged Lewis to follow Yulee’s lead and to hold out for land on the Mexican Gulf Coast as far south as Tampico, ‘‘something that will do for sugar and cotton.’’ At least, Yancey implored Lewis, the Senate must incorporate into the treaty a guarantee that the entire Mexican Cession remain open to slaveholders as well as to those calling for ‘‘free soil’’ until smaller parts of the territory petitioned Congress for admission as states. Then, Yancey conceded, the nascent states could finally decide about slavery.43 Later in March, as it appeared more likely that the treaty would pass as presented to the Senate, Yancey grew more strident. He wrote Lewis again, arguing this treaty represented a willful effort by northerners to grab enough land to create a three-fourths majority of free states, the requisite number to amend the Constitution. He predicted that the North would then attack the South by repealing the three-fifths provision regarding slave representation. Operating under a siege mentality, Yancey forgot what he had once pointed out to others, that this formula actually reduced southern power in Congress. But his fears did not lack foundation; in  Congressman Columbus Delano of Ohio had said on the House floor, ‘‘We will establish a cordon of free states that shall surround you; and then we will light up the fires of liberty on every side until they melt your present chains and render all your people free.’’ While Yancey stopped short of calling for a treaty that would represent southern interests exclusively, he called it ‘‘the very essence of stupidity not to head our foes in a plan designed to behead us.’’ If the South could not gain strength through a treaty, Yancey hoped that it would at least not be overwhelmed by free states. He beseeched Lewis, ‘‘Oppose the treaty then—Oppose the giving of millions— the buying a peace, which our arms can enforce—Oppose the recognition of Mexican grants—the guarantee of the Catholic religion—Oppose the boundary line—Plant yourself on Monterey and grasp Tampico.’’ 44 The treaty passed on March , , without the modifications Yancey wanted. ‘‘I am sorry,’’ he grumbled to Lewis. ‘‘I like peace—but not an inglorious peace—and above all shudder at the future, which will usher in so many states hostile to us. The Treaty I fear is pregnant with scorpions.’’ 45 Finally everyone had a clear understanding of precisely how vast the Mexican acquisition The Alabama Platform

n



was, of how much was at stake if northerners banned slavery from it. And without guarantees for the South written into a treaty, the Alabama Platform transcended its original manipulative purpose and became for Yancey the key to southern salvation. As the U.S. Senate debated the treaty, Yancey found himself besieged on two fronts: ‘‘Up to the eye-brows—and a little more in heading off certain political moves,’’ and busy tending to his cases before the state supreme court. Yancey had argued his first supreme court cases in that winter session, winning the first, but losing four of his next six, perhaps due to the distraction of politics. The Chancery Court opened days later, and cases he had there and in lower courts kept him busy through the time he would have to leave for Baltimore and the national Democratic convention. Meanwhile, disaffected Democrats tried to undo the Alabama Platform, and Yancey worked to stop them.46 Thaddeus Sanford had already confronted Yancey about the Platform. So did Governor Reuben Chapman. In March and April a veritable campaign began to free delegates from these resolutions. Yancey stood virtually alone to combat it. Early in March he learned that delegate John A. Winston, state senator from Sumter County, ‘‘is sore under the harness,’’ but still believed that most other delegates would support Woodbury. Days later, though, more opposition emerged. Yancey informed Lewis of an ‘‘insidious attack’’ on the resolutions in a local newspaper, ‘‘designed to relieve the Buchanan-disposed from the harness which galls them.’’ Among themselves, Hunkers denounced the binding resolutions and wondered how and why they had not objected at the time they were offered. James Saunders concluded that Yancey’s resolutions were hastily read, denying opponents a real opportunity to debate or discuss them, and termed the Platform ‘‘suicidal.’’ One Hunker fumed, ‘‘Their adoption is unaccountable. . . . I am of the opinion the Calhounites are determined to rule the State, and let nothing be done that does not emanate from them.’’ Another saw in the Platform an effort to force the Baltimore convention to nominate Calhoun, or in the advent of a Woodbury presidency, to leave Calhoun ‘‘the power behind the thrown [sic].’’ Some now called for another convention to meet and officially repudiate the Platform.47 After the initial positive press reception, Yancey also faced criticism of the Platform from across the South. Franklin Elmore, brother of Yancey’s law partner, wrote to Dixon Lewis from South Carolina, ‘‘We are in a fog here. Who is to be our man? . . . Ought we send Delegates to Baltimore? And if so, why? . . . If we go should we not adopt the Alabama resolutions as our platform?’’ Yancey complained that Thomas Ritchie, the powerful Democratic editor of 

n

The Alabama Platform

the Richmond Enquirer and leader of the ‘‘Richmond Junto,’’ had failed to print the Alabama Platform in his influential paper, even though he had published convention resolutions from several other states. Yancey suspected that Ritchie and Buchanan were working together to demolish his work through a letterwriting campaign to Alabama Democrats, designed to fan the flames of the discontented. ‘‘The only way to head this rascally movement and bind these scorching resolutions on the foreheads of these traitors is for Woodbury to come out,’’ a furious Yancey informed Lewis. If Woodbury seriously desired a nomination he would have to publicly declare his stance on slavery in the territories. Yancey expressed similar sentiments to Woodbury and to his New England friends.48 When Yancey returned to Montgomery after attending the Circuit Court in Autauga County, he did not like what he read in the papers. The usually supportive Montgomery Advertiser now claimed that during the February convention Yancey’s resolutions were ‘‘indistinctly read and were, therefore, not fully comprehended,’’ that delegates voted for them ‘‘in order to avoid unnecessary debate and confusion at the heel of the Convention.’’ When two editorials in the State Gazette over the pseudonym ‘‘Giles’’ joined the attack, Yancey could no longer resist fighting back. He dismissed the ‘‘Giles’’ letters as ‘‘effusions from the pen of a disappointed politician,’’ and turned his wrath instead to the editors of the State Gazette. They had written that Yancey’s resolutions were written hastily and passed without deliberation. Neither was true. The editors also claimed that the resolutions were part of a trick launched at a late hour to support Calhounite candidate Levi Woodbury. Yancey denied that he had controlled the timing of his presentation or that he had intended to trick anyone; his report simply happened to come late one night. After Yancey moved to substitute his resolutions, two delegates spoke in favor of them, two against. Then Yancey spoke at length, quoting Cass, Buchanan, and Dallas on whether the people of a territory could exclude slavery. Yancey correctly reminded readers that his resolutions had been read three times, twice by him, once by the clerk, and adopted unanimously by nearly  delegates, including some of the most powerful politicians of the state. He concluded that the convention actually deliberated longer on his resolutions than on the original committee’s report. How, he asked, could this have been a trick? 49 Satisfied that he had answered critics at home, Yancey prepared for his work at the Baltimore convention. He wrote to Buchanan, Cass, Dallas, Woodbury, and even Zachary Taylor and Henry Clay, seeking written statements about their positions on slavery in the territories. He explained to each the content and meaning of the Alabama Platform, and the consequences of not meeting The Alabama Platform

n



Alabama’s test. More important, Yancey signaled for the first time the dire consequences if the Platform failed. His state’s resolutions, he explained, ‘‘concern a matter of vital importance to the people of the South and are of equal importance to every one, North or South, who deems the perpetuity of the union of value and who regards with pride the equality of privileges, which that union was designed to confer upon the people.’’ Originally Yancey used the Platform to manipulate the nominating process; he now announced his belief that the Union itself was at stake. The responses that Yancey received clarified little. As sitting vice president, George Dallas did not feel at liberty to express certain political views. Cass simply sent a copy of an  letter that enunciated his idea of popular sovereignty. Buchanan similarly offered a letter from  in which he endorsed extension of the Missouri Compromise line, °' north latitude, to the Pacific, allowing slavery south of it and prohibiting slavery to the north. And finally Woodbury responded. His letter to Yancey, though, illuminated nothing and certainly failed the Platform’s test of an ‘‘unequivocal’’ position on the territories. He wrote that as a Supreme Court justice he considered it improper to express a political opinion, and yet explained ‘‘my views are already well known to most people on these questions.’’ Sounding very much like a politician, Justice Woodbury simply stated his adherence to strict interpretation of the Constitution, the reserved rights of states, and the ‘‘fraternal spirit’’ that formed the federal Union. Of course, if Woodbury were seriously interested in the presidency, he could not make the unequivocal statement Yancey wanted without alienating northern voters.50 Still trusting that Woodbury would stand by his private assurances to men like Lewis, Yancey went to Baltimore and hoped for the best. On the way there Yancey and many of his fellow delegates stopped in Washington, D.C. There the first major rift among the Alabamians manifested itself. The five Alabama delegates (including Yancey) who counted themselves among the Chivalry vowed to stand by Woodbury; the four Hunkers insisted on a clear statement by Woodbury before they would do the same. Yancey only had confidential and indirect statements from Woodbury, so the Hunkers told him they would support Buchanan. Yancey scrambled for more support, but his brief huddle with Calhoun and a futile effort to speak directly with Woodbury produced nothing.51 Despite the steady erosion of support for Woodbury, Yancey desperately stuck to his hopes and resolutely fastened himself to the Platform. Between his oratory and reputation for violence, the thirty-three-year-old Yancey entered Baltimore a prominent figure and played a conspicuous part there. The Baltimore assembly began with some confusion. One problem had 

n

The Alabama Platform

to do with the location of the Alabama delegates’ seats. John A. Winston objected to a motion to vote by acclamation rather than polling the delegation of each state. He explained that Alabama delegates were situated so that larger delegations could shout louder and overwhelm them. He and his colleagues, a reporter recorded, ‘‘had weak lungs, and were all modest men, with the exception of his friend Yancey.’’ Everyone enjoyed a good laugh, including Yancey, who jokingly shouted, ‘‘Order! order!’’ 52 A more serious rift occurred over the appearance of two rival New York delegations, which threatened to delay the convention for days. Yancey rose to suggest that if New Yorkers could not decide among themselves, ‘‘we will go without her.’’ The convention decided to admit both delegations and split their votes. Happily for Yancey and most southerners, the antislavery Van Burenite faction spurned this compromise and walked out. Later, Van Buren himself would lead a new organization, the Free Soil Party, dedicated to prohibiting the spread of slavery into the territories.53 The next order of business greatly upset Yancey. Over his protests, the convention voted to nominate a candidate first, then vote on a platform. Even the Alabama Chivalry delegates supported the idea. This willful evasion of principle should have signaled to Yancey that his plans would fail. On the fourth ballot, Democrats nominated Lewis Cass. Each state delegation then pledged its support. Yancey announced that he would not join that endorsement until the convention adopted a platform. His own colleague, John Winston, disregarded Yancey’s protest and tendered the support of the Alabama delegation.54 For a less determined and dogmatic person, all hope would have vanished at this point. But not for Yancey. As a member of the convention’s platform committee, Yancey rose on May  to offer a minority report, one based loosely on the Alabama Platform, demanding that the party’s nominee acknowledge that ‘‘Congress has no right to interfere with the question of slavery in the territories.’’ Failure to do so, he explained, would place the party on record ‘‘against the political equality of the people’’ of each section. Furthermore, he predicted defeat for Cass if the party platform did not protect the interests of the southern states. The convention brushed aside his resolutions by a vote of  to . True to the instructions of the Alabama Platform that bound delegates to support no one for the nomination unless they clearly supported that Platform, Yancey concluded that he could no longer remain at the convention. So he bolted. One other Alabama delegate, a planter and notorious gunman in his own right, Philip Augustus Wray, joined Yancey. The other Alabamians stayed and tried to gain the vice presidential nomination for Alabamian William R. The Alabama Platform

n



King. They had no better success than Yancey; William O. Butler of Kentucky joined Cass on the ticket.55 The disgruntled Yancey stopped in South Carolina on his way home. Carolinians, already used to solitary defiance of the Union, staged a mass rally in Charleston on June  to endorse the now defeated Alabama Platform. Yancey attended, along with his new friend, secessionist Robert Barnwell Rhett, and Daniel H. Huger, his late father’s friend. The Alabamian denounced those delegates who had violated their instructions and stayed at Baltimore. As Yancey and the throng in Charleston railed against Cass and the Democratic Party, press reaction from Georgia, Mississippi, and even Alabama began to turn against Yancey and other radicals.56 Shortly after arriving in Montgomery Yancey found that most of his allies had abandoned him. Justice Woodbury produced another weak public statement, this one disavowing any sympathy for the Alabama Platform. By early August John A. Campbell decided to endorse and work for Zachary Taylor, even though the general had not taken a public stand on the territories. And of course Dixon Lewis, bound by his written deal with the Hunkers, publicly announced his support for Cass.57 As his friends deserted him, Yancey’s foes assailed him. A North Carolina Democrat complained of Yancey’s ‘‘hair-splitting distinctions’’ that were bound to antagonize the very northern Democrats whom southerners ought to court. A Georgian called Yancey’s resolutions ‘‘a pack of nonsense’’ and dismissed him as an extremist, part of a radical ‘‘Calhoun, Yancey and Charleston Mercury clique.’’ 58 Alabamians condemned him even more severely. One Hunker concluded, ‘‘Yancy [sic] is generally looked upon here by the old fashioned democrats as having made a ‘John Donkey’ of himself while he was trying to make himself conspicuous. . . . A few more conventions for him . . . will make him so ridiculous as to render him perfectly harmless.’’ Another Hunker believed that Yancey’s dramatic exit from Baltimore ‘‘has added nothing to the very dubious reputation he had before.’’ Since Yancey was such a stickler for instructions, asked another critic, why did he commit himself so steadfastly to Woodbury when that man never offered the unequivocal stand on the territories that Yancey himself had demanded? 59 The Montgomery Advertiser acknowledged Yancey’s abilities as an orator, but reproached him for lacking ‘‘coolness, caution, prudence, and conciliation. When he speaks he becomes excited, and in the midst of excitement, he spares neither friend nor foe that stands in his way.’’ The State Gazette, a Hunker paper, heralded Yancey’s political death, proclaiming ‘‘it only remains now to sing his requiem and write his epitaph.’’ 60 

n

The Alabama Platform

As he had done at every step so far, Yancey again tried to seize the offensive. Angry at those who had abandoned him as well as those who offered him ‘‘as a sacrifice to the angry passions of my assailants,’’ he published an eighty-page pamphlet that both justified his actions and condemned his fellow delegates. Far from seeking self-aggrandizement through his conspicuous actions at Baltimore, Yancey insisted that he simply had stood on principle. He responded to charges that he was a disappointed politician, a forsaken office seeker, by noting correctly that he had never sought an office that he did not win and that he twice resigned ‘‘posts of high trust and honor when it was conceded that I was in the zenith of popularity.’’ Again he reminded readers of the commitment delegates had made to refrain from voting for any candidate who did not endorse the Platform. And he emphasized that Alabama Democrats surely found Cass’s position on slavery in the territories not just disagreeable, but unconstitutional.61 Yancey tried simultaneously to depersonalize the incident and to focus on larger issues. He now minimized his own role in shaping the Alabama Platform, claiming only to have sponsored key provisions that fellow Democrats had already introduced. Yancey stated that delegates from Texas, Virginia, and Mississippi had voted for the Alabama resolutions while in the platform committee, but against them when they came to the floor. How, Yancey pleaded, could the South count on northern support ‘‘when so large a portion of the South flinched upon an assertion of her own interests!’’ Most important, he emphasized, ‘‘There was a real, palpable danger hanging over the South.’’ 62 But Yancey’s pamphlet stirred few. ‘‘I have labored incessantly, but I begin to despair,’’ he lamented to Calhoun. ‘‘I have hardly yet struck a spark from the flinty bosom of the party.’’ Yancey found most Democrats simultaneously ignorant of Cass’s true character and determined to vote for him. Growing both more despondent and defiant, Yancey saw only one alternative left, and believed that Calhoun could and would help him. He would try to create a new political party. Yancey knew the task would be arduous. ‘‘I find here not more than half-a-dozen, who are ready even to pause and consider what should be done,’’ and wondered how many of the them would prove ‘‘bold enough to face the storm.’’ The consequences of any other course, though, Yancey found dangerously unacceptable. Southern support for Cass, he feared, would generate arrogance among northerners and subserviency in the South, making it impossible in the future ‘‘to rouse our people to resistance.’’ Even if a new Southern Party failed to win, Yancey believed that if it tipped the election to Zachary Taylor, the Whig candidate’s ambiguity on The Alabama Platform

n



the territories offered more hope for the South than Cass’s popular sovereignty. ‘‘It is indeed all important,’’ Yancey informed Calhoun, ‘‘to preserve at least a nucleus around which to rally our countrymen: and if it is not preserved, I tremble for the result.’’ 63 Clearly, though, Yancey did not tremble. In fact, his defiance increased in proportion to the enormity of his task. On June , he returned to Wetumpka and faced an angry gathering of his old friends and neighbors. He told them that his actions both at Baltimore and since simply reflected his determination to ‘‘teach the North, that when we speak brave words, we will follow them, if needs be, by brave acts.’’ And then Yancey revealed exactly how far this determination might lead him. Not only would he attempt to raise a new party, but if all efforts failed to force the North ‘‘to respect our rights, we will promptly dissolve all political connection with them.’’ 64



n

The Alabama Platform

CHAPTER SEVEN

Secessionist The failure of the Alabama Platform to secure a Democratic presidential candidate suitable to Yancey led him to a logical conclusion: find another candidate. Still unconvinced of Zachary Taylor’s soundness on slavery issues, especially after the Whig national convention nominated the antislavery Millard Fillmore of New York for vice president, Yancey and a small group of followers decided to launch an independent ticket. Sharing John C. Calhoun’s dissatisfaction with the major party candidates and assuming that he had his usual backing from Dixon Hall Lewis, Yancey joined with John A. Elmore, John A. Campbell, and a few others and abruptly launched their effort on June , . They jointly composed a letter to sixty-four-year-old Littleton W. Tazewell of Virginia, a former congressman, senator, and staunch states’ right’s advocate. They informed Tazewell that because Lewis Cass expressed opinions ‘‘known to be diametrically opposed to the principles avowed in our resolution’’ regarding slavery in the territories, they sought a statesman who had proven him-

self sound on the ideals of the ‘‘old republican party.’’ Yancey and his colleagues asked Tazewell’s consent to mount a campaign for him for the presidency.1 On the same day, Yancey wrote to his political mentor, Senator Lewis, to boast of his plan and to summon the help that he knew awaited. He listed the names of twenty-six prominent Alabamians who would work to create an independent organization based mostly upon the Alabama Platform ‘‘but generally upon the entire Democratic faith.’’ They planned a mass meeting and needed to quickly find a willing nominee among prominent Democrats in Washington. Yancey told Lewis, ‘‘See [George M.] Dallas—see [Robert M. T.] Hunter—enquire about Tazewell and [ James A.] Seddon.’’ Yancey commanded Lewis to consult with Alabama congressmen Sampson Harris and Samuel W. Inge and to inform Yancey about their views on the matter. Yancey had already started raising money to establish his own party press. ‘‘How much shall I put down for you—how much for Harris—how much for Inge[?]’’ He explained that his group knew they could not form a majority, but hoped to gain the balance of power in the state and deny Whigs or Democrats a majority. ‘‘You, of course, are with us,’’ Yancey insisted. ‘‘I am asked that repeatedly. I answer you are. Because I occupy the ground marked out for me by you.’’ 2 Yancey proudly reported his activities to the man who had longed for a united southern party, John C. Calhoun. ‘‘The skies are brightening,’’ Yancey crowed. He notified Calhoun that plans to raise money and launch a newspaper proceeded well. Taylor’s emerging partisanship had resulted in the revolt of wayward Democrats such as James Belser and, according to Yancey, a groundswell of support for an alternative both to the Whig and to Cass. Yancey and his group even set July  as a date for a convention and hoped to add recent war hero Jefferson Davis to the ticket as Tazewell’s running mate.3 While Yancey waited for Tazewell’s response he received a letter from Dixon Lewis. It stunned him. Lewis wrote tersely and hastily, criticizing Yancey’s plan to abandon the Democratic Party. He could not understand why Yancey thought that principles, propriety, or personal vindication for his bolt from the Baltimore convention required such a drastic move. Furthermore, Lewis attacked Yancey’s logic and the logic of the very Alabama Platform that Lewis himself had helped create. If Congress had no power to touch slavery in the territories acquired from Mexico, either to prohibit it or to allow popular sovereignty or to protect it, then Lewis concluded that power belonged to the conquered Mexican people who had already abolished slavery in those lands.4 A day later, Lewis sent a longer and more personal letter, again repudiating the idea of a new party. He then suggested that the basis for the scheme lay in 

n

Secessionist

Yancey’s wounded pride. He reminded his hot-headed protégé that not only did the national convention rebuke his platform, but also that state Democrats endorsed Cass’s nomination. Until the effort to draft Tazewell, Lewis wrote that he had approved of every step made by Yancey—and acknowledged that Yancey took those steps in large part because of Lewis’s advice. ‘‘I believed it was proper for Alabama as a slave holding state to have passed the strongest possible resolutions against the Wilmot Proviso,’’ he continued. But while acknowledging his solidarity with Yancey up to this point, Lewis denied that ‘‘I must necessarily agree with you in the propriety of forming a new Party.’’ Quite the opposite; once Cass won the state party’s endorsement, Lewis explained, Yancey’s duties as a delegate were over and all party members needed to fight for their candidate.5 Next, Lewis alternately criticized, praised, sympathized, and offered Yancey his seasoned interpretation of political processes. Lewis expressed his certainty that before the year’s end those who believed that the Alabama Platform ‘‘was made up by you—& to express your individual feelings’’ would learn the truth, that the resolutions mirrored those of Virginia, Georgia, and South Carolina. ‘‘I have great confidence . . . in your ability of carrying a crowd,’’ but criticized Yancey’s speech at Charleston on his way home from Baltimore for containing ‘‘too much of denunciation & too little of calm & quiet statement of the facts.’’ Lewis explained blandly that Yancey should not wonder why Cass received such great support; he opposed the Proviso. Even if Cass’s position was troubling, Lewis stressed that the Democrat’s condemnation of the dreaded Proviso satisfied most party members.6 Lewis then tried to explain to Yancey why a third party could never achieve what Yancey hoped it would. Lewis gave Yancey advice that he would not act upon for a few years, but would ultimately implement quite effectively. ‘‘But why talk of a rd Party? You have given me the names of several of the most respectable names in the State . . . with half the activity & zeal required to start a new Party—they might . . . control the party to which they now belong. Cut off these gentlemen however, into a separate party—& how powerless— With all due respect to them & to you, I doubt if they could carry a single County in the State.’’ As if all this were not discouraging enough, Lewis added that if Yancey created a third party—or a fourth, once Martin Van Buren and his Free Soilers held their convention in August—who would he nominate? Most Democrats had pledged themselves to support Cass. Even Robert Barnwell Rhett and Calhoun grudgingly added their support. Then came another bitter pill from Lewis, his assurance that Tazewell would support Taylor. The Secessionist

n



same day that Lewis penned his discouraging opinions and advice, Tazewell himself responded ‘‘promptly to decline this honor and to withhold the consent you ask.’’ And when Samuel Beman, Yancey’s half-brother who had received his unflinching support when running for Congress in , announced his support for Taylor, Yancey felt quite abandoned.7 Although ever more isolated, Yancey defiantly stood his ground. After uncharacteristically pondering matters overnight he awoke still bitter and emotional. Yancey wrote that Lewis had misinterpreted him, that he had no selfish motive whatsoever. He expressed shock that his political mentor knew him so imperfectly, especially since it was Lewis himself, ‘‘by his bold, fervid and eloquent assertions of great principles,’’ who had guided Yancey’s actions over the previous six months. Yancey complained, ‘‘I confess, I am somewhat humiliated’’ by Lewis’s abandonment. ‘‘I had fondly thought, and made it a point of self-congratulation, that I was looking down with undisguised contempt upon the pack of party curs which have been snarling around the path I was treading.’’ Yancey felt the same about his defiance of a fickle press, which first praised him and then attacked him. All his actions, he pleaded to Lewis, were on behalf of his country. The fundamental problem as Yancey saw it was not his own course but the blind adherence of others to political parties, a force so compelling that it had apparently even ensnared Lewis. His anger now barely concealed, Yancey insisted that it was ‘‘the immense power of party, which could thus drive men so completely from their position, and cause them to curse a friend, whose bold blow in their behalf had aroused party anger—and had earned a decree to issue to which they tamely submitted—and they turned and stab’d their defender.’’ 8 An anguished Yancey continued to attack Lewis while simultaneously striving to remind him about his own principles. Yancey agreed that as a state Democratic delegate he was bound to certain obligations and must suffer the consequences of defying them. But Lewis was not. Yet Lewis chose party over principle. ‘‘This is what I have characterized as ‘extraordinary,’ in one who has been so instrumental in strengthening a strong pre-disposition in myself to love the truth—to spurn every shackle that would hamper me in its assertion—to despise that system of party organization which destroys the individual independence of the voter, and makes him a machine in the hands of its drill sergeants.’’ Yancey asked Lewis, ‘‘Did we assert vital, fundamental political truths’’ when they won adoption of the Alabama Platform ‘‘with not a dissenting vote?’’ Was every Democrat bound by the decree, or only Yancey? Did not the national Democratic Party harm the South by refusing to adopt it, and were not all Alabama Democrats therefore bound to oppose the party? ‘‘Can any num

n

Secessionist

ber of wrong doers, by ratifying such a nomination make it right, or relieve us from that pledge?’’ Yancey argued that the South would never gain strength by yielding to the North and by ‘‘submitting to encroachment—and by swallowing our pledge.’’ 9 For a moment it seemed as though Yancey might build a new party movement even without Tazewell and in defiance of Lewis. James A. Calhoun wrote to fellow Calhounite Joseph Lesesne in July that while things looked bleak for southern interests with Cass as the Democratic candidate, as many as half the state’s Democrats showed a willingness to defect. Slavery, James Calhoun insisted, must remain the central issue in southern politics, and if major party candidates did not take a bold stand on slavery, then ‘‘we should make it by bringing out our own candidate. . . . On this question we will have no compromise.’’ The prospects of defeat he considered inconsequential; ‘‘It is the meek and timid who are fit to be made slaves of not the bold and brave.’’ 10 Others were not so sure. ‘‘Can’t you stop Yancey in his course?’’ Democrat Leroy Pope Walker asked Lewis. Walker acknowledged that Yancey fought for principles, but believed that his timing was off. And, like Lewis, Walker still believed it possible to reform the Democratic Party from within. Another Democrat confidently predicted that Yancey could not reduce the vote for Cass by more than one hundred ballots statewide. And Yancey’s old Hunker foe James E. Saunders agreed that Yancey’s efforts would fail.11 In fact, the movement fizzled. Yet Lewis, always looking ahead, tried to regain Yancey as an ally. Usually proficient at getting what he wanted, directly or indirectly, Lewis chose a backdoor route to bring Yancey again into the fold. Lewis wrote to his ally and in-law, John A. Elmore, Yancey’s own law partner. Elmore complained about being drawn into a dispute between friends but then gently sided with Yancey. After all, Elmore had coauthored the letter to Littleton Tazewell asking him to accept a nomination. And like his partner, Elmore believed that Lewis misunderstood Yancey’s motivation to form a new party, that it was based on idealism, not ego. ‘‘But I say frankly,’’ Elmore diplomatically continued, ‘‘that I was surprised by the views expressed by you both.’’ By August a mutual friend of Yancey and Lewis reported, ‘‘Yancey is quiet.’’ In fact Yancey had stopped his attempt at party making, but only for a while. Meanwhile, Yancey and Lewis never resolved their differences. On October , , Lewis fell critically ill, and died sixteen days later.12 That death removed an important check on Yancey’s growing radicalism, and again left him seeking a father figure. As a result, Yancey drew even closer to John C. Calhoun. Only days after Lewis’s death came the election results. They represented Secessionist

n



mixed news for Yancey and Democratic Party regulars. Cass carried Alabama, but by only  votes, a fraction of the , vote margin of Democrat James K. Polk in  and a clear sign that others shared Yancey’s profound trouble with the Baltimore nominee. Nationally, Van Buren’s Free Soil Party picked up , votes, presenting white southerners with an alarming indication of northern antislavery sentiments. Van Buren siphoned off enough traditionally Democratic support from Cass in New York to throw that state’s electoral votes to Taylor and thereby help the Whig win the presidency. The war hero and slaveholder who had offered such great promise to Yancey and others in  and who had subsequently gained the support of prominent antislavery northerners such as William Henry Seward of New York and less-known opponents of slavery like Abraham Lincoln still did not clarify his position on slavery in the territories. Congress had failed to pass legislation on the matter during the campaign, and now it waited for a signal from the new president.13 Antislavery northern politicians would not wait. John G. Palfrey of Massachusetts introduced a bill in the House on December , , to abolish slavery in the District of Columbia. It failed by a vote of –; only  northerners voted with a solid South to stop this bill. Later the same day the House succeeded in forcing the territorial committee to ban slavery in California and New Mexico. On December  Daniel Gott of New York won passage of a House resolution that called for ending the slave trade in Washington, D.C.; it passed by a vote of –. Although none of these measures won Senate approval, they and the strength of the antislavery votes convinced more and more southerners that their interests and perceived rights were facing imminent danger.14 To John C. Calhoun, these threats offered opportunity as well as danger. Finally he saw fellow southerners agree with him about the necessity and urgency for united, nonpartisan action. Calhoun had already set up a committee of fourteen slave state senators to investigate the prospect of issuing an address to the people of the South. After much infighting on the committee—generally along party lines, with Whigs far more cautious than Democrats—Calhoun offered his Southern Address in February . It largely restated his longtime dream by promising that a united South could stop all encroachments by the North on southern rights and interests. It also promised disaster if resistance failed. Playing to the worst racist fears of white southerners, the address predicted that emancipation of slaves and subjugation of whites was the logical result of all northern agitation. Peaceful coexistence between the races was impossible, according to Calhoun. If slaves obtained freedom, ‘‘We would, in a 

n

Secessionist

word, change conditions with them—a degradation greater than has ever yet fallen to the lot of a free and enlightened people.’’ The only escape from this, he declared, would be ‘‘fleeing the homes of ourselves and ancestors, and by abandoning our country to our former slaves, to become the permanent abode of disorder, anarchy, poverty, misery, and wretchedness.’’ Although Calhoun possessed far more skill, influence, and power than Yancey, like the young Alabamian Calhoun failed to win bipartisan support; only  of  southern congressmen signed his address, with most Whigs refusing.15 But Calhoun’s address touched a nerve throughout the South, if not among a majority of its representatives in Congress. And as President Taylor sought advice from men like the outspoken antislavery senator William H. Seward and indicated that he favored admission of California as a free state, otherwise reluctant congressmen began to reconsider their positions. Already in July , Congressman Sampson W. Harris—Yancey’s first law partner—warned his colleagues that ‘‘the wrongs already threatened have weakened, in many a patriotic bosom, the sentiment of attachment to the Union of the States. Men now use familiar words which twenty years ago would have been deemed treasonable.’’ 16 Throughout  the rhetoric of resistance to the North escalated and spread. In January the Virginia and Florida assemblies passed resolutions calling for a dramatic and meaningful response by southern states to defend themselves. Missouri followed suit. South Carolina, ready to unite with other slave states ever since the tariff crisis two decades before, also signaled a desire for coordinated resistance. During a visit to Pennsylvania in August, the slaveholding President Taylor shocked most Americans, pro- and antislavery alike, by promising there would be no further extension of slavery to the territories. In October an unofficial meeting in Jackson, Mississippi, led by secessionist gubernatorial candidate John A. Quitman, invited all slave states to send delegates to Nashville, Tennessee, on June , , to assemble a first-ever southern convention. Georgia Democrats asked their assembly for instructions in case Congress passed antislavery legislation. Across the region many congressmen who had failed to sign Calhoun’s address lost reelection. In the North congressmen began to hear and take seriously rumblings of disunion. Even Calhoun began to entertain that frightening possibility. Privately he wrote, ‘‘We ought rather than to yield an inch, take any alternative, even if it should be disunion.’’ 17 Alabamians, too, closed ranks in defense of slavery. The Montgomery Flag and Advertiser concluded in February that ‘‘either slavery or the union must give way under this incessant warfare.’’ John A. Campbell expressed similar sentiments at a meeting in Mobile in February. Similar meetings took place across the state. Secessionist

n



By spring politician Hilliard M. Judge reported to Calhoun that only South Carolina had organized for resistance better than Alabama, where public opinion quickly grasped ‘‘what must come at last—the dissolution of the Union.’’ 18 One of the congressmen who had refused to sign Calhoun’s Southern Address was Henry W. Hilliard, the Whig for whom Yancey had campaigned in . But now, in , as Hilliard stood again for reelection, Yancey led the effort to stop him while arguing for regional solidarity. This began with a bipartisan meeting in May that resolved to approve the Southern Address and called on the governor to convene a special legislative assembly in case Congress enacted anything like the Wilmot Proviso. In June Yancey served as a delegate from Montgomery to a state Democratic meeting, despite two years of denouncing party organizations. Yancey helped secure an endorsement of the Southern Address and a condemnation of all congressmen, Democrats and Whigs, who had failed to support it.19 Although Yancey helped set the stage for a challenge to Hilliard, he did not lead the charge. Whigs outnumbered Democrats in this district and Yancey’s strident and independent course of late rendered him an unlikely candidate for Congress. So Democrats gambled by endorsing a states’ rights Whig, James L. Pugh. A friend and associate of Yancey’s Democratic allies from Eufaula, such as John Gill Shorter and Jefferson Buford, Pugh served as a Taylor elector in . This effort drew some ridicule from the press. The Montgomery Flag and Advertiser tagged the election ‘‘the War of the Roses,’’ after the power struggle within the English royal family in the s. Yancey made a few public speeches on Pugh’s behalf and Democrats begged him to challenge Hilliard to a series of debates. The incumbent, a renowned orator and debater in his own right, knew better than to take on both Pugh and Yancey, so he declined. Hilliard won easily.20 At his victory celebration in August, Hilliard joked, ‘‘The best trump card of my adversaries was reserved for last, and, lo! it turned up a knave . . . brought all the way from South Carolina.’’ When Yancey heard this and correctly assumed that he was the trump card in question, he bristled. He penned a note demanding to know whether Hilliard said anything of the sort and, if not, what exactly he had said. Hilliard responded calmly, reassuring the thin-skinned Yancey, ‘‘If you had heard my speech, I am sure you would have laughed at it in perfect good temper.’’ The matter ended.21 In the fall of , the territorial question erupted again. Residents of California, where tremendous gold reserves had been discovered, petitioned Congress for admission to the Union as a free state. This naturally reignited de

n

Secessionist

bate over the territorial question. In South Carolina, assemblyman Ben Yancey joined with outspoken secessionists such as Laurence Keitt and Governor Whitemarsh Seabrook in calling for disunion if slaveholders could not prevent the abolition of slavery in the District of Columbia or the passage of the Proviso. Ben Yancey backed a resolution by Keitt calling for congressmen to reject any candidate for House Speaker who proved ‘‘in the slightest degree tainted with unsoundness on the slavery question.’’ 22 Officials in Georgia, Texas, and Virginia voted to send delegates to the Nashville Convention, set to assemble in June , and other state assemblies that declined to send representatives nevertheless approved of that gathering. Alabama politicians expressed similar extreme positions. John A. Winston, who had opposed Yancey’s bolt from the convention in Baltimore just over a year before, now sounded much like Yancey in declaring that the South had to unite regardless of party divisions to defend slavery ‘‘at all hazards.’’ In November the Alabama assembly expressed its support for the slave state convention in Nashville, although it would not issue instructions to select delegates for three more months.23 And then in January , a fateful proposition came before Congress, one intended by its sponsor to settle forever all disputes over slavery between North and South. Henry Clay, one of the few public figures to receive the consistent hatred of Yancey, offered a multifaceted solution. California should be admitted as a free state. The remainder of the Mexican cession should be organized with no reference whatsoever to slavery. The federal government would assume the debt of Texas, left over from the days of the Lone Star Republic, in compensation for that state’s surrender of its claims to an extensive northwestern border, meaning a cession of all of Texas north of a line connecting El Paso on the West to the Sabine River on the East. In response to antislavery pressure, Clay recommended the abolition of the slave trade in Washington, D.C.; otherwise, the institution would remain untouched. And to satisfy southern complaints that northern ‘‘personal liberty laws’’ violated constitutional provisions for the capture and return of runaway slaves, Clay offered a tough, dramatic new fugitive slave law.24 Although Clay was both a southerner and slaveowner, many other southerners saw nothing but disaster in his proposal. The loss of California, the lack of guarantees for slavery elsewhere, truncation of an existing slave state, and the destruction of any part of the institution of slavery in Washington alarmed thousands. In Alabama Thaddeus Sanford, previously far more moderate than Yancey, now complained that Clay’s measures would force the South to Secessionist

n



‘‘concede everything.’’ 25 In Congress, the aged and ailing John C. Calhoun denounced Clay’s proposals and warned that if Clay’s bill passed the South might have to secede. And on March , Calhoun died.26 Citizens of Montgomery, like those across the South, held a memorial meeting to honor their late political hero. Yancey attended but played no conspicuous role. He argued seventeen cases before the state supreme court from January to June , one of the busiest sessions in his life, and that diverted much of his attention and time. But he gladly accepted an invitation to deliver a longer eulogy for Calhoun later,27 for which he prepared a lengthy pamphlet and heartfelt speech that he would deliver on July . Meanwhile, Yancey did make the time to attend a meeting in Montgomery in May to rally support for the upcoming Nashville Convention. In many ways this was a dream come true for Yancey. The gathering was bipartisan to the core. A Democrat and a Whig served as co-chairs, supported in turn by bipartisan secretaries. The important resolutions committee had three Democrats, three Whigs, and the resolutely independent Yancey as its chair. Yancey won unanimous support for his declarations that southerners had a right to assemble at Nashville and that antislavery agitation had already imposed the idea of the Wilmot Proviso upon California. Later, responding to a crowd’s insistence for a speech, Yancey expressed his optimism that southern unity might finally and effectively come to fruition at Nashville.28 The fact that John A. Campbell, coauthor with Yancey of the Alabama Platform, headed the state’s delegation to Tennessee heightened Yancey’s optimism. There, Campbell succeeded in gaining the convention’s approval of his resolution insisting that the federal government actively protect slavery in the territories. If slaveholders could not share in the common property of the Union, Campbell asserted, they must be exempt from obligations of citizens to the state, such as paying taxes and participating in the military. The federal government had no authority to define property; states did that. For Campbell, the protection of property and all other rights were ‘‘the price paid by the government for the support of its citizens.’’ 29 After offering so many firm, adamant resolutions, however, Campbell also persuaded most fellow delegates to endorse an extension of the Missouri Compromise line across the Southwest to the Pacific if Congress could find no better resolution for the issue. Moderates pointed out that Congress had yet to pass any legislation regarding slavery in the territories, so talk of resistance was premature. Delegates voted to wait and see what Congress would produce before convening again in Nashville in November.30 

n

Secessionist

The willingness of so many southerners to accept compromise in the same breath in which they proclaimed defiance infuriated men such as Yancey. Like other radicals, Yancey wondered why northerners would ever take seriously southern threats, demands, and constitutional arguments if southerners continuously backed down. On behalf of this minority, Robert Barnwell Rhett managed to offer a final word at Nashville. Only secession, Rhett demanded, could save the South. Southerners should have seceded in the past and their failure to do so only emboldened antislavery forces to attack more relentlessly. Rhett extended a chilling and crystal clear warning that ‘‘forbearance has had the effect of inspiring the Northern people with the belief that we value a union with them more than we value the institution of slavery.’’ He insisted, as he had for over twenty years, that a slaveholding people ‘‘must rule themselves or perish.’’ 31 As congressional debate dragged on and southern cries of defiance intermingled with offers of mediation, Yancey found himself more closely aligned to men such as Rhett. When July  arrived and Yancey finally delivered his oration on the life of Calhoun, Yancey used the occasion both to pay homage to the man and to rally southern resistance. Yancey emphasized that for a generation Calhoun had warned the South that a spirit of abolitionism infected national politics, but by ignoring the great Carolinian’s advice, Yancey observed, southerners had compromised and conceded until few modes of resistance remained available.32 Like a growing number of southerners, Yancey blamed this hostile attitude on northern religious leaders. Other southerners had expressed the same belief, but for Yancey this also meant turning the spirit of Calhoun against the likes of his own abolitionist stepfather, Rev. Beman. ‘‘A demon spirit is in the midst of a Christian brotherhood,’’ Yancey sermonized. ‘‘It formed a united, powerful, religious denomination, with an ecclesiastical government co-extensive with our whole country.’’ 33 Yancey agreed with Calhoun that the country had quickly changed from a republic into a democracy in which northern majorities ran roughshod over constitutional rights. And Yancey reminded his audience how Calhoun had predicted that only southern unity would save southern rights from a contentious and hostile northern majority.34 Yancey presented Calhoun as a model for all to emulate. Not only had the great statesman exhorted others to ‘‘crush the golden idol of party,’’ but also (and incorrectly) Yancey said that Calhoun had personally ‘‘cut himself loose from all party ties.’’ 35 Yancey noted another striking quality about Calhoun, his ability to convert others to his creed. ‘‘It was no uncommon event of his life that young men have made his acquaintance and been admitted to his friendship, whose Secessionist

n



political connections and bias were all antagonistic to those of Mr. Calhoun; yet they have left his society his most ardent admirers.’’ For Yancey this reference was deeply personal. When ‘‘the feelings and prejudices of the Union party in South Carolina ran high, none were more industrious than your speaker . . . in the unenviable task of strewing the path of the great statesman with nettles,’’ he admitted. But ‘‘grateful has been the privilege of thus publicly weeding them away from his grave, and . . . deepening the lines which record the virtues of a dedication character which I, in common with the great masses of the people of the Union at that day, neither appreciated nor understood.’’ 36 Undoubtedly Yancey meant that if he could finally renounce his unconditional unionism, his Alabama audience of  could do the same. When the teenage Yancey had returned to the South from New England he found a father figure in Benjamin Perry. After he moved to Alabama, Yancey’s older cousin Jesse Beene largely replaced Perry, and Beene’s states’ rights philosophy directly challenged Perry’s unionism. Yancey then came into the orbit of Dixon Hall Lewis, and like a devoted son, Yancey fully embraced Lewis’s politics and radical political circle, especially the Elmore family. Lewis’s death and, in Yancey’s mind, the betrayal Lewis had recently displayed, sent Yancey directly to Calhoun, his former adversary. Calhoun’s stalwart defense of the South served as an anchor for Yancey, who also relished the attention and approval he received from the powerful, prominent Carolinian. But with Calhoun’s death came an end to Yancey’s pursuit of fatherly guidance and approval. He would never again follow the lead of another. The death of his last surrogate father finally thrust the thirty-five-year-old Yancey into political adulthood, and with that coming of age he emerged as a leader in his own right with a political stamp far more extreme than any of his mentors. As the summer dragged on, so did the interminable debates in Congress. A sudden, unexpected development shook all Americans when they learned of President Taylor’s death on July , five days after contracting gastroenteritis during Independence Day activities in Washington. The new president, Millard Fillmore, was more amenable to Clay’s legislation than Taylor, who had resented the senator’s determination to override his influence in national affairs.37 When yet another bipartisan meeting assembled in Montgomery later in July to ratify and approve the actions taken at the Nashville Convention, Yancey revealed exactly how defiant he had become. A Whig delegate from Montgomery, Thomas H. Watts, had already worked to block Alabama’s participation at the convention, and now opposed all plans to resist acts of Congress. 

n

Secessionist

Others agreed and seemed to carry the crowd with them. Outraged at this display of moderation, Yancey gained the floor and moved to adjourn for a few hours. Taking advantage of the fact that his law partner and fellow extremist John A. Elmore was co-chair of the meeting, Yancey quickly prepared and offered several radical resolutions. Although most delegates stood by John Campbell’s relatively moderate Nashville resolutions, Yancey coaxed them instead into approving Barnwell Rhett’s defiant address. Yancey called for southerners to adopt an economic and commercial boycott of the free states until the South gained protection for slavery. In his most direct language yet he announced ‘‘that justice to the South is a necessary preliminary to perpetuity to the Union, and that we do not hesitate between them to choose justice to the South.’’ Yancey insisted that Alabamians stand by Texans in their fight to preserve their vast northwestern boundary, ‘‘if need be with the bayonet.’’ And if Congress admitted California as a free state, Yancey argued that the governor should call a special convention so that the people of Alabama could consider whether or not to secede. Just as in the debates over the Alabama Platform in , Yancey’s magical oratory helped him win the unanimous endorsement of these vastly more extreme resolutions in .38 Although bipartisanship vanished quickly, with Whigs more likely to favor compromise over defiance, Yancey continued relentlessly on his latest crusade. He bragged to his brother about ‘‘an immense southern meeting’’ that occurred in Montgomery on August . Besides taking ‘‘firm ground’’ on the great questions of the day, delegates accepted an invitation from like-minded southerners in Macon, Georgia, to send speakers to a ‘‘great Mass Meeting’’ in a few days. Yancey’s friend John Cochran, another Eufaula radical known for his wit, intelligence, and oratory, joined Yancey to represent Alabama. He urged Ben to attend as well, but his younger brother remained in South Carolina to fortify the spirit of resistance there.39 On August  the ‘‘Mass Meeting’’ assembled at Macon. Press and eyewitness accounts varied widely in their coverage of the event, depending of course on their political leanings. The unionist Nashville True Whig claimed that only  attended and that organizers had expected ,. A Georgian estimated that fewer than  secessionists showed up. The Washington Daily Union counted no more than ,; the radical Columbia Telegraph guessed the crowd numbered between , and ,.40 At any rate, the speakers had some local and national audience to listen to their message: southerners must secede immediately. Secessionist forces gained support in Virginia, Mississippi, and Texas. Following Secessionist

n



the closed meeting of southerners at Nashville, the Macon rally marked the first time that secessionists had gathered from several states to publicly advocate disunion.41 Georgia radicals at Macon included former governor C. J. McDonald and former U.S. senator Walter F. Colquitt, but, according to one unionist, ‘‘The godlike Rhett and his adjutant Yancey preached most eloquently on behalf of treason.’’ 42 Although no complete record of Yancey’s speech has survived, it is clear that the man who once criticized Rhett’s radicalism now literally stood with him, if not a step ahead. After Rhett suggested that secession might be temporary if meaningful political concessions by the North followed, Yancey quoted former governor George Troup of Georgia who once insisted, ‘‘The argument is exhausted and we must stand to our arms!’’ One local reporter wrote, ‘‘In the avowal of his disunion sentiments, Mr. Yancey was more candid and manly than Rhett. . . . He faced the music like a man, and openly proclaimed that there was no remedy in the Constitution for existing evils—that there was actually no Union now in existence, and the South ought, and must, set up for themselves.’’ 43 The rally seemed to rejuvenate a faltering southern resistance movement. A correspondent for the Charleston Mercury, no doubt as biased toward secession as the proprietors of that radical newspaper, claimed that the crowd reacted to the speeches (especially Rhett’s) by rising to their feet, waving hats and handkerchiefs, and offering long, loud cries for disunion. The Columbia Sentinel denounced the Union as ‘‘an engine of infamous oppression,’’ and endorsed Yancey’s call for ‘‘secession, open, unqualified, naked secession.’’ The Georgia Telegraph followed suit, insisting on ‘‘secession, . . . resistance, open unqualified resistance.’’ 44 In part because of the agitation caused by fire-eaters such as Yancey and Rhett, moderates in the North and South renewed efforts to achieve a peaceful, political solution and preserve the Union. One of Yancey’s many old foes in Congress, Democrat Stephen Douglas of Illinois, saw an opportunity that Clay had mysteriously overlooked. In  Clay had won victory for the Missouri Compromise by breaking up its three major components into two distinct bills and built separate coalitions of support to drive each part through in succession. In the early summer of , several senators did the same. They dismantled Clay’s proposals. Later that summer, Douglas worked doggedly to cajole, persuade, and manipulate his colleagues into the short-lived voting blocks needed to carry each provision. Douglas also divided the vast New Mexico territory roughly in half (naming the northern portion Utah territory) and proposed that 

n

Secessionist

the two territorial assemblies would choose whether or not to have slavery. And with Calhoun dead, Daniel Webster now in the president’s cabinet bolstering Fillmore’s support for a compromise, and an exhausted Henry Clay resting in Newport, Rhode Island, circumstances favored a breakthrough. On August , the Senate finally settled the Texas boundary controversy. Over the next several weeks, one bill passed after another, and by September  Fillmore had signed them all into law. Douglas had helped secure victory for the ‘‘Compromise of .’’ 45 Like most Americans, few southerners actually liked Douglas’s Compromise, but in the South resistance fizzled quickly. Douglas had convinced several southerners to vote for each provision, so radicals could not claim that the entire South dissented. Plus, the Compromise created the possibility that slavery could extend to both New Mexico and Utah territories. Texans surprisingly accepted the loss of ,, acres of their original territory (from the establishment of the Texas Republic in  until ). When the second Nashville Convention assembled on November –, even fewer states participated and sent even fewer delegates than they had to the first (Alabama, for instance, had sent twenty-two delegates to the first meeting, but only nine to the second). The tiny assembly protested the elements of the Compromise that opposed slave interests and called for a Southern Congress to restore their ‘‘rights,’’ but the second convention drew little attention from southerners grown exhausted by debates and threats. On December  Georgians held their own convention to address the Compromise. They vented their displeasure with the package and declared that any future congressional assault on slavery in Washington or in the territories or northern failure to return runaway slaves constituted grounds for disunion. The ‘‘Georgia Platform’’ captured the feelings of most southerners; they disliked the recent Compromise, but they valued the Union more.46 Yancey and other fire-eaters, however, were not like most southerners. They fumed, both over the Compromise and over their people’s submissive reaction. Typical of these dissatisfied radicals was the son of former president John Tyler, Robert Tyler, who predicted, ‘‘If the slaveholding States continue to talk without acting, in a few years they will not even have the privilege of talking.’’ 47 So Yancey and like-minded southerners, still refusing to give up, worked to bypass national political and party structures that they knew would block disunion. Despite—or because of—the grudging acceptance of Douglas’s Compromise by most southerners, Yancey’s work for secession had only begun.

Secessionist

n



CHAPTER EIGHT

Creating the ‘‘Leaven of Disunion’’ In his determination to convince fellow southerners to resist the Compromise of  even if that entailed secession, Yancey decided to cultivate and invigorate what had come to be known as Southern Rights Associations. These groups, which originated in South Carolina in November , resulted both from John C. Calhoun’s clamor for southerners to unite across party lines and from the legacy of Revolutionary ancestors’ Committees of Safety and Sons of Liberty. By May , Carolinians had established twenty-nine Southern Rights Associations; they continued to multiply and exert enormous influence there. And they spread across the South, to Florida, Mississippi, Virginia, North Carolina, and Alabama.1 Yancey’s success in establishing these associations in Alabama demonstrated that he was a leader now. While reaching for secession, he forged a dedicated corps of followers, a faction that would exert influence in state politics for a decade and ultimately achieve their goal of a southern nation. In September , after Congress passed its Compromise, Southern Rights men gathered in Lowndes and Dallas Counties to protest. Yancey’s letter to

them dramatically defined the issue. For months southerners had warned Congress not to pass these measures. Congress, however, calmly and deliberately passed them anyway, as though no protests had been made. ‘‘The issue, then, is before us. Congress boldly tendered it—submission or secession. I have no doubt but that it will be as boldly met by the people; and that being denied equality in the Union, they will maintain independence out of it.’’ Yancey warned fellow radicals that the time for speeches had ended. ‘‘I am for action, gentlemen, and not talking. At this time, action is eloquence.’’ He called for the creation of Southern Rights Associations wherever one hundred men could be gathered, and revealed his own growing militancy by adding, ‘‘Organisation now may be the source of an effective military discipline hereafter.’’ He appealed again to the heightened sense of honor in which so many southerners juxtaposed white men’s freedoms with slaves’ inability to defend themselves. He goaded white men by stating his hope that ‘‘this noble young state may not be disgraced by a base submission to the unconstitutional action of a free soil Congress.’’ 2 Yancey’s clarion call brought results. That autumn radical leaders in Dallas County tried to take over a Union meeting. They failed, but left the meeting hall and gathered in the street outside. About two hundred radicals formed a Southern Rights Association and declared secession the ‘‘ultimate remedy’’ for the South. In Eufaula, in Barbour County, John Cochran and James L. Pugh, the states’ rights Whigs supported by Democrats two years before, led one of Alabama’s most extreme associations. They denounced the Compromise, declared their readiness for secession, urged others to shun unionists, ‘‘exclude all Northern newspapers from your midst,’’ and ‘‘patronize Southern Ministers and Churches.’’ The Eufaula radicals controlled the local newspaper and changed its name from the Democrat to the Spirit of the South. Each cluster of radicals had their own newspaper, magnifying their voices and influence beyond their numbers. Other radical organs included the Cahaba Dallas Gazette, the Montgomery Atlas, the Mobile Tribune, the Talladega Watchtower, and the Jacksonville Sunny South.3 Former governor Arthur P. Bagby publicly supported the movement and recommended that Alabamians form ‘‘committees of correspondence,’’ as the nation’s founders did prior to the American Revolution, to share information and coordinate activities.4 Supported by this small but vocal, well-organized, and dedicated cohort of radicals, Yancey urged these groups to press Governor Henry W. Collier to call a special state convention to consider withdrawal from the Union. Yancey’s friends George W. Gayle and Benjamin F. Saffold led Dallas County’s petition The ‘‘Leaven of Disunion’’

n



drive, and his staunch friends and allies John G. Shorter, John Cochran, James L. Pugh, Jefferson Buford, and E. C. Bullock did the same from Barbour County. Governor Collier, a unionist, insisted that with public opinion in the state divided it would be ‘‘irreparably disastrous’’ to rush toward secession. He urged Alabamians to wait until the second Nashville Convention met and until key states such as Georgia and Texas, already scheduled to hold special conventions, had expressed official opinions. When the Nashville gathering fizzled, Georgians capitulated, and unionists across the South snatched back momentum, Collier—and Yancey—knew that Alabama would hold no state convention.5 Not surprisingly, Yancey refused to accept defeat. In early November, an estimated , unionists held a rally in Montgomery. They, too, insisted on southern unity and nonpartisanship, but to preserve the union, not destroy it. Southern Rights men failed to break up the meeting and instead adjourned to the county courthouse to hear Yancey speak. The unionist Alabama Journal reported that only a small band of secessionists congregated, most of them boys, and that they tried to exaggerate their number by applauding especially loudly for Yancey and by beating sticks.6 With this comic opera over, Yancey attempted a serious and calculated counterinitiative. Through a Montgomery Southern Rights Association in January , Yancey issued a call for a statewide meeting of all Southern Rights Associations to come to the capital in February.7 With barely a month to prepare for the meeting and with no official sanction or standing, the Southern Rights Convention had a small turnout. Plus, to discourage attendance a unionist newspaper had run a lengthy story about a smallpox epidemic in Montgomery (which proved to be true). On February , eighty-four representatives from seventeen of the state’s twenty-five associations assembled; another eighty delegates came later. The overwhelming majority of delegates came from the several Montgomery County Associations, but past and future comrades of Yancey arrived from across the state. Thomas Williams presided, but Yancey dominated the gathering from start to finish.8 The secessionists, or fire-eaters, of Alabama shared several important characteristics. They were not spread out evenly across the state, but generally clumped together in the most densely populated regions and urban centers. The urban and commercial orientation of many of these men gave them a greater exposure to national news and events, which made an abolitionist menace more real and immediate to them than it appeared to more remote and isolated rural folk. Each group had a slightly different approach to southern rights and expressed it through their local newspapers. Most of these fire-eaters had little political experience. Only  of the  who attended the Southern Rights Con

n

The ‘‘Leaven of Disunion’’

vention of  had previously won election to the state legislature, and only  more would later. Few enjoyed tremendous wealth; only  owned as many as  slaves by . Many, though, had great ambition for fame and notoriety and chafed at waiting to rise through existing party organizations; they saw opportunity in these new structures. All shared the fears of most white Alabamians that some uncontrollable, external force was always ready to destroy their liberty.9 Believing the abolitionist threat real and immediate, these fire-eaters wasted no time defining a course of action. On the first day they went on record declaring that the only purpose of the Constitution had been to make more perfect the ‘‘partnership between the States of the Union.’’ Nowhere did that document specify how long such an agreement would last; nowhere did the Constitution abrogate ‘‘the right to destroy it.’’ The convention adopted seven resolutions. The first stated that the federal government had been attacking southern rights for over a quarter century, since the Missouri Compromise. They next announced that southerners must choose between disunion and ‘‘the emancipation of our slaves with its dreadful consequences.’’ They affirmed secession as an undisputable right, and asserted that the Compromise of  served as a sufficient cause for disunion. Another resolution concurred with a call from South Carolina that slave states should meet in November at Montgomery, because of its central location within the Deep South. The final two emphasized ‘‘that we know of no middle ground between submission and secession,’’ and urged Alabamians to dispense with old party divisions ‘‘and to know no party but the great southern party.’’ 10 The second day’s meeting dealt more with details than principles. John J. Seibels read a letter from a South Carolina Association offering encouragement and support to Alabamians. Another delegate argued that it would be best if several states seceded together, but insisted that Alabama must ‘‘secede alone if necessary.’’ Yancey quoted from James Madison’s Virginia Resolution of , arguing that states were ‘‘duty bound to interpose’’ their sovereign authority when the federal government exceeded its constitutional powers, as he claimed that it did with the recent Compromise. Yancey endorsed a call from the second Nashville Convention to form a Southern Congress, and also suggested that it meet in Montgomery. George Stone of Lowndes moved that Governor Collier order a special session of the assembly to elect delegates to such a congress, but if the governor refused, Stone proposed that the people themselves open polls in each congressional district and hold their own elections. The assembly adopted all these resolutions and others to create committees of publications The ‘‘Leaven of Disunion’’

n



and vigilance committees and to start their own fugitive slave patrols, in contempt of federal efforts to do the same.11 The only major controversy at this convention arose from a resolution proposed in defense of slavery. T. J. DeYampert of Mobile offered, ‘‘That African Slavery, as it exists in the Southern States of this Union is both politically and morally right, and that the history of the world furnishes no proof that slavery is either evil or sinful.’’ Yancey objected. He refused to allow the North to seize the initiative in discussions over slavery. Yancey demanded, ‘‘That we will not deign to discuss the question, whether the institution of slavery is a moral or political evil, or not; but will maintain our rights under that Institution at all hazards.’’ Realizing that if debate ensued it would only dramatize internal divisions within this group, Seibels moved to table both resolutions. Delegates agreed.12 On the last day, February , delegates returned to a united front. They voted to meet again in June and to send copies of their proceedings to Southern Rights Associations in other states and to all Alabama congressmen and senators, the governor, and former governor John A. Quitman of Mississippi, then quite active in his state’s association and secession movements. Next they created a committee headed by Yancey to prepare an address to the people of the state, to be published by the friendly Montgomery Advertiser and the Atlas.13 After three days’ work, Yancey’s committee produced its eighteen-page ‘‘Address to the People of Alabama,’’ which clearly revealed both Yancey’s influence and the urgency of the situation in the minds of these men. ‘‘The tendency of old party organization has been to lead their members to avoid any decisive action on the great Slavery question, and to wink at and acquiesce in aggressions on the South rather than endanger party success by opposition to them,’’ the address began. Southern Rights Associations, therefore, were formed in response to the ‘‘radical change’’ that has altered the character of the federal government, one that ignored the Constitutional rights of white southerners. These associations now faced the hostility of both major parties, which, the committee asserted, grew alarmed by the threat the associations posed to their political hegemony.14 The South, Yancey and his colleagues continued, could no longer hope for justice or generosity because, they claimed, antislavery sentiment had taken over the federal government. These authors traced the history of slavery and antislavery in the United States over the past several decades. They claimed that ever since the Louisiana Purchase in , northeasterners feared that the South would overpower them within the Union by opening vast new territory to the expansion of slavery. New Englanders in  at the Federalist Hartford Con

n

The ‘‘Leaven of Disunion’’

vention had sought to limit the admission of new slave states and to eliminate the Constitution’s three-fifths clause. Then, of course, came the nefarious Missouri Compromise of , an ‘‘arbitrary exercise of power.’’ To these radicals in , that compromise had proven that the Constitution could not save the South from ‘‘the well-aimed and poisonous shafts of a vindictive and sleepless enemy.’’ Northerners had intentionally crippled the ability of southerners to resist future assaults on their rights by circumscribing slave expansion to below the °' line; over time, more free states than slave states would emerge from national territories and thereby increase the northern electoral majority.15 And sure enough, in  the Oregon boundary question showed that ‘‘no slaveholder should emigrate to any part of the United States, and that no compromise would be made by the antislavery power.’’ And on its heels came the Wilmot Proviso. And after the conquest of Mexico and acquisition of new lands came protracted debates over forming territorial governments for California and New Mexico. Delay, according to the address, provided enough time for the territories’ military governors—both presidential appointees of the turncoat Zachary Taylor—to snuff out incipient slave expansion by declaring that the Mexican ban on slavery applied there now.16 The authors of the address suggested that Taylor allowed California to bypass a territorial phase to pacify the powerful forces of abolition. They argued that because the California government was military, not popular, it was not sovereign when it applied for admission and therefore could not express any position on slavery.17 The South had long called for a national policy of non-intervention by Congress regarding slavery in the territories, maintaining that slavery there was beyond congressional jurisdiction. But Yancey and others claimed that Congress had an obligation to provide republican government for territories and to protect the rights of all Americans there, slaveholders and nonslaveholders alike. This, the address asserted, was not intervention, only the removal of obstacles for migration to new lands. And if Congress could not exclude slavery from territories, as most southerners maintained, how could Mexican law do so? The address alleged that antislavery forces dominated the entire federal government and had the power to revoke Mexican laws but, in refusing to do so, effectively enacted the Wilmot Proviso.18 The address interpreted other features of the Compromise of  as part of an antislavery conspiracy as well. It protested the ‘‘dismemberment’’ of Texas, claiming that no legal authority existed to accomplish this. President Taylor had ordered troops to New Mexico to protect free soil claims and therefore threw federal military against ‘‘the weak, small and deeply indebted State of Texas.’’ The ‘‘Leaven of Disunion’’

n



Constitutional law had been crushed by military force and the power of northern votes. Texans’ acceptance of  million compensation from Congress did not signal consent but a pragmatic choice since resistance would result in federal invasion.19 The portion of the Compromise that stopped the slave trade in Washington also drew the wrath of the convention. Part of that law stated that if a citizen brought a slave to the capital for sale, that slave became free. ‘‘Here then is the commencement of the actual abolition of Slavery by Congress.’’ Besides devaluing slaves by encroaching on the right to sell and buy slave property, ‘‘Congress, by the law, assumes the right to say under what circumstances a slave shall be set free. Yield the principle, and what will prevent the entire abolition of our property, under some other law of Congress.’’ 20 Not only had the ‘‘anti-Slavery power’’ encircled the South with free states and territories, but it had also revealed another, more menacing feature for white southerners. Northerners had branded southerners ‘‘as inferiors in the Union—as degraded by your contact with Slaves, and as unworthy of an association with the Northern man in the great work of extending the institutions of liberty over the vast plains of the West.’’ That northerners again showed their reluctance to enforce the Compromise’s new fugitive slave law, and instead continued to aid and harbor runaway slaves, simply revealed that ‘‘the entire Northern community is stirred to its very depths upon this [slave] question.’’ All this proved that ‘‘the causes of this hostility to our institutions are not transient or light—that they lie upon the oft-repeated idea so universally entertained at the North that slavery is a moral and political evil.’’ These sentiments had spread through most of the civilized world, ‘‘finding lodging in the pulpit, the cabinet, the school house and the press. We cannot shut our eyes to the fact that the world is against us.’’ It was folly, therefore, to imagine either that the North was an exception to this, or that only a fraction of the people there opposed the South. ‘‘In no country does the pulpit exert a more decided influence than in the North; and her divines are universally opposed to slavery, and conscientiously believe it to be the duty of the North to eradicate it.’’ Many northerners would try to do so within the bounds of the Constitution, and most believed the Constitution would not prove a hindrance. But whatever the methods of antislavery, no hope existed for the South against such ‘‘insatiable fanaticism.’’ 21 As if this northern menace were not frightening enough, Yancey and the others warned about the impact of antislavery within the South. Until recent years the rapid increase in the slave population had helped the South by main

n

The ‘‘Leaven of Disunion’’

taining a rough balance with the northern population and federal representation. But with expansion now cut off, what would happen to this black population? The address took aim at the deepest, racist fears of white southerners. The slave labor supply would grow so great and therefore so cheap that it would eventually drive away all free white labor. Slaves would become mechanics and artisans (in fact, they had been for generations). ‘‘This will undoubtedly enlighten them, and give them power and dangerous ideas. . . . The whole country will become one vast African population, a land of the slave and his owner!’’ Then it would only be a matter of time before ‘‘the black and loathsome tide, in vain seeking an outlet, will find it by an overflow of the body politic, drowning all distinction between white and black man!’’ 22 The committee then reiterated that Alabamians’ only choices remained submission or secession. Southerners who chose submission would only bolster the party organizations that trampled on their rights. The address drew a direct analogy from the American Revolution, when British loyalists denounced the founding fathers as ‘‘agitators,’’ preached ‘‘acquiescence’’ to the British, and manipulated fear by presenting ‘‘the horrors of war to the excited imaginations of the weak.’’ 23 Authors of the address knew that many southerners counseled boycotts, the taxing of northern goods, and promotion of southern manufacturing, much like their Revolutionary ancestors. But now, as in , according to the address, tyranny threatened the South. And just as in the days before the Revolution, southerners again found their forbearance met by injustice, their petitions answered by further injury, and their votes inadequate against the growing might of a hostile government. Even southerners’ offer to fall back to an extension of the inequitable Missouri Compromise line no longer satisfied their foes.24 Authors of the address conceded that the course they advocated would leave southerners branded as rebels, but reminded them, ‘‘Washington was a rebel! LaFayette was a rebel . . . rebels against abuse of power; and welcome to us be the appellation received in defence of our rights and liberties.’’ Southerners had to defend their liberty, either by secession or revolution. ‘‘Resistance to tyranny, by any and all means, is ever the motto of the vigilant freeman.’’ The committee reported that they did not try to dictate when Alabama should secede, but only sought to prepare the state for secession, and that if any other slave state seceded, Alabama must join them.25 The address concluded by admitting that success might not come soon, that ‘‘timidity may hold thousands from our ranks’’ who otherwise sympathized The ‘‘Leaven of Disunion’’

n



with their cause. But it also suggested that southerners emulate their foes, the abolitionists. These northerners began few in number, but remained true to their principles. They generally spurned political office except as means toward an end, and over time, according to secessionists, rose to ‘‘command and control the great parties of the country,’’ effectively driving national policy.26 This was precisely what Dixon H. Lewis had urged Yancey to do three years before. Through the address to the Southern Rights Convention, Yancey offered Alabamians the prospect of war at the very time that Whigs and unionists in general labored to calm the heated sectional crisis. Democrats in the state recognized this and initially tried to dismiss the vocal but small faction of disunionists. Senator William R. King sarcastically predicted that Yancey and his crew would have to secede all by themselves, and predicted that the extremity of the address would subject secessionists to public ridicule. The Wetumpka State Guard posited that Yancey’s extreme position marked his attempt to revenge himself upon his party for abandoning him in  over the Alabama Platform. But because Democrats still sought some means of resisting the Compromise of , they found it difficult to distinguish themselves from the tenacious secessionists. Intra-party strife grew so heated that in April Yancey procured part ownership of the Montgomery Atlas in order to personally denigrate unionist Democrats and newspapers.27 Even some southern rights newspapers expressed uneasiness about the radical resolutions and Yancey’s address. The Huntsville Democrat equivocated on disunion, warning that Alabama should not secede merely if some other state did. The Montgomery Advertiser strove to distance Yancey’s group from party regulars. Its editor, John J. Seibels, had participated in the convention, but apparently developed cold feet soon afterward. Seibels himself had often agreed that no alternative existed between submission and secession, but now he argued that the resolutions did not represent all Southern Rights men in the state, only delegates at Montgomery. Yancey and others responded quickly. In a public letter they insisted that they had in fact built a platform for all Southern Rights men, and had done so with remarkable unanimity.28 The state’s Southern Rights Associations, in fact, remained steadfastly united behind Yancey. A Dallas County chapter urged him to run for governor in the fall of . Although he declined, Yancey wrote a public letter designed to stoke the flames of extremism. The only issue in southern politics, he proclaimed, was submission to the unconstitutional acts of Congress or secession from the Union. Again drawing upon the images and rhetoric of honor and liberty so integral to white Alabamians, Yancey declared, 

n

The ‘‘Leaven of Disunion’’

In the ranks of the advocates of submission will eventually be gathered whatever there is of federal and abolition tendencies in our midst; while beneath the banner of secession will, as inevitably, be rallied all that are true to the institution of African slavery, as a part of the fundamental basis of the social and political policy of the South—and all that prefer citizenship under separate State sovereignty, to a servile acquiescence in the consolidation of the federal government upon the basis of freesoilism. Sooner or later, Yancey assured his supporters, the misguided or corrupt press and those who gained notoriety by ‘‘pandering to party prejudice’’ would exhaust themselves. Those who still hoped for halfway measures of resistance— through taxing northern goods and hoping to spur southern industrial development—meant well, but unwittingly exacerbated the problem. ‘‘Nations do not become commercially independent in a day,’’ Yancey cautioned. A sectional trade and tariff war would certainly ensue, and the North’s commercial dominance would force southerners to buy products from ‘‘our Northern taskmasters at exorbitant prices.’’ By staying their course, resisting advice from men who had served their country well in the past but failed to recognize danger now, this core group would eventfully survive ‘‘the disintegration of those old parties which have heretofore preyed upon the vitals of the South,’’ and place Alabama ‘‘in a position of independence and honor.’’ 29 Yancey’s extremism found resonance among many in his family. His aunt Louisa Cunningham complained to Sarah Yancey about the unwillingness of many southerners to defy the North: ‘‘I feel indeed that our dear Country is in time to be sacrificed to the inertness and apathy of its own Citizens—our own dear South—Slumbering over, what seems to me here, A Volcanoe—ready to burst upon their heads . . . for want of action.’’ Like her fire-eating nephew, Cunningham worried that antislavery forces gained strength rapidly and indoctrinated the people of the North with the idea that antislavery was more important than the Union itself. Conversely she complained that Union meetings in the South failed to present a bold, undivided front and served only to ‘‘blind and mislead our poor misguided deluded people at home.’’ 30 A tremendous part of southern honor stemmed from men’s protection of their wives and families; these women feared that southern men were failing them.31 While Louisa Cunningham stoked the flames of resistance from the Carolina upcountry, in Charleston  delegates from Southern Rights Associations met for their own convention. Despairing of cooperative secession with other slave states, on May  they voted overwhelmingly to recommend sepaThe ‘‘Leaven of Disunion’’

n



rate state action. Reacting to this news, Montgomery’s Southern Rights Association assembled. Yancey again dominated the meeting. If South Carolina did not secede, Yancey announced, or if other slave states failed to come to her aid in case of federal attempts to stop her, it would signal the death knell of southern resistance to federal oppression. Again John J. Seibels balked at this extreme course and instead promoted southern economic independence as preparation for disunion in the future. Yancey managed to have Seibels’ resolutions tabled and had his own adopted. Days later Yancey repeated his message in the Eufaula Spirit of the South. ‘‘If you submit, behave like submissionists. Be quiet and peaceable, subservient to the will of your masters. If you resist at all, resist effectually and manfully, use swords, not pins, cannon and iron balls, not paper pellets.’’ 32 In June, when ninety delegates from nineteen associations arrived for the second state Southern Rights Convention in Montgomery, Yancey showed that he had learned a thing or two about posturing from the late Dixon H. Lewis. Yancey knew that his fellow fire-eaters lacked the clout to control events in his state. And perhaps he had read and absorbed an editorial in the Wetumpka State Guard in March that suggested if Yancey wanted to revenge himself upon his party for their course in , ‘‘he ought to act with the Democrats, and whenever the proper time arrived, he could more successfully strike the blow.’’ This second assembly again urged Yancey to run for governor or Congress, but Yancey talked this idea to death. After a debate that lasted well beyond midnight and drove thirty-two delegates to quit for the evening, Yancey convinced those who remained not to nominate him. Besides removing the focus from himself, Yancey offered a sort of olive branch to less radical Democrats; he now only advocated war if the federal government first used force to stop a slave state from seceding. These backward steps were enough to enable some regular Democrats to find some common ground with Yancey, and consequently gave Yancey the appearance of support from party regulars.33 One of the main reasons that Yancey decided to ease back slightly from his extreme course involved the upcoming governor’s race. Radicals had no love for the incumbent, Henry Collier, who had persistently refused to call special assemblies and who failed to state what he would do if South Carolina seceded. But Yancey agreed with John A. Campbell that as inadequate as Collier was, he was preferable to the challenger, Benjamin Shields. A planter from Marengo County, former state representative, and former congressman, Shields ran as an unconditional unionist under the slogan, ‘‘Union right or wrong, at all hazards, and to the last extremity.’’ Campbell convinced Yancey that any support 

n

The ‘‘Leaven of Disunion’’

for a third-party Southern Rights candidate would likely draw away votes from Collier and result in the election of Shields.34 Congressional races provided the next challenge for Yancey. With unionists rallying across the state, a potential landslide existed unless Southern Rights men worked closely together. In Yancey’s district, Henry W. Hilliard chose not to seek reelection, stepping aside for fellow Whig James Abercrombie. A planter and seasoned state assemblyman with strong popular support, Abercrombie nevertheless did not figure prominently in his own campaign. Neither did his opponent, John Cochran, the Southern Rights candidate and beneficiary of support from the powerful Eufaula fire-eaters. Instead, the people and press followed speakers who stumped for their respective candidates, men recognized as the two greatest orators in the state: Hilliard and Yancey.35 Originally Hilliard and the Whigs did not plan on debates, only a solitary speaking tour by Hilliard. But at the first of his well-publicized appearances, at Union Springs (forty-five miles from Montgomery), Yancey emerged from the crowd with a group of supporters to present his views. Caught off guard but unafraid of his radical adversary, Hilliard agreed. Each would speak for one and a half hours, with Yancey opening and Hilliard getting the last word. Yancey accused Hilliard of inconsistency on slavery questions and therefore of being unworthy to represent the South. He denounced the Whig administration of President Fillmore as antislavery. Yancey repeated his indictments against the Compromise of , reminding his audience how it harmed the South, and demanded secession as a response. After a little over an hour Yancey asked how much time he had left. Someone shouted back that twenty-five minutes remained. Yancey exclaimed that he only needed five more, and that he had ‘‘said enough for Hilliard to chew on for ten hours.’’ 36 Hilliard responded coolly. He reminded Yancey and their listeners about the Northwest Ordinance of , a bill supported by the slave state of Virginia, which prohibited slavery north of the Ohio River. Congress, Hilliard explained, had held the right to rule on slavery in territories from the beginning of the republic. Then he stung Yancey by digging up a detail from the latter’s brief career in Congress. When a bill came before Congress in  to organize a territorial government for Oregon, Yancey voted for it—even though that particular bill contained a prohibition on slavery. Hilliard went on to defend the Compromise of  as the best deal in years for the South in national politics, denounced secession as unwise (though not illegal), and voiced his support for the Union. In a brief rejoinder, Yancey desperately tried to justify his vote. In a reply as heated as the July weather he insisted that his sole concern lay in providing The ‘‘Leaven of Disunion’’

n



badly needed civil government for the huge, remote territory. A battle over words ensued, and Yancey grew angry. A Whig newspaper, the Eufaula Southern Shield, described the Democrat as ‘‘anything but courteous,’’ and accused him of using ‘‘rough, uncouth language.’’ Meanwhile Hilliard remained composed and insistent that Yancey had voted for a version of the Wilmot Proviso.37 The explosion by Yancey briefly interrupted the joint appearances. Hilliard at one point smugly referred to Yancey’s friends who carried a small cannon from one site to another and fired it in an effort to irritate Hilliard. ‘‘Mr. Yancey and the gun are alike. The gun is a big gun, and so is Mr. Yancey; but I am not afraid of either, as they both fire blank cartridges.’’ Even after supporters of the two brought them back together, Hilliard remained cool and Yancey simmered. Just before one debate began, Yancey asked privately, ‘‘Mr. Hilliard, shall we have a pleasant debate today?’’ To his great displeasure Hilliard responded, ‘‘Mr. Yancey, I must mention your vote on the Oregon question; I cannot overlook it today.’’ 38 The climax of the contest should have been the final meeting, a five-hour debate with a lavish barbecue in Montgomery. But throughout the summer campaign many noticed that Yancey lacked his usual luster on the stump. Hilliard himself noted earlier that Yancey spoke with characteristic animation, ‘‘but not with the vigor I had expected from him.’’ After the first debate a farmer in the crowd announced that Yancey had been ‘‘over-crapped’’ by Hilliard. And in Montgomery, the Whig Alabama Journal observed astutely, ‘‘No one could have defended a bad cause better than did Mr. Yancey. . . . He was hampered, however—the banner of secession was not over him—his heart did not seem in it— and he found himself in the position which he had recently deprecated—that of tolerating expediency and milder remedies.’’ 39 In other words, Yancey paid a heavy price for his limited accord with regular Democrats. After the difficult summer campaign, the results of the August elections exacerbated Yancey’s depression. It was a nearly total unionist sweep. In five of the seven congressional races, unionist candidates (generally Whigs) defeated opponents who had some sort of connection with the Southern Rights movement. Whig unionists won a bare majority in the state senate, one of only three times they would ever do so, and achieved a large minority in the statehouse. Shields, the unconditional unionist for governor, withdrew from the race on account of poor health, making Collier’s reelection easy, with , votes to , for Shields—and  protest votes for Yancey. But the unionist tide allowed Collier to stand firm against the ultra–Southern Rights faction.40 The collapse of the secession drive in Alabama helped destroy what was left 

n

The ‘‘Leaven of Disunion’’

of that movement elsewhere. Radicals had watched hopefully and despaired at Yancey’s inability to prevail within a state that once seemed poised for at least cooperative action. Prominent South Carolina secessionist Robert W. Barnwell grumbled, ‘‘You see what Yancey’s support comes to in Alabama.’’ Over the next few months, radicalism yielded to unionism across the region. In Mississippi Jefferson Davis, the Southern Rights candidate for governor, lost to unionist Henry S. Foote. Georgians both ratified the Georgia Platform and elected a unionist governor. And by early , even South Carolinians voted down secession in elections for a special state convention. Cooperationsts—having no other slave state left with which to cooperate—defeated immediate secessionist candidates statewide by an aggregate ,–,.41 At last, even Yancey surrendered. ‘‘As to the So. Rights cause, per se, it has no organized party here,’’ he conceded to his brother. ‘‘One half of those who were its advocates in name, are as much submissionists as the union men.’’ Yancey vowed to take no part in tampering with the Democratic Party in the state. Then he predicted that the upcoming presidential election would finally ‘‘kill off all that remains of So. Rightsism,’’ and its supporters would drift back into the old political parties. Although unaware of Yancey’s intentions, his withdrawal pleased regular Democrats. A prominent Louisiana party member wrote to a Democratic leader in Georgia, ‘‘I am as anxious to purge the party of abolitionists and unqualified disunionists as you. . . . As to the Rhetts, Yanceys &c, the sooner we get rid of them, the better.’’ 42 Although most of his old Southern Rights comrades had drifted back to the Democratic Party by , a core group remained faithful to Yancey. They held a convention of sorts—delegates came from only seven counties—in Montgomery on March . These fire-eaters acknowledged that most southerners had capitulated to the Compromise of , but they still considered the agreement unconstitutional and menacing and vowed continued resistance to it by any means short of secession. They established a ‘‘permanent’’ central committee to correspond with all Southern Rights men across the South to coordinate their activities and to work toward a regional convention that would nominate a Southern Rights presidential ticket, and named Yancey head of that committee.43 Again, regular party Democrats actually rejoiced that these dissidents seemed so determined to remain outside the party organization. One wrote of his hopes that this ‘‘little band of factionists’’ would join the Whigs. ‘‘It would be a Godsend to our party,’’ he thought, if these men ‘‘would go over where they belong, and no longer curse our councils with their treacherous alliance.’’ 44 The ‘‘Leaven of Disunion’’

n



After so many years of wishing for Yancey to go away, regular Democrats must have been surprised and dismayed to find him moderate his course. At their national convention in , Democrats nominated Franklin Pierce of New Hampshire and Alabama’s William R. King for president and vice president. A strict constructionist, friend of Levi Woodbury and of Calhoun, and a veteran of some fame from the Mexican War, Pierce pleased southern Democrats so much that some wondered if northern Democrats would find him acceptable. Two happy Georgia Democrats predicted, ‘‘It is possible that a few of the most violent of the violent may follow the example of Yancey and others in Alabama, but the masses of the party will gladly return to their old standard.’’ The party’s platform endorsed the Compromise of , but gave special emphasis to enforcement of the fugitive slave act. Pierce’s nomination not only brought back many disgruntled southern Democrats, but also attracted thousands of northerners who had defected to the Van Buren ticket in . Determined to oppose Whig nominee Winfield Scott, Yancey decided that Pierce was the best man for the South in .45 Alabama Southern Rights delegates assembled in July in Montgomery to consider the Scott and Pierce nominations. Yancey strongly supported Pierce. He said that it was well and good to withhold support from unacceptable candidates, but argued that it was just as critical to endorse men like Pierce, who Yancey contended represented a concession to southerners. He convinced the gathering to recess until each candidate had an opportunity to respond to a series of questions designed by John Elmore to test their soundness on sectional issues, and then to reconvene.46 Yancey finally saw the wisdom of Dixon Hall Lewis’s admonition against third parties, and realized the power that his followers could exert within established parties. Southern Rights men reassembled on September . General Scott’s response to Elmore explained that his letter of acceptance to his party would have to stand as his only public statement about his views. Pierce did not reply at all. Elmore had also solicited an answer from John Quitman, the secessionist leader of Mississippi, who enthusiastically supported the work of Alabama Southern Rights men. Yancey again worked for an endorsement of Pierce but found himself in the minority. The majority, composed mostly of delegates from Cahaba, Eufaula, and John Elmore’s supporters in Montgomery, still favored an independent ticket. The convention therefore nominated George M. Troup of Georgia—whose defiance of President John Quincy Adams on federal Indian policy back in  had earned the wrath of a younger Yancey—and Quitman. Both 

n

The ‘‘Leaven of Disunion’’

men accepted. Delegates also selected a slate of state electors, who included George W. Gayle, Yancey’s old associate from Cahaba.47 With only two months to organize their upstart party, the Southern Rights men who emerged victorious over Yancey nevertheless knew that his support remained critical. George Gayle did his best to draw out Yancey in correspondence made public through the Montgomery Advertiser. Gayle asked Yancey about rumors that he continued to support Pierce, not Troup, and doubted that ‘‘the soul and spirit’’ of the Southern Rights cause would now stray, but encouraged Yancey himself to stop the gossip with a direct reply.48 Yancey’s response was not quite what Gayle had in mind, but demonstrated that he had finally gained some political maturity and insight into the power of American political parties. He explained that he no longer endorsed Pierce but that he would not work for Troup, either. Yancey was convinced that Pierce would win in November no matter what Southern Rights men did. If Scott had the slightest chance, then ‘‘it would be my duty to vote for Gen. Pierce.’’ But because of his faith in Pierce’s victory, he vowed to vote his conscience and support the slate of Troup and Quitman, even though he considered that throwing away his vote. He wished that the Southern Rights ticket had a realistic chance of victory. ‘‘Such an event would be the bright dawn of a new era in the history of the Government—the renewal of better days of the Republic.’’ But Yancey guessed that ‘‘probably no man expects it less then the venerable Troup.’’ Yancey would vote for Troup only to ‘‘organize and keep together the Southern Rights party, with a view to ulterior usefulness.’’ Yancey advised others to avoid upsetting either of the two major parties in the South, because ‘‘these are the ranks from which we expect to draw recruits hereafter to the standard of the South.’’ 49 On election day Pierce won an overwhelming victory, taking twenty-seven of the thirty-one states and  electoral votes to Scott’s . The Southern Rights ticket barely registered. In Alabama it carried Lowndes and Barbour Counties, with  percent and  percent of all votes, respectively, but statewide it captured just over , votes, less than  percent of the total. Still, that was better than Georgia, where the native son, Troup, received only  votes.50 The short-term failure of the Southern Rights Party stood in bold juxtaposition to long-term goals and strategies finally developed by Yancey. Generally he learned the futility of simply reacting to others and to events. As he explained in , before Alabama or any state would be ready to secede, disunionists had to accomplish two objects. One was to create ‘‘an organized, honest minority, based on a true remedy.’’ This he found much more important than ‘‘putting in The ‘‘Leaven of Disunion’’

n



a majority that will give us no remedy.’’ In other words, his emphasis was on organizing in order to coerce a major party to tilt to the seceders, rather than have seceders race blindly toward a powerful party simply to win an election. Yancey no doubt reached his second goal in large part from personal knowledge of the fear evoked in unionists from advocates of secession when he was on the other side in the s. He planned to work toward gaining support from the masses, not through subterfuge, misdirection, or conspiracy, but through education. Yancey concluded that that ‘‘can only be done by a fair, open manly issue, intelligently placed before them. They certainly never can be prepared for so grave an act, if secession is kept in the back ground and other remedies [are] proposed for their consideration.’’ 51 In this, his first effort to achieve secession, Yancey laid the groundwork for success in the future. He was now a leader like Lewis and Calhoun, with a dedicated corps of followers behind him. Like other fire-eaters, Yancey had already helped convince multitudes of fellow southerners that the Union was a means to protect their liberty, but not an end in itself. Yancey and company found that they could play to the hopes and fears of the nonslaveholding majority by focusing the specter of a swelling African population that would deprive ordinary people of land. Yancey, like others, also posed the frightening idea of white people losing mastery and black people gaining it. Yancey had also done in Alabama what Barnwell Rhett and other, earlier secessionists had already accomplished in South Carolina; he helped create a political environment in which countless young men perceived the federal government a potential threat to them rather than a blessing. John Cochran, the young secessionist who accompanied Yancey to the Macon rally of August , shortly thereafter expressed his belief that secession might not come soon, but that a ‘‘leaven of disunion’’ would inevitably rise over time across the South and result in independence.52



n

The ‘‘Leaven of Disunion’’

CHAPTER NINE

Public Man, Private Life Yancey’s great disappointment in his fellow southerners for their acquiescence to political compromise convinced him to drop out of national politics for a while. When a Georgia newspaper suggested Yancey for a post in President Franklin Pierce’s cabinet it gained the attention of Ben Yancey, but William remained silent and uninterested.1 After the collapse of his secession efforts in  Yancey devoted most of his time and energy to his family, his home, and his law practice. During the s he earned a good income from law and, what was always more important to him, attention. ‘‘The bar in America is the road to honor,’’ a prominent Virginia jurist explained early in the nineteenth century. Like politics, law offered opportunities for public recognition, to demonstrate and to command authority. A contemporary of Yancey received sage advice from his father; winning or losing a case was not as important as the chance ‘‘for displaying your eloquence. Let all your pleadings be full of allusions, trophies, figures, and abound in general knowl-

edge.’’ 2 So not only did law rank with politics among the most prized professions in the old South, but it also provided Yancey the validation and public approval he craved his entire life. And law was a good way to make money, too. During the s Alabama taxed lawyers’ and surgeons’ incomes at a rate of fifty cents per , or a total of  annually at the taxpayer’s option. Presumably Yancey’s income from law yielded far above , in good years because, ever frugal, he always opted for the  amount.3 Successful attorneys in urban centers across the country during the mid-s could expect an annual income of between , and ,, with  to  for routine tasks such as drafting wills and , to , fees customary for cases argued before state appellate courts.4 On one trip to South Carolina in , Yancey collected a total of , for his firm and an associate.5 The public knew that Yancey and Elmore enjoyed financial success. The Montgomery Advertiser commented about Yancey’s ‘‘extensive and lucrative law practice.’’ One of his contemporaries recalled, ‘‘He charged big fees and collected.’’ 6 Money certainly remained one of Yancey’s greatest concerns, but fame, notoriety, and attention, as always, ranked higher. Thomas H. Watts, a prominent lawyer in Montgomery during the s, noted that the firm of Yancey and Elmore was busy and successful, that ‘‘Yancey was rather a careful collector, and charged very fair fees.’’ Watts recalled that Yancey tried more criminal cases than civil ones, even though lawyers’ oaths bound them to defend clients whose poverty might have rendered them unable to pay for legal services. Watts noted, ‘‘Men make great reputations in criminal cases—but it does not pay like civil cases.’’ 7 Although Yancey chronically worried about money, tax records show that he was far from poor. By  the assessed value of his town lot (,), his farm, expanded now to seventy-seven acres (,), carriage (), livestock (), and jewelry and household furnishings (,) totaled ,. Beyond that he had several hundred dollars in various investments and twenty-four slaves, even though during the previous two years Yancey’s bad health had made it almost impossible for him to work.8 From  to  he resumed his law practice with a vengeance, earning more than ever. The  census listed his real and personal estate at ,.9 Although other lawyers had begun to specialize in various fields of law, Yancey remained an old-fashioned generalist.10 His practice grew from three major sources: his location in the state capital, his reputation as an orator, and his uncanny knack of selecting prominent, experienced partners. He tried all types 

n

Public Man, Private Life

of cases, civil and criminal, and argued before state circuit and chancery courts, as well as the state supreme court. Like all other lawyers who ‘‘rode the circuit,’’ he had to leave home days, weeks, even months at a time. These courts usually met one or two weeks in each session at county courthouses, usually thirty to fifty miles apart. Lawyers riding the circuit often traveled together and slept in the same inexpensive hotels, frequently two to a bed and usually all in the same room. Although Yancey always loved riding horses, the still undeveloped back roads of Alabama proved quite an obstacle. As he prepared for a spring circuit in  Yancey wrote to his brother, ‘‘I can only say I would favor a state-road or Geo-system to connect North & South Ala. & permit private co[mpanie]s to connect on equal terms.’’ When disease spread through the countryside, Yancey and others had little choice but to risk exposure. It was a difficult life. During one grueling session Yancey facetiously asked his brother, ‘‘Do you not wish to come to Montgomery and practice law? If so, I will sell out my premises to you, and my practice at a fair price, and I will move to California!’’ 11 Sometimes after a taxing journey to the next courthouse Yancey found himself with little to do. Often, if he arrived in town a day or two early, local citizens asked him to address them on politics—a request he seldom declined. While waiting for a circuit court to convene he enjoyed observing local trials. Frequently his thoughts turned to home and to family. Yancey composed many of his most personal and touching correspondence while he passed time on the circuit. At least once when he sat idly by during one of his own trials, the ever restless Yancey actually wrote Ben a letter on a legal pad during the proceedings.12 When the circuit court met in Montgomery County, Yancey was glad to be home, but often found himself swamped with work from various sources. The fall  session of the Montgomery circuit lasted eight weeks, closing only on Christmas eve, and disposing of only half the docket. Exhausted from this effort, Yancey wrote to his old law teacher, Ben Perry, ‘‘I have hardly had a moments rest, and have not eaten a dinner for six weeks (the court not adjourning) and am completely worn down.’’ Of course, a busy lawyer is often a financially successful one, and Yancey truly loved his work. So even as he complained, his sense of humor showed through. ‘‘I am overwhelmed in business, but working under it bravely,’’ he assured his brother.13 In the mid-s fewer than  attorneys practiced—officially—in the entire state. In  the Montgomery City Directory listed only twenty-two law firms and thirty-seven attorneys. Not much competition existed. Living only a Public Man, Private Life

n



few blocks from the supreme court immensely helped Yancey’s business. From  to  he, alone or with various partners, brought  cases to the highest state court. These cases ran the gamut from contested wills to wrongful and malicious suing, determining land and livestock titles, recovering property and money, and a variety of criminal charges. Twenty-four cases (over  percent) of these cases involved slaves: suits over ownership, inheritance, soundness of slaves’ health when purchased, and even petitions for freedom.14 Yancey likely accepted most of these cases for the money rather than for the merits of a case or pre-existing relationships with clients. He served as advocate for an appellant  times, only a little more often than for a defendant ( cases), and had a better record on behalf of plaintiffs, winning  percent of cases for appellants, and losing  percent for defendants. Overall, he won  of  cases. But given the nature of these trials it is difficult to determine Yancey’s effectiveness in court. Some cases surely were desperate, final appeals, and Yancey must have simply tried his best for a guilty client. Once Yancey defended a man convicted of murder after the defendant hit his victim in the head with a brick. Yancey argued that his client was drunk at the time, and that the prosecution had not proved intent to murder. Yancey, who had personal experience with a murder trial, argued that the crime should have been second-degree manslaughter at most. He lost that case.15 He offered another convicted murderer a last, dire appeal by arguing that one juror had been improperly impaneled at a previous trial. He lost that one, too.16 Some cases fully consumed Yancey. The trial of Mrs. Milly David versus Henry P. David hit close to home, evoking memories of his mother’s loss of slave property and the violence that plagued his mother’s marriage to Beman. Mrs. David sought divorce on the grounds of cruelty. Yancey and Elmore proved that Mr. David had struck his wife with a stick and choked her. Moreover, it appeared that David had married merely to gain property. Even though Mrs. David often ‘‘greatly provoked and irritated’’ her husband (as Caroline Beman did hers), Yancey and Elmore made this case so well that Justice George Goldthwaite berated Mr. David for lacking ‘‘that degree of forbearance and meekness which became him as a man dealing with the mother of grown children, and as a professor of a christian church.’’ 17 Once Yancey established himself as a lawyer in Montgomery he participated in the education of new lawyers. Nationally, law schools were replacing the old apprentice system, but Yancey offered his services as mentor to a few aspiring attorneys, just as Benjamin Perry had done for Yancey. He had one marked success. James T. Holtzclaw, born in McDonough, Georgia, in , 

n

Public Man, Private Life

came to Alabama with his family and read law under Elmore and Yancey in . He received his license in  and soon developed a successful practice in Montgomery. Holtzclaw and Yancey shared many interests—especially a love of horses—and became good friends. When Alabama seceded in , Yancey’s former student immediately volunteered for military service.18 Yancey typically awoke at sunrise and rode to his small dairy farm to give instructions to his overseer.19 Afterward he returned home for breakfast and then walked or rode the five short blocks to his law office on Washington Street. He attended various courts in Montgomery; often during noon recesses he would walk home, where his trained thoroughbred dogs met him at the gate.20 Home and family were so important to Yancey that at least once he left court in Autauga County at : .., reached home late that night, and left again early the next day for Autauga.21 For most of Yancey’s legal career he enjoyed a partnership with John A. Elmore. A fine complement to Yancey, Elmore established a reputation for passionlessness and legal scholarship. Although clearly a states’ rights Democrat, after a brief stint in the state senate in  Elmore seldom engaged actively in politics, a rare thing for a prominent and respected lawyer of his time. Affable and popular, the large and heavyset Elmore was more likely to cultivate clients than the fiery, socially maladroit Yancey. Yancey and Elmore proved a formidable team. Thomas H. Watts considered John A. Elmore’s one of the greatest legal minds of their day. The junior but more eloquent Yancey typically consulted with Elmore, who conducted most of the legal preparation for their cases, with Yancey delivering the evidence and arguments in court. But Yancey was far from dependent on his senior partner. Shortly after they teamed up, Elmore became too ill to attend court for days. Yancey shouldered all the work for the firm, scarcely leaving the courthouse from nine in the morning to six in the evening, and enjoyed tremendous success, winning all but one case.22 Despite their good fortune and reputation, in  Yancey dissolved his connection with Elmore. He had long wanted to practice with his brother, but he had persistently refused. Later that year, though, Yancey proudly and happily welcomed his oldest son, Ben Yancey, as a new partner. And by  Yancey and Yancey added the considerable services of William P. Chilton. An active Whig in politics, Chilton built a successful law firm in . In  Chilton won election to the state supreme court and served as its Chief Justice from December  to January . Yancey argued scores of cases before Justice Chilton. In  Chilton resigned from the bench and resumed private practice in Macon County, and in  won election to the state senate. He resigned the next year Public Man, Private Life

n



and moved to Montgomery. There, he and his son joined forces with Yancey and his son. Because of Chilton’s political and judicial renown, combined with Yancey’s own reputation, the firm of Chilton and Yancey promised to attract plenty of business.23 Thomas Watts provided perhaps the best account of Yancey’s legal style and ability. He should have, because he faced Yancey in the state supreme court no fewer than forty-three times, over  percent of all Yancey’s high court appearances, and occasionally he even served as co-counsel with Yancey. According to Watts, ‘‘Yancey was a wonderful man before a jury, or even before a Court. He had as much power over juries as he had over public audiences, in his political speeches.’’ Watts recalled Yancey’s ‘‘magnetic power which he had over audiences and juries,’’ although he found it difficult to describe this ‘‘magnetism.’’ He concluded that it did not stem simply from Yancey’s arrangement of facts or his powers of analysis, both of which Watts found considerable, but rather ‘‘the peculiar charm about his speaking was his sweet voice, and the annunciation [sic] of every word and syllable of every word when he spoke, so that even in a conversational tone he was distinctly heard in any room and at great distance when speaking in the open air.’’ 24 Young L. Royston, a frequent courtroom adversary of Yancey’s, offered a similar assessment. Royston prosecuted many circuit court cases in which Yancey served as defense attorney. Like those more accustomed to hearing Yancey in political settings, Royston considered Yancey the greatest orator he had ever heard. Royston usually lost to Yancey, but after the Civil War Royston recalled these encounters with bemusement. An impressive figure in his own right at over six feet seven inches, lean, genial, and intelligent, Royston nevertheless felt outmatched by Yancey. Like Watts, Royston recalled ‘‘a magnetism about him that nobody could resist.’’ According to Royston, juries hung on Yancey’s every word and usually started nodding in agreement with him as he spoke. Even Royston claimed to have trouble disagreeing with Yancey once his adversary warmed up to his task. ‘‘I have held my hands in my ears many a time to keep from hearing what he had to say, afraid of being carried away and convinced that my case was . . . wrong.’’ Like Watts, Royston thought that juries tended to believe Yancey because of his oratorical skills, rather than the evidence he presented. Royston also recollected that Yancey wore his emotions plainly after a verdict came in, no matter how great or small the issue, money, or consequences involved. If he won, Yancey exhibited great animation; he would swing his arms and hold his head up proudly. If he lost, he would sit and bury his face in his hands and for a time remain ‘‘utterly unapproachable.’’ 25 

n

Public Man, Private Life

However formidable Yancey proved in the courtroom or on the stump, his private social encounters revealed quite a different man. Several contemporaries, including admirers, found his social skills imperfect at best. One recalled that while Yancey always smiled in company, in private drawing rooms the great public speaker remained conspicuously silent, seldom engaging in casual conversations. Henry S. Foote, a unionist in the s and later a Confederate congressman, noted ‘‘a perceptible approximation to moroseness’’ in such settings, just as Benjamin Perry had found in the s. Thomas Watts found Yancey’s social skills further impaired by his inability to remember people’s names. When combined with Yancey’s familiar and conversational speaking style, according to Watts, people who heard him speak and later met him thought that he should have recognized them, and when he did not they tended to feel slighted. In more informal social settings Watts found other peculiarities in Yancey. Although a fine conversationalist, Yancey remained austere and introverted rather than affable. These characteristics, Watts concluded, proved a political liability for Yancey, who, however much he shined in front of an audience, never managed to build great personal popularity.26 Thirteen years after Yancey’s death, Henry Foote described him as a physically unimpressive man, just below average height, ‘‘neither strikingly handsome nor the reverse,’’ wearing clothes remarkable only for their plainness and ill fit. Foote described Yancey as usually quite reserved and who ‘‘not seldom betrayed tokens of nervous exhaustion.’’ Generally Yancey kept his emotions ‘‘in a state of stoical suppression,’’ but occasionally, whether for calculated effect or from loss of self-control, he ‘‘unloosed all the furies under his command upon some noted antagonist, and did and said things which those who witnessed his sublime ravings never again forgot.’’ Thomas H. Watts also noted how ‘‘Yancey’s fiery temper . . . sometimes permitted his passion to get the better of his judgement.’’ 27 In social settings with women, however, a different side of Yancey’s personality emerged. Virginia Clopton Clay, wife of Alabama senator Clement C. Clay Jr., recalled a social encounter with Yancey in the early s. She reminisced about a ball in Tuscaloosa, then the state capital, shortly before she met her future husband but well after Yancey’s marriage to Sarah. While dancing with Yancey she mentioned how brilliantly he had spoken during one of his recent efforts. Virginia Clay remembered—or claimed to remember—Yancey responding, ‘‘Ah, if it had not been for a pair of hazel eyes I should have been submerged in a sea of rhetoric!’’ Although this seems fanciful and overly romantic, Yancey himself had once boasted to his brother about dancing in WashingPublic Man, Private Life

n



ton with a nineteen-year-old belle, and had thoroughly enjoyed the company of women when he lived in South Carolina.28 Social events, dancing, even savoring the company of women other than his wife, took a back seat to his greatest private passion. Whenever he believed that he could afford it, Yancey bought horses. Ever since his youth in South Carolina Yancey relished horse races. Now he had arrived at a station in life where he could enter his own horses in contests and not just wager on others’. Races in Montgomery paid between  and  for the winner. At the end of  his brother sent Yancey a promising thoroughbred named St. John. Even though St. John proved sluggish under the saddle, Yancey wanted to enter him in local races.29 Eventually Yancey decided to sell him and refused to budge from a  asking price, despite St. John’s infirmities of the feet and shoulders.30 Although acquiring horses occupied much of Yancey’s interest, slaveholding remained a central value to Yancey throughout his adult life. Even when he focused his attention on his law practice, Yancey always kept his eyes open for an opportunity to purchase slaves. Southern society in general and the gentry of Alabama’s black belt in particular equated slave ownership with status and achievement; no matter how wealthy or successful a man was in this culture, to gain entry into elite status he had to acquire slaves. And besides prestige, Yancey considered slaves a sound investment.31 Yancey was a strict master who expected profit and obedience from his slaves. Occasionally he exchanged slaves with Ben, who owned scores of them on his plantation. During one such swap in  William’s initial satisfaction gave way to irritation. ‘‘I found out . . . that the little rascal had got to stealing—had broken into a store—and had been at it for weeks.’’ The brothers either trusted one another sufficiently or had already established some parameters for discipline and treatment of their slaves, because the older Yancey wasted no time exchanging this slave with a slave trader. In return he took possession of a twenty-twoyear-old man whom Yancey considered very intelligent and endowed with several marketable skills. This slave could earn for his master two to three dollars a day by making willow baskets and, more important to Yancey, had the training to break young horses and to drive his carriage. Although this slave had a stunted arm caused, Yancey believed, from an infection during his youth, he proved so strong and able that Yancey tossed in an extra  in his deal with the slave trader. He told his brother that the market value of the young man stood at ,.32 Yancey saw further profitable opportunities in another of his brother’s slaves, a man named Anderson. Anderson met Yancey’s criteria for slaves. ‘‘He is a good 

n

Public Man, Private Life

boy in disposition—& has not lost a moment from sickness.’’ Yancey planned to hire out Anderson within Montgomery. Slave hiring offered potentially large profits for the slave’s owner, and more white people could afford to hire a slave for a year at a time than to purchase one. It was precisely at this time that Yancey himself hired some slaves for his dairy farm. The only problem Yancey foresaw came in the relative freedom of movement experienced by urban-dwelling slaves as they went about their business engaging in tasks unsupervised by white people. Most other whites shared his concern. In March  Montgomery authorities arrested ten slaves for gambling and seized from them the considerable sum of . Yancey expressed no uneasiness over Anderson’s possible interest in gambling, but worried whether he might be tempted to drink alcohol. Yancey remarked that Anderson ‘‘always looks as if drunk—tho not so.’’ 33 Yancey adopted a strictly utilitarian attitude toward his slaves. Even though Anderson proved ‘‘steady—faithful & content’’—a paternalistic slaveholder’s dream—Yancey sought every opportunity to sell him. In that regard Yancey typified the southwestern slaveholder. As one master in Mississippi put it, ‘‘To sell cotton in order to buy negroes—to make more cotton to buy more negroes, ‘ad infinitum,’ is the aim and direct tendency of all the operations of the . . . planter: his whole soul is wrapped up in the pursuit.’’ No sooner did a prospective buyer withdraw an offer of  for Anderson in  than Yancey sent this slave to his old friend Morgan Smith in Lowndes County. Smith tried Anderson at plowing and ox driving but did not make Yancey an offer; he had just spent the extraordinary sum of , on slaves and decided that he could not afford more for a while. Yancey then ran advertisements in local newspapers with no success. He urged his brother to keep Anderson. The fact that Yancey himself judged Anderson both useful and ‘‘a good boy’’ did not make Anderson intrinsically valuable to Yancey, nor did Anderson’s personal qualities create any emotional or personal attachment. Only after a year under the watchful eye of Yancey’s overseer did Yancey grudgingly conclude that ‘‘Anderson is turning out well.’’ 34 Indifference by Yancey was often the best his slaves could hope for. The mere perception of disobedience or recalcitrance exposed Yancey as a cold, if not cruel, master. ‘‘Do you know of a fine carriage driver & good servant for sale, young, black & good tempered?’’ he asked his brother. The reason for the inquiry, Yancey explained impassively, was that he had found Joe, a faithful slave of many years and currently his carriage driver, ‘‘growing sullen and rebellious.’’ Yancey did not mention any efforts to reason with Joe or to persuade him to do better, as some other masters did. Yancey did not even threaten him. ‘‘I shipped Public Man, Private Life

n



him, without a minutes warning to New Orleans to be sold.’’ Ben Yancey arranged for a replacement, named Austin, whom he acquired from a cousin in Georgia. William reported back later, ‘‘Austin is doing finely—is daily improving as an Ostler & coachman and pleases us both. He is a good boy—’’ 35 Clearly, Yancey expected his slaves to be productive and at least to appear content, although no evidence exists to suggest that Yancey gave his slaves many positive inducements to do so or that he offered them any religious instruction. When away from home Yancey seldom expressed concern for their welfare or even inquired about them. A measles outbreak in  elicited a singular paternalistic utterance from Yancey, one common among many slaveholders, a reference to slaves and whites alike as ‘‘family.’’ Three of his sons first contracted the disease, then two slaves. ‘‘It will doubtless run thro the family,’’ Yancey sadly concluded. But both during the accidental poisoning of his slaves at Harrowgate Springs in  and the measles epidemic, Yancey expressed fewer concerns for his slaves’ well-being than fear of losing investment, income, and status. In  while away from home he casually noted that a yellow fever outbreak in Montgomery hit blacks harder than whites and that two of his slaves had contacted the deadly malady, but he indicated no great concern. Sarah’s personal servant, Jane, had severe rheumatism, and Yancey once contemplated taking her with Sarah to the mineral baths at Hot Springs, Arkansas, but no record suggests they ever made this trip.36 Yancey infrequently alluded to his slaves by name. Once, when referring to the recovery of a slave in a lawsuit, he stressed his desire for ‘‘the thing itself ’’ rather than cash value, not caring that the ‘‘thing’’ was a human being.37 Securing his status as a slaveholder remained so important to Yancey that it sometimes blinded him to his other goals and values. In the same letter to his brother in which he boasted of acquiring a slave in , he mentioned a possible vacation for his beloved daughter, Mary. He wanted her to go on a trip and thought that it would ‘‘greatly benefit her,’’ but concluded that the two dollars a day allowance plus traveling expenses were ‘‘beyond my means,’’ even though his professional income was solid and he had just bought a new slave.38 But, as it had many times before, his quest for status within his community proved the driving force behind this decision. From a low of six slaves in  (after the poisoning episode), Yancey slowly worked his way back into the planter aristocracy. He owned eleven slaves by , fourteen by , and twenty-four from  to .39 Ben Yancey was wealthier and owned far more slaves than his brother. By the end of  Ben had moved back to Alabama and a plantation near Cedar Bluff, 

n

Public Man, Private Life

in Cherokee County, Alabama. While he lived and worked in South Carolina Ben Yancey was an absentee owner, visiting his property and slaves occasionally but leaving the daily activities to his overseer, Joseph C. Doyle. Ben Yancey’s slaves produced profitable cotton harvests, and Doyle proved a reliable agent. By  Ben Yancey owned seventy-eight slaves, placing him among the six largest slaveholders in the county.40 William Yancey always had big plans for his younger brother. In  he wanted Ben to run for Congress and spoke to several prominent men about it in Alabama’s seventh congressional district. Their encouraging response led him to press Ben to visit key towns on ‘‘some business pretext.’’ William believed that his brother would get the backing of Benton County Democratic Party delegates and offered his own support in Chambers and Tallapoosa Counties. Ben did not seek public office, but the next year William strenuously urged him to move to Montgomery and practice law there. Although he joked about selling out his practice and moving to California, he yearned for a professional reunion with Ben. ‘‘I will dissolve with Elmore & take you into partnership,’’ he offered. ‘‘The litigation never was better here.’’ 41 Again Ben Yancey rejected his brother’s suggestion, but by  he again caught the itch for public office. And this time, with or without older brother’s advice, Ben defeated an incumbent state senator, J. M. Hendrix, and was selected as senate president. Frustrated, however, at his inability to enter into the fray on the senate floor, Ben resigned his seat in April .42 That year Ben moved to Atlanta, not much farther from Montgomery than Cherokee County, Alabama. The Yancey brothers resumed their habit of family visits. Almost immediately William sent his daughter Mary to Atlanta, where her uncle tended to her education. ‘‘I am rejoiced to learn that Mary has improved so much,’’ her father wrote. ‘‘She shall visit you often.’’ William and Sarah also planned a visit soon, hoping for a family reunion at the state fair the coming autumn.43 As evidenced by the brothers’ visits and correspondence, they clearly longed for each other’s company and strove always to help the other. As Ben prepared for a long trip to the Northeast in , his prominent older brother prepared a series of letters of introduction to his friends in Baltimore and New York. To Horace F. Clark, a friend in New York City and partner in mischief from their Williams College days, Yancey remarked dryly, ‘‘Any attention paid to him will be kindly remembered, and I should be particularly happy to reciprocate them here in the Metropolis of Alabama.’’ Another letter revealed an older brother’s almost fatherly pride as well as self-effacing humor. Ben Yancey, William wrote, Public Man, Private Life

n



‘‘is said to be a little more staid in temperament than I am, tho I think a ‘chip of [sic] the old block’!’’ 44 William’s devotion to his family kept him in contact with Charles Yancey, an elderly cousin. Charles provided William and Ben with the closest living link to their deceased father. William and Ben always referred to Charles fondly as ‘‘Uncle,’’ although in fact he was their father’s first cousin. Born in , Charles proved to be a treasure trove of invaluable (although often inaccurate) genealogical information at a time in William’s life that he grew most interested in his ancestry.45 Charles told the story of three brothers, Lewis, Henry, and Richard Yancey, who came from England—although other family members believed they migrated from Wales—during the eighteenth century. Lewis settled in North Carolina, Henry in Culpeper County, Virginia, and Robert in the wilds of westernmost Virginia, the part that would become Kentucky. The latter, Robert, was Charles Yancey’s father. Henry had two sons, Robert and Leighton, both of whom Charles had known personally and who had fought in the Revolution. Both served, he believed, as captains of Dragoons under the command of the glamorous Virginian Colonel Harry Lee. In fact Leighton Yancey served as ensign and regimental quartermaster in the th Virginia infantry from January , , to March , then as captain in the Virginia militia in  and . In  his brother Robert rose to lieutenant in the st Continental Dragoons, commanded by Harry Lee, and on May , , he was taken prisoner when the British captured Charleston, South Carolina. Robert was released on parole for the remainder of the war.46 As for Charles, he remained in Virginia and himself became active in politics in . Doubtless exaggerating a bit as well as revealing his own Federalistoriented values, he recalled that ‘‘it was then a pleasure to be associated with John Marshall, James Madison . . . John Taylor [of Caroline], & others, but we broke the freehold vote [property qualification] in [], & let in all the tag rag [sic] fellows to the polls, which filled the legislature with demagogues & would be great men which caused my service to be irksome.’’ 47 In  William and Ben Yancey learned that a prominent jurist in South Carolina, Judge John Benton O’Neal, planned to write a biographical sketch of their father for a book called Bench and Bar of South Carolina. This prodded William to contact Daniel E. Huger, Yancey’s former housemate in Washington and his late father’s friend. He also wrote to Charles, now almost eighty-three, for more information, and he gladly complied, with some help from elderly family slaves who had the aristocratic Virginian names of Harrison and Mar

n

Public Man, Private Life

shall. From these efforts William learned that Lewis Davis Yancey settled on the Little River in Louisa County, Virginia, and had five sons. One son, James, moved to Boston in  and married Abigail Cudworth. Their son, Benjamin Cudworth Yancey, was William’s and Ben’s father.48 However grateful to Charles for helping him recapture family history, Yancey’s relationship with his cousin was often unpleasant and sometimes quite strained. In  Charles moved to Wetumpka, then William’s home. Twice Charles became involved in efforts to establish Whig-oriented newspapers designed to compete against William’s Democratic Argus. On July , , Charles produced the first issue of his Courier. Six months later, Charles, William, and Ben signed an agreement that Charles would sell his interest in the Courier and never again participate in a rival endeavor. In exchange the brothers agreed to assume some of Charles’s financial obligations. But it was only another six months before Charles began publishing the Wetumpka Times. The Yancey brothers grumbled about this in their Argus in August, and by December  had convinced Charles once again to sell his interest. Four years later Charles again challenged his Democratic cousins by publishing a Whig campaign sheet in support of Henry Clay’s presidential run, called Harry of the West (referring to one of Clay’s nicknames). Much of William’s politics at this time centered around vilifying Clay. Although Charles finally gave up the newspaper business after , as William grew to prominence in state and national politics, Charles continued to express criticism. After William’s bolt from Baltimore and the publication of his protest, Charles wrote Ben, ‘‘Wm Lowndes sent me his defence pamphlet. It was ingenious & plausible, In reply to him I gave him a gentle rebuke for his kick up in Baltimore Convention, he was rather fastidious.’’ 49 Charles upset William privately much more than he did politically. Through most of his later years Charles apparently drank to excess. As a youth William drank a lot and joked about it often, but as an adult, head of a family, and churchgoer, he now disdained alcohol abuse. In  he was thrilled to learn that Charles had decided to give up drinking, although he expressed skepticism that he would ‘‘keep it up.’’ His worries were not unfounded; only four months later, Charles indeed resumed drinking. In language and judgment much like Beman’s, Yancey grumbled that his cousin ‘‘will die I fear a sot & cannot maintain any degree of respectability.’’ 50 Yancey’s troubles with Charles, however, paled in comparison with his ongoing problems with his wife’s family, the Earles. In  William and Sarah made one of their occasional visits to Greenville, South Carolina, to see Sarah’s family, as well as Ben Yancey and Ben Perry, William’s old law teacher and Public Man, Private Life

n



friend. On August , Sarah and some of her relatives engaged in a shouting match while William was absent. Yancey regarded Dr. C. S. Stone, the husband of his sister-in-law, Nancy Earle Stone, as awful a person as his own stepfather, Rev. Beman. ‘‘His mind & heart are wrong,’’ Yancey judged. ‘‘Dr. Stone is a domestic tyrant—conceited—mean—narrow minded—intensely selfish and dogmatic . . . and crooked in mind & morals, almost universally despised in Greenville. He has embittered the life of his wife,’’ and did so in the Earle household in front of Nancy and Sarah’s mother, Elizabeth Earle. Yancey described Nancy Earle Stone as ‘‘mild, yielding & credulous—a perfect child.’’ Supposedly, Dr. Stone went into a tirade in which he ‘‘grossly abused his wife & cursed the old lady,’’ Sarah and Nancy’s mother, prompting her to leave the room. Sarah stayed. An honor-bound southerner herself, she denounced Stone for his actions. In angry and obscene language, Stone replied that it was none of her business and that the only source of his marital woes was interference in his affairs by Sarah Yancey and the Earle family. Sarah Yancey boldly countered that that was a lie. This elicited quite a reaction from Stone, ‘‘using constantly most profane language & swore he would have satisfaction.’’ 51 That evening Stone sent Yancey a note complaining that Sarah had insulted him and demanding satisfaction. According to the code of honor, husbands bore the responsibility for their wives’ actions and words and could in fact be ‘‘called out’’ to a duel in such cases. Stone wrote, ‘‘I have this evening, being so grossly insulted by Mrs. Yancey that no apology would be received (even if one should be sent) I will therefore hold you responsible.’’ Stone also insisted on reserving the right to select the ‘‘mode of satisfaction.’’ Stone sent the letter to Montgomery, unaware that the Yanceys had not yet left Greenville. On September , Stone sent another missive to Yancey, followed by yet another on September . Yancey, who had never before shrunk from such challenges or situations, had no idea what to do when he reached Montgomery and found the bizarre letters waiting for him there. He noted that Stone did not specify what type of satisfaction he wanted. ‘‘It was a peculiar letter,’’ he explained to his brother. ‘‘I laid it before Elmore & he, as well as myself, came to the conclusion that there was nothing [in] it to reply to, but that I must hold myself in readiness for an attack.’’ So Yancey simply filed away the letter without issuing a reply.52 After the encounter between Sarah and Dr. Stone and before the Yanceys left Greenville, William Yancey had another close call. Elias Earle, the aggrieved son of Dr. Robinson Earle, whom Yancey killed in , had been waiting ever since to seek vengeance. His plot had taken on a life of its own, according to Ben, who told his wife that the young Earle’s latest effort ‘‘was the result of 

n

Public Man, Private Life

his being sneered at for previous threats without any attempt to put them into execution, on account of which he deemed it necessary to do something.’’ The good news was, however, that most folks in Greenville agreed that Elias had given up on the scheme, due largely to the ‘‘good sense’’ of his brothers.53 But the whole affair almost boiled over anew, ironically, after Elias Earle wrote an apology to Ben Yancey. ‘‘It is doubtless known to you that I sometime ago lost control of myself and made an attempt to kill your brother,’’ Earle blandly explained. Surely Ben Yancey understood that ‘‘the thought of having a dear father murdered makes my blood boil up within me.’’ Now, however, Earle promised to never again molest his father’s assailant. Ben Yancey replied graciously and commended Earle’s latest actions as honorable, although he objected to the term ‘‘murdered.’’ Ben Yancey assured Earle that although William still considered his actions justified, he regretted the fray nevertheless, spoke of it only with sorrow, and had consciously chosen to restrain himself ever since from trying to kill Elias Earle before Earle could attack him! 54 After Ben Yancey happily sent word to his brother about the reconciliation with Earle, William erupted. Clearly, he told Ben, Earle directed his apology and attempt at conciliation only to Ben. William protested that a ‘‘casual remark’’ by Earle hardly excused or exonerated him from two previous ‘‘assassin attacks,’’ nor did it offer him much confidence that Earle would in fact give up on his malevolent designs. If Ben chose to bury the hatchet with Earle, his brother announced formally, ‘‘I of course have nothing to say.’’ At least Yancey had heard nothing further from Dr. Stone, although friends had told him that Stone would pass through Montgomery that autumn.55 Still disgruntled with Earle and Stone, Yancey at least believed that his troubles in Greenville had ended. Silence proved deceptive, however. Dr. Stone and related problems would continue to crop up year after year. For two years Yancey heard nothing from Stone. But in the summer of  while on a ‘‘flying visit’’ to Greenville and the Carolina upcountry, a messenger brought Yancey a note from the doctor who reminded him about Sarah’s insult from , that he had sent Yancey two letters at the time, and that he ‘‘again demanded satisfaction.’’ Yancey immediately consulted with his acquaintances and with their friends about his course of action. Within two hours he sent a reply to Dr. Stone stating that he was simply in the area on a visit, not to provoke a fight, and that the relevant correspondence from two years before remained back home in Alabama, unavailable to him now. He sent this message around : .. on August . Yancey truly wished to smooth things over. He hoped that from this point on he and his family could safely visit Sarah’s family Public Man, Private Life

n



and his own friends in Greenville. The next morning Yancey left for Alabama at : .., not having heard a reply from Stone. This was not the same volatile Yancey who ran amok in college or who grappled with a fellow law student or who challenged a congressman to a duel. He was now approaching his thirty-seventh birthday. He now had five children. His one duel six years before had generated the wrath of church leaders. His fame in politics and in law now made him a prominent member of his church. And Yancey preferred to focus his energies on secession. Furthermore, in Yancey’s mind, Stone did not qualify as a gentleman, which according to the Code of Honor provided Yancey with an honorable option to refuse his challenge. Yancey’s spots had not completely changed, however, as he poured out his frustrations to his faithful brother. He decided to do only ‘‘what is absolutely required of me.’’ He called Stone ‘‘a contemptible puppy,’’ and acknowledged that Sarah’s role in the encounter complicated matters. ‘‘I am much at a loss as to what to do. My position as a member of the Church—as head of a poor, large & growing family, and my contempt for the puppy,’’ all inclined him to simply repeat his and Sarah’s side of the story, ‘‘and to inform him that I had no satisfaction to give him—that if he decided to seek it, he knew where I lived & was always to be found.’’ 56 The fearless Yancey now decided that honor, faith, and family combined to demand that he should not fight, but instead simply walk away. Fate did not allow matters to end so simply. The next wrinkle, however, involved a court battle rather than a meeting on the field of honor. Sarah’s mother, Elizabeth Earle, died in . Ironically, the executor of the estate was Nancy’s husband, Dr. Stone. Years before, Sarah’s mother had given her a family of slaves. Sarah left them behind with her mother when she joined her husband in Alabama in . After Elizabeth Earle’s death, Stone tried to keep this enslaved family for himself. Yancey sued Stone for the recovery of these slaves in a South Carolina Chancery Court. He won, but Stone immediately appealed the decision.57 Again, conflict with Stone refused to die, and continued in various courts for three more years. As the legal battle with Stone dragged on into , Yancey decided to strike back with one of the greatest legal resources he had available: Ben Perry. A lesser associate, Sam Townes, likely did the bulk of the work for Perry, but Yancey chose to remain in Alabama and corresponded frequently to keep up on his case and to offer information and advice. Perry informed him that the best he could hope for was to recover the value of the slaves. Yancey wanted the slaves themselves, so the court fight carried on into .58 As the matter 

n

Public Man, Private Life

went from Equity Court back to Chancery Court, briefly Yancey believed that he had finally won, but Stone and his lawyer found new grounds for appeal.59 By late summer Yancey heard the disheartening news that something had occurred to upset the friendship of Townes and Perry. Both as a friend and client, he hoped that a mutual friend of the two might patch things up. Then more bad news arrived. Stone had hired Christopher Memminger, a lawyer and politician at least as prominent and successful as Perry, to handle his final appeal to the Court of Appeals, South Carolina’s highest tribunal. Yancey faithfully stood by Perry, simply muttering that all family members (except the Yanceys and Stones) had gathered together for the burial of Mrs. Earle and that all of them agreed that these slaves belonged to Sarah.60 The affair finally ended with Stone in possession of the slaves. Lawsuits, invective, murder, and attempted murder—all within his own family—left Yancey muttering, ‘‘I am fated, I fear, never to visit Greenville in peace.’’ 61 Yancey got along better with other family members, especially his halfbrother, Sam Beman. Sam, William, and Ben never lost touch with each other after Sam returned north in . Sam, who occasionally referred to ‘‘Brother Will,’’ was one of the few people privileged to address Yancey other than ‘‘William.’’ In  Beman won election to the New York Assembly from Washington County, in the northeastern corner of the state. William proudly followed Beman’s career both through correspondence and newspaper accounts. Beman’s speech in  in favor of the fugitive slave law of  thrilled his southern brothers, but cost him his political career in New York.62 Beman headed west, first as a temperance lecturer in Ohio, then roaming through the prairies of Illinois and settling at last in Minnesota territory by . There he resumed his political career, serving as a member of the first legislature to assemble in that new state in .63 In a letter to Ben in , Beman confessed that he was jealous of the Yancey brothers and wished that he had enjoyed their success. He offered a sad remark that could have easily been uttered once by William: ‘‘I sought public life to stifle the moanings of a wounded spirit.’’ 64 William provided both brotherly and fatherly love in turn. He continually loaned money to Beman, including enough for the purchase of land and a home in Minnesota.65 In Yancey’s mind, his family always included Benjamin Perry. Every time Yancey planned a return to Greenville he hoped to have a reunion with Perry, and yearned ‘‘for the children of both families to know each other.’’ 66 Despite Perry’s steadfast unionism and Yancey’s newfound secessionism, the two remained close, at least until . Ironically, it was Perry more than any other man who gave Yancey the unqualified love that the secessionist yearned for. Public Man, Private Life

n



But Yancey’s greatest joy came from his own family, especially his children. As a father Yancey exhibited none of the abusiveness that he experienced as a youth. On the contrary, he most often was a kind, even indulgent father. Also in contrast to the Beman household, religion served as a source of calm and unity for the Yancey family. Regular morning and evening prayers brought together his large family for a few moments each day. Yancey also served as one of many vice presidents of the Alabama Bible Society.67 Yancey doubtless related to all his children the daring tales of his father’s experiences in the Quasi-War. These stories obviously captured the imagination of young William Earle Yancey, born on November , . The father encouraged his son’s interest in overseas adventure. In the late s Yancey presented his namesake with a copy of Elisha Kane’s Arctic Explorations, a harrowing and best-selling account of an American sailor’s efforts to locate and rescue a British explorer lost somewhere in the frozen ocean near Greenland. Yancey inscribed the gift, ‘‘A Christmas Present to my son William: May he learn from these pages lessons of patience, fortitude and reliance on Divine Providence in all trials.’’ William Earle—‘‘Wille’’—attended private schools in Montgomery, and his father decided that he and Dalton should acquire a business education. By the end of the decade Yancey made plans for William to work in a cotton commission house in Mobile, but his son had other ideas. He entered the U.S. Naval Academy in , training a while on a new ship, the  Constellation, named for the historical craft his grandfather served on. He would not remain long in Annapolis, though. When Alabama seceded in January , the young midshipman resigned and came home.68 Yancey had two daughters. Ella Bird was born on January , , but died four years later on September , . The grieving parents laid her to rest in Oakwood Cemetery, on a hill adjacent to and overlooking the capitol and Goat Hill, where William and Sarah themselves would later be buried. Mary Elizabeth was born in  in Wetumpka, on the Coosa River. Yancey once proposed to his brother, ‘‘I really think that ‘Coosa’ would be a beautiful name. What say you to its becoming her baptismal one?’’ Either the father changed his mind or the mother vetoed this idea. Especially after the death of young Ella, Yancey doted on his only daughter. He proudly watched Mary ‘‘growing more womanly daily,’’ doing well with her education at private girls’ schools in Alabama and in Baltimore, and developing a knack for music. Yancey boasted to Ben, ‘‘Mary, by the bye, has grown so much. She is improving rapidly— At times—in church say—she is the very image of her grandmother—even of her  years! When at play, however, her spirit is up.’’ To Ben Perry, Yancey 

n

Public Man, Private Life

described the fifteen-year-old Mary as ‘‘tall, fine-looking—Yancey in all her features—very affectionate—very studious—and greatly beloved by teachers & friends.’’ 69 Four years later, on November , , Mary Elizabeth married John B. Harrell, a banker in Montgomery and a relative of the Pickens and Calhoun families of South Carolina. Yancey liked Harrell. He described him as smart with a will and a purpose in life, but moaned that Harrell had ‘‘no fortune.’’ In , the Harrells had a son, their first and the first grandson for William and Sarah. They named him Yancey Harrell.70 Yancey had two other boys. Dalton Huger was born on February , , while Yancey was in Congress and boarding with Daniel Huger, his late father’s friend. His last child, Goodloe Harper, was born July , . Both received their education at private academies in Montgomery and Coosa Counties. In  Yancey wrote to Ben Perry that Dalton was ‘‘Yancey all over,’’ and that Goodloe Harper was ‘‘very much like me.’’ Dalton spent a year at Franklin College, near Tuscumbia, Alabama, then enrolled at the University of Alabama in , just as the Civil War broke out. Goodloe Harper joined Dalton at the University of Alabama and after the war attended the University of Georgia, but was expelled after twice getting into fights with other students in .71 Goodloe Harper was very much like his father after all. Caroline Yancey, Ben Yancey’s daughter and William’s niece, clearly inherited the family propensity for impetuosity and intensity. In the fall of  ‘‘Caro’’ arrived in Montgomery for a long visit with her uncle and aunt. Her trunk arrived later by mail but no one had a key. William sent for a locksmith to open it, but before he could Caro broke it open herself. She displayed the same restlessness that her uncle did in his adolescence. ‘‘As to her deficiency in scholarship and general progress,’’ William sadly reported to Ben, ‘‘I assure you that it is hardly the fault of her teacher. She is incorrigibly opposed to books & study & practice—Twice is necessary with her, with judicious management—before she will learn to think & before she will acquire habits of study.’’ 72 In Caro, Yancey clearly saw a reflection of his own youthful wildness, but responded with love and acceptance more often than with harsh words, and never with violence. Caro ‘‘is very lively, which is all right. Children should not have drilled into them the sedateness & gravity of old age. Only keep them in the path of truth, & let them romp, in proper places, as much as they please. When a child, let her like Paul ‘speak as a child.’’’ He assured Ben, ‘‘We will treat Caro, as we do Mary, in all things.’’ Caro remained her uncle’s favorite, likely because of her fieriness. When she grew up Caro married Hugh H. Harris, son of Yancey’s first law partner, Sampson Harris.73 Public Man, Private Life

n



Despite the size and expense of his growing family, Yancey enjoyed opening his home to as many children as he could. For a while in  he boarded two friends’ daughters. When his brother invited him and his family to visit his plantation home in Cherokee County—actually, a simple log cabin—Yancey declined only because the ‘‘seven—or eight—children in the house’’ (he obviously lost count) would have overcrowded the small home. But, Yancey proposed, Ben and his family ought to come to Montgomery in the spring with Ben’s children, Caro, Hamilton, and Mary Louisa; the prospect of attending to several children added to Yancey’s happiness.74 Yancey struggled to ensure that his oldest son, Ben, had a proper early education. All concerned parents had trouble finding good schools in Alabama.75 The one that Ben attended in  had lost its solitary teacher. The situation became so hopeless that Yancey considered sending Ben to the Mt. Zion Academy in Georgia, Yancey’s old school, run by Nathan Beman’s brother, Carlisle. For a while in  Yancey sent Ben to live with his brother in South Carolina and asked his brother to find some sort of school for his son. Then he decided to educate the boy at home for a few months. Later he sent Ben to a friend, Dr. Andrew A. Lipscomb, who operated a private school. For college Yancey narrowed down his decisions to the University of Georgia or the University of Alabama, deciding upon the latter in  mostly because the devoted father wished to remain as close as possible to his son. To Ben Perry, Yancey boasted in  that at age eighteen, his son was ‘‘well grown, character much mature . . . reflecting, amiable, and a fine student, beloved by teacher scholar & neighbor.’’ To his brother Yancey crowed, ‘‘Ben stands high at college—and has been tried, as to character, for coolness, moral & physical courage, and reflections, and is really a jewel of a boy. They [Ben and Mary] both are great blessings to us.’’ After graduating from college, Ben studied law in Lebanon, Tennessee.76 In the summer of , William Yancey proudly accompanied Ben to the polls for his son’s first vote, and in  Ben’s ‘‘Pa’’ welcomed his son to partnership in his law firm.77 Concern for his family took primacy with Yancey. Even at a critical time in  in his efforts to organize Southern Rights Associations, he took the family on vacation to the Gulf Coast, at the Daphne Hotel in Point Clear, on the east side of Mobile Bay. ‘‘We are all well here & pleased,’’ he wrote to his brother. ‘‘The sea breeze, salt water bathing & excellent fishing constitute strong attractions. It is dull, very dull to me, however,’’ he groused. Barriers on the Alabama River delayed their return to Montgomery for several days, but Dalton, Mary, 

n

Public Man, Private Life

Goodloe Harper, and Sarah all enjoyed the rest and Yancey himself felt rejuvenated. Doubtless the weekly and family rates at his hotel helped him relax about the expense, not to mention the  percent discount for children and slaves.78 Sarah Earle Yancey enjoyed and loved her children as much as her husband did. But the chronically ill Sarah particularly appreciated her husband’s active role in the household. Early in  she endured severe headaches, causing pain that led her to ingest an elixir called ‘‘Black-drop,’’ that, according to Yancey, had the same effect as morphine. The next year his wife’s health had not improved. ‘‘Her constitution is giving way,’’ Yancey feared, ‘‘tho she never gives up, & is always cheerful.’’ In  Sarah was afflicted by some other ailment for a month, leaving her husband to fear permanent injury to her spine.79 Although Sarah pulled through these and other trials, her husband never stopped worrying about his frail wife. Even at the end of his own life Yancey feared that she would die first. She rallied yet again from illness and lived until January , , almost twenty years longer than her husband. She was buried in Montgomery’s Oakwood Cemetery, next to her devoted husband and daughter, Ella, who died in infancy in .80 The joy, love, happiness, and contentment at home that Yancey cherished so greatly seemed to have survived all challenges but one: his mother. Caroline Beman grew more embittered and more obsessed with money as she grew older, and she vented her anger and confusion at those who tried best to support her. Restless and wearing out one welcome after another, she moved about frequently during the s, staying with friends and relatives in Milledgeville and Sparta, Georgia, and with William in Alabama. For months at a time she also lived in boarding houses. Whenever he could, Yancey visited his mother. Considerations of work and immediate family, though, made it more reasonable for his mother to visit Montgomery, yet she often stubbornly refused to do so. After William called on her in Athens, Georgia, in January  and invited her to come back with him to Alabama, Caroline protested to Ben that she could not accept William’s ‘‘entreaties,’’ yet complained again about her lack of money. By the end of the year, she was in Montgomery.81 Caroline Beman expected her sons to provide for her and to welcome her to their homes, but curiously complained to one whenever the other tried to help, perhaps because she grew more caustic and bitter with age. One visit to Montgomery in  brought out the worst in her. As she related events to Ben, Caroline began by proclaiming, ‘‘I would rather sacrifice my own interest, than add the least possible unhappiness to another.’’ But—and there was always a Public Man, Private Life

n



‘‘but’’ with Caroline—she had to comment on her daughter-in-law’s spending habits. And her relationship with William. And the way Sarah interacted with her slaves. And how badly William and Ben provided for her.82 During this visit Caroline began gossiping with Sarah’s friends in Montgomery about Sarah’s spending habits, even though ‘‘William begged me not to do it.’’ According to Caroline, Sarah’s friends assured her that Sarah had been spoiled and indulged since childhood, and implied that she continued so now. Later, Caroline wrote that her sister, Louisa Bird Cunningham, told her that Sarah had , coming to her in South Carolina, but that William refused to retrieve it because he feared he would make enemies in the process. Of course, he was right. He was suing his own in-laws, the Earles, for some slaves, and now he was supposed to go to Greenville and collect inheritance money from that same family, one of whom he had killed in . But that was just a start. Surely thinking about her own separation from Beman, Caroline told Ben, ‘‘I love Mrs Yancey, and I have often told her if Mr Y was to be cut off, what would she do with such a family; then added, that she was so extravagant, that she must live up to her income.’’ Sarah was greatly upset to have her own mother-in-law ask her to contemplate the loss of her husband, whether through death or separation. William rebuked his mother for interfering with his marriage and household, but she only found more to criticize and began adding exclamation points as she related her saga to Ben. She could not believe that Sarah ‘‘dare[d] say to Wm what she did!!’’ Caroline then confirmed her status as the prototypical meddling mother-in-law. ‘‘I never felt respect for a man to be afraid of telling his wife that he could not afford this and that, that as to extravagance in large matters, he was more so than she. Invariably I always defended her, and yet she thinks I am her enemy!!!’’ The pièce de résistance involved the household slaves. As tempers mounted and tears flowed, Jane, Sarah’s house slave, approached Caroline ‘‘to express her pity for me!’’ Accepting the charity of a slave was intolerable for Caroline. ‘‘I put up my hand and said not a word Jane not a word.’’ Then Caroline noticed that Jane was crying. ‘‘I first thought it was to draw me out but I don’t make a race for whom I have so bad an opinion of their honesty or sincerity, my confidents, and those who do, I respect less than themselves.’’ To Caroline, white people who confided in a slave, like Sarah and perhaps her own son, ‘‘are ignorant.’’ 83 This melodrama shook William Yancey. ‘‘As to mother,’’ he told Ben, ‘‘I fear there can be no doubt that her trials have greatly unsettled her intellect.’’ As to her finances and who spent money most carelessly, despite his ‘‘gentle remonstrance,’’ Yancey accused his mother of ‘‘buying the most useless, showy and ex

n

Public Man, Private Life

pensive dresses!’’ To Yancey, his mother’s ‘‘whole ideas on dress, seemed to have undergone a sudden change.’’ Now Yancey also peppered letters with exclamation points, and grew so upset that he misspelled words. He was incredulous that Caroline insisted on at least  for clothes, especially after she had just purchased ‘‘a . wardroble!’’ as well as carpeting and other household items. All this ‘‘useless’’ spending forced Yancey to do something distasteful: contact Rev. Beman. He convinced his estranged stepfather to increase Caroline’s allowance to  a quarter and promise to pay her medical expenses in case of serious illness. Yancey assured his mother that he would ‘‘cheerfully make up any deficiency in her income.’’ But nothing was ever good enough for Caroline, who continued to gossip and to divide her own family against itself. When Caroline told William that one of the Cunninghams complained that he and Ben neglected her financial needs, Yancey felt ‘‘mortified.’’ Defender of her character, protector and provider, newspaper editor, assemblyman, congressman, accomplished lawyer, farmer, husband, and father, William Yancey nevertheless proved a disappointment to his mother. Although he always welcomed her into his home, he must have had some relief when, in , she finally passed away.84

Public Man, Private Life

n



Benjamin Cudworth Yancey, father of William and Benjamin Yancey (Alabama Department of Archives and History, Montgomery)

Caroline Bird Yancey Beman, mother of William L. Yancey (Alabama Department of Archives and History, Montgomery)

Image not available

Reverend Nathan S. S. Beman, Yancey’s stepfather (Institute Archives and Special Collections, Rensselaer Polytechnic Institute, Troy, N.Y.)

William Lowndes Yancey, ca.  (Southern Historical Collection, Wilson Library, University of North Carolina at Chapel Hill)

Benjamin Cudworth Yancey, brother of William L. Yancey, after the Civil War (Southern Historical Collection, Wilson Library, University of North Carolina at Chapel Hill)

Williams College, West College, where Yancey developed his propensities for oratory and violence (photograph by the author)

Dixon Hall Lewis, the radical states’ rights congressman and senator from Alabama who helped complete Yancey’s transformation from a unionist into a believer in state sovereignty (Alabama Department of Archives and History, Montgomery)

John B. Harrell (left), husband of Yancey’s daughter Mary Elizabeth, and Yancey’s son Benjamin Cunningham Yancey (Alabama Department of Archives and History, Montgomery)

John A. Elmore, Yancey’s law partner, member of the radical South Carolina Elmore family, with close ties to fire-eater Robert Barnwell Rhett (courtesy of Edward Patillo, former curator of the Alabama Supreme Court Library, Montgomery)

Law offices of Yancey and John A. Elmore, Washington Avenue, Montgomery (photograph by the author)

Yancey, Commissioner from C.S.A. (Library of Congress)

John Bull cartoon (Library of Congress)

Dogtrot farmhouse at Yancey’s dairy farm, then outside Montgomery, and the place of Yancey’s death on July ,  (photograph by the author)

Burial site of William and Sarah Yancey, with their daughter, Ella, Oakwood Cemetery, Montgomery (photograph by the author)

William Yancey’s sons William Earle Yancey, Dalton Huger Yancey, and Goodloe Harper Yancey, at a reunion of Confederate soldiers in Birmingham, Alabama, in  (Alabama Department of Archives and History, Montgomery)

CHAPTER TEN

Yancey and the House Divided While Yancey focused his energies on home, family, and his law practice in the early s, momentous developments transpired in Congress and around the country that would draw him back into national politics. Among the greatest of these was an issue that superficially had little to do with slavery: building a transcontinental railroad. As early as , a merchant from New York, Asa Whitney, had proposed this monumental undertaking, asking Congress to sell him federal land at sixteen cents an acre in a sixty-mile swath from Milwaukee to the Columbia River to construct what would rank as the longest railroad on earth. By selling the land at a profit, Whitney would finance the road and then turn it over to the federal government. Most Americans balked at the idea of federal ownership of a railroad and at one man’s control of the project. Plus, politicians everywhere south of Milwaukee lusted after the dream of winning the eastern terminus in order to receive the vast resources of the West and, in turn, trade with Asia. But even most critics agreed the federal government must get involved and must allocate land to private businesses.1

The next year, , just before Yancey arrived in Washington, another freshman Democratic congressman, Stephen A. Douglas of Illinois, proposed a plan similar to Whitney’s, but in important ways more ambitious and audacious. Chicago, not Milwaukee, would serve as the eastern terminus, and construction would proceed due west to San Francisco, then a sleepy port town in Mexican California. As the railroad advanced and settlers followed it, Douglas reasoned, the United States would surely annex more western land in time to complete the project. Douglas’s bill failed. Over the years Congress considered several bills for a transcontinental railroad, with Chicago, St. Louis, and New Orleans emerging as the great rivals for the eastern end. The Gold Rush of  and the admission of California as a state the next year added urgency to the situation, but regional greed always stopped the project. In March , Stephen Douglas resumed his efforts. Now head of the influential Senate territorial committee, Douglas threw his considerable support behind the Nebraska Bill, designed to organize all national territories west of Missouri and north to the Canadian border. A fellow proponent of this measure, Senator David Atchison of Missouri, warned Douglas not to expect support from slave states because Nebraska lay north of the °' line of the Missouri Compromise, and thus remained closed to slavery. Atchison was right. Before the year’s end a southern route looked more likely. President Franklin Pierce owed his election in large part to southern support. In  Pierce appointed James Gadsden of South Carolina as minister to Mexico, where he successfully negotiated for the American purchase of land that bolstered the chances of a route from New Orleans to San Diego. Atchison then told Douglas he would no longer support the Nebraska Bill and joined the phalanx of other slave state congressmen, stating he would see the territory ‘‘sink in hell’’ rather than yield it to free soilers. Douglas’s effort had failed even when he had Atchison’s backing. Now, without strong support from the South, Douglas knew he was sunk. With his energies directed exclusively at a railroad and the fame and increased power he would gain for pulling off this stupendous feat of engineering and statecraft, Douglas found a solution. He would appeal to white southerners by repealing the restrictions on slavery contained in the Missouri Compromise. On January , , Douglas offered a new bill, one creating two territories, Kansas to the south, Nebraska above it. The division implied that Kansas might become slave and Nebraska free, but the bill stated expressly that the decision over slavery would fall to the people of each territory, not Congress. With Atchison and other powerful slave state senators aboard, Douglas approached President Pierce with the plan and won his approval. 

n

Yancey and the House Divided

As Douglas maneuvered, antislavery northerners began a counteroffensive. Congressmen Joshua Giddings and Gerrit Smith, along with Senators Charles Sumner and Salmon P. Chase, drew up an ‘‘Appeal to Independent Democrats.’’ They condemned Douglas’s plans and the institution of slavery in no uncertain terms, and with the same passion that men such as Yancey defended slavery. By trying to repeal the Missouri Compromise line, these northerners announced, Douglas and his allies threatened ‘‘a gross violation of a sacred pledge’’ to limit slave expansion. The Nebraska bill, in whatever form, represented a ‘‘criminal betrayal of precious rights,’’ and formed the core of ‘‘an atrocious plot’’ to make the territory a ‘‘dreary region of despotism, inhabited by masters and slaves.’’ 2 For several months Douglas took on all challengers. The burly, five foot three inch ‘‘Little Giant’’ relished tough political fights. Senator Chase warned Douglas and the South that if Kansas-Nebraska passed it would prove to northerners that no compromise over slavery would last. Chase predicted the measure would precipitate ‘‘the inevitable reorganization of parties,’’ and, more dramatically, ‘‘It will light up a fire in the country which may, perhaps, consume those who kindle it.’’ Douglas replied, ‘‘I accept your challenge,’’ and dared his opponents to ‘‘raise your black flag, call up your forces; preach your war on the Constitution as you have threatened it here. We will be ready to meet your allied forces.’’ 3 The bill passed the Senate on March  by a vote of –. In May it passed the House under the leadership of one of Yancey’s old congressional antagonists, Alexander Stephens of Georgia. The vote there was –. President Pierce signed the bill, pronouncing it ‘‘a test of Democratic orthodoxy.’’ 4 But the cost of the railroad proved stupendous. Hundreds of anti-Nebraska rallies broke out across the North. Douglas initially remained calm and predicted that once northerners spent their initial fury and calmly considered the new law they would support Kansas-Nebraska as enthusiastically as southerners. Besides, as he told many northern audiences, the soil and climate of these territories precluded slave expansion there anyway, so free soil would surely emerge victorious. But northern crowds were not persuaded. As Douglas spoke across the region from spring into summer, hostility toward him and the new law mounted instead of declined. He would later recall, ‘‘I could travel from Boston to Chicago by the light of my own [burning] effigy.’’ And by the time Douglas reached Chicago, an angry crowd of , drowned out their own senator with hisses, boos, groans, and shouts. Angered, frustrated, Douglas lashed out, ‘‘Abolitionists of Chicago, it is now Sunday morning. I’ll go to church, and you may go to hell.’’ 5 Enraged both by the potential expansion of slavery and by the perceived beYancey and the House Divided

n



trayal of the Missouri Compromise that most considered an almost holy covenant, tens of thousands of northerners took out their wrath on politicians who supported Douglas’s bill. In the fall of , improvised anti-Nebraska coalitions emerged and proved staggeringly popular. Over  percent of all incumbent Democrats from the North lost their seats in Congress. In , every proNebraska senator up for reelection from the North was booted out.6 Salmon Chase’s prediction about party realignment was coming true. Aroused by the Kansas-Nebraska bill, various antislavery groups began to coalesce, unwilling to let collapse their makeshift anti-Nebraska affiliations. Schisms over slavery had already existed among Whigs and Democrats, and there had been several abortive efforts to form antislavery parties; first the Liberty Party of , and more recently and successfully the Free Soil Party of . Across the country by  the Whig Party had already begun to fall apart, in large part by refusing to take a stand one way or another on slave issues. Disaffected voters and politicians, motivated by ideals or opportunity or both, gravitated toward the anti-Nebraska movement. In February , in Ripon, Wisconsin, many of these citizens gathered to form a new party, the Republicans. Similar movements occurred elsewhere, with groups coming together as a People’s Party or Fusion Party or Anti-Nebraska. Adding or accentuating issues such as temperance or nativism, many of these groups eventually merged with the Republicans, a purely sectional, northern party pledged to stop the spread of slavery to the territories.7 The sudden emergence of the Republican Party did not immediately capture Yancey’s attention, but the congressional repeal of the Missouri Compromise did. Although Yancey had tangled verbally with Douglas in Congress a decade before, like most white southerners Yancey now saw the Illinois senator as an unexpected hero. Douglas had engineered the removal of a law that Yancey and others had long seen as odious, unfair, and dishonorable. In his joy, Yancey simply joined the throngs of Alabamians who celebrated their victory, unconcerned and unaware of the threat posed by the new party forming quickly in the North. In fact, in  few politically aware Alabamians worried about anything, convinced that given a fair chance slavery would successfully transplant itself to Kansas and that northerners would accept that fact.8 In the North, however, fear of slavery in Kansas or Nebraska motivated thousands to flock west, or to support the emigration of free soilers to Kansas in a desperate effort to outvote slaveholders. New Englanders established Emigrant Aid Societies and solicited free soilers and weapons from the east to settle in Kansas. Among those who complied was Rev. Henry Ward Beecher, an aboli

n

Yancey and the House Divided

tionist whose fanaticism excelled even Nathan Beman’s, and whose sister, Harriet Beecher Stowe, had written Uncle Tom’s Cabin. From his pulpit Beecher urged his congregation to purchase rifles for free soilers in Kansas. Soon, many contemporaries referred to the weapons as ‘‘Beecher’s Bibles.’’ The specter of northern extremists gathering arms and flooding west, combined with the sudden opportunity to grasp new slave territory, ended complacency in Alabama and across the South, where proslavery expeditions formed to combat their northern counterparts. Coincidentally, Rush Elmore, brother of Yancey’s law partner, took his family and slaves to Kansas in April  to serve as a territorial judge. And almost from the start, when pro- and antislavery settlers met in Kansas, violence resulted. In ‘‘Bloody Kansas,’’ each group redoubled their efforts to prevail, and violence escalated accordingly.9 One of the greatest proslavery drives into Kansas came from Alabama. Jefferson Buford, a lawyer and state senator from Eufaula, the stronghold of secessionists in Barbour County, took bold action. Staking his life, his son, and , of his own money, Buford sought  able-bodied men to fight for slavery in Kansas. From the late summer of  and into the winter of , Buford toured Alabama to awaken people to the crisis and gather money, men, and munitions. These efforts won the enthusiastic support of Yancey. Although he donated little (if any) money and apparently never considered going west himself, the great orator spoke for hours at a time and served on fund-raising committees.10 To Yancey the great menace in , the one that would bring him back into national politics, came not from the new Republican Party of the North, or from Kansas to the west, but instead from the stunning success of the American Party, better known as the Know-Nothing Party. Originating in the North from various anti-immigrant and anti-Catholic societies—many of them secret, so when members confronted nonmembers they were to reply they knew nothing—the Know-Nothing Party thrived on a nativist backlash to waves of mostly Irish and German Catholics who flooded to America in the s and s; from  to , . million total immigrants arrived. In the North, Know-Nothings appealed to workers who feared that immigrants would take their jobs and to repugnance toward people of different cultures and creeds. In the South, with far fewer immigrants and an absence of large Catholic enclaves (other than in Louisiana), Know-Nothingism was a pale shadow of its northern counterpart. Nevertheless, it served as the best, if not only, home for old Whigs.11 With astonishing speed Know-Nothings replaced the Whig Party in Alabama. One of Yancey’s opponents from the Alabama Platform days, Johnson J. Yancey and the House Divided

n



Hooper, moved to Montgomery in the summer of  and established the Montgomery Mail as the first Know-Nothing organ in the state. The party drew in many former Whigs, who hoped that the new order would revive opposition to the Democrats, thereby resurrecting what had proven a powerful unionist coalition.12 Not only did Know-Nothingism represent an immediate threat to Yancey because of its challenge to Alabama Democrats, but it also signaled to him the growth of evil and intolerance across the nation. If Yancey had any doubts about the menace of nativism, his stepfather erased them. Since at least , when Rev. Beman joined the American Protestant Society, he added anti-Catholic and anti-immigrant pronouncements to his abolitionist rhetoric. Beman attacked immigrants and Catholics with the same verve he used on slaveholders. Immigrants, Beman announced, ‘‘feel no natural sympathy with our soil and our institutions. In politics, they often bring with them a strong tincture of monarchy.’’ In any case, Beman concluded, ‘‘they make bad republicans.’’ And Catholics, whether native born or foreign, threatened the ‘‘establishment of the Papal religion among us. . . . We should keep a keen, jealous eye upon them. . . . The movement of this ecclesiastico-political machine, as its burning wheels roll through any country, is fearful and desolating.’’ 13 During extensive travels, speeches, sermons, and writings over the next several years, Beman’s rhetoric intensified. He feared ‘‘papacy on the banks of the Mississippi,’’ and condemned the Church of Rome as ‘‘the most perfect work of Satan.’’ 14 Beman’s Puritan ancestors could not have damned a foe better. Yancey, then, saw the spirit of Beman within the political movement that swept into Alabama in the mid-s, and rose to the occasion. Even while other secessionists worried more about the Republican Party and Kansas, Know-Nothings served as the catalyst for Yancey’s political reemergence.15 But in truth, although Yancey had remained aloof from national politics since , he had remained in the public eye. Besides his law practice, which helped him maintain prominence throughout Alabama, Yancey appeared periodically as an active, public-spirited citizen, as well, of course, as a man whose soul demanded public attention. When the Alabama Bible Society held its annual meeting in , Yancey was among those elected as a vice president, along with his friend A. A. Lipscomb, old Whig adversary Henry W. Hilliard, and others.16 When a vacancy suddenly appeared on the Montgomery City Council in , Yancey accepted an interim appointment.17 Editorials by the Montgomery Advertiser and the Gainesville Independent could not coax Yancey into making himself available for the presidency of the University of Alabama, as flattering as the idea was to 

n

Yancey and the House Divided

him. Not even a call by the Cherokee Delta in  for Yancey to run for governor stirred him back into the political arena. On national issues during this tumultuous time Yancey also remained relatively quiet, even when Rush Elmore, son of his law partner, headed to Kansas to bolster the proslavery movement there.18 As Yancey prepared to resume partisan battle, he shared his views on politics in general and nativism in particular with his brother, Ben. In both respects, Yancey displayed new maturity and consideration. In fact, Yancey for a while sounded positively logical. Considering the secrecy that once cloaked KnowNothing organizations, Yancey wrote Ben, reason required that one not ‘‘war upon them, save in self defence’’ because one could not readily identify one’s enemies. ‘‘In fighting an ambushed foe, the greatest caution and movement is necessary, for you know not who you fight,’’ Yancey warned. Instead of waging old-fashioned partisan warfare, Yancey told Ben to attack Know-Nothing issues ‘‘calmly & respectfully, and with no feeling, argue their pretensions before the people.’’ Yes, he admitted, immigration laws required reform, but delaying naturalization and codifying religious discrimination flew in the face of American liberty. Besides, how hard was it to imagine that if Protestants could proscribe Catholics, that various Protestant denominations might do the same to others? 19 Above all, however, Yancey, like other southern Democrats, contended that the new party’s greatest threat was not to foreigners or Catholics, but to white southerners. Yancey urged Ben, ‘‘Hold up its origin in the North, where it has without fail elected Anti-Nebraska & Abolition governors & senators.’’ Show the southern people, too, how ‘‘a secret caucus’’ was ‘‘one hundred fold worse than any mere party convention.’’ 20 Yancey would heed his own advice, and lead a careful, multifaceted attack on this new antagonists in Alabama. A public exchange of letters between Yancey and William Northington of Prattville in July of  provided Yancey with his first salvo against KnowNothingism. Northington asked about the veracity of a rumor that Yancey had joined a nativist party. Yancey claimed no desire to engage in politics and that he had no time to draft a reasonable response—but still managed to fill a column and a half. In his view the original secrecy of Know-Nothings made them even worse than the old parties, which at least had open meetings and conventions. The Know-Nothings held their first convention on June , , in Philadelphia, and Yancey claimed that their platform consisted mostly of platitudes that anyone could endorse. But the third and fourth articles of that platform, Yancey explained, offered an alarming proposition. They called for the maintenance of the Union as ‘‘the paramount political good,’’ even if states’ rights fell victim in the process. If a state felt that Congress violated its rights, KnowYancey and the House Divided

n



Nothings called for the Supreme Court to settle the matter. This, to Yancey, unmasked the Know-Nothings as the latest incarnation of persistent, dreaded Federalism. ‘‘State sovereignty and State Rights can never submit themselves to the authority of the Federal Courts.’’ To Yancey the mere thought of this ‘‘portends evil to the country.’’ 21 Using a biblical phrase years before Abraham Lincoln did to such great effect, Yancey declared, ‘‘A house divided against itself cannot stand,’’ both as a warning and as a call to action. Because Know-Nothings refused to take a stand against abolitionism, Yancey argued that made them in fact a sectional, northern party, hostile to the rights and interests of the South. Yancey reminded his readers how Democrats and Whigs alike had pledged to support the Georgia Platform, which explicitly repudiated future compromises on the slavery issue, or taking slavery questions to the Supreme Court. The only remedy remaining, he insisted, was ‘‘the last resort of outraged nations—secession or arms.’’ 22 Article  of the Philadelphia Platform, which called for the exclusion of all Catholics from public office, evoked almost as much of an outcry from Yancey as issues of sovereignty. Admitting that his religious education (largely influenced by Beman) taught him to view that faith as ‘‘anti-republican,’’ Yancey argued that proscriptions like this never destroyed or even weakened religious groups. He reminded readers that those very sorts of prejudices drove many of their ancestors from Europe and toward America—Quakers, Puritans, Huguenots—who together built ‘‘a glorious temple to religious and political equality.’’ Nothing could prove more anti-American, ‘‘more European—in accordance with the antecedents of Kingcraft and despotism,’’ than religious tests and proscriptions. Therefore he concluded that this new party was ‘‘eminently federal, and Anti-American,’’ poised to attack both freedom of conscience for individuals and ‘‘the great State Rights creed.’’ 23 One response to Yancey’s letter touched upon the key issue in the controversy over slavery in the territories: sovereignty. This correspondent claimed that no real difference existed between Democrats and Know-Nothings on this issue, and that territories did not become states until sanctioned by Congress. Yancey jumped at this proposition. To admit that, he said, bolstered Know-Nothings’ desire to make the federal union the ‘‘paramount good’’ and assailed state sovereignty.24 Claiming a continuous line of argumentation from Thomas Jefferson to Calhoun to himself, Yancey explained that a people became sovereign the moment they gathered themselves in convention for the purpose of forming a government, whether state or territorial. The official Democratic stand on this, Lewis Cass’s popular sovereignty, asserted that sovereignty over territories lay 

n

Yancey and the House Divided

in the people inhabiting them. That, Yancey conceded, was a better position than that of the Know-Nothings. As far as the concept of sovereignty lying in Congress, Yancey wrote that only abolitionists believed that wild idea. The states’ rights and southern doctrine, according to Yancey, placed sovereignty in the various states, ‘‘until the people, in convention, assume it.’’ To Yancey that meant that every citizen had equal rights in all territories, and that the inhabitants of territories, with no apology to Cass, could not exclude citizens of any state or deny them their rights.25 But when Yancey or others made that assertion, they ignored the fact that pro- and antislavery citizens could not have equal rights in one place and at one time: only one could prevail. To Yancey, when the people of a territory met in a convention, ‘‘they then become fully clothed with that sovereignty which previously had existed in the States.’’ Whether or not they then chose to enter the Union and whether or not they gained entry, they remained fully sovereign states. Yancey’s reasoning was heartfelt, but flawed. He implied that new ‘‘states’’ formed from territories implicitly seceded unless granted admission to the Union from which they were carved in the first place. Yancey rested his case on the phrase in the Constitution that stated ‘‘New States may be admitted by the Congress into this union.’’ 26 Yancey would cling to this line of reasoning, and as the territorial controversy intensified, this issue would help him lead his state and section out of the union. Meanwhile, Yancey reiterated publicly the positions that he had set out in writing. In September , in Columbus, Georgia, he repeated the claim that the Philadelphia Platform ran counter to the Georgia Platform, and expressed his defiance of further compromise on slavery. In any case, he stated that further compromises were futile because the North held a solid majority in Congress. By now he summarily dismissed Know-Nothing attacks on foreigners and Catholics ‘‘as mere abstractions, of no political value to the South,’’ and kept his focus on the territorial question.27 Back home, in January , Yancey joined leading Democrats in calling for a ‘‘Democratic and Anti-Know Nothing’’ convention to prepare for state elections in August. Meeting in Montgomery with old allies John Cochran, J. L. M. Curry, and his brother, Yancey called for two delegates from each congressional district to meet and draft resolutions.28 The ‘‘Democratic and Anti-Know Nothing Convention’’ duly assembled in Montgomery in early January . Yancey served as chair of the platform committee, and easily imposed his ideas upon an agreeable and united convention. The platform called for equality of privileges of all citizens in the territories, proclaimed that ‘‘the American Union [was] secondary in importance only Yancey and the House Divided

n



to the rights and principles it was designed to perpetuate,’’ and that Alabama would resist any future attack on slavery anywhere, in any form, by breaking ‘‘every tie which binds her to the Union.’’ Resolutions also endorsed the Kansas-Nebraska Act as the embodiment of ‘‘Congressional non-intervention’’ on slavery in the territories. Delegates threatened secession if Congress restored the Missouri Compromise line, and vowed not to affiliate with any political party that did not avowedly protect the rights of slaveholders in the territories.29 Plank  of the platform virtually replicated the Alabama Platform of  by declaring that if the national convention refused to adopt the resolutions by Alabamians on slavery in the territories, her delegates must withdraw. Plank number  commended ‘‘the friends of the slavery cause in Kansas, in their manly efforts to maintain their rights, and the rights and interests of the Southern people.’’ Almost as an afterthought, plank number  condemned the Know-Nothings for their bigotry and secret oaths. The rest of the platform endorsed the presidency of Franklin Pierce, which had indeed proved most South-friendly, and vowed to stand by others across the South who united to defeat the Know-Nothings. With speed and efficiency the convention ratified the platform and adjourned, but not before selecting Yancey and Leroy Pope Walker as presidential electors-at-large.30 Sensing that public opinion backed him, Yancey sent a sharp volley across the Know-Nothing bow in a crisp letter to Johnson J. Hooper of the Montgomery Mail. Denying that he had recently said the American Party ‘‘stunk in the nostrils of every honest patriot’’ as Hooper had reported, Yancey argued that what he said, and Hooper misquoted, was that secrecy and oaths, and the proscriptive policies of the party, ‘‘stink in the nostrils of the people.’’ As to the members of the party, Yancey did not challenge their intentions or character—only the stench of their ideas and actions.31 With the scent of political battle back in his nostrils, Yancey resumed the vigorous and overt political activity that he had only recently renounced. In response to a letter from William F. Samford of Tuskegee, Yancey penned another long missive that found its way into print across much of the state. He assailed the Know-Nothings as a free soil party, dominated by antislavery and abolitionist politicians from the North. He claimed that they offered one set of promises to northern voters and another to southerners. Then Yancey all but announced his reconciliation with the Democratic Party. He admitted that this party had suffered dissent over the years due to slavery, losing many northern party members over time. Adversity, he said, had purified it, and invigorated its 

n

Yancey and the House Divided

members. Although lukewarm about Pierce’s nomination in , now Yancey found his administration proof positive that Democrats stood ‘‘on high constitutional grounds.’’ 32 And finally, Yancey joined other southern radicals in targeting the Republican Party as the greatest threat to slavery. Soon, he announced, with their sectional power and appeal, the Republicans would take over Congress and then use it to attack slavery. If the Supreme Court became ‘‘abolitionized,’’ Yancey reminded his readers, ‘‘each State has another tribunal to which to bring the question—and that is her own people, in convention assembled,’’ meaning a secession convention. The Know-Nothings only distracted white southerners from the menace of Republicans. As long as Democrats controlled the White House and the Senate, Yancey promised ‘‘there shall be safety for the South.’’ His message was clear: if Republicans prevailed, the South must secede.33 As winter turned to spring, Yancey engaged prominently in a swirl of local and national events. In May, Charles Sumner, an eminent and eloquent Republican senator from Massachusetts, launched a calculated assault on slavery’s defenders in his speech, ‘‘Crime Against Kansas.’’ In it he assailed slaveholders’ ‘‘rape of virgin territory,’’ and mercilessly attacked South Carolina senator Andrew P. Butler, absent from the chamber during the speech due to infirmities of old age, as a slaveholder who ‘‘discharged the loose expectoration of his speech’’ upon proponents of free soil in Kansas.34 Preston Brooks, a cousin of Andrew P. Butler and a congressman from South Carolina, was appalled by Sumner’s speech. To Brooks, Sumner’s behavior resembled that of a horse or dog who reared on a human. Brooks knew what he must do: punish the Yankee as one would punish an unruly animal. And since Brooks required the aid of a cane ever since he was shot in a duel in , his modus operandi took care of itself. With the company of Laurence Keitt, a fellow South Carolina congressman, Brooks entered the Senate chamber on May  and faced Sumner, who sat calmly at his desk, unaware of who Brooks was or of his relation to Butler. Brooks said, ‘‘Mr. Sumner, I have read your speech twice over carefully. It is a libel on South Carolina, and on Mr. Butler.’’ Before Sumner could respond, Brooks struck him with his gold-handled cane. As Sumner flinched, Brooks struck him again and again, over thirty times in all, as Keitt held back would-be meddlers with his own walking stick, brandished for combat. Brooks split open Sumner’s skull, and the senator slumped to the floor and into a pool of his own blood. Brooks and Keitt, their honor vindicated, calmly left the chamber, washed Sumner’s blood from themselves, and strolled out to dinner. It would take over two years for Sumner to fully recover. Yancey and the House Divided

n



On June , a public meeting gathered in Montgomery in support of Brooks. Thomas J. Judge, Yancey, Thomas Watts, and others spoke in favor of resolutions that condemned Sumner for abusing his rights of free speech to slander South Carolina and to insult Senator Butler. Yancey and others declared that Sumner ‘‘richly deserved the chastisement inflicted on him by the Hon. Preston S. Brooks.’’ The crowd unanimously adopted the resolutions, which they sent to Brooks by way of thanks.35 Simultaneously, all Montgomery and much of the South suddenly grew as militant and fanatical as Preston Brooks. William and Sarah Yancey hosted a public reunion of the Montgomery True Blues, the oldest and most famous hometown militia organization. The Montgomery Advertiser heralded the ‘‘war news’’ from Kansas. Election violence—riots, destruction of property, even murder—broke out in New Orleans, Baltimore, and Washington, triggered largely by Know-Nothings’ intolerance. And Americans watched in dread or amazement or both as William Walker, the self-styled ‘‘grey-eyed man of destiny,’’ became dictator of Nicaragua. Walker, a Tennessean, decided to bolster his power by reinstating slavery there. Franklin Pierce duly recognized Walker’s regime, and white southerners raised money, arms, and freebooters to rush to his aid, determined to expand slavery somewhere, no matter the challenge.36 And as sectionalism produced more conflict, drama, and bloodshed, Yancey read a book published in  written by Frederick Law Olmstead, a northern journalist and landscape architect (he later designed New York’s Central Park), called A Journey in the Seaboard Slave States. Olmstead spent fourteen months looking for confirmation that slavery was an abomination. And although he concluded that life for African American slaves was not quite as horrible as he had supposed, his travels reinforced his conviction that the institution degraded the entire region and its people. In various writings he repeated and expanded these basic themes. Olmstead condemned the yeomanry of the South as ‘‘unambitious, indolent, degraded and illiterate,’’ a ‘‘dead peasantry.’’ 37 Needless to say, Yancey did not like what he read. Uncharacteristically, though, he kept his reaction private, jotting down page after page of unpublished rebuttal.38 Yancey struck severely at Olmstead’s contention that white southerners lacked ‘‘hospitality of mind,’’ that they closed themselves to the ideas of others, and that the southern gentlemen had ‘‘a large, but unexpansive mind.’’ Yancey replied that southerners possessed the broadest of minds, both in terms of the power to reason and in sentiment. Then Yancey tried turning the tables on Olmstead. It was Olmstead whose mind had closed ‘‘to all antagonist schemes and opinions.’’ Yancey pointed out correctly that historically many of the great 

n

Yancey and the House Divided

schemes to check the growth and development of slavery had come from southerners. Virginians at the Constitutional Convention had argued for an end of the African slave trade (although Yancey incorrectly claimed that northern shipping interests deferred it until ; in fact, delegates from South Carolina and Georgia insisted the trade remain open for the time).39 Yancey dubiously claimed that Virginians had considered gradual emancipation for slaves ‘‘before the Northern mind had conceived the idea,’’ though he rightly noted that many Virginia masters, including George Washington, used wills and other means to free their slaves at the beginning of the republic, and again accurately recalled that ‘‘the great scheme of African colonisation’’ had its origins among southern whites.40 ‘‘Then came the officious interference of English and New England sentimentalists,’’ Yancey grumbled. Aiming directly at Rev. Beman and his ilk, Yancey charged, ‘‘Ministers of the gospel did violence to their vocation and aroused the slaves[’] worst passions—and deliberately devised schemes to rob the master of his property.’’ Yancey alleged that northerners like these taught slaves to see their masters as inhuman, and that rebellion was slaves’ ‘‘sacred right and duty.’’ 41 Like so many masters, Yancey believed that any slave restlessness or outright rebellion had its origin in Yankee propaganda, that neither his own poor treatment of slaves nor the institution itself caused any discontent. Yancey complained bitterly that all of northern society conspired to attack the South. Northern women harbored fugitive slaves, ‘‘and men and women and children sent up their offensive petitions to congress to take steps to abolish African slavery in the South.’’ Only white southerners’ tolerance, only their ‘‘deep seated Conservative Spirit,’’ enabled them to bear these abuses and attacks, rather than disrupt all bonds of union.42 But this forbearance in the face of assault brought serious consequences. Yancey warned men such as Olmstead that their supposed concern for slaves actually made slaves’ lives worse, drew suspicion to northern travelers, and resulted in more vigilant slave patrols. So many northerners condemned white southerners as degraded and corrupt just because they owned slaves that Yancey concluded that any truth to Olmstead’s observation of southern closed-mindedness resulted from relentless attacks from people precisely like Olmstead.43 Yancey expanded his sharp contrast between northerners and southerners. White southerners thought ‘‘the affairs of other people do not concern him —and that others are not concerned in his affairs.’’ Yankees, however, butted into everything. ‘‘Nothing is more common than to find an educated New Englander unconsciously invading the privacy of others’’ and in so doing, ‘‘giving Yancey and the House Divided

n



a personal turn to conversation in a way that outrages all moral refinement.’’ 44 Against Yankees’ supposed careless intrusiveness stood white southerners’ code of honor that Olmstead also denounced. Yancey’s reaction to this charge revealed a significant change of heart and of mind in the man who had scuffled, fought, and dueled in his earlier days. As Yancey’s family, religious faith, and personal maturity grew, his faith in honorable conduct remained intact, but his opinions regarding duels had changed. Blatantly ignoring the truth, Yancey announced that the time had passed when duels ruled the day. Religion emerged as a replacement. Claiming a greater predominance and impact of religion in the South than the North, Yancey hailed the ‘‘high standard of pure morality among us’’ and asserted, ‘‘The law of honor was adopted as but a substitute for the law of God—the law of love. . . . As the great law of love prevails and is recognized, [the] law of honor recedes.’’ 45 Implicitly, to Yancey the North lacked enough honor or true religion to restrain social disorder. Instead, he explained, northerners bowed relentlessly to public opinion. ‘‘The northern man surrenders his individuality—See one of them, and you have before you a type of all.’’ However reluctantly, Yancey asserted that the northerner invariably capitulated to the masses. ‘‘He will smother —in his heart every individual suggestion of propriety and duty. . . . His conscience is that great Public Opinion which thinks for him and decides for him.’’ But in the South, Yancey noted, men ‘‘are left to the full enjoyment of their own powers and society hardly taxes them enough to keep them in remembrance that it has some rights of authority over them.’’ 46 And this irrational conformity and intrusiveness into others’ lives, Yancey continued, lent itself to deceptions of the masses in the North. For proof he pointed to the Mormon church, ‘‘and its success, North of the Potomac,’’ with its missionaries already fanning out everywhere, it seemed, except to the sensible South. So, too, with New Yorker William Miller and his Adventists, whose ‘‘followers are numerous in his native climes,’’ but who ‘‘has deluded not an inhabitant of the South.’’ 47 Yancey offered as further proof of northern turpitude the influence of Margaret Fuller, author of Woman in the Nineteenth Century and public lecturer for feminism and Transcendentalism. For Yancey, Fuller embodied northerners’ debauched march away from God and His natural order. Unhappy with life as God created it, Yancey remarked that to men like Olmstead, ‘‘Heaven itself will be dull and stupid to him, if there is no work to be done there. . . . Before its people will be satisfied with God, he must erect for them a patent Office, in Heaven.’’ 48 Clearly to Yancey the entire North had 

n

Yancey and the House Divided

taken on the exaggerated, negative characteristics of his stepfather, and the distinctions between the ideal and the real in the South vanished in Yancey’s mind. After venting his anger on Olmstead, Yancey prepared for battle against the Know-Nothings. On June  Yancey began his personal onslaught, with a speaking schedule that was remarkable even by his own standard. On June  he would talk at Tuskegee, in Hayneville on July , Selma on July , Marion on July , Greensborough on the ninth, Livingston on the eleventh, Carrollton on the nineteenth, and on the twenty-second, enter Bibb County—nine counties in one month. For good measure Yancey would speak at the commencement at the University of Alabama. The Montgomery Advertiser—by now, a Yancey organ—boasted that all these engagements lay in ‘‘the very heart of the Know-Nothing power in Alabama.’’ 49 Yancey quickly added an additional appearance in Montgomery on June . There, Democrats met at the Exchange Hotel to ratify the work of their party’s national convention. In Cincinnati, Democrats nominated Pennsylvanian James Buchanan—Yancey’s old friend from Congress—and John C. Breckinridge of Kentucky. The party platform supported popular sovereignty in the territories, and therefore satisfied the criteria set forward by Yancey and Alabama Democrats in January. Yancey praised the party, even while noting that it had recently been wrong and was still far from perfect. The Democracy’s pledge of non-interference with slavery in the territories would win back the principle surrendered in  with the Missouri Compromise. What friend of Henry Clay, Yancey asked, or admirer of Daniel Webster, ‘‘what sincere KnowNothing,’’ for that matter, could disagree with the Cincinnati platform? Yancey repeated the history of northern opposition to slave expansion, and stated that Kansas-Nebraska simply offered fairness to the South. Only in passing, curiously, did Yancey mention the presidential ticket. Buchanan and Breckinridge, he offered, combined ‘‘the experience, moderation, and wisdom of age, with the genius, eloquence and ardor of youth.’’ 50 But a letter to his brother revealed that his new, amiable tone was calculated. Yancey pointed out that he had thus far avoided his typically combative speaking style. He merely adopted a conciliatory posture, ‘‘and while this detracts from the brilliancy and spice of one’s efforts,’’ he noted that opponents would be more likely to listen. Yancey claimed that Know-Nothing leaders recognized that this was working and would rather ‘‘hear my abuse.’’ He admitted that he all but ignored his candidate in favor of his party’s platform, and when opponents attacked Buchanan, Yancey replied they ‘‘are not up to the dignity of the issue[s]—are groveling in the mire of Yancey and the House Divided

n



party.’’ In turn, Yancey avoided attacks on Millard Fillmore, the Know-Nothing candidate, and instead struck at the party’s positions, too many of which were anathema to white southerners. Yancey noted that most Alabamians, like himself, now realized the real contest was between Buchanan and John C. Frémont, the Republican candidate, and that the Democrat’s platform protected slavery.51 This strategy paid off. ‘‘He is killing our opponents with kindness,’’ the Montgomery Advertiser gloated. Used to Yancey’s ‘‘fierce onslaught,’’ his opponents generally remained off guard and were unable to regroup. An old foe, Jeremiah Clemens, now served as a Know-Nothing presidential elector. With his own deserved reputation as an orator, but also as an alcoholic, Clemens periodically confronted Yancey on the stump. Once when Yancey urged Clemens to stop appearing before the public in an inebriated state, Clemens replied caustically that he had to drink to bring his genius down to the level of Yancey’s. In keeping with his kill-them-with-kindness campaign, Yancey let the slur go.52 As he labored on the stump, Yancey complained, ‘‘Our press, however, is asleep.’’ He claimed that the local Democratic newspapers did perk up after he had come through a town. And while he felt great satisfaction over the attention he received, he worried about shouldering the burden for his party. ‘‘I feel much exhausted,’’ Yancey complained. ‘‘The awful heat & my own ardent way of speaking . . . are telling upon me.’’ After speaking two hours at a time, even Yancey grew hoarse and required two or three days to fully recuperate.53 Yancey continued and extended his schedule, turning it into a triumphant tour of the state. In Selma, a large crowd turned out on July . The correspondent for the Montgomery Advertiser waxed eloquent about Yancey’s oratory, complaining only that many had hoped to hear Yancey cleave the head ‘‘and riddle the carcass’’ of his opponents ‘‘with his keen and merciless blade.’’ Indeed, Yancey himself was the center of attention, over and above parties and presidential candidates. He considered his trip to Mobile in early July particularly successful. ‘‘I & family were guests of the city,’’ he reported to Ben. ‘‘Committees of reception met us on the wharf, carriages ready for us. . . . Splendid suite of rooms ready for us . . . & a private parlour adjoining.’’ After a brief stop home in Montgomery in mid-July, Yancey resumed his travels: to Montevallo in Shelby County on July , and to Prattville in Autauga County on July .54 Whenever time permitted during his speaking tour, Yancey drafted a commencement address for the University of Alabama, an oratorical version of his private rebuttal to Frederick Law Olmstead’s writings. Yancey decided to dedicate this oration to ‘‘the Southern stump versus the No[rthern] school house,’’ and wanted to show ‘‘that the one leads to So[uthern] supremacy in govern

n

Yancey and the House Divided

mental matters & lands the citizen on the capitol at Washington, while the other leads to supremacy in the dollar & cent view & lands the citizen in the patent office at Washington!’’ 55 Yancey’s address at the university on July  marked both a interruption from his  campaign and offered a unique insight into his psyche. Qualitatively different from every other public utterance in his life, this oration revealed how the culture of the Southwest provided the sense of place and esteem that he had never received from his mother and stepfather, and how critical it was for him to defend the South, at least the exaggerated and romanticized version of the South that his late father represented. As Yancey took his stand on the stump he joined the growing mass of southerners who tried to explain and define their region. But more than most others, Yancey consciously and explicitly described himself as the personification and defender of the South.56 ‘‘Momentous events,’’ he began, ‘‘occurring within the last few years, and now threatening our national life,’’ had brought into focus the differences that distinguished the people of the North and the South. The days seemed gone when George Washington and John Hancock, southerner and Yankee, ‘‘blended and intertwined the diversities of section—and brought them to bear in favor of National Liberty and glory.’’ In fact, the two great sections appeared ready to burst apart.57 As Yancey sketched out the characteristics of each section, he all but depicted the North as the Rev. Beman writ large—cold, hard, determined, humorless, and businesslike. New England offered colonial settlers a landscape barren and unyielding in summer, cold and inhospitable in winter. Survival depended upon a keen mind, utilitarianism, and stern denial of indulgence. All culture and qualities emerged from this conflict with nature: a unity of purpose among its inhabitants, and the need for pragmatic education. These characteristics, Yancey explained, were embodied in the common school of New England. ‘‘This species of education has given to the North unity of purpose and design in the material forms of its civilization.’’ These schools represented ‘‘a monied interest,’’ and reaped great dividends over time by producing factories and fisheries.58 But these qualities, Yancey explained, came with a cost. Northerners’ materialism, he told Alabama’s youth, came ‘‘at the expense of those sentiments, which give . . . breadth and scope to character and intellect—and which are absolutely necessary to a proper balance of character.’’ 59 In stark and happy contrast, Yancey’s South was like the mother he never had —warm, loving, nurturing, enabling. For the Cavaliers and Huguenots who settled the colonial South, nature ‘‘invited them to repose upon a bosom that, Yancey and the House Divided

n



warmed by a southern Sun, teemed with all the elements necessary to national growth.’’ Southern soil, with its ‘‘never tiring fertility,’’ produced more than enough for all, and with but little effort.60 Unlike their unhappy counterparts in the North, southerners had no need for the ‘‘association of labor and capital.’’ Instead, ‘‘individual independence of thought and movement’’ flourished. ‘‘Leisure—contemplation—enlarged the faculties of his mind.’’ With no need for the Yankee’s economy, with money not the ‘‘great end of life’s struggle,’’ free from care and giving full reign to ‘‘genial influences, society became a pleasure —hospitality a general virtue.’’ 61 Despite his own relentless concern for money and his disdain for leisure, Yancey truly believed that these ideals characterized his region and rendered it superior to the North. For Yancey, one of the great differences between North and South concerned how each had come to view women. Although Yancey himself in  had publicly advocated modernizing and expanding women’s rights, a decade later and with a new perspective on the sections and their people, politics, and values, Yancey now condemned the North for a meddling spirit that undermined women’s true worth. ‘‘That same spirit, which would turn everything into gold . . . has invaded the sphere of woman.’’ Yancey contended that northern men had desexed women, had ‘‘brushed the down from her cheek, and raised the stiff beard in lieu.’’ Materialism in the North condemned women as worthless in their vocation as mothers and thrust them into the workplace. Horribly, northern society had led women to believe ‘‘that the rights of man are also woman’s rights, and that the editorial chair—the medical—the legal and clerical professions should be filled by her, as well as by men.’’ Northern women had mounted the speaker’s platform and joined in ‘‘public harangues,’’ and some wore ‘‘Bloomers,’’ ready ‘‘for bestriding a fence or a saddle as utility shall demand.’’ 62 In happy contrast, Yancey found southern white women, like most everything in the South, happy and content in their domestic sphere. The southern white woman was loving, gentle, retiring—still a woman. She kept her home sacred, a sanctuary from man’s rough world. For Yancey the home provided opportunity and challenges both sufficient and important enough to command her full attention and time.63 And as the outside world turned ever more contentious and foreboding, Yancey’s faith in old-fashioned southern patriarchy increased in proportion.64 According to Yancey, patriarchal white southerners improved upon nature’s munificence by incorporating African slavery. ‘‘Owing to the existence of African slavery in the South, the laws of labor were fixed—permanent—under 

n

Yancey and the House Divided

perfect control.’’ Slavery, in fact, worked so harmoniously within the region that to disturb that institution in any way at all ‘‘would uproot the foundations of society.’’ Therefore, ‘‘Conservatism became ingrafted’’ on white southerners’ minds, as well as a ‘‘habitual reverence for law and order—and a fixed dislike of change.’’ 65 In contrast to the organic, structured South, northern society had grown colder than its wintry climate. ‘‘In the North the masses are day laborers, confined closely—and unremittingly to the work-shop, the factory, or the field. Few are their holidays—few their hours of leisure.’’ Northerners obtained their information primarily by reading newspapers. ‘‘Thoughts come to them cold— abstract,’’ and were unlikely to rouse them, unless a particular fact affected them materially.66 ‘‘Our own people read less than the Northern people—Thousands of them cannot read—They labor less—they make less money,’’ but Yancey argued, ‘‘They have more leisure—They have more amusement. They are a far happier people.’’ Ignoring his own penchant for publishing letters in newspapers, Yancey asserted that white southerners received their most important information not from an inorganic newspaper, but in public gatherings, from a living person—an orator.67 By placing the public speaker at the center of his society, Yancey finally and explicitly articulated how he had resolved his long struggle for acceptance and esteem. ‘‘These popular lecturers diffuse among the people, the great principles of government—and governmental policy.’’ True oratory, Yancey argued, was no ‘‘exhibition of mere sentiment and declamation. Such oratory is not the mere Rhetoricians art, It is not a fine show for a fine occasion, but a real, closehearted contact with concerns of great and absorbing interest.’’ The ‘‘true orator’’ spoke to reason and to affection. He ‘‘stirs the blood in the bosom of age— and arouses the energies and directs the hopes and aims of manhood.’’ The best model was Demosthenes, the great Greek orator from the time of Alexander.68 With these words, Yancey effectively proclaimed himself the man to rally his countrymen against a common foe, the one to defend all that was dear and sacred. And all that he cherished was nothing less than the slaveholding South itself. After this commencement address, Yancey resumed his busy speaking schedule.69 At Carrollton, he beseeched all voters—old Whigs and Know-Nothings alike—to unite with Democrats and present ‘‘an unbroken front’’ to defend southern rights. One Know-Nothing, bewildered by Yancey’s renewed faith in the democracy, charged him with inconsistency. Yancey answered that he was the embodiment of consistency and had been since ; it was the DemoYancey and the House Divided

n



cratic Party that had waxed and waned, but now had returned to true constitutional principles. A correspondent for the Montgomery Advertiser claimed that in the current crisis ‘‘the opinion of Wm. L. Yancey is entitled to more weight than that of any other politician in the South.’’ 70 Even allowing for boosterism, this writer underscored what many Alabamians had come to believe: that even while out of elective office, Yancey’s voice had emerged among the most powerful and influential in his state, if not in the entire South. In late July, Yancey had to cancel a scheduled engagement at Montevallo. Unusual summer heat and his ‘‘ardent way of speaking’’ proved too much, even for the Demosthenes of the South. In fact, he lay bedridden with fever, taking medicine hourly and attended to by a doctor who forbade him to speak. KnowNothing challengers roused Yancey’s ire, but his fever and possibly the medicine he took left him ‘‘slightly wandering in the mind.’’ Perhaps because Johnson Hooper’s Montgomery Mail implied that Yancey was afraid of meeting a challenge in Montevallo, after a few days rest at Chalybeate Springs, Georgia, Yancey announced another taxing round of addresses, thirteen of them between August  and September .71 Now Yancey decided that he had better address one of the few issues that dogged him on his speaking tour: how could the man who found Buchanan unacceptable on slavery in the territories at the  Democratic convention support Buchanan now? A letter from Mississippi on this topic found its way into the Montgomery Advertiser, along with Yancey’s feeble response. The Mississippian used Yancey’s own words from the pamphlet that he had published in  to justify his bolt from the party convention. Yancey’s reply bore a striking resemblance to the way he once explained his shift from nationalism to state sovereignty. ‘‘On re-reading that pamphlet, I am disposed to blush for the defectiveness of my reasoning at that day.’’ In other words, he now argued that Buchanan had been sound on the territorial question all along. Yancey informed readers that he had known Buchanan since their days together in Congress in , and that he now considered the Pennsylvanian one of the few politicians who could reside in Washington for a long time ‘‘and yet preserve the character of a pure and moral man.’’ Yancey then quoted his latterday hero: ‘‘Well did John C. Calhoun say of him: ‘On this (slavery) question, Mr. Buchanan has habitually indicated correct feelings.’ ’’ 72 The Know-Nothing opposition naturally latched on to Yancey’s inconsistency, despite his explanation for it. And when illness forced Yancey again to cancel an engagement on August , Know-Nothings believed they had him on the run. But days later Yancey came back fighting. At Salem in Russell 

n

Yancey and the House Divided

County, residents prevailed upon Benjamin H. Baker, a member of the state assembly and a Know-Nothing, to meet Yancey on the stump. The Advertiser claimed he ‘‘consented with extreme reluctance, for the dread of encountering Col. Yancey.’’ Yancey had recovered fully and was in a very good mood. Baker brought up the  pamphlet and sneered that a supporter had defended Yancey by claiming that, at thirty-three years of age at the time, youthful indiscretion accounted for his attack on Buchanan. If Yancey were a mere youth at thirty-three, Baker reasoned, now at forty-two ‘‘Col. Yancey was in his dotage.’’ 73 Yancey could not have wished for more. Taking up Baker’s age categories, Yancey launched into his two-hour response by saying he rose as an old man to give his audience the wisdom and experience of age, and that, though grey and wrinkled, he still had ‘‘some of the fire and vigor of youth and manhood.’’ And as an old man, Yancey claimed the privilege of parents with disobedient children like Baker (only a year younger than Yancey), ‘‘that of taking down their breeches and spanking them.’’ 74 Then Yancey returned to his standard denunciation of the Know-Nothing Party and their platform, and praised the Democracy. This time he also manipulated his listeners’ sense of honor as he had not done for years. He reminded his audience that the Know-Nothing platform of  asserted that they had arisen from the ashes of the Whigs and Democrats, but had no responsibility for the ‘‘obnoxious acts or violated pledges of either.’’ Ignoring his own party, Yancey targeted old Whigs and cried, ‘‘Hear that, old line Whigs—they brand your acts as obnoxious and your pledges as violated. When they felt strong and confident, in your weak and distracted condition, they put their foot upon your neck. . . . Can you cast your lot with them, and at the same time preserve your honor?’’ Yancey offered his audience an honorable course of action by joining the Democrats and Buchanan and standing by the Georgia Platform.75 Then Yancey took aim and fired at the Know-Nothing ticket of former president Millard Fillmore and his running mate, Andrew Jackson Donelson. Just as Yancey usually spoke of his party rather than his candidate, he generally refrained from attacking opposition personalities. But Benjamin Baker had opened the door for this, Yancey explained, by attacking Buchanan first. Yancey painted Fillmore unfairly as an abolitionist, as extreme as John Quincy Adams and Joshua Giddings. Baker had repeatedly offered Fillmore as a ‘‘Model President’’ for the South. Yancey asked how one could reconcile that with Fillmore’s brief record as president. Fillmore had signed the bill admitting California as a free state, ‘‘the first instance of Presidential sanction of the odious doctrine of Squatter Sovereignty,’’ allowing the first people to arrive in an area the power Yancey and the House Divided

n



to decide about slavery. When Fillmore signed the bill to abolish the slave trade in Washington, D.C., did that make him a model president for the South? And in the first famous test of the fugitive slave bill, Yancey reminded his listeners, abolitionists Samuel Gridley Howe and Theodore Parker orchestrated a violent resistance in aiding slaves William and Ellen Craft of Georgia to evade authorities and flee to freedom in England in . Fillmore did nothing to stop them.76 Now fully warmed up, Yancey combined attacks on personalities with appeals to honor and to interest. How could white southerners trust to Fillmore ‘‘their two thousand million dollars of slave property’’? When Spanish soldiers captured fifty Americans, including a nephew of U.S. senator John J. Crittenden, who attempted to aid Narciso López in his filibustering expedition to Cuba in , ‘‘the Spanish Captain had those brave Americans shot like dogs and left to rot in the ditch,’’ while the American consul, on orders from Fillmore, refused to intervene. And in , Fillmore pardoned two abolitionists who had been arrested in  for attempting to liberate seventy-six slaves. Fillmore did so at the urging of radical antislavery men such as William Henry Seward, John P. Hale, and Charles Sumner, ‘‘who carries the hand writing of South Carolina on his skull.’’ 77 The exertion at Salem cost Yancey some of his recently regained health, and again he had to rest and cancel public appearances. But confined to bed, he read something deeply troubling. Benjamin H. Hill, a Georgia elector and campaigner for Fillmore, had written to a newspaper that he had to cancel a public debate with Robert Toombs and Alexander Stephens because he had scheduled an encounter with Yancey in West Point, Georgia, on August . This was the first Yancey heard of this, and he angrily wrote to the Augusta Constitutionalist that only his bad health now prevented him from meeting Hill to settle accounts as well as to debate.78 This incident set in motion short- and long-term confrontations between Hill and Yancey that would finally erupt on the floor of the Confederate Senate. After a few days’ rest, Yancey returned to the stump and tangled again with Jeremiah Clemens in Huntsville. According to a friend of the family, Yancey had fully recovered his health and his speaking ability. He and Clemens each spoke two and a half hours. ‘‘It was a glorious speech,’’ the friend reported. Yancey seasoned his remarks ‘‘with the salt of argument, the vinegar of sarcasm, the pepper of wit, and the genuine champaigne [sic] of eloquence.’’ A reporter for the partisan Advertiser claimed, ‘‘So completely were we fascinated by the eloquence of the man, that . . . we forgot to make a single note.’’ 79 Two days 

n

Yancey and the House Divided

later the two debated once more. Again the Advertiser passed on recapitulating Yancey’s words, and simply declared him the ‘‘Ajax of Democracy.’’ Of Clemens, the reporter termed his performance ‘‘a species of self-immolation,’’ and sarcastically praised him for ‘‘his courage and christian resignation.’’ 80 Steeled by his friends, feeling healthy, and sensing victory, Yancey pressed on with a grueling speaking schedule. He decided that now he would meet Benjamin Hill in West Point, Georgia, on October . In fact, Yancey took on Hill and two Alabama Know-Nothings, James Belser and Thomas Watts, and gave them a half hour more time than he would take in the debate. On the way to Georgia, Yancey challenged William P. Chilton to a debate in Chilton’s hometown of Tuskegee. ‘‘I [intend] to weed out the whole thicket of K N orators,’’ he told his brother. ‘‘We are rising ground here. Large bets are made by our friends on this district.’’ 81 Newspapers predicted a crowd of , for the great debate at West Point, and again Yancey played the underdog, contenting himself and much of the crowd that he had carried the day.82 Yancey closed his campaign with a brief stop in Selma, and on October  joined a meeting at Estelle Hall in Montgomery. There, James Dowdell, another Georgia transplant and Democratic stalwart, declared that Fillmore was no better than the Republican, Frémont. As he spoke, a telegraph operator handed him news that Democrats had just carried state elections in Pennsylvania, to the delight of all assembled. After three hours of speaking, Dowdell’s voice failed. The audience cried for Yancey, who capped the evening by promising that the only threat left to Buchanan’s victory came if a last-minute fusion occurred, uniting Know-Nothings and Republicans in a desperate effort to stop the Democrats at all costs. As usual, the Advertiser supported Yancey with headlines such as ‘‘  !     ! . . .       !!’’ 83 After the votes were tallied for president, Yancey and his party tried very hard to rejoice in Buchanan’s victory. He had won handily, but election results confirmed that the real threat to slave interests came from the Republican Party. Fillmore received but  percent of the popular vote and carried electoral votes only from Maryland. Buchanan captured  percent of the popular vote but  percent of the electoral vote, and Frémont, the Republican, took eleven states with only  percent of the nation’s popular votes. In fact, Frémont lost only five free states: Buchanan’s Pennsylvania, New Jersey, Illinois, Indiana, and California. Ominously, with four years to continue building strength, if the Republicans could capture just a few more free states, they could take the White Yancey and the House Divided

n



House even with every popular and electoral vote from the slave states against them.84 Meanwhile the Advertiser declared, ‘‘The Union has a respite for four years, the Constitution is preserved from violation, and the Presidency from the pollution of Black Republicanism.’’ 85 For Yancey came the satisfaction that his old friend Buchanan was president-elect and that the entire Democratic Party knew that Yancey had helped carry Alabama.



n

Yancey and the House Divided

CHAPTER ELEVEN

Walker and Walker, the League and the Letter Yancey reveled in the afterglow of the Democratic triumph of , and especially his part in that achievement. He boasted to his brother that the state electoral college unanimously urged Buchanan to appoint Yancey to his cabinet. The Montgomery Advertiser had already started beating those drums in , proposing that Buchanan should tap Yancey for attorney general. Another newspaper had come out against Yancey for the cabinet, but ‘‘for me against the world for Senate,’’ he reported to his brother. ‘‘These articles have done me good here, in arousing the country press & the universal Democracy of the State, almost.’’ 1 Flattery and talk of a possible high-profile appointment excited Yancey. He urged his brother to contact his friend, prominent Georgia Democrat Howell Cobb, to ‘‘exert yourself to get his influence’’ and to act promptly. Cobb had vigorously opposed secession during the early s, but some mixture of expediency and faith in the Democratic Party platform permitted Yancey to forgive that for now. Ben Yancey did the best he could on behalf of his brother,

urging the Georgian to use his tremendous leverage with Buchanan. Ben reminded Cobb that the Alabama electoral college rallied behind his brother for such a position, and claimed that the few public utterances against him in Alabama came from a disgruntled clique made up of Senator Benjamin Fitzpatrick, George Houston, and John J. Seibels, old friends now estranged. But mostly Ben reminded Cobb that for almost four months his brother had worked relentlessly to carry his state for the president-elect.2 Unfortunately for the Yancey brothers, Cobb believed that Buchanan intended to make his own nominees, rather than taking dictation from party leaders.3 Plus, Cobb knew of the rumor that Buchanan wanted Cobb for his cabinet, and under those circumstances the Georgian explained that he considered it inappropriate to suggest anyone else for a post. Cobb praised Yancey, but that was as far as he exerted himself.4 Yancey himself faced the inevitable by Christmas , and with some amount of grace. He claimed satisfaction at the short-lived campaign on his behalf and actually took heart that Howell Cobb would occupy a place of influence with the new president.5 In early January Yancey traveled to South Carolina to collect some legal fees and turned the journey into a triumphal personal tour. In Anderson, local Democrats gave him ‘‘a really splendid watch & chain,’’ and presented Sarah with ‘‘a dozen very heavy silver tablespoons.’’ Citizens of Pickins offered Yancey a silver cup, galvanized inside with gold and inscribed to Yancey from Democrats of the district. Andrew Calhoun had escorted Sarah to join her husband in South Carolina and told her to expect a dozen silver goblets from the ladies of Marengo County, Alabama. ‘‘Quite satisfactory exhibitions of popular favor,’’ he bragged to his brother, more than enough to offset the annoyance of John Seibels and that clique back home.6 Then Yancey hurried off to Washington, D.C., where he was ‘‘received in a highly flattering & cordial manner by Mr Buchanan, Gen Cass & my old associates in Congress—Cobb, [Albert G.] Brown, [ Jacob] Thompson & [Stephen] Douglass [sic].’’ Thompson now served as secretary of the interior, and Lewis Cass as secretary of state. Continuing his lifelong effort to please his mother, he wrote to her, ‘‘I dined with Douglas & a host of magnates’’ seated at the head of the table. Yancey pressed Cass for a diplomatic post for Ben; Buchanan appointed him as commissioner to the Argentine Confederation in .7 After repeated public demonstrations of praise for Yancey and hobnobbing with the powerful, he realized that his radicalism would have ill-suited him for a cabinet position. By early  Yancey desired ‘‘to let Mr B be disembarras’d of all considerations respecting me.’’ That would prove a two-way street, be

n

The League and the Letter

cause Yancey also realized that association with Buchanan might embarrass him should the president prove disloyal to southern interests.8 During this winter between the election and inauguration of Buchanan, several issues boiled up, each offering tests and opportunities for embarrassment to moderates and extremists alike. At the end of , Governor James H. Adams of South Carolina ignited one controversy when he called for reopening the transatlantic African slave trade. As Samuel Beman accurately reported to his southern brothers, ‘‘Blunders’’ like this only strengthened the Republican Party and fed northern passions about slavery in the territories. ‘‘I tell you that the people here are for Free Kansas,’’ he emphasized. On better terms with Rev. Beman than his Yancey brothers, the pro-South Sam Beman still noted that he and his father ‘‘dare not talk’’ politics. Sam Beman passed along local rumors of a possible fusion of northern Know-Nothings and Democrats against the surging Republicans in , provided that men like Governor Adams tone down their rhetoric and demands. Southern newspapers had already commented about such an alliance, but worried about Know-Nothings fusing with Republicans to stop Democrats.9 Meanwhile, bloodshed and turmoil continued in Kansas, William Walker fought stubbornly to hold his slave regime in Nicaragua, and a suit for freedom by a slave named Dred Scott finally worked its way to the Supreme Court, which would soon issue a ruling.10 But in January  Yancey remained focused on state politics. On the sixteenth he and twenty-six others gathered at a small Democratic meeting in Montgomery to begin planning for a June convention to nominate a governor.11 Until then he concentrated on his law practice and seemed strangely silently as events swirled around him. On March , , a divided Supreme Court announced its landmark Dred Scott decision. A narrow majority held that slave or free, blacks were not American citizens and therefore could not sue in American courts. Furthermore, Chief Justice Roger B. Taney, himself a former slaveholder, announced that Congress had no lawful power to prohibit slavery in federal territories. To Yancey and virtually all white southerners, this decision settled the territorial question once and for all, and in their favor; it simply stated what most had argued at least since the Missouri Compromise in . To northerners, Republicans in particular, the case struck at the heart of their values and their party creed. James Buchanan stood foursquare behind the decision, earning him praise and respect from white southerners and suspicion and ignominy from fellow northerners.12 As sectionalism heightened, some of Yancey’s friends schemed to thrust him back into national politics. William F. Samford, yet another Georgia transplant, The League and the Letter

n



had gained quite a reputation for his intellect at a young age. Samford was elected professor of belles letters at Oxford College, Georgia, at age twenty. He gained admission to the bar the next year, and entered politics in  as a Polk elector. Samford spoke across much of Georgia and, as Yancey so often did, made as much a name for himself as for his candidate. Samford moved to Alabama in the mid-s, and in  and  edited the Tuskegee True Union with a young man named James S. Slaughter.13 While Yancey stumped for Buchanan in , Samford watched in awe and jealousy. ‘‘I feel that while Yancey rides like Richard Cour de Leon . . . and [ James] Dowdell plays young Ivanhoe right Knightly, I am but a poor Minstrel of the War, when I might under more favorable circumstances, ‘win my spurs!’’’ 14 Physically (or psychologically) unable to campaign himself, Samford used his reputation and his nerve to write to Yancey and others, gaining the appellation ‘‘Penman of Secession.’’ 15 When Yancey jockeyed for a cabinet position in December , Samford contacted Buchanan’s confidant, Governor Henry Wise of Virginia, to rally support. Samford’s admiration for Yancey knew no limits. In March , without any direct contact with Yancey, Samford tried to orchestrate a congressional run for his champion. By returning Yancey to Congress, Samford believed, he could ‘‘put Yancey above the reach of his enemies,’’ by which he meant the Seibels-Fitzpatrick-Houston clique.16 As a die-hard Yancey partisan and newspaper editor in his own right, Samford next tried supporting his hero by tinkering with the editorial policy of the Montgomery Advertiser. Samford contacted its editor, Mathew P. Blue, and offered unsolicited advice on how to strengthen the paper’s support for Yancey. Samford suggested conspiratorially, ‘‘You can serve Yancey better by a position that seems to be sufficiently different from his, to indicate yr. independence,’’ and avoid antagonizing those who might later ‘‘be of use to him.’’ 17 The chaos and bloodshed in Kansas served Yancey’s drive for secession far better than any newspaper scheme. In , when Buchanan appointed Robert J. Walker territorial governor, he thought he had begun to end the turmoil there. He was wrong. Walker, from Mississippi, had published a pamphlet in  proclaiming Kansas too cold and arid for slavery. Upon accepting his post, Walker insisted that, in the spirit of the Kansas-Nebraska Act, only bona fide residents of the territory could vote; there would be no ‘‘squatter sovereignty’’ under his administration. Walker immediately had to deal with competing territorial governments; the official one, a proslavery assembly at Lecompton, and a rival, free-soil body at Topeka. Walker knew that the vast majority of ‘‘bona fide’’ residents preferred free soil, so he tried to placate both sides by ignoring 

n

The League and the Letter

the Topeka government while encouraging its supporters to vote for delegates to the upcoming Lecompton constitutional convention. Walker hoped at least to lead into statehood a solidly Democratic Kansas that, if free, at least was not too hostile toward slavery.18 By June, though, Walker realized that antislavery forces would stand by the Topeka government. On election day they refused to vote for delegates to the Lecompton convention. In fact only about  percent of potential voters turned out, approximating the entire strength of the proslavery faction in Kansas. To this Walker responded by calling for all voters in Kansas to cast ballots on the results of the Lecompton gathering.19 From across the South howls of protest erupted from both fire-eaters and relative moderates. Interest and honor outweighed fairness and common sense. Long-time secessionists such as Edmund Ruffin of Virginia, Barnwell Rhett, and Congressman Laurence Keitt of South Carolina led the chorus. Yancey added his voice on June , when Alabama Democrats held an ‘‘Anti-Walker’’ meeting at Estelle Hall. Proclaiming a direct interest in Kansan affairs because of the ‘‘political and proprietary interests involved in the promotion’’ of slavery in all federal territories, the assembly implicitly based all its resolutions on Yancey’s long-held premise that the federal government must support slavery in territories to allow ‘‘equality,’’ and that only states could decide to exclude or end that institution. Delegates condemned Walker’s administration as ‘‘dangerous to the institutions of the South,’’ contrary to the policies of Buchanan, and antithetical to the recent Dred Scott decision. They mocked Walker’s supposed ability to judge who qualified as ‘‘actual bona fide resident settlers in Kansas.’’ 20 Perhaps satisfied that Alabamians stood foursquare behind slavery in Kansas, Yancey spoke very little on the subject for the rest of the year. Occasionally, during visits to courthouses across the states, he did offer his opinions. At Chambers County on August  he announced that he still stood by President Buchanan, even as he blasted Walker’s administration in Kansas. Yancey joined the southern chorus that denied Walker had the qualifications or ability to judge who counted as a majority in Kansas. Yancey demanded that southerners and all Democrats unite against antislavery forces in Kansas and across the country, especially Republicans, to drive ‘‘these political Vandals’’ from both the capital and the territories. If they failed, Yancey insisted, only secession could save them. Had Republican candidate John C. Frémont won the presidency in , Yancey added, the union should have been dissolved then.21 Other southerners, of course, were not so sure. Governor Wise of Virginia deemed Yancey’s attacks on Walker rash and unjust, considering the roughly ten-to-one advantage in people, weapons, and money enjoyed by opponents The League and the Letter

n



of slavery in Kansas.22 By year’s end, Buchanan announced his support for the Lecompton government and slavery. Stephen Douglas then broke with his president and party and opposed Lecompton on the grounds that it failed to truly represent the sovereign will of the people in Kansas. The national Democratic Party now stood deeply divided between northerners and southerners; the latter continued to place their hopes, ironically, in the northerner Buchanan, while northern Democrats now stood firmly behind Douglas. But for the remainder of the year, Yancey again remained conspicuously quiet on national politics. With the new year, however, Yancey came roaring back into the arena of sectional politics—as did William Walker. After Walker issued a decree to reinstitute slavery in Nicaragua in , his status as a hero for white southerners soared to new heights. But in Nicaragua, his presence precipitated a civil war, and anti-Walker forces gathered from neighboring countries to topple his regime. Driven out by May , Walker returned to the southern United States, intent upon gathering men, supplies, and supporters for a new invasion of ‘‘his’’ country.23 Ready to try again in November , Walker sailed from Mobile, Alabama, aboard the Fashion with  men. U.S. Navy Commodore Hiram Paulding used marines to stop Walker from landing, invoking American neutrality laws that prohibited private citizens from invading other nations. Arrested and sent to New York, authorities took Walker to Washington for presentation to Secretary of State Lewis Cass, who promptly dropped all charges. Cass reasoned that Paulding could not enforce American law on foreign soil. Buchanan, again trying to placate everyone, announced that Paulding had ‘‘committed a grave error,’’ but also that Paulding had acted from patriotic motives and saved Nicaragua from ‘‘a dreaded invasion.’’ Buchanan also refused to compensate Walker for his arrest.24 An uproar of protest swelled among southerners who supported Walker. Upon the announcement of his arrest, a disturbance occurred in a theater in New Orleans. Anti-Paulding meetings and resolutions took place across Dixie and made their way into state assemblies in Virginia, Texas, Tennessee, and Alabama. In Washington, Deep South senators rose to defend their hero and to denounce Paulding. And Walker made a triumphant tour to raise a third expedition to Nicaragua.25 At about the same time, proslavery forces in Kansas unveiled the Lecompton constitution and scheduled a vote for December . Knowing that antislavery forces dominated, the Lecompton convention rigged the election so that even if slavery were rejected, it would not affect the slaves already in the 

n

The League and the Letter

territory. Free state advocates saw this, so few participated in that election and thousands prepared for armed resistance. Lecompton passed, with over , (mostly fraudulent) votes for and fewer than  against. Buchanan, straining to end the chaos, announced his support for the Lecompton constitution. Stephen Douglas then defied his president. Whether a territory produced a good or bad constitution, voted slavery up or down, ‘‘is none of my business and none of yours,’’ he protested. But the senator simply could not watch idly as a minority, meeting without sanction of congressional law or by authority of Governor Robert Walker, tried to dictate terms to a majority. To allow this mocked Douglas’s revered popular sovereignty. Indeed, in a second referendum on the Lecompton constitution on January , , free state partisans in Kansas won a rousing , to  vote majority. Even excluding fraudulent free state votes, clearly Lecompton was doomed. But southern extremists cried foul. Determined to have Lecompton and slavery prevail at all costs, they now turned their wrath on Douglas.26 So pro–William Walker meetings competed with anti–Robert Walker meetings in the South; support for slavery’s expansion into Kansas and Nicaragua became enmeshed. On January , , William Walker visited Montgomery to address a ‘‘Nicaragua meeting’’ at the state capitol. After he recounted his exploits and trials, the enthusiastic crowd called for Yancey. He denounced Paulding’s conduct as ‘‘tyrannical and unjustifiable,’’ and proclaimed the ‘‘Central American enterprize as the cause of the South.’’ Yancey rebuked the ‘‘old woman policy of the administration in apologizing for Paulding.’’ Now Yancey publicly questioned Buchanan’s reliability, and for the umpteenth time doubted the efficacy of the Democratic Party. Had Buchanan forgotten that the South put him in the White House? 27 Yancey still stood by the administration’s Kansas policy, but the Walker arrest showed that the president’s ‘‘power to aid the South had received a fatal blow.’’ 28 On January , another meeting of Democrats gathered in the statehouse to support Buchanan’s stand on Lecompton, but not Walker’s efforts in Nicaragua. Yancey suspected something fishy. The call had gone out from the Montgomery Confederation, edited by John J. Seibels. The main speaker, Henry W. Hilliard, had only recently joined the Democratic Party. Yancey’s organ, the Advertiser, suggested that a conspiracy existed between Seibels’s Confederation and the Selma Sentinel to undermine Yancey’s influence. The Advertiser reprinted the Sentinel ’s attack on Yancey as ‘‘cold hearted, selfish, and unreliable . . . either in politics or in personal transactions.’’ The Advertiser then claimed that about sixty copies of the Sentinel piece had been circulated in Montgomery, mostly to members of The League and the Letter

n



the legislature. All this made Yancey suspect that a ‘‘clique in this town, outside of the General Assembly,’’ tried to exploit the occasion ‘‘to use party machinery to advance their hidden purposes.’’ That meant, of course, John J. Seibels, Benjamin Fitzpatrick, and George Houston.29 Although uninvited, Yancey barged into the meeting to settle a few things. Yancey’s recent efforts on behalf of the Democratic Party and his stance as a party watchdog made him more sure of himself, his power, and his influence than ever before. And he flaunted it. ‘‘I came to this meeting to-night fully armed with weapons offensive and defensive—and I say to this band of confederates, that I recognize them as foes—[they] have long been aware of their purpose to undermine, as far as they were capable, my political fortunes—and I defy them.’’ There was no better time or place, he announced, to expose his enemies’ schemes and to crush them than at this meeting, arranged ‘‘for the destruction of myself, and of all those who think with me.’’ Why else, Yancey asked, would Seibels’s Confederation organize the meeting without informing Yancey and select Hilliard to speak, ‘‘to use his great powers . . . to beat down a Democrat who had often crossed swords with him in defense of Democratic principles’’? Even if he were wrong, Yancey explained, even if this meeting, after all, simply served as a ‘‘council of war to devise measures against our common foe,’’ Yancey claimed his right to speak as ‘‘an older soldier in the Democratic camp’’ than Hilliard. Yancey also emphasized that Hilliard targeted ‘‘a Democratic administration which I aided to bring into power, and which he had ably opposed.’’ 30 Then Yancey tried to fuse together Kansas and Nicaragua. He reminded the crowd that regarding their resolutions in favor of slavery in Kansas, ‘‘I am no neophyte. I am an older supporter . . . than the editors of the Confederation, or any in confederation with them in their attack upon me.’’ Yancey then traced his position back to , and again reminded his listeners that his bolt from the Democratic convention of that year was upon the grounds that no one could exclude slavery from federal territories. ‘‘I will pass over the years of political exile which followed, in which I fed upon the bitter herbs’’ imposed upon those who dared to disregard the Democratic Party’s dictates. Yancey explained that no editor or party or clique ‘‘can read me out of the Democratic church. The judge of my Democracy is enthroned here,’’ Yancey exclaimed, pointing to his heart. ‘‘It is my conviction of what is right that makes me a Democrat or not.’’ Yancey argued that all his vicissitudes with the Democrats did less to harm the party than the efforts of Seibels et al. to divide that party among those who supported Kansas and those who supported Nicaragua.31 

n

The League and the Letter

Yancey separated himself from Hilliard and the assembly’s endorsement of the president: ‘‘I must frankly admit that my confidence has been somewhat abated.’’ True, Buchanan stood behind Lecompton and slavery, but the same president appointed Robert Walker and tolerated his meddling. No matter his intentions, Yancey continued, Buchanan’s execution of the Kansas act ‘‘has been unfortunate for the South.’’ Bad appointments and poor decisions might have been blunders instead of betrayal, but ‘‘every blunder [occurred] against the South!’’ Then Yancey conceded, ‘‘Kansas will be lost.’’ Even if admitted as a slave state, the predominance of antislavery forces within and without would end the institution there soon enough. Added to the president’s inexcusable actions against William Walker, Yancey could only conclude that Buchanan’s ‘‘official misconduct’’ warranted ‘‘just censure.’’ 32 Again Yancey announced his readiness to bolt from his party. But unlike  or , Yancey now poised himself to lead by leaving. ‘‘The time has passed for little men to lead and control great parties. . . . The mighty interests at stake have attracted the attention of the people, and parties of late shriveled up under the burning indignation of the Southern masses.’’ 33 In fact, parties of late had emerged, evaporated, transformed, and realigned. But through it all, Yancey and his followers stood firm. Kansas and Nicaragua stirred white southerners more profoundly than any issue since the Compromise of , and even a sympathetic—if blundering—president did little to restore their faith. The time for Yancey was about to arrive. Yancey found yet another way to fan the flames of disunion through a philanthropic venture begun by one of his relatives. Ann Pamela Cunningham, Yancey’s first cousin, helped found the Mount Vernon Ladies Association of the Union in  to raise money for the preservation of George Washington’s home. Women, especially in the South, seldom took such public roles. But when Cunningham’s mother, Yancey’s favorite aunt Louisa Cunningham, glimpsed the deteriorating building one evening from the Potomac River she wrote to Ann, ‘‘If the men of the country will not save Mount Vernon, the women should!’’ And her daughter did just that. Washington’s great-grandnephew wanted to sell the place, and it would take , to buy it and restore it. Ann Pamela Cunningham mustered women from the North and South to run the association and made fund-raising their top priority. Toward that end Cunningham acquired the aid of two of the foremost orators in the country: Edward Everett of Massachusetts and William Lowndes Yancey.34 Yancey welcomed the invitation as an opportunity to pay tribute to the revered founder of the republic, to help the portion of his family that he loved, The League and the Letter

n



and to keep himself in the public eye. On May , at a dinner at the Exchange Hotel, Yancey first appealed for support. He soon thereafter announced that the association had selected the Montgomery Advertiser as its official organ for the central Deep South, and that Yancey himself would oversee the effort to raise , by February , —Washington’s birthday. By speaking at each stop on his spring court circuit, by May  Yancey raised over , and challenged his fellow lawyers to do the same. The effort provided an easy occasion for bipartisanship; old Whigs Henry Washington Hilliard and Thomas H. Watts happily joined Yancey’s crusade.35 Yancey’s efforts helped raise three times his goal, over ,.36 On February  Yancey appeared in Richmond, Virginia, at elaborate ceremonies to honor George Washington. Yancey and Everett spoke together at the Richmond Theater on behalf of the Ladies Association and at the unveiling of Thomas Crawford’s immense equestrian statue of Washington adjacent to the state capitol building. The Virginia capital filled with dignitaries: General Winfield Scott, hero of the War of  and the Mexican War, Governor Wise of Virginia, and several elected officials of the host state, among others. The town did not have enough hotel rooms for the thousands who came to watch and to listen, and many who did find accommodations were turned away from the ceremony at the theater. Everyone at least had a chance to watch the great parade that preceded the statue’s unveiling; the military array stretched out for a mile and a half, complete with marching bands and five companies of soldiers.37 There, the two great orators received ‘‘sacred relics’’ as thanks for their work to save Mount Vernon. George Washington’s cane went to Everett, and Yancey received the general’s spyglass. Everett accepted his icon and responded with his stock but heartfelt speech about Washington, the address he had delivered countless times during his fund-raising efforts. In fact, Everett himself exhibited so much emotion during this event that he reduced to tears many of the men in the audience.38 The master of ceremonies, George W. Munford, then turned to Yancey and gave him the spyglass. He also gave Yancey a cue that the Alabamian did not really need. ‘‘As you ascend the ladder of fame,’’ Munford intoned, use this glass as Washington had, and if Yancey spotted ‘‘the approaches of the sappers and miners of the Constitution, let your eloquent voice be raised to rouse the people to a sense of danger,’’ so that they will rally to rescue ‘‘the last hope of republican liberty from desecration and annihilation.’’ 39 That was precisely the angle Yancey had planned for the occasion. Washington’s life, Yancey explained, served as the supreme example of determination and sacrifice to protect the 

n

The League and the Letter

rights of the oppressed against tyranny. And, ever ready to lead the South out of what he considered a despotic Union, Yancey used the life of Washington as a metaphor for the current struggle of the South. When Washington first grasped this spyglass, Yancey reminded his mostly southern audience, his country was ‘‘an undisciplined multitude,’’ with ‘‘no foundries; no munitions of war; no navy; no famed leaders; no common government,’’ with its meager resources scattered across a fifteen hundred mile expanse. His opponent was the mightiest force on earth. By relying on his own character and will, Washington infused his men with trust, patriotism, and courage in their great cause, ‘‘that governments were made for the benefit of the governed; that all authority rightfully springs from the people, and that it is not only their right, but their duty to subvert a government which becomes destructive of the ends for which it was formed,’’ and to make a new one to protect their rights. Washington began his conflict as a loyal subject of the British crown, but later pledged his life, fortune, and sacred honor to his cause and emerged the first citizen of a new nation. And how had the sons of Washington fared? Yancey used the unfinished Washington Monument as an analogy. Well-intentioned citizens began planning and creating the great shaft, designed to pierce ‘‘the very heavens’’ at  feet. But now it stood a little over  feet, with rough boards covering the exposed top, tools rusting on the ground. The efforts of Washington’s heirs turned to naught. But now Washington’s daughters tried to step in and save his very home from decay, and their labors tapped the patriotic hearts of all Americans. Hope in saving Washington’s legacy—structural and ideological— survived. After seeming to strike a note of harmony and unity, Yancey closed his oration with a prophesy tantamount to a warning. Mount Vernon, he assured everyone, would become a ‘‘holy shrine.’’ Even if the Union itself ‘‘shall be shattered and broken in the conflict of sectional aggression, its alienated citizens may still meet, and, in the shadow of the tomb of the mighty dead, learn to sorrow for its destruction.’’ His stirring words and thinly veiled rallying cry won a positive reception from the people back home. When Yancey returned to Montgomery, he placed his ‘‘sacred relic’’ on display at a local jewelry store. The ever-enthusiastic Advertiser promoted Yancey for the U.S. Senate.40 But no one embraced Yancey’s words, ideas, and warnings in Richmond more than Yancey himself. He had no desire for public office in a federal government that he considered virtually out of control. Instead, he continued to work for secession as a private citizen. Fate seemingly played into Yancey’s plans as Montgomery prepared to host The League and the Letter

n



the annual Southern Commercial Convention. Since  southerners had formed assemblies, mostly of businessmen and some politicians, to discuss and promote industrial, agricultural, and commercial enterprises, developments, and knowledge.41 One of these, the  meeting in Memphis, helped inspire James D. B. De Bow to move from Charleston to New Orleans, the great commercial hub of the South, and begin publishing his influential De Bow’s Review. Over time and with each successive sectional outbreak, these conventions developed overtly political overtones. With every new threat of secession, it became more glaringly obvious that the South’s relatively slower industrial and commercial development boded ill in case of a military conflict with the proportionately more modern and industrial North. So, whether to increase the might of the southern economy to gain some bargaining power within the Union or to ensure its survival out of it, these annual commercial gatherings drew the attention of southern radicals.42 In  the meeting took place in Knoxville, Tennessee. Benjamin Yancey, one of the delegates, heard a presidential address by James De Bow that was no less than a call for secession. De Bow announced that after Republicans closed the West to slave expansion, denounced white southerners as ‘‘cowards and robbers . . . unfitted to share with them in christian communion,’’ that the only way the South could remain in the Union was to give up both slaves and white men’s honor. De Bow insisted that if the Union were no longer safe for southerners, ‘‘it is to be crushed.’’ 43 De Bow hoped to further the drive for disunion in  when the annual convention would gather in Montgomery, Alabama. Early in  De Bow joined the small but steady groundswell of southern radicals who called for a reopening of the African slave trade. Leonidus Spratt, editor of the Charleston Standard, raised the issue in . Governor James H. Adams added his endorsement in , and the idea persisted. While most white southerners found the trade abhorrent, replete with images of the devastating middle passage from Africa and fear that masses of new slaves would overwhelm whites and ‘‘Africanize’’ the South, De Bow sensed that the time was ripe to press the issue. After all, if slavery were as good as its defenders claimed, how could any part of it be bad? And if the South could acquire plentiful, cheap slaves, prices would drop and more common southern whites could afford one, thus tying together southern society even more tightly. Perhaps the singlemost outspoken public defender of slavery, Virginian George Fitzhugh, wrote to De Bow, ‘‘Stick to the Slave Trade.’’ And Yancey himself added that there ‘‘is but one subject upon which I should care to expatiate,’’ the federal statutes that outlawed the slave trade.44 

n

The League and the Letter

Not only was Yancey eager to stand by De Bow, but he also helped gather fellow radicals. Yancey wrote to an old friend of Ben’s, Louis Wigfall, who left South Carolina in  for Texas and emerged as the leading advocate of secession there. Yancey told Wigfall that the enormous Lone Star State ought to serve as ‘‘the leading State in the Union, or in a Southern Confederacy,’’ and urged him to attend the convention. Wigfall did not, but an unprecedented gathering of secessionists did. Ben Yancey took his place among the  Georgia delegates. De Bow came from Louisiana. Barnwell Rhett came from South Carolina, likely his first meeting with Yancey since they jointly called for secession in Macon, Georgia, in . From Virginia came the long, greyhaired, crazed-eyed Edmund Ruffin, who frequently published pro-secession essays in Rhett’s Charleston Mercury and in De Bow’s Review. And to top it off, although not a delegate and appearing at Montgomery coincidentally, the supposed president-in-exile of Nicaragua, William Walker, added his weighty presence.45 An aura of excitement started building weeks in advance of the meeting. On March , the mayor of Montgomery appointed delegates to start making arrangements. Yancey, of course, was included, along with Johnson J. Hooper, John J. Seibels, Thomas H. Watts, and several lesser lights. Almost at once they realized that no meeting hall in the city—including the state capitol—could accommodate the assembled crowd. They contracted with the owners of the West Point Company railroad to use their warehouse. Although previous venues had drawn larger crowds, the  delegates who arrived in Montgomery taxed that city’s resources. Local newspapers ran their own articles on the African slave trade and reprinted other papers’ editorials favoring its renewal. The Richmond Whig offered, ‘‘If we could only break our Federal fetters, we could import the negroes with great ease and profit.’’ Ruffin excitedly observed, ‘‘There seems in many a strong feeling of disunion.’’ 46 Ruffin arrived on May  and took a room at the Exchange hotel, as did Barnwell Rhett. Yancey himself stopped by the hotel to meet Ruffin for the first time. Talk of secession was on everyone’s lips.47 On May , , the Montgomery Commercial Convention began, and devoted the next day to a discussion of reopening the slave trade.48 Roger A. Pryor, a young lawyer and editor from Virginia, spoke against reopening the trade. He denied that renewing the overseas trade would bring any material benefit to the South. Pryor asked members to envision what would happen if masses of new slaves came to Dixie. Prices for cotton and for slaves would drop as population and production increased, to the detriment of those who already owned slaves and land. Pryor argued that the South’s very sparseThe League and the Letter

n



ness provided its strength. ‘‘Elbow room was necessary,’’ he explained. Plenty of land existed for all. Rather than flood the land with superfluous black labor, if southerners needed to increase their population to keep pace with the power of the North in Congress, ‘‘we want a population of white men.’’ Pryor claimed that harmony existed between slaveholding and slaveless southern whites, but predicted that cheap importations of slaves jeopardized that, too. It would result in direct competition between black slaves and white mechanics and factory operatives. How, he asked, would job competition with cheap, black slaves help white workers? Pryor also addressed practical political obstacles to reopening the trade. He denied emphatically that the federal government would never agree to it, and if southerners persisted in trying, their efforts would certainly alienate their northern allies within the Democratic Party, which he correctly termed ‘‘the only remaining tie which holds the Union together.’’ And even if this effort succeeded, it would ‘‘shock the sentiment of the christian world.’’ Pryor concluded that advocates of reopening the trade, knowing the storm of controversy they would unleash, in fact wished to trigger secession. If disunion was their true intent, Pryor demanded, let them call for it openly and directly after the federal government precipitated a crisis. If that happened, he promised, the border states of the South would stand firm with the Deep South. ‘‘Let us do it, if we do it at all, boldly, fearlessly, and manfully. Don’t let us slink behind any such subterfuge as this.’’ Yancey responded with the longest oratorical effort of his life, one that spanned three days. He denied Pryor’s assertion that debating the African slave trade would alienate northern party allies. If recent Kansas troubles were any indication, Yancey reminded the crowd, ‘‘surely no show of fidelity to the South’’ remained among northern Democrats. Admitting less than honorable actions had taken place in the recent Lecompton controversy, Yancey blamed party politics for forcing southerners ‘‘to get by trick what we ought to demand as freemen.’’ If northern Democrats continued to demand surrender of southern rights for the sake of the national party, Yancey announced, he favored disunion, even if war resulted. He deplored ‘‘this eternal cry of the Union.’’ Back in , Yancey had argued that while a citizen’s patriotism began at home, it should then expand until it included ‘‘his whole country—his America’’;49 now he insisted that patriotism began at home, and if any remained, ‘‘it was due first to his neighbor, and then the balance belonged to the Union.’’ Then Yancey shifted to constitutional and historical aspects of the slave trade. Although a hair-splitting distinction, he correctly noted that the Constitution itself did not prohibit the traffic; it actually protected it from congressional 

n

The League and the Letter

legislation for twenty years after ratification. In  Congress passed a law to outlaw the Atlantic trade in . Even after , the Constitution itself did not ban the slave trade. Yancey then made a coldly logical argument. ‘‘If slavery is right per se, if it is right to raise slaves for sale, does it not appear that it is right to import them?’’ If it was legal to buy slaves from Virginia, why was it illegal to purchase them cheaper in Cuba, Brazil, or Africa? Ever since the prohibition of , Yancey argued, a hostile North had begun to attack the South on the basis that there was something un-American about slavery. ‘‘We have been degraded, sorely degraded, since ,’’ he reminded his audience, when Congress prohibited slavery in most of the Louisiana territory. Southern seamen now had the duty of ‘‘catching, imprisoning, and degrading a southern man who shall dare to buy a negro upon the coast of Africa.’’ But men like Roger Pryor wanted the South to accept degradation rather than antagonize allies in the North or lose presidential elections. Yancey responded to Pryor’s remark about the rebuke of Christendom by insisting that the ‘‘puritanical sentimentality of Boston’’ did not constitute Christendom. Rather than presenting a biblical defense of the institution, Yancey simply asserted, ‘‘The system of slavery is founded upon high and immutable laws,’’ and that true Christianity ‘‘was for us,’’ the slaveholders of the South, and not for New England. What Pryor called the spirit of Christendom, Yancey damned as ‘‘the opinion of devildom.’’ 50 Concluding his morning speech on a religious note, Yancey trumpeted, ‘‘Let us then wipe from our statute book this mark of Cain which our enemies have placed there.’’ Terrific applause built as the convention adjourned until the afternoon. When delegates resumed the second day’s session, Yancey explained clumsily that he did not advocate reopening the trade, but only demanded removal of the federal laws that branded it as ‘‘obnoxious.’’ He would trust the invisible hand of the marketplace to operate on the matter. But Yancey then built an elaborate case for how the economy would benefit from more slaves. First, the idea that slaves should remain expensive was not, to Yancey, an idea of the marketplace, but rather of Virginia slaveholders, and certainly not of southwestern cotton growers. In fact, demand and therefore costs of slaves in the cotton states continued to climb steadily at this time, giving an advantage to those who inherited slaves but making it harder for ordinary people to buy them. ‘‘We want negroes cheap, and we want a sufficiency of them, so as to supply the cotton demand of the whole world.’’ Yancey agreed that more slaves would lower the unit price of cotton, but argued that cheaper cotton would sell in greater volume, ‘‘so that the world will wear it instead of silk or woolen fabrics.’’ Land values, Yancey reaThe League and the Letter

n



soned, would increase rather than decrease once enough slaves became available to work land currently uncultivated. And rather than creating potential competition between slaves and white laborers, if slaves were cheap enough, Yancey predicted, ‘‘no mechanic would object to own[ing] a negro.’’ If more ordinary folk could afford slaves, white solidarity and interests would clearly increase.51 Politically, too, Yancey saw nothing to lose and much to gain if more slaves were made available. Only if a multitude of white southerners could buy cheap slaves, Yancey asserted, could southerners secure their rights and interests in territories, since more settlers would be able to go there with slaves and more southerners would have a direct interest in the cause of slave expansion. Yancey cautioned that wherever one found a scarcity of slaveholders in the South, there abolitionists made inroads.52 Across the border from Maryland to Missouri, Yancey warned, too many southerners lacked ‘‘fidelity to the institution.’’ While the South appeared divided, the North, Yancey alerted the assembly, pressed on relentlessly against slavery. ‘‘The expansion of slavery has been shackled, the institution hemmed in by a cordon of free States. . . . The sale of slaves has already been prohibited in the District of Columbia,’’ and the North continued to encroach daily upon the South. And yet men like Pryor counseled cooperation. Who ever heard of a wolf yielding to a submissive lamb, Yancey asked. Appealing to manhood and honor, Yancey submitted, ‘‘The very worm will turn if you tread upon it.’’ He insisted, ‘‘Let us agitate our wrongs, agitate our injuries, and let the people know that the temple of liberty is still here, although the priests who officiated at its alters [sic] are no more.’’ Pryor interrupted to state that if a ‘‘Black Republican’’ were elected president and began to actively undermine southern rights, that he and all Virginia would join Alabama in a southern nation. Yancey shot back that ‘‘the crisis was upon us, the time was coming which would nerve every Southern arm, and strengthen every Southern heart to strike the blow for Southern Independence,’’ and predicted that when the time came, the South would find a Moses to lead them. Pryor, according to Yancey, embodied the ‘‘great rock in our way,’’ the notion that the South would never move unless it were wholly united. Yancey declared, ‘‘The united South never would move.’’ But he called upon all southerners who, like himself, believed they no longer lived under ‘‘the government of our sires’’ and wanted to leave it. ‘‘Let those who wished to march, form the vanguard and move on,’’ and let others remain at home. Yancey asserted that the people were ready, but ‘‘thunderstruck’’ at the hesitance and conservatism of their elected officials—which of course excluded him. Shouting to the crowd, Yancey asked ‘‘whether the time had come that our rights and interests could no longer be 

n

The League and the Letter

preserved in the Union,’’ and if so, were the southern people ‘‘ready to erect a standard of Southern Independence?’’ On the third day, May , others briefly had a chance to speak. They debated the slave trade, secession, and even attempted to discuss other matters like increasing direct trade with Europe. But everything focused on Yancey’s report on the African slave trade. He recapitulated the centrality of slavery to the South and reemphasized the unfairness of shutting off its labor supply while allowing multitudes of white laborers to flow to the North. Again Yancey cited the law of  making the slave trade illegal, but now also referred to the federal law of  that assigned armed vessels to stop the trade and a law of  declaring the trade a form of piracy. After a passing reference to protective tariffs, Yancey charged that the federal government used its power to build up the North’s economy while it also drove down the South’s. Again he claimed not to ‘‘express any matured opinion’’ as to ‘‘the expediency of reopening the Slave Trade,’’ but instead resolved that the federal restrictions on the slave trade violated the spirit of the Constitution ‘‘and are unjust and an insult to the South,’’ and therefore should be repealed. The morning and afternoon of the fourth day, May , others tried to speak and attempted to shift the discussion, but again found themselves overwhelmed by Yancey. William B. Preston of Virginia actually held the floor a while, trying desperately to argue against rash action either on the slave trade or secession. When Yancey replied, even the approving Edmund Ruffin remarked, ‘‘Yancey is a very eloquent & powerful speaker. But he is so fluent that he does not know when to stop.’’ 53 The pounding of the gavel for noon recess only postponed Yancey’s four-hour effort for that afternoon. By now, even the Advertiser reporter had started to simply summarize everyone’s remarks, even its hero’s. Yancey did not speak much on May , the final day’s proceedings, but he did not have to. By then he had successfully transformed the meeting from a commercial convention into a forum to discuss secession. Yancey acknowledged the divisiveness—even among southerners—on the slave trade issue. He asked, though, ‘‘On what are we united?’’ To Yancey the South was only united in acquiescence and silence in the face of northern oppression. He lamented that southerners would never unite on the question of disunion; some would always wish to delay or to compromise. As far as staking secession on a peripheral issue such as the slave trade, Yancey alluded to the three-penny tax on tea that led the founding fathers to rebel against Britain. When he heard others speak of seceding if a Republican were elected president, he dismissed this excuse as an inferior issue because it would not violate the Constitution, although The League and the Letter

n



he quickly added that he would join other southerners if they seceded under those circumstances. Yancey argued, though, that the South should secede now, before Republicans took over the presidency, the Supreme Court, and the armed forces. He advised the creation of a southern convention. If such a body met and decided to do nothing, no harm would come of it. If they decided to secede, he would join them. Yancey then referred to the War of : when Captain Isaac Hull of the  Constitution bore down on the Guerriere, Hull did not submit. Instead, ‘‘he only wanted to get within destructive cannon shot!’’ The crowd roared its approval. The closing remarks of other delegates reflected Yancey’s impact on the meeting. Leonidus Spratt of South Carolina, who first prepared a report on the slave trade, announced that slavery ‘‘makes us a peculiar people—it is a denial that Democracy is right, and when we see that we [white southerners] are in a minority, we should stand on a right to protect ourselves or fall in the attempt.’’ Percy Walker of Mobile offered a resolution declaring that southern interests in the colonizing of Central America were ‘‘paramount to all other interests,’’ and that a repetition of federal interference, as in the case of Paulding’s arrest of Walker, ‘‘would certainly lead to a dissolution of the Union.’’ Isaac Hayne of South Carolina objected that such a threat was ‘‘unworthy of this Convention,’’ although he ‘‘did not worship the Union’’ and swiftly withdrew his motion to strike. The final sign of the radicalization of the Montgomery convention came in its election of officers to prepare the official address for the  meeting, slated for Vicksburg, Mississippi. Among others, De Bow and Yancey would join John Quitman, the leading Mississippi secessionist and supporter of Latin American filibustering.54 Yancey celebrated. On the evening of May  he held a dinner party in his home for several delegates and some of their wives. It was surely one of the most extraordinary affairs of the age. Guests included the aged Edmund Ruffin, who happened to sit next to none other than the grey-eyed man of destiny himself, William Walker. Ruffin, more than a little eccentric himself, thought Walker odd, especially when the filibuster told Ruffin—a total stranger until that moment—that Walker had  men ready to leave for yet another crack at Nicaragua. After talking and dining, Ruffin left for his quarters after midnight, but the party continued on, with toasts and speeches flowing into the early hours of the morning.55 Even in Alabama, some complained that Yancey ‘‘unfurled the disunion banner’’ prematurely.56 That suited Yancey. He emerged from the convention convinced that he had helped achieve a more aggressive sectional posture, and he 

n

The League and the Letter

continued to stoke the fires of sectionalism. In a private letter Yancey repeated that he had no fixed opinion of the slave trade, but now confessed ‘‘my mind is favorably inclined’’ to it. His entire course, he emphasized, was to repeal federal laws that stood as ‘‘a direct condemnation . . . of the institution of slavery in its moral and social aspects.’’ Using naval metaphors again, Yancey explained that his goal ‘‘was to strip the Southern ship of State for battle—to furl and cast loose every rope that would drag upon her progress.’’ 57 In preparing for a great confrontation, Yancey insisted upon muting differences among southerners to create a united front. For this reason he chose not to condemn southern congressmen who recently approved the Conference Bill on Kansas that allowed the free-soil majority to reject slavery. ‘‘Such an issue would at once divide and distract that noble band of Southern Rights men who believe in secession, and have ever been ready to exercise it—upon whom the South can alone rely.’’ The only southerners Yancey denounced were ‘‘the Union-loving fogies who expect to rise upon the ruins resulting from a quarrel among the State Rights men.’’ Well-intentioned southerners, like Senator Jefferson Davis, supported the Conference Bill in order to avert potential civil war. But to Yancey, ‘‘Far better had the issue been met.’’ Davis might have been right, ‘‘but the fact is that the North laughs at us,’’ and there was nothing to celebrate about the result.58 While Yancey solidified issues in his mind and among his friends, Ruffin traveled around the Deep South. On his journeys he settled upon a plan to unite forces with the fiery orator he had just met in Montgomery. Ruffin had longed to create some sort of southern league, bodies of citizens who would proselytize for secession through publications, meetings, and speeches. Ruffin returned to Montgomery and met again with Yancey. The Virginian suggested that Yancey inaugurate this movement by giving a July  oration that demonstrated how the founding fathers had opted for disunion for less wrong and suffering than the North now inflicted upon the South. Yancey liked the basic idea. Ruffin shared his draft of a ‘‘Declaration & League.’’ Yancey agreed to that also, and the League of United Southerners came to life.59 In the Montgomery Advertiser of June , , Yancey, writing under the pseudonym ‘‘Southron’’ but citing Ruffin by name, unveiled a constitution for the ‘‘Proposed Plan of Association for Defence of the Rights and Interests of the Southern States.’’ Yancey argued again that no single issue would unite the entire South, and insisted that northerners had seized upon that knowledge ‘‘to promote our longer submission.’’ Complete southern unity, he admitted, would never occur. But Yancey reminded readers that neither had all their ancestors The League and the Letter

n



united against British tyranny, and that deep divisions continued even after war broke out. So, like the founders, Yancey urged the formation of associations, free of party influence and ‘‘pledged to resistance at the proper time.’’ The constitution for the League of United Southerners—originally the ‘‘association of United Southerners’’—was bland enough. The stated object was to gather individuals to discuss southern rights. Any number of men could form their own ‘‘clubs,’’ and any member of one club could participate with any other, but a member could only vote in his own. Each association could select delegates to a general council (no more than one delegate per thirty members) and take a seat on the general council for a twenty dollar fee. Funds raised would go to publication and dissemination of information. The general council would plan meeting times and places, verify members’ credentials and qualifications, and elect officers annually. It created an executive committee, consisting of the president, a vice president, secretary, and ten other members.60 This was precisely the type of organization that Yancey had used and dominated so well in the past, one that freed him from party fetters. He had great hopes for the league. In Virginia a few days later, Pryor gave Ruffin a copy of Yancey’s article, much to Ruffin’s satisfaction.61 Caught up in his own zeal and momentum, on June  Yancey wrote hastily to a friend, James S. Slaughter, to promote the league. Yancey used much the same language and imagery that he already expressed both in the Commercial Convention and in private letters: No National Party can save us; no Sectional Party can do it. But if we could do as our fathers did, organize Committees of Safety all over the cotton States, (and it is only in them that we can hope for any effective movement,) we shall fire the Southern heart—instruct the Southern mind—give courage to each other, and at the proper moment, by one, organized, concerted action, we can precipitate the cotton States into a revolution.62 Slaughter came to Yancey’s acquaintance through William F. Samford. Slaughter had helped Samford edit the Tuskegee True Union in  and had worked on the Auburn Gazette from  to . A former Know-Nothing, Slaughter left that party for the Democrats, becoming an ardent Yancey supporter. Yancey likely saw something of himself in the young Slaughter, another Georgia migrant who came to Alabama and worked in the newspaper business. But Yancey also saw Slaughter as a pliable, useful tool to form local chapters of the league and thereby prepare for secession. That Slaughter had boundless enthusiasm as 

n

The League and the Letter

well as youthful indiscretion became manifest when he allowed other editors to publish Yancey’s private letter. The result was a firestorm of controversy.63 The Slaughter letter at once gained both fame and infamy. For better or worse, the oft-reprinted letter spread news of Yancey’s league across the nation. The Charleston Mercury, Atlanta Intelligencer, the Alabama Huntsville Democrat, and, of course, the Montgomery Advertiser enthusiastically applauded Yancey’s stand.64 Unionists, both South and North, condemned the document as an open declaration of revolution and treason. New York Tribune editor Horace Greeley, a Republican, tagged it ‘‘The Scarlet Letter.’’ Stephen Douglas, Yancey’s old foe, then friend, now turned foe again, railed against Yancey and the league on the Senate floor. Douglas cited the Slaughter letter to prove that the ‘‘Southern League’’ was a secret organization designed to subvert the Democratic Party and ‘‘plunge the cotton states into revolution.’’ 65 Although he blundered into more public scrutiny than he had planned, Yancey knew how to capitalize on a situation like this: talk. He began now as he often did, solidifying his supporters at home. Yancey addressed a great barbecue at Bethel Church, Alabama, on July . Despite another bout of ill health, he defended the league in a two-hour speech. The South had surrendered its rights to the success of national parties and to their legislative compromises. He acknowledged that the Constitution itself resulted from many compromises, but once ratified, Yancey insisted that it had to ‘‘stand forth as the fundamental, unchangeable, fixed rule of legislation.’’ 66 Then, as never before, Yancey lashed out at all parties and all compromisers. Although acting in the spirit of compromise, southern politicians had erred, he insisted, when they supported ending the African slave trade in . The Louisiana Territory and the Texas Republic, he reminded his audience, had both entered the Union as slave territories, but ‘‘compromise’’ had stripped away two-thirds of Louisiana and part of Texas from slaveholders. Worst of all, Yancey explained, was southern complicity in these swindles, due largely to blind loyalty to national parties. Southern giants such as William Lowndes, Henry Clay, and even John C. Calhoun, by supporting the Missouri Compromise, ‘‘forbade even the South to wince under the immense robbery.’’ And the North, Yancey emphasized, had never surrendered a single right in any previous socalled compromise. The Dred Scott decision in  finally favored the South after a generation of futile ‘‘compromise.’’ But who truly believed, Yancey asked, that slavery would expand to Kansas, or Nebraska, let alone Oregon, Washington, or New Mexico? No, ‘‘not a foot of public domain’’ remained for slavery, The League and the Letter

n



especially with the continued growth of northern antislavery sentiment. Yancey must have thought of his stepfather as he declared that the northern clergy infused ‘‘the most wide spread and intense fanaticism against slavery as a moral, social and political evil.’’ 67 With so little hope for the South within the Union, Yancey outlined the only strategy he considered viable. Even though no national party was trustworthy, Yancey argued that the best alternative was to stick with the Democrats. No new party, he believed, could do better. He advised southerners not to pass more resolutions—they had done so in the past to no avail. Instead, they must ‘‘bridle’’ politicians and parties not just prior to elections, but constantly by forming leagues all over the South. Ultimately the South must throw off the shackles of party and assert its independence, but meanwhile it was imperative to form these leagues. He hoped that soon an annual congress of southern leagues ‘‘will rise up and vie with our Federal Congress in its influence on the public mind,’’ just as the Continental Congress had done prior to the American Revolution. And like their forefathers, southerners should create committees of safety, charged with molding public opinion and ‘‘gathering munitions of war.’’ A Bethel league formed immediately after his speech.68 Yancey repeated his message at Benton on July , where he helped create another league, and again in Montgomery. Southern leagues, he promised, would ‘‘crush out the mere political tricksters, who now make the slavery question subordinate to the Parties.’’ He insisted that an annual congress of Southern leagues would either ‘‘save the Union, if it shall prove worth saving,’’ or lead the South to independence. Again, locals immediately created a new Montgomery league.69 In Virginia, Roger Pryor, editor of the Richmond South, denounced Yancey, the league, and the Slaughter letter for trying to dress up their true goal, secession, in the guise of purifying parties and saving the Union. Pryor claimed that league members combined former Know-Nothings and disgruntled Democrats in an effort to overthrow the Democratic Party. He argued that the Slaughter letter proved Yancey’s willingness to jettison the Upper South states while he precipitated only the Deep South ‘‘cotton States into a revolution.’’ 70 On August  Yancey penned a long rebuttal that Pryor published, as did several other papers across the country. ‘‘You have unjustly assailed myself and the ‘League of United Southerners,’’’ Yancey began. As to the charge of KnowNothingism, Yancey replied that opposition to the league from leading KnowNothing newspapers in Georgia and Alabama belied Pryor’s accusation. As to the aims of all leagues, Yancey fired back that if Pryor had ever read a league constitution he could have no doubt as to their intention, so Yancey reprinted 

n

The League and the Letter

the charter for the Montgomery league both for Pryor’s benefit and for the readership of the Richmond South. Yancey pointed out the contradiction that Pryor committed by commending Ruffin and his Southern Associations but condemning Yancey and his leagues, since, in fact, Ruffin started both.71 As to whether the league was ‘‘a premature blow against the integrity of the Union,’’ as Pryor insinuated, Yancey replied with but one qualification: ‘‘I shall presume, of course, you mean a Constitutional Union.’’ Yancey pointed to the preamble of the Montgomery charter that stated the primary purpose of each league was to help preserve southern rights within the Union. Its secondary goal and function, Yancey readily proclaimed, was to prepare for disunion. After offering a fairly straightforward explanation of policy, Yancey provided a murky defense of his language in the Slaughter letter. First he hedged, saying he had written Slaughter in great haste and had never intended or authorized the publication of the letter. Then he announced, ‘‘I am a secessionist, and not a revolutionist, and would not ‘precipitate,’ but carefully prepare to meet an inevitable dissolution.’’ Yancey, like other secessionists, had learned that more southerners warmed to a defense of their perceived rights than to aggressive destruction of the American republic.72 As far as Pryor’s complaint that Yancey’s attention to the ‘‘cotton States’’ in the Slaughter letter insinuated that Virginia and other, older slave states lacked ‘‘Southern spirit,’’ Yancey all but pleaded guilty. Yancey avowed that Delaware, Maryland, Kentucky, and Missouri all contained antislavery elements, and correctly pointed out that antislavery Tennesseans supported Senator Andrew Johnson. Yancey asserted that he never claimed Virginia lacked ‘‘Southern spirit,’’ but confessed that he did not expect Virginia to take the initiative in seceding. But then with a sense of certainty in secession, if not complacency, Yancey suggested that when disunion came the Upper South states would serve the cotton states better by remaining a while within the Union, using their geographic position to help protect a new slaveholders’ republic from northern invasion. Besides, Yancey explained, if the Upper South seceded immediately it would give ‘‘the Southern Confederacy a long abolition, hostile border to watch.’’ Later, after this new nation gained strength and stability, Yancey suggested that other slave states ‘‘could join the Southern Confederacy, and be protected by the power of its arms and its diplomacy.’’ Yancey closed his letter to Pryor with another clarion call for secession. He reminded readers that in , under Calhoun’s leadership, South Carolina had hoped for southern cooperation, but ‘‘was ready to march forth alone upon her grand mission of independence and honor out of the Union.’’ In , GoverThe League and the Letter

n



nor Quitman announced that Mississippi should secede alone, if no other slave state would join her. In contrast, Yancey suggested, by working for a union of cotton states with more similar interests, it would create a new sense of regional unity. ‘‘I claim then, sir, that my cause is the cause of the South.’’ The honor of the South had become tarnished and assailed, even by some of its own politicians, and Yancey claimed to have tried every remedy within the Union. He quoted Shakespeare’s Hamlet: ‘‘To be rightly great, is not to move[;] Without great argument; But to quarrel upon a straw, Where honor is at stake.’’ Clearly for Yancey, the time to quarrel had ended. It was time to act. This letter was reprinted in almost as many newspapers as the Slaughter letter. Among others, the Richmond Enquirer, Charleston Mercury, Nashville Union and American, and the Montgomery Confederation ran the four-plus column letter, providing Yancey, the league, and secession with tremendous free and expanded publicity.73 Pryor fired back his own salvo, but probably did Yancey more good than harm by making it personal. Pryor lashed out at Yancey’s ‘‘inordinate vanity,’’ his ‘‘spirit of egotism,’’ his ‘‘verbose and vapid production,’’ in which Yancey exposed ‘‘such an indifference to sense and grammatical construction, that I am often at a loss as to apprehend your meaning.’’ Then Pryor attacked Yancey for his resignation from the House in , leaving his Democratic seat to ‘‘a bitter Whig,’’ for opposing Lewis Cass in , for failing to vote for Pierce in , and, according to Pryor, for supporting Buchanan only in an effort to gain a cabinet appointment.74 Yancey responded with great restraint. In part avoiding a head-on confrontation and in part surely as an insult, Yancey penned his reply to Pryor’s rival newspaper, the Richmond Enquirer. If his letter was as poorly written as Pryor charged, why had no other newspapers said as much when they reprinted it? Yancey then dismissed the whole matter by asking readers to understand his ‘‘inability to compete controversially with Mr. R. A. Pryor, in the spirit in which [he has] written.’’ In fact the only one he lashed out at was James Slaughter. Yancey mentioned that he had become convinced that young Slaughter had ‘‘a peculiar moral and mental obliquity,’’ and considered all correspondence with him public information.75 Clearly, Yancey had not lost his penchant for confrontation. He had finally come to realize, however, that sometimes one ought to leave well enough alone. His health had also become more of a problem. He now suffered horribly from neuralgia, acute and often throbbing pain that follows along a column of nerves. In May, during the Commercial Convention and his strenuous efforts 

n

The League and the Letter

there, Yancey turned to alcohol to numb his pain. The results were apparent. Ruffin criticized Yancey for his obvious intoxication, ignorantly assuming that the great fire-eater needed to get drunk before a big speech. On July , at Bethel Church, he had begged his audience’s indulgence for his ‘‘great physical debility [sic]’’ that had already afflicted him for a month.76 On August  Yancey began a week’s travel to Talladega Springs, Alabama, with his wife. It was there that Yancey composed his long letter to Pryor. ‘‘I have written in constant physical pain,’’ he explained to the editor, so much so that it affected his penmanship. It had severely impaired his neck and back, even his walk. At one point he reported to his mother that his health started improving, but anticipated a few more days for complete relief.77 Relief did not come. By the end of September, Yancey tried another spot renowned for its natural spa, Warm Springs, Georgia. It was from there that Yancey wrote his final reply to Pryor, the one that lacked his accustomed punch. And still he found no end to his pain. In fact as fall arrived his symptoms worsened. Throughout this personal trial, his best friend and confidant, his brother, was out of the country. Ben had departed for his mission to the Argentine Confederation in June. William, who always acted as protector to his brother, must have been in agony when he confessed his helplessness. ‘‘The nerves of my spine, back & sides are in bad condition. I . . . am worse, and weak, can barely walk, aided by a cane. At night, the nerves that run across my back, just below the shoulder blade, and that cover my ribs, at regular intervals of not more than half hour, are in motion, and seem to curl, and knot up, and to twist off, almost—waking me if in slumber & causing me to cry out. The consequence is I get no good sleep. I have to use morphine every night.’’ An outbreak of yellow fever in Mobile and New Orleans prevented him from traveling to Hot Springs, Arkansas, where he had planned to go with Sarah and her personal slave, Jane, who suffered from rheumatism. ‘‘If that gives me no relief, I shall go to the water cure hospitals in Germany,’’ he moaned to Ben.78 Yancey’s pain threatened to unravel his whole life. He could not work and had to completely give up his law practice in the autumn of . He obviously had to abandon his crusade for secession, which had to be discouraging in the extreme after he had personally built up so much momentum. Yancey ordered the weekly edition of the Montgomery Advertiser sent to Ben through the State Department to keep his brother informed of ‘‘all the political matter relating to me,’’ and then remembered ‘‘quiet is best for me, even in politics.’’ 79 As far as politics was concerned, Yancey claimed, ‘‘I am content to abide by The League and the Letter

n



events.’’ That fall’s elections resulted in a surge of Republican Party strength at both local and state levels across the North. Between that mounting threat and ‘‘the absolute treason of the Democracy on Kansas,’’ Yancey believed that thousands of southerners had finally opened their eyes, ‘‘and the foolish idea that the South is on rising ground is abandoned.’’ Through his pain, Yancey looked to the future with hope.80



n

The League and the Letter

CHAPTER TWELVE

The Conventions of 1860 The momentum for secession generated by Yancey in the summer of  faded by the end of the year, forcing him and his fire-eating associates to reappraise their strategy. Like other secessionists, these Alabamians grew ever more stupefied, wondering what could ever shake their complacent countrymen out of their lethargy, whether it took the form of unified resistance within the union or separate state secession. As they pondered their next move, Yancey continued to suffer horribly from neuralgia and remained out of public life. His allies, therefore, had to continue without him. None worked harder than Yancey’s chief admirer, William F. Samford. In public and private correspondence, Samford harped on the African slave trade and promoted the League of United Southerners.1 Yancey had appealed to honor in order to rouse southern men, but Samford challenged their very manhood. In an overtly gendered appeal, Samford proclaimed, ‘‘There is not a woman in the world’’ who, in reacting to the laws prohibiting the Atlantic slave trade, ‘‘would not rise up in the desperation of outraged human nature,

and desperately die fighting battalions of bayonets with nothing but knitting needles in her hands before she would submit to the cool, self-complacent, calculating, cunning, canting, biting, burning, blistering, insulting, contemptuous petty despotism of these insidious laws.’’ More boldly than Yancey, Samford demanded either repeal of the prohibition or for the South to ‘‘sink this Union.’’ 2 Samford also worked behind the scenes to secure a Senate nomination for Yancey. To Senator Clement C. Clay, whom Samford had supported for Alabama’s other Senate seat with editorials in the Montgomery Advertiser, he gushed, ‘‘You know I am for Yancey for Senate. You ought to be on every account personal & political.’’ Samford wanted Yancey to run as an ‘‘independent democratic candidate on his own platform. We can elect him triumphantly!’’ Audaciously, Samford claimed that Senator Clay owed this favor to Samford for his work on Clay’s behalf.3 The great fire-eater himself likely knew little of Samford’s schemes, and cared even less. The marriage of his daughter, Mary, to John Harrell on November , , provided one of the few happy moments during his continual bout with pain. As winter set in and a new year arrived, Yancey remained disabled. In fact, his condition grew so bad that he could no longer directly care for his mother. With some great emotional, if not physical, relief, Yancey sent Caroline Beman to Argentina and the care of his brother. To escape the relative cool of winter in Montgomery, Yancey traveled to Mobile, then to Florida, seeking warmth to ease his aching body. Some improvement came. ‘‘My specialty, neuralgia still has a strong and unpleasant grip on my back,’’ he reported to a friend. Yancey planned to summer in the mountain resorts of Virginia and still contemplated a voyage to the water-cure hospitals of Europe.4 For once, Yancey’s letters avoided politics. With his brother and mother far away, Yancey’s thoughts gravitated again toward his family. He even missed his mother. Yancey wrote her regularly through the American Counsel’s office. ‘‘Although I have not yet rec’d a line from you, save once from Rio de Janeiro, and have no assurance that my letters reach you or Ben, I will write again.’’ A niece in Tampa, Florida, Mary Wilson, had recently died of yellow fever. Otherwise, the family enjoyed good health, Yancey reported, ‘‘save myself.’’ Although superficially he improved—‘‘I am even yet fattening’’—his disease greatly affected his walk. He could not yet return to work, and found that his eldest son, Ben, ‘‘does not take kindly to the labor of the office—and will never make an efficient lawyer.’’ Yancey now regretted allowing his son to pursue law at all and wished he had encouraged Ben to learn civil engineering instead. 

n

The Conventions of 

He would not make the same mistake again. ‘‘I have determined to give Will & Dalton business education & will put Will [in] a cotton commission House in Mobile, next fall.’’ Just as he closed his letter, Yancey received one from his mother, dated December, via the State Department in Washington. She asked him for money. Yancey promised to send some, but admitted, ‘‘I am utterly ignorant’’ about how to transmit it, in American dollars or in Argentine currency.5 By the spring of , Yancey could report only meager improvement in his health. He eased himself back to work, not because he felt better, but because he needed some income. Yancey even had to turn down an invitation to attend that year’s Southern Commercial Convention in Vicksburg, Mississippi, but from Montgomery Yancey joined fellow disunionists Edmund Ruffin and James De Bow by writing editorials, trying again to fire the southern heart.6 Yancey, De Bow, and Ruffin spread their messages across the Deep South. Ruffin prepared an essay for De Bow’s Review focusing on the negative economic impact of ‘‘The Effects of High Slave Prices’’ and the antidote, cheap, new African slaves.7 At Vicksburg, De Bow spoke for reopening the trade, and delegates approved his resolution to repeal all state and federal laws banning it by a resounding vote of –. De Bow then used the convention to form the ‘‘African Labor Supply Association,’’ with himself presiding, and Yancey named in absentia as an officer.8 Accepting the honor, Yancey replied in both the Montgomery Advertiser and De Bow’s Review. In the Review he and De Bow asked rhetorically if Africa could not provide, ‘‘from the teeming millions, the barbarian hosts, crushed, oppressed, benighted, of that fatherland . . . a few more subjects to be spared to civilization?’’ To his hometown paper Yancey repeated his contention that the Constitutional clause that protected the African slave trade until  did not mandate that Congress should later prohibit it or condemn it as piracy. He had said as much before, but finally Yancey announced, ‘‘I must confess that the inclination of my mind is in favor of a regulated and limited supply of African Slave labor.’’ Limited, at least, until the inevitable conquest of Latin America as far south as William Walker’s Nicaragua, when ‘‘the cause of civilization will demand as large drafts upon Africa for slaves as that continent can supply.’’ 9 Yancey broadened his editorial campaign after an admirer, James D. Meadows, asked his opinions on leading questions of the day. Yancey again defended both the slave trade and slavery in general, an institution that predated the American Revolution, he reminded his readers, and made possible by ‘‘a legal and unrestricted trade in slaves.’’ He added that the Constitutional mandate for The Conventions of 

n



the return of fugitive slaves marked that document as proslavery. Up to  and the ban of the African slave trade, Yancey claimed, there had been no national problem with slavery.10 Over time, Yancey continued, ‘‘Exceedingly loose, and indeed unconstitutional, ideas on the subject of slavery’’ had entered public opinion. ‘‘Wild, impracticable and false notions, as to the equality of the human race, got abroad both here and in Europe,’’ he explained, because the world had so long suffered from absolute despotism, ‘‘that the rebound of opinion went far beyond the line of truth.’’ This rebound, Yancey claimed, started in France and swept across the Atlantic in the person of Thomas Jefferson, who became ‘‘imbued with the spirit of slavery emancipation.’’ Under Jefferson’s influence, ‘‘this mental poison spread through our political sphere.’’ Then, aided by ‘‘mighty preachers of the gospel,’’ many Americans came to consider slavery ‘‘a moral leprosy fastened upon the land.’’ But the bulk of white southerners knew ‘‘slavery to be morally, as well as politically right,’’ and the Supreme Court had recently held that Congress could not exclude slavery from the national territories. And still there remained on the statute books the ‘‘semi-abolition policy’’ on the slave trade.11 Yancey then shifted to the upcoming presidential election. Antislavery sentiment in the North had already created the Republicans, an aggressive party, assailing a purely defensive South which never attacked the Constitutional rights of the North. But the same antislavery spirit, Yancey declared, had invaded the Democratic Party. With Stephen Douglas now explaining how territorial governments could adopt local legislation to effectively prohibit slavery and Republicans openly claiming, despite the Dred Scott decision, that Congress could prohibit slavery in the territories, white southerners found themselves attacked directly from the North and indirectly in the territories by Douglas and his Democratic followers. Bad enough, Yancey continued, that northern Democrats capitulated to Douglas’s version of antislavery; more horrible were the signs that southerners stood ready to support a Douglas nomination. The South, ‘‘Manacled and robbed,’’ was ‘‘exhorted to be quiet, for lost rights are but spilt milk! Debauched and humbled,’’ too many southerners already believed their best course now was to back a party that might select a southerner to run as president or vice president, or include southerners in a cabinet, instead of fighting for their rights. Yancey labeled Douglas the South’s ‘‘greatest and most dangerous’’ enemy. Briefly, Yancey referred to another potential internal foe, an incipient party organization in the border states and Upper South led by old Whig unionists. 

n

The Conventions of 

Men like John Bell of Tennessee, completely disregarding of southern rights and attacks on those rights, would ignore all issues concerning slavery only to create a new party and, through it, ‘‘take possession of the government.’’ Parties and party ambition, Yancey insisted, provided the last great stumbling block for the South. The South needed ‘‘true men in her councils,’’ not more platforms or parties. He condemned most southern politicians as ‘‘mere puppets in the show, made to wheel and dance as the party organists choose to grind the music,’’ or as otherwise able men ‘‘absorbed in their own personal advancement, which invariably requires a compromise of Southern issues.’’ Next, Yancey turned directly to Meadows’s question: ‘‘You ask if I am a disunionist, per se.’’ Yancey, more radical now than ever, but burned often by his more conservative countrymen, answered disingenuously, ‘‘I am not and never have been.’’ Taking a course that other fire-eaters had already started to use after their failed efforts at disunion, Yancey now offered secession as a defensive southern reaction to incendiary, revolutionary changes in the North.12 Yancey argued that in  when Congress admitted California as a free state, ‘‘dismembered the slaveholding state of Texas,’’ and banned the slave trade in Washington, D.C., it ‘‘in effect destroyed the Constitutional compact of Union.’’ Standing unequivocally on the principles of the Georgia Platform, Yancey promised to bide his time and wait to see what the future brought. The taste of politics back in his mouth acted as medicine for Yancey. Despite his continuing pain, he considered the times ripe to resume agitation and organization, especially to stop Stephen Douglas from getting the Democratic nomination for president in . The Democrats’ national convention would meet in Charleston in only nine months. Needing to travel north to consult yet another physician anyway, Yancey made his first public speech outside of Alabama in years. On July , Yancey delivered an oration to the people of Columbia, South Carolina.13 Approaching his forty-fifth birthday, Yancey now had such great confidence in himself as a spokesman for the South and for his potency on the stump that he presumed to give Carolinians a primer on slavery and secession. Recalling his own part in the nullification crisis a generation before, Yancey labored under the misapprehension that Carolinians still considered tariffs the major issue in politics. He acknowledged the importance of that issue, but asked his listeners to focus on ‘‘the greater question of slavery.’’ With slavery preserved and protected, he promised, ‘‘we are safe either in the Union or out of the Union.’’ 14 Again Yancey addressed the African slave trade and the federal proscriptions upon it. Appealing to the spirit of Manifest Destiny, Yancey promised expanThe Conventions of 

n



sion as far south as Panama. And how, he asked, could the South populate and reap the benefits of this domain without a new influx of slaves? But Yancey warned that the South had no chance of reopening the slave trade—or even protecting slavery at home—while in the Union. Yancey made a peculiar vow to work with those who still had faith in the Union, but only in the hope that soon southerners would unite in leaving the Union. However strained his logic Yancey meant what he said, and then specified how the South should proceed. The first step required all parties to adopt proper views, especially the Democrats. ‘‘It is necessary to make a contest in its Charleston Convention,’’ he explained. Defeating Douglas there might buy time, but if a ‘‘Black Republican’’ won the presidency in  the South must secede before inauguration day, before a Republican could seize the powers of the purse and the sword, backtracking on his recent condemnation of seceding after a legal federal election. But even if a Democrat prevailed, the government must repeal all laws that Yancey considered an attack on slavery, or the South must secede then as well. Plainly, Yancey insisted that the South must emerge victorious, either within the Union or out of it, with no more compromises, no more delays. And like other secessionists, Yancey braced his countrymen for whatever trials lay ahead, but promised that the future would be glorious no matter what. He believed that the South could ably protect herself from aggression ‘‘when in the position of an independent southern confederacy.’’ With eight million people, with a multitude ‘‘educated to the use of arms, trained to self-reliance, with a thorough knowledge of governmental principles, with as much spirit and manhood as was ever possessed by any people,’’ a Southern Confederacy would have nothing to fear. Plus, as almost every white southerner believed by now, Yancey reminded his listeners, ‘‘We have the great product without which the world cannot do’’—cotton. Speaking as though disunion were certain, Yancey concluded, ‘‘When we part from this government, which no longer looks to the Constitution for guidance, we will carry with us our sage experience of the operations of this government,’’ and never repeat the mistakes of the past. In short, Yancey promised that secession would not only work, but that it offered solutions to all the South’s problems. After all but declaring himself for secession, the man who denied being ‘‘a disunionist, per se’’ proceeded to Richmond, Virginia, leaving enthusiastic secessionists in his wake. The Rhetts, in their Charleston Mercury, before they could typeset Yancey’s Columbia speech, reprinted another Yancey editorial on the slave trade. Later the Rhetts offered their own list of demands for the Democratic convention. Like Yancey, they insisted that the South must only support a 

n

The Conventions of 

man who stood firm on slavery in the territories. If no such man got the nomination, the Rhetts demanded that ‘‘the southern States nominate and support candidates of their own.’’ If they could not, or if their candidate lost, the Rhetts agreed that the South must secede.15 While in Virginia, Yancey met with its governor, Henry Wise, a radical himself. Wise, a quiet supporter of reopening the African slave trade, confided to a friend his astonishment at Yancey’s boldness on the issue. He and Yancey did not discuss that topic, but ‘‘agreed in all else.’’ 16 Back in Alabama, the Huntsville Democrat endorsed Yancey’s call to reopen the slave trade. Samuel F. Rice, an old friend of Yancey’s in Montgomery and recently a state supreme court justice, wrote to the Montgomery Confederation that when he saw so many of the fire-eaters from  now willing to make further compromises of southern rights, ‘‘I could not but entertain for all true men like Yancey, of all parties, a feeling akin to that of gratitude.’’ Rice then offered to support Yancey for the U.S. Senate.17 The summer’s tour buoyed Yancey’s popularity, but did nothing to revive his health. He made several trips to the springs of Virginia, and while resuming physical activity restored his appetite and appearance, his suffering continued. From Philadelphia he complained that he had little sympathy from people who, judging by his appearance, assumed that he had fully recovered. Still, the exhilaration of returning to the stump combined with his deep-seated disgust for compromises to convince him to run for the U.S. Senate.18 Benjamin Fitzpatrick, an old ally of Yancey’s when Dixon Lewis was still alive, was the incumbent senator. To Yancey, Fitzpatrick embodied the result of southerners’ capitulation to national party organizations. Back in , Fitzpatrick vigorously supported the Kansas Conference bill, an act that scheduled yet another referendum to settle the slavery question in that hapless territory. That bill offered no guarantees for slavery and therefore proved unacceptable to Yancey. And while Yancey beat the war drums for reopening the slave trade, Fitzpatrick opposed that idea. Now Fitzpatrick allied himself closely with John J. Seibels, another old friend-turned enemy because he, too, had turned his back on southern radicalism for the sake of his party. Betting they had the votes to fend off Yancey’s radical allies but worried their strength would fade, Fitzpatrick, Seibels, and their clique managed to have the assembly hold the Senate election early, with two years left in Fitzpatrick’s term. The combination of issues, personalities, and tactics piqued Yancey’s fury. ‘‘Fitzpatrick is a member of no church—a profane man & utters (if he indeed has any) no political opinions!’’ 19 Sick or not, Yancey was back in form. The Conventions of 

n



This contest, however, took place primarily with behind-the-scenes maneuvers and newspaper editorials. The Montgomery Advertiser, under editor George H. Shorter, an established Yancey ally, and Yancey’s cousin William A. Beene, son of the late Jesse Beene, stood resolutely behind their man. Seibels’s Montgomery Confederation fired back in kind. Newspapers around the state joined in, but the contest largely remained within the state capital with the goal of influencing the assemblymen who actually selected senators.20 The legislature met in Montgomery in December. Edward Bullock, a Yanceyite floor leader in the state senate, counted fifty-eight likely votes for Fitzpatrick, fifty for Yancey, and twenty-two for John A. Winston, but recognized that Winston and Fitzpatrick stood closer to each other than either did to Yancey. Unable to devise a plan for a Yancey victory, Bullock found a way to prevent one for Fitzpatrick. Ingeniously, Bullock opposed the resolution that called for an early election in the first place, which had been considered a foregone conclusion. Although the resolution passed in the lower chamber, it failed in the senate by a vote of –, and so the election was canceled. Most of Fitzpatrick’s backers were absent for the vote. As Bullock put it, ‘‘They were taken by surprise, blown up before they knew there was a grain of powder on the premises.’’ 21 Fitzpatrick still remained in office, but had to wait two more years for reelection, when he considered his prospects less certain. Although doubtless upset at not winning the seat, Yancey at least could find consolation that he and his supporters had enough clout to prevent what they considered capitulation to the national Democratic Party, personified by Fitzpatrick. And to further ease his disappointment, Yancey rejoiced over the return of his brother from South America. Benjamin Yancey had acquitted himself admirably in his diplomatic post,22 and President Buchanan offered him another appointment. The younger Yancey refused the offer, however, and made a circuitous journey home, stopping briefly in London before returning to Georgia by December.23 The conjunction of Ben’s return with William’s revived political influence— at least his ability to block undesirable actions—happened at an auspicious time. On October , abolitionist John Brown and a band of men made their fateful raid on Harpers Ferry, Virginia. Brown planned nothing less that precipitating a race war to free all slaves and to destroy the United States of America. The abject failure of the plot, Brown’s execution in December, and the discovery that prominent abolitionists—a ‘‘Secret Six’’—had sponsored the raid supercharged the political atmosphere in Alabama, as it did throughout the nation.24 

n

The Conventions of 

As Alabamians turned their attention to preparations for the  presidential elections, the shadow of Brown loomed over them. On November , , Democrats of Montgomery County met to prepare for the state party convention in January. The backdrop of Yancey’s constant agitation, events of recent years, and especially John Brown’s raid played to Yancey’s interests. Montgomery Democrats decided to press the state party for a reaffirmation of the Alabama Platform, an intractable insistence on federal protection for slavery in the territories. By definition, this placed Montgomery Democrats on record unalterably opposed to Douglas’s nomination, and delegates selected Yancey to lead them into the state convention in January.25 During the intervening weeks, the radicalism of Alabamians intensified as they looked toward the national convention and the presidential election. Edward Bullock, tired of ‘‘this revolutionary war’’ waged by Republicans against the South, all but decided for secession by the end of . ‘‘We cant get out of the Union without a convention & nobody would call that, but the legislature,’’ he explained to a colleague. Meanwhile, Bullock reported that the state assembly was prepared to bolster their militia by ,, to prepare for violent conflict with federal authorities should Alabama secede. As Bullock noted, ‘‘Disunion sentiment never was so deep.’’ 26 As delegates arrived at the capitol building in Montgomery for the state Democratic convention in January , the table was set for Yancey. His health was good enough for the task, and again he would provide the dominant voice. Yancey stated that national parties could not save the South, and yet the South could not get rid of these parties. Therefore southerners must ‘‘elevate and purify’’ them, forcing parties to abandon compromise, when dealing with southern questions. This goal underlay his League of United Southerners, which he again defended. But now, to make the Democratic Party useful, he repeated that ‘‘it is necessary to make a contest in its Charleston Convention.’’ 27 No matter what would transpire during the election year, Yancey labored to prepare Alabama for secession. He confessed the likelihood that a ‘‘Black Republican’’ could win the presidency. Yancey repeated the warning he issued in South Carolina, that if a Republican won, then the South must secede as quickly as possible, and that even with Democrats in the White House and Congress, the South must leave the Union unless all unconstitutional acts against slavery were repealed.28 Clearly to Yancey, during this election the South must have its way entirely, one way or another. Yet Yancey realized how powerful appeals to Union sounded to his listeners. The Conventions of 

n



After all, he had sounded them himself long ago. ‘‘Your fears, your love of quiet —of ease—of peace,’’ and attachment to the Democratic Party that had long served the South well now undermined the spirit of defiance. But Yancey reminded his audience about their forefathers’ spirit of resistance preceding the American Revolution, and announced that if the firm assertions of their rights would break up the Democratic Party and the Union itself, ‘‘I am now, as I have ever been, ready to seize upon the Constitution in which those rights are guaranteed,’’ and, with fellow southerners, ‘‘form a new Union under that Constitution.’’ And if the North tried to stop them, Yancey swore ‘‘to tread a pathway in blood’’ to protect and secure their rights and property.29 Following his lead, the convention again adopted the Alabama Platform and again instructed its delegates to the national convention to withdraw if that platform did not win adoption. Ironically, on this point Yancey objected. Doubtless still smarting from his rebuff in  when he followed instructions by bolting when that convention rejected the same platform, Yancey perhaps also sensed a new spirit of unity. The mood of the South, after all, was quite different than it had been in . The Compromise of  had satisfied few. The chaos in Kansas, the rise of the Republican Party, divisions within the Democratic Party since Lecompton in , and of course John Brown’s raid had forged tremendous southern solidarity. Yancey’s consistent alerts since  about southern rights and secession helped to galvanize this unity. In fact, other delegates had such little faith in the national party convention that they argued against sending representatives at all, only a single bearer of Alabama’s ultimatum. But the state convention conformed to Yancey’s wishes and selected its delegates—including Yancey—for Charleston, without binding regulations regarding the platform.30 Days later the state assembly convened and effectively endorsed the actions of the state Democratic Party. At last it seemed to Yancey that partisanship had vanished. Old Whigs and Democrats alike instructed the governor, in the event a Republican won the presidency, to call a convention within forty days to discuss secession. The assembly sent copies of the resolutions to the governors of the other slave states.31 Similar events transpired across the South.32 Meanwhile, Yancey worked behind the scenes to fortify a united southern front at Charleston. In February he traveled to Virginia and corresponded with Robert M. T. Hunter, a prominent Democrat there, about that state’s preparations. Yancey expressed his relief that Virginia’s state party convention decided against backing former governor Henry A. Wise for president. Although Wise had proven sound on particular 

n

The Conventions of 

issues like the African slave trade, Yancey worried that Wise had a ‘‘selfish and vaulting ambition’’ for the presidency, which rendered him ‘‘a mill stone around the neck of our party which will sink it forever.’’ Instead of capitalizing on the John Brown raid to rally the South for secession, Yancey complained that Wise simply used the incident to promote himself for the presidency.33 Men like Wise had used party and ambition before to the detriment of southern rights, and Yancey would do his best to prevent that from happening again. Sharing Yancey’s concerns about self-serving politicians, South Carolina secessionist William Henry Trescott echoed the longtime complaint that most politicians seemed more determined to represent public opinion rather than to direct it. Trescott hoped that a ‘‘revolutionary genius, could bring about a real crisis,’’ but complained, ‘‘I do not see the man.’’ Trescott did hold out hope, though, that ‘‘the extreme Southern party headed by Yancy [sic] will carry their point; have a very explicit platform and a very decided and distinct Southern candidate.’’ 34 The stage was set to see what Yancey could do. More than  delegates from every state in the Union gathered in late April in Charleston for the Democratic convention, the only party convention that year with a truly national representation. Secessionist James De Bow also attended in his capacity as editor, rather than as a delegate. Barnwell Rhett and his son, editor of the Mercury, intensified the atmosphere in their hometown prior to and during the assembly by printing inflammatory editorials and stories in their paper, demanding a united southern stance and promoting secession.35 Yancey arrived three days early, on April , checking in with most radical delegates at the Charleston Hotel, just north of the convention site, Institute Hall, on Meeting Street. Ben Yancey joined him. Reporter Murat Halstead of the Cincinnati Commercial noted William Yancey’s arrival and the attendant excitement it produced. ‘‘The prince of the Fire-eaters,’’ Halstead dubbed him, had come to the capital of secessionism. ‘‘He is a compact, middle-sized man,’’ Halstead observed, with eyes ‘‘full of expression. He is mild and bland in manner . . . and has an air of perfect sincerity.’’ No one would likely point to this ordinary-looking man in a crowd, Halstead mused, ‘‘as the redoubtable Yancey, who proposes . . . to precipitate the Cotton States into a revolution.’’ Halstead observed that Yancey remained unconcerned about the Douglas forces, convinced that they could not stop him.36 For the next several days excitement mounted as northern and southern Democrats each prepared for an inevitable conflict. Over , visitors poured into tiny Charleston. Hotels in the city ‘‘swarmed like hives,’’ Halstead reported. ‘‘The politicians are in full blast.’’ 37 Most delegates, especially Douglas’s, stayed The Conventions of 

n



at the opulent but modest-size Mills House, one block south of Institute Hall and across the street. The Mills House overflowed with its , guests, ‘‘as lively as a molasses barrel with flies,’’ according to one observer. Institute Hall was one of the largest buildings in town, but inadequate for the throng that turned out.38 Between the crowd, the anticipation, and the rising spring temperatures, heated arguments broke out over credentials from several delegations, and confusion reigned. Conspicuously absent from the hall and the bustling streets, Yancey met privately with delegates from Louisiana on the twentieth, and remained with his state delegation on April . As the convention opened the next day, Yancey again stayed noticeably quiet, Halstead speculated, to save ‘‘ammunition for a bombardment of the Douglas castle.’’ 39 Something had to give. Douglas forces had better organization and more delegates, but southerners demonstrated unprecedented unity and determination. Many Douglas delegates actually hoped that a few southern states would refuse to accept their man, reasoning that it would be better to jettison a small southern bloc in order to secure more northern votes.40 As Halstead explained, ‘‘They want a little eruption, but not a great one,’’ although the reporter knew full well, ‘‘If the party blows up, the country is doomed, of course.’’ 41 Everything hinged on the platform vote. Douglas had announced that he would not accept a nomination if his party voted for a plank calling for protection of slavery in the territories. Although the North had a majority of delegates (–), the South dominated the all-important Resolutions Committee that would offer the platform.42 On the fifth day of the convention, April , two reports came to the floor. The majority report all but articulated the Alabama Platform, insisting that neither Congress nor territorial governments could keep slavery out of federal territories. The minority then read its report. Delegates argued and debated for several hours, but again Yancey remained silent.43 After a midday break, debate resumed. Finally, Yancey asked for the floor and received a thunderous ovation. He asked for more than the standard time allotted to speak—a few minutes—and received an additional half hour. He spoke for an hour and a half, delivering one of the most fateful addresses in American history.44 In tone and language Yancey’s speech was relatively moderate, deliberate, and controlled, but never would his words have greater impact. He denied any intention of his delegation to break up the party or to dissolve the Union. ‘‘There is no disunionist, that I know of,’’ he claimed. ‘‘There is no disruptionist.’’ With the same strained logic that had allowed him in  to insist he was a secessionist but not a revolutionist, Yancey now explained that Alabamians had arrived 

n

The Conventions of 

both to save the country and the democracy. But if they could not do both, he warned, they would have a duty to demand that the North stand by the Constitution, which, he argued, party organizations had deliberately rejected.45 Yancey again recited the litany of northern attempts to thwart the spread of slavery, from the Missouri Compromise of  and Stephen Douglas’s efforts to block slavery in Kansas in  to the baneful influence of national parties and so-called compromises that had impinged upon southern rights.46 But Yancey pointed to a more horrific betrayal of the South by her northern Democratic brethren, their failure to snuff out popular antislavery sentiment. ‘‘You hesitated, you trembled before its march, and you did not triumph over the young Hercules in his cradle, because you made no effort to do so.’’ 47 And the result? ‘‘They have advanced from a small band of Abolitionists, who, when I was a schoolboy in one of the Northern States, were pelted with rotten eggs whenever they assembled,’’ until now when they have split into three: abolitionists, free soilers, and popular sovereignty men. Antislavery forces had even divided the Baptist, Methodist, and Presbyterians churches along pro- or antislavery lines by . Since then, Americans had ‘‘two Gods, two alters [sic], two systems of worship.’’ 48 Social, political, and religious fanaticism in the North culminated logically in physical attacks on slavery and slaveholders. With a clear reference to John Brown’s raid, Yancey offered, ‘‘Ours is the property invaded; ours are the institutions which are at stake; ours is the peace that is to be destroyed; ours is the property that is to be destroyed; ours is the honor at stake.’’ Yancey challenged the northern majority to stop all antislavery, ‘‘this cancer, which is not only eating into your body, but into the body of the country at large.’’ 49 And what, Yancey asked, did northerners find so distasteful about slavery, anyway? ‘‘I have no doubt, gentlemen, that each of you here enjoys most pleasantly, the hospitalities of this city—even such hospitalities as you pay for so magnificently,’’ he suggested. Black slaves in Charleston waited on them, attended to their comfort, and waited for their every command. Yancey promised northern delegates that the same advantages awaited them in the territories if they would but endorse the proslavery plank. ‘‘If we beat you, we will give you good servants for life and enable you to live comfortably,’’ Yancey promised. Poor whites would find themselves elevated from menial chores that denigrate ‘‘the highest order of civilization,’’ and take their proper place ‘‘amongst the master race and put the negro race to do the dirty work which God designed they should do.’’ 50 This last statement won Yancey tremendous applause and cheers from the The Conventions of 

n



packed house. S. H. Buskirk from Indiana rose to issue a point of order, complaining that for over an hour he had heard noise from the galleries and moved that the galleries be cleared. The chairman, Caleb Cushing of Massachusetts, responded that he could not distinguish applause from the galleries from that of delegates on the floor, so he could not comply with Buskirk’s request. Isaiah Rynders of New York City then shouted, ‘‘You will have to stop Mr. Yancey from speaking if you want to suppress applause on the floor,’’ and more cheering and laughter erupted.51 Concluding his address, Yancey issued dire warnings. He urged northern delegates to tell their people that ‘‘there will be disunion if we are defeated.’’ To southerners Yancey promised that if the North triumphed at the convention it would inevitably lead to death ‘‘by the hands of your avowed enemy.’’ 52 The moment Yancey’s time expired, George E. Pugh of Ohio leaped to his feet. Pugh was older and less verbose than Yancey, but spoke with as much passion and force and got right to the nub of matters. Equality could not, after all, exist in the territories between slavery and antislavery; one had to prevail, the other had to lose. And just as Yancey traced the weaknesses of the Democratic Party to capitulating to northern members, Pugh identified the problem as northern acquiescence to southern demands. And now, when Yancey and other southerners again asked northern Democrats to abandon their political and moral opposition to slavery, Pugh replied fervently, ‘‘Gentleman of the South, you mistake us—you mistake us—we will not do it.’’ Pugh could not complete his remarks; his defiance triggered a chaotic outburst from the floor, and the convention recessed for an hour.53 As if to punctuate Yancey’s charges of northern infidelity to the South, the very afternoon that he lay down the gauntlet in Charleston an antithetical drama played itself out in the North. Charles Nalle, a runaway slave from Virginia, had made his way to the state of New York. In compliance with the fugitive slave act of , local authorities seized him and took him to the office of the United States Commissioner on First and State Streets in Troy, New York. There, only a few blocks from Yancey’s old home and near his abolitionist stepfather’s church, on April  a local free black man rallied antislavery men and women, black and white, who mobbed the office. One rescuer died and another was injured in the melee that ensued, but they regained Nalle’s freedom and sent him safely on his way. The people of Troy effectively answered Yancey even more defiantly than had George Pugh. And on that fateful April , the Troy Whig noted anxiously, ‘‘Tomorrow will be an exciting day. Mr. Yancey is 

n

The Conventions of 

cooked and primed to the full, and the fire eaters generally are in the greatest state of excitement.’’ 54 In Charleston, on Saturday, April , arguments, tactical parliamentary efforts, and resolutions all came to naught, and delegates recessed until Monday. Meanwhile, more jockeying took place. Before midnight on Sunday, April , Richard Taylor, a Louisiana delegate and son of the late president Zachary Taylor, requested a brief meeting with Yancey. Taylor hoped to secure party unity to better stop Republicans in the general election. Most of his fellow delegates shared Taylor’s moderation, although a New Orleans newspaper considered two or three of them ‘‘of the ultra stripe . . . as much so as Yancey himself.’’ Taylor hoped to find an acceptable candidate and a new platform that could both defeat Douglas and keep Yancey from bolting out of the convention.55 Apparently, Yancey himself did not realize how close he had come to destroying the party. Now it became evident why Yancey had urged his state convention to leave delegates uninstructed; he planned to stage a walkout, but only briefly, in an effort to force the national convention to accept his slave plank or to nominate a proslavery candidate. Taylor believed he could persuade Yancey to stay, and promised to deliberate with his Alabama colleagues. In the pre-dawn hours of April , a bizarre twist occurred. Former governor John A. Winston of Alabama, a moderate like Taylor who had opposed binding delegates to a walkout during the state convention, now rejected Yancey’s willingness to compromise. Winston did this ‘‘to force those who had brought the trouble from Alabama to stand by their work,’’ or in other words to try to humiliate and destroy Yancey so Winston could reclaim lost power back home. When Taylor heard the news, he muttered, ‘‘Thus the last hope of preserving the unity of the National Democracy was destroyed, and by one who was its greatest advocate.’’ 56 Later on the morning of the thirtieth, anticipation of Yancey’s next move was palpable. The Charleston Mercury, unaware of Yancey’s hesitation, trumpeted, ‘‘We rejoice that our cause of State Rights in this time of trial has so able and accomplished a champion.’’ Halstead, also unaware of the private deliberations with Taylor and Winston, described Yancey ‘‘smiling as a bridegroom. He had evidently made up his mind. He was not perplexed by saucy doubts and fears.’’ Thunderous applause greeted Yancey as he walked onto the floor of Institute Hall. The slave plank came up for a vote and lost by a tally of –. Douglas forces had held. Leroy Pope Walker, leading the Alabama delegation, obtained the floor and offered a few brief remarks about the violation of southThe Conventions of 

n



ern rights and Douglas’s treachery. He then turned and led his colleagues out of the building. The crowded room grew ominously silent as those assembled contemplated the meaning of this and what might follow.57 When Yancey had led the bolt from the convention of , but one man followed. Now, the entire Mississippi delegation joined their neighbors in storming out, and the crowd erupted with approval. Former governor Alexander Mouton of Louisiana spat out a few choice remarks, and marched out with his forces, including the despondent Richard Taylor. Two Louisiana delegates remained, and Mouton pointed angrily at them and shouted condemnation as he left. Then others quickly followed, from South Carolina, Florida, Texas, and portions of the delegations from Delaware and Arkansas. The next day, May , Georgians joined the bolters, as did more from Arkansas.58 Through his years of preparation and despite some brief wavering, William L. Yancey had finally destroyed the Democratic Party. On the evening of April  Yancey and the seceding delegates held a huge public meeting and celebration on the streets of Charleston. Bands appeared and joined the throng that lauded the prince of the fire-eaters on the steps on St. Andrew’s Hall and nearby City Hall. Thousands listened first to Congressman L. Q. C. Lamar of Mississippi. Then Yancey spoke. He called the Douglas men the ‘‘rump convention,’’ praised southerners for standing by the Constitution, and described the seceders as the ‘‘Constitutional Democratic Convention.’’ Halstead noted that the more ultra the sentiment, the greater the crowd’s response. In turn, this inspired Yancey. Less cautious now about his choice of words, he proclaimed that the pen of the historian was poised to write the story of a new revolution, at which point someone in the multitude shouted, ‘‘Three cheers for the Independent Southern Republic.’’ The cheers rolled forth. The crowd and band proceeded to the Mercury offices and called out Barnwell Rhett Jr. One ‘‘flaming fire-eating harangue’’ followed another, Halstead wrote. ‘‘A fourth of July feeling’’ permeated the city.59 Meanwhile, the mostly northern Democrats remained in session at Institute Hall, trying desperately to proceed with business as usual. One South Carolina delegate had refused to leave with the rest and now asked to address the assembly. It was Benjamin F. Perry, Yancey’s old law teacher and friend, who struggled desperately to speak in the face of derisive shouts from the public galleries. The diehard unionist who had helped hold back so many previous challenges to the nation was ruled out of order in the chaos that enveloped Charleston. The course of events was now in the hands of his prodigal friend from Alabama.60 But secession and southern independence did not occur quite yet. All con

n

The Conventions of 

cerned scrambled to regroup for the presidential campaign.61 At noon on May , the seceding delegates convened at St. Andrew’s Hall—also called Military Hall —two short blocks south of Institute Hall and around the corner on Broad Street.62 There, John S. Preston of South Carolina called to order  delegates, including  from New York under the charge of Fernando Wood, the proSouth mayor of New York City, who just as promptly withdrew his group. Other delegates arrived and enrolled. The convention selected James A. Bayard of Delaware as president, and chose vice presidents from each Deep South state plus Arkansas, Virginia, and Delaware.63 Yancey proposed that the meeting call itself the ‘‘Constitutional Democracy’’ and adopt the Democratic platform of . On that note, the seceders adjourned for the day.64 On May  the seceders struggled to change their public image. Leroy Pope Walker, after hearing the brief minutes of the previous day, moved to change the word ‘‘seceding’’ to ‘‘retiring.’’ W. E. Burrows of Arkansas then restated Yancey’s resolution, calling for adoption of the  platform, emphasizing the right of all Americans to take property into the territories and Congress’s obligation to admit a new state even if its constitution recognized slavery. Yancey then argued they had done all they could do until the ‘‘rump Democracy or rump Democrats’’ reconvened to nominate a presidential candidate. Although delegates unanimously ratified the platform, arguments over nominating a candidate consumed the rest of the day and spilled over into the next. After various delegates suggested Jefferson Davis of Mississippi or even the convention’s own James Bayard, they decided to reconvene in Richmond, Virginia, the second Monday in June.65 Yancey hastily summarized events in a letter to Alabama senator C. C. Clay. Neither Yancey’s ‘‘Constitutional Democracy’’ nor the ‘‘rump’’ Douglas convention had nominated a candidate. Yancey thought the Douglasites adjourned to prevent an open disruption among themselves. He proudly reported that Alabamians had stood firm on the platform and on meeting again in Richmond. Before dispersing, the seceders had spoken of possible presidential candidates. ‘‘[ Jefferson] Davis’ was the favorite name with us,’’ Yancey related; others mentioned Joseph Lane of Oregon and two Kentuckians, James Guthrie (Pierce’s secretary of the treasury) and John C. Breckinridge (Buchanan’s vice president). Yancey expressed his disgust that Virginia sent but two men to the seceders’ convention. ‘‘Virginia has lost all influence (moral) except her mere numbers,’’ he concluded.66 Yancey then offered a forward-looking plan. He called upon Clay and the rest of Alabama’s congressional delegation ‘‘to speak of our actions here and . . . The Conventions of 

n



 . It is our right and your duty and exigencies call for the aid of every man.’’ Yancey sent along copies of his speeches, including the official protest of the withdrawing Alabama delegation, imploring Clay to circulate them immediately in order to influence another state convention to meet in May. ‘‘I write in great haste, amidst much ‘noise and confusion,’ and pray to excuse any abruptness of manner or phrase. All for the cause, now.’’ 67 Clearly, Yancey was satisfied with what he had started and expected more good to follow. Robbed of a coveted presidential nomination, Douglas lashed out at the Alabamian on the floor of the U.S. Senate. Citing published accounts of Yancey’s now defunct League of United Southerners, its platform, and the infamous Slaughter letter, Douglas revealed ‘‘Yancey’s whole plan.’’ Douglas explained how Yancey conspired to ‘‘form the Southern League, bound by secrecy for a southern confederacy,’’ and plotted to ‘‘wait in the Democratic party until the proper moment came; and then, by a sudden movement, disrupt the party, and plunge the cotton States into revolution.’’ 68 Southerners offered decidedly mixed reviews of the great schism triggered by Yancey. Barnwell Rhett Jr. grumbled to fellow Carolina secessionist William Porcher Miles, ‘‘There was some want of nerve in the management of the seceders here, and an evident want of leadership. Yancey is not capable that way, however great an orator and debater.’’ 69 Congressman Laurence Keitt echoed these sentiments, and with a watchful eye on Yancey commented, ‘‘Let us do nothing under passionate appeals, or declamatory oratory.’’ 70 One-time secessionist James H. Hammond grumbled that if the American Revolution had been left to radicals of that day like Patrick Henry and Samuel Adams, instead of ‘‘the silent men,’’ those less radical like Washington, Jefferson, and Franklin, it would have turned out the same as ‘‘this Charleston Secession under Bayard & Yancey—a fizzle.’’ 71 Edmund Ruffin, like other radicals, read newspaper accounts and rejoiced not only in the defeat of Douglas, but also in the destruction of the national Democratic Party. Ruffin prayed that both results would further the chances of a Republican presidential victory, the only thing he considered shocking enough to stir sluggish southerners to secede.72 The political ferment of  proliferated. On May , remnants of the archaic Whig and Know-Nothing parties gathered in Baltimore to form a new organization, the Constitutional Union Party. Several prominent old Whig unionists from the Upper South and border states had planned for many months to defy both major parties and appeal for peace and national reconciliation. Instead of adopting a platform, they vowed to stand behind the Constitution and the Union—whatever that meant. For president they nominated a seasoned poli

n

The Conventions of 

tician, Senator John Bell, a slaveholding unionist from Tennessee with a long and illustrious political career. For vice president they selected former Whig Edward Everett of Massachusetts—Yancey’s partner in Mount Vernon fundraising. The Constitutional Unionists really did not believe that they could win the presidency, but in a crowded field hoped to prevent a major party candidate from winning an electoral majority. Somehow, they hoped, with the election thrown to the House of Representatives, politicians could find some compromise candidate.73 One week later, on May , the Republican Party nominated Abraham Lincoln on a platform unequivocally committed to stopping expansion of slavery to the territories. The next test for Yancey came quickly. Alabama Democrats scrambled to make sense of the political turmoil in their state, planning a meeting in Marion on May . Early that month, as Yancey alerted Senator Clement Clay to prepare for this gathering, former governor John A. Winston deserted fellow party members in an effort to lead Alabama delegates to the party convention in Baltimore that would support Douglas. As Winston, along with Yancey’s old friends and current foes John J. Seibels, John Forsyth, and William B. Figures, labored to undo Yancey’s work in Charleston, Yancey prepared a counterattack and hoped for a political purge. Delegates at the Marion convention continued squabbling over a platform, with Yancey, as usual, leading the radicals and Winston and company pushing for moderation. In no mood for compromise, Yancey lashed out at his adversaries. He charged the former governor with repudiating his state’s instructions and authority at Charleston, with the complicity of Forsyth, Seibels, and Figures. Yancey accused them of plotting to create a new party in Alabama, ‘‘a mongrel crowd of Douglas Democrats, ‘conservatives,’ ‘all others,’ and union shriekers of all stripes,’’ to oppose those committed to the Alabama Platform and to support the Douglas Democrats.74 Yancey accused Winston of trying to deflect attention from his own schemes by blasting Yancey in a series of public addresses. Yancey quoted Winston from newspapers calling Yancey’s followers ‘‘the most rabid fire-eaters,’’ and ‘‘ambitious and designing men.’’ Yancey noted that Winston called the majority platform from Charleston ‘‘a mere cheat and humbug—nothing else,’’ or rather, ‘‘a plot ‘to precipitate the cotton States into revolution.’ ’’ 75 In response Yancey told fellow delegates that Winston suffered from ‘‘a most restless and consuming ambition to get some body out of a place in the U.S. Senate and to get in himself !’’ So, if ambition were a crime, Yancey proclaimed, ‘‘I know of no greater criminal than ex-Governor J. A. Winston.’’ As far as secesThe Conventions of 

n



sionists were concerned, Yancey reminded everyone that Seibels, back in , ‘‘was once one of those ‘rabid fire-eaters,’’’ but quickly ‘‘turned against us’’ also, and in fact won an appointment by President Pierce as charge d’affairs to Belgium. ‘‘Turn [now] to that self-poised, self-conceited dogmatist, John Forsyth,’’ Yancey continued. ‘‘He, too was a Secessionist; a rabid fire-eater,’’ but also forfeited his radicalism for a foreign mission, in this case, from James Buchanan to Mexico.76 If Winston truly disagreed with the seceders from Charleston, Yancey asked, why had he signed their written protest two days later? Winston seceded from the national convention because it did not accept the majority platform, yet two days later, Winston seceded from the seceding convention because it adopted that very platform. ‘‘I may be a ‘designing’ man, but I certainly never saw or heard of a design as deep, as unfathomable, and, it appears to me, as indefensible, as this one of the ex-Governors!’’ 77 Invective aside, Yancey demonstrated a new strategic understanding of politics. In previous secession attempts he had pursued his course dogmatically and often defensively. Now he trimmed back his demands. He no longer spoke of the African slave trade or other issues that divided fellow southerners. He planted himself firmly on federal protection of slavery in the territories, the one issue that most white southerners agreed upon wholeheartedly. Yancey also departed from his previous tactics by offering flexibility to all who would stand with him. Against the confusion that permeated the atmosphere like the mounting southern heat and humidity, Yancey simplified his message and stuck with it. And now, with parties forming, splitting, and threatening, Yancey’s stance seemed reasonable in the South. When Alabama Democrats assembled in the capitol at Montgomery on June  to select delegates to both of the next national conventions—Richmond and Baltimore—Douglas Democrats led by John Forsyth gathered nearby to do the same. On June , delegates from the Deep South states as well as some from Tennessee, Virginia, and one from New York, gathered briefly in Richmond. Confusion dominated the two-day meeting. Some asked Yancey to speak. He declined, claiming a desire to enable a restoration of the party at Baltimore. The meeting adjourned, and most proceeded to Maryland, including Yancey.78 As Yancey prepared for Baltimore, once again fellow southerners questioned his leadership and judgment. One Alabamian reported to Benjamin Perry, ‘‘Yancey will make a desperate struggle, but is destined to a Waterloo defeat . . . even the fire-eaters are backing down in despair.’’ Alfred Huger of South Carolina doubted that Yancey could really lead Alabama out of the Union, and there

n

The Conventions of 

fore cast a wary eye at the new party conventions. Yancey was not ‘‘safe in the Saddle,’’ Huger groused, and protested against South Carolina ‘‘being put upon the Gallop, only to try the height & width of ‘bank and ditch’ before others venture to ‘take the step.’’’ Governor John Letcher of Virginia predicted that no party could survive the leadership of men like Yancey.79 But on to Baltimore Yancey went. On his way he stopped in Washington to consult with Stephen Douglas, but their meeting solved nothing. Then an incredible offer came to Yancey through George N. Sanders, a Douglas supporter and self-proclaimed mouthpiece for the senator. Wholly without authorization, Saunders told Yancey that in return for Yancey rallying southern support for Douglas’s presidential nomination, Douglas would offer Yancey the vice presidency. Furthermore, Sanders suggested that Douglas supporters would then back Yancey for president in , and rather ghoulishly implied that the poor health of Douglas might result in a Yancey presidency before that. Yancey declined, and again proceeded to Baltimore.80 On June  Baltimore buzzed with excitement as hundreds of delegates and two hundred reporters gathered to see if the Democratic Party would reconstruct itself. Immediately an argument broke out over whether delegates who had seceded in Charleston could gain admission here. With other regularly selected delegates, Yancey offered reunification if the Baltimore meeting would ratify the majority platform from Charleston. Douglas men, tired of Republican charges that they served as pawns to southern Democrats, took a firm stand against the southerners. One Douglas supporter complained, ‘‘The southerners have been ruling over niggers so long they thought they could rule white men just the same.’’ Four days later the credentials committee reported. They accepted the Forsyth group from Alabama, not Yancey’s. The next day, delegations sympathetic to Yancey’s withdrew: Louisiana, Virginia, North Carolina, Tennessee, and even some from Massachusetts. Yancey had prevailed again.81 A crowd gathered to call out Yancey from his hotel room at the Gilmore House. Yancey now intoned his new mantra, ‘‘I am here to defend the Constitution and the Union. Truer friends than the Democracy of Alabama never enlisted under your banners. . . . It is sheer slander that we are here as factionists and disruptionists.’’ 82 All of this was true, of course, provided that the rest of the party and the nation accepted Yancey’s interpretation of the Constitution and the Union. With the southern disruptionists gone, the bulk of the Democratic Party finally nominated Stephen Douglas for president, standing resolutely on The Conventions of 

n



popular sovereignty. Yancey taunted the Douglasites, ‘‘ostrich-like—their head was in the sand of squatter sovereignty, and they did not know their great, ugly, ragged abolition body was exposed.’’ 83 With the Democratic schism complete, the seceders quickly held their own convention in Baltimore’s Institute Hall on June . The  delegates quickly and unanimously adopted the Charleston majority platform. They then proceeded to nominate thirty-nine-year-old John C. Breckinridge of Kentucky, Buchanan’s vice president, over the likes of Jefferson Davis, Robert M. T. Hunter, and Joseph Lane. With even less debate, delegates then selected Lane, a senator from Oregon, for vice president. Lane had recently moved west from North Carolina, where he had established his secessionist credentials. Although Breckinridge wanted to keep the Union intact, he accepted the extreme southern platform that Yancey had labored to graft onto a presidential candidate since .84 Four candidates now stood for the presidency. Before it adjourned, the seceders’ convention called for Yancey to speak. Murat Halstead observed that Yancey had a ‘‘decided stoop in the shoulders,’’ an indication that the neuralgia lingered still. Otherwise, Halstead noted again that this extraordinary public speaker had such a common countenance, and found it extraordinary that at this auspicious moment, ‘‘he is at perfect ease.’’ Halstead observed a man who had overcome the traumas of his youth, the chaos of his family, a man who turned so often to the public for praise (or at least for attention) that he felt as safe and powerful in public as most people did only in private.85 ‘‘The storm clouds of faction have drifted away and the sunlight of principle under the Constitution and the Union, shines brightly upon the National Democracy,’’ Yancey began. ‘‘Accept these congratulations from the hands of one who, through the assiduous wiles of our common enemy, has acquired the reputation for being factious and disruptionary—for being a disunionist.’’ Yes, Yancey admitted, a decade ago he had counseled secession rather than acquiescence in the Compromise of . For that matter, he still believed that served as grounds for secession. Yancey explained, ‘‘I am, however, no worshiper at the shrine of the Union. I am no Union shrieker.’’ The union only had value if it bolstered constitutional rights. ‘‘When the Government confessedly becomes a failure . . . then its organization is but an instrument for the destruction of constitutional liberty—and taking lessons from our ancestors, we should overthrow it.’’ The southern portion of the Democratic Party, Yancey explained, served as the solitary champion of that constitutional union.86 Yancey then lashed out at Douglas—‘‘that arch-enemy of true Democracy’’ 

n

The Conventions of 

—and tried to woo his supporters. Now that the Democracy had split irreparably, Yancey evoked biblical imagery. To the delight of his partisans he said, ‘‘If longing after the Douglas flesh-pots—if in grief of their great disappointment, we shall ever look longingly back for an instant to witness how crushingly the peoples wrath is about to fall on the devoted House of Douglas, they will assuredly be turned into a pillar of salt.’’ As for Douglas himself, Yancey prophesied that the senator’s restless and reckless ambition would end with ‘‘his dead body’’ covering ‘‘his casket of corrupt matter.’’ ‘‘I pass then, as I have said, from this painful scene of the dead and dying to contemplate a healthful and cheering picture of the living,’’ Yancey continued. He sang the praises of Breckinridge and Lane, and promised that with their victory would come safety and equality for the South in the Union. With this speech Yancey established themes for the rest of the campaign. The Union should exist only if it promoted the Constitution as interpreted by Yancey. Therefore, he was not a secessionist per se. The only hope for a constitutional union lay in the election of Breckinridge and Lane. Yancey, therefore, did not need to declare that any other outcome demanded secession. Shortly after returning to Montgomery, Yancey ventured out on the stump yet again, delivering a two-and-a-half-hour talk at Kingston, in Autauga County, at a dinner given in his honor on July . Over , people attended. The local Prattsville Southern Statesman reported that many who had once ‘‘been afraid of Yancey, and of his doctrines’’ and who had feared his rashness and recklessness now believed ‘‘that his were the true doctrines for the salvation of the country, and the south, and that Yancey was the man.’’ A little later, the Richmond Reporter printed a similar editorial, regretting that southerners had not listened to Yancey long ago when they could have more easily nipped in the bud the antislavery movement.87 These gatherings and editorials helped Yancey realize that another issue had emerged as central to the presidential contest, that one more man, besides the four candidates, had attracted national scrutiny: William Lowndes Yancey. He drew the attention and wrath of the New York Herald in late July. The Herald reprinted the Slaughter letter under a front page story titled ‘‘  /    ,’’ and went on to link Yancey with secessionist Laurence Keitt of South Carolina as leaders who stood poised to foment disunion if Lincoln won the election.88 Yancey relished the attention. In July, two Democrats from Tennessee assailed him in the press, reprinting the Slaughter letter and generally, according to Yancey, engaging in ‘‘artThe Conventions of 

n



ful misrepresentations of my acts and views and positions.’’ As was his custom, Yancey fired back. ‘‘I have no idea whether Wm. H. Carroll and H. M. Watterson are ignorant or criminal in this regard.’’ He proceeded to rebut every point, writing nearly three full columns. He congratulated himself that his League of United Southerners, though dead mere months after its formation in , had ‘‘leavened all parties South’’ to stand firmly against any further compromises of southern rights.89 But after writing this letter, a new idea began to form in his mind. Yancey had already received invitations from Breckinridge and Lane organizations in Tennessee, Ohio, and New York asking him to campaign in person. He decided to accept—all of them. He traveled to Memphis by August , four days after his forty-sixth birthday, to begin an unprecedented, haphazard, and electrifying speaking tour of the country. He would deliver twenty major addresses over seven weeks, after having already given about thirty orations since the first of the year.90 His actions would help fire the southern heart and precipitate a revolution.



n

The Conventions of 

CHAPTER THIRTEEN

The Voice of the South From the outset many Americans questioned Yancey’s motivation for his grand tour. Did he really think that Breckinridge could win? Did he really think that northern voters would reject Lincoln, Douglas, and Bell, for a man pledged to an aggressive proslavery platform? In fact, Yancey had several motives and many potential goals. First, he hated Stephen Douglas so much, found him such a threat to the South, that he did not care about destroying the Democratic Party provided he could keep the Little Giant out of the White House. Second, after twelve years of trying, he had found at least a sizeable portion of his party willing to embrace the Alabama Platform and to do so enthusiastically. Combined with a strong southern candidate like Breckinridge, the prospects were virtually nil that Yancey would face the sort of betrayals he had suffered from Buchanan. Yancey had learned how reluctant fellow southerners were to secede. Each of his previous campaigns for disunion had failed miserably, and none faster than his attempt to create a League of United Southerners. And so Yancey carefully and repeatedly spread the message that he and Breckinridge

stood for the Union, for a ‘‘constitutional Union,’’ one that guaranteed rights for slaveholders. By offering himself and his candidate as the last and only true hope for Union, he needed only mention as an afterthought what southerners must do if they failed. And by undertaking a national tour he chose to make himself a lightning rod, to dramatize and personalize issues through his oratory and to bring the perennial sectional conflict to some sort of conclusion, once and for all: Breckinridge and a pro-South federal government, or a southern republic. As Yancey made his way from Alabama to Memphis, a newspaper editor in Columbus, Mississippi, C. C. Langdon, charged that his support for Breckinridge was a ruse, that he had purposefully divided the Democratic Party in an insidious effort to divide votes, encourage Lincoln’s election, and thereby trigger secession. Yancey fired back, but instead of answering Langdon’s accusation, he attacked the source. Yancey called Langdon a ‘‘Yankee editor’’ who had criticized him for two decades, was variously a Whig and Know-Nothing, and who joined in nothing less than a conspiracy to destroy both Yancey’s character and his cause.1 Yancey would repeat these sentiments in virtually every speech he gave the rest of the year, seldom even addressing directly the frequent accusations about ulterior motives. Most newspaper attacks on him used similar assertions, making it easy for Yancey to prepare quickly for each public appearance without the need for written speeches. As he arrived in Memphis yet another reprinting of the Slaughter letter awaited him. On August  he addressed his Whiggish, unionist audience. Dripping with sarcasm, Yancey wailed, ‘‘But they say ‘the League!’ Oh, that is a secret thing? Bring it out; maybe it has a cloven ox foot, and a tail hidden under its constitution.’’ Unflappable and relaxed, he continued to use humor to win his audience by charging another Tennessee editor with ‘‘denying me the privilege of being born in the South, and says I was born at a place called Fungus, in New York.’’ The crowd hung on every word.2 Yancey challenged his listeners to stand resolutely for Breckinridge and slavery in the territories. He left Memphis proclaiming that if Republicans took over the government, ‘‘I hope to God . . . that there will be some great Washington arise who will be able to scourge them from the temple of freedom, even if he is called a traitor, an agitator or a rebel, during the glorious process.’’ 3 More a Patrick Henry than a George Washington, Yancey had just begun. On his way home, he traveled eastward across Tennessee to Atlanta, and spoke there briefly. In his wake, Tennessee newspapers continued their attacks. The Nashville Patriot lashed out at Yancey and the league, much to Yancey’s delight as he saved one press clipping after another. In Atlanta Yancey addressed a crowd of over 

n

The Voice of the South

, at City Hall, greater than the number of voters of the tiny Georgia town.4 Even his critics already noticed that Yancey overshadowed Breckinridge, and that he was the only Breckinridge supporter whom they cared about. ‘‘The mere mention of Yancey’s name creates the wildest enthusiasm,’’ an opposition editor grumbled.5 Some even called the Breckinridge faction ‘‘the Yanceyites.’’ Breckinridge himself never advocated secession, but with radicals like Yancey and Louis Wigfall campaigning for him, and Breckinridge’s feeble efforts to distance himself from them, by all appearances Yancey had indeed trumped his own candidate.6 Back in Montgomery, Yancey scrambled to arrange his business and personal affairs so he could complete his swing through the country. In a hurried letter to Ben, Yancey strived to rebut the most recent and common charges against him, setting up his brother to respond by proxy while he headed north. Because of repeated charges of his disloyalty to the Democratic Party, Yancey defended the weak parts of his voting record. No, he did not vote for Pierce in . He did not vote at all, since he was away at circuit court duty, but he had previously published a letter supporting Pierce and announcing that ‘‘if my vote was necessary he should have it.’’ As for the election in  and Yancey’s efforts on behalf of his half-brother, Sam Beman, who ran as a Whig for state assembly, ‘‘I did not live in the District & had no vote to give.’’ Some foes dredged up charges that Yancey supported state banks long ago. ‘‘I have no recollection,’’ he confessed, but denied ‘‘ever borrowing a dollar from them.’’ 7 More immediately, Yancey could not firmly plan further travel until a family matter reached resolution. While he was away, Yancey’s eldest son, Ben, got into trouble in true Yancey style. The scene bore an eerie resemblance to William Yancey’s deadly street brawl with Elias Earle twenty-two years before. John J. Seibels, through his Montgomery Confederation, had joined the procession of editors who were badgering William Yancey with attacks on the league. On a rainy summer day, Ben Yancey encountered Seibels walking along the streets of Montgomery. The fire-eater’s son intoned, ‘‘Sir, you have grossly slandered my father in your paper, and I have come to resent it—defend yourself.’’ The twenty-four-year-old Yancey, standing '", weighing  pounds, and armed with a hickory cane, pitched into the forty-five-year-old, '", pound Seibels, armed only with his open umbrella. Ben held his own, struggling to exact revenge even while a Montgomery policeman broke up the fray in front of several witnesses. When William Yancey learned about the affair he concluded that ‘‘Ben could not hurt Seibels much,’’ and seemed neither terribly pleased nor upset with his son. As for Seibels, on August  Yancey announced The Voice of the South

n



in the Montgomery Mail, ‘‘My son has this day caned the senior editor of the Confederation—and I now brand him as a convicted liar, and slanderer, and turn him loose.’’ Seibels replied in kind, ‘‘This man—a convicted felon, the recipient of Executive clemency, who is more familiar with the walls of a jail than with truth or honor—revenges an insult offered him, not by acts but , and advertises himself as a poltroon and coward, by publishing that we ‘are not to be treated as gentlemen.’ He has saved us the necessity of publishing him as a coward, by publishing it himself.’’ 8 Ben Yancey pleaded guilty to assault on August . His father arrived just in time for the trial. The notoriety of the principals presented William Yancey with yet another stage. Called to the stand on behalf of his son to explain the bad blood between his family and Seibels, Yancey quickly transformed the occasion into a defense of his league, its great and patriotic purposes, and its sad demise before the end of . Ben Yancey received a small fine, and his father resumed preparations for his tour.9 To help him with his frenetic plans, Yancey turned to a friend, Cullen A. Battle. Another transplant to Alabama from Hancock County, Georgia, Battle read law under Eufaula fire-eater John Gill Shorter and briefly practiced with William P. Chilton, automatically earning him a place of trust within Yancey’s inner circle. Selected now as a Breckinridge elector, Battle would go above and beyond his charge by joining Yancey to most of his engagements. Battle had to be nimble; Yancey planned very little and changed plans frequently. After canceling talks in Rome, Cartersville, and Kingston, Georgia, at the last minute Yancey reconsidered and spoke briefly at Kingston on September . There, a committee from Knoxville escorted Yancey into Tennessee.10 In Knoxville Yancey spoke for three hours, attacking John Bell supporters on their own turf, castigating them as descendants of Tories from the American Revolution. When one man called out to Yancey, ‘‘What will you do if Lincoln is elected?’’ Yancey called him to the speaker’s stand. ‘‘I spent twelve years of my life in New England and there learned how to answer a question with a question,’’ Yancey quipped. So he asked the Tennessean whom he would vote for. The man replied John Bell. Yancey asked if the Bell voter really agreed with Bell’s unconditional unionism. The man replied that he did after he had discussed the matter with, among others, East Tennessee’s famous unionist minister, William ‘‘Parson’’ Brownlow.11 Brownlow happened to be in the crowd, so Yancey called for him and other Bell backers to stand beside him. When Yancey asked each of them what they would do if Lincoln were elected, each answered that they would stand by 

n

The Voice of the South

the result. Brownlow, though, added, ‘‘I propose, when the Secessionists go to Washington to dethrone Lincoln, to seize a bayonet and form an army to resist such an attack and they shall walk over my dead body on the way.’’ To that Yancey replied as he always did to fellow southerners whom he considered dishonorable. If Alabama left the Union, ‘‘I shall go with her and if I meet this gentleman marshaled with his bayonet to oppose us, I will plunge mine to the hilt through and through his heart, feel no compunctions for the act, but thank God my country has been freed from such a foe.’’ Yancey then apologized to the ladies in the crowd for the language that he said Brownlow’s challenge demanded of him, and prepared to leave. Brownlow shouted that he would continue the argument in his newspaper the next day. ‘‘If you have anything further to say speak it here, like a man,’’ Yancey snorted, but the confrontation ended immediately.12 Yancey’s defiance grew as he moved north. After a brief speech in Richmond, Virginia, he canceled a planned stop in Staunton and proceeded instead to Washington, D.C. From the steps of his hotel on September  Yancey lashed out at Republican leaders. Abraham Lincoln, in a speech that had helped make him a nationally recognized politician, had spoken of a ‘‘House Divided,’’ a nation half-slave and half-free, and accused the South of trying to impose slavery on free states and territories.13 Yancey countered directly, ‘‘With all proper respect for those who say this I, as a Southern man, say it is false,’’ and again denied that the South had any intention to harm the North. All southerners asked of the federal government, Yancey said, ‘‘is to keep its hands off of us and let the Constitution work its own way!’’ 14 And then, referring to Lincoln’s campaign boosters, paramilitary marching clubs called the ‘‘Wide-Awakes,’’ the Alabamian offered, ‘‘No man is more wide awake than he who . . . determines, as far as God gives him power, that nobody shall aggress on him.’’ That same spirit, he warned, had animated the founding fathers to defeat the most powerful nation on earth.15 Yancey next set in his sights William Henry Seward, the powerful New York Republican whom most Americans had expected to win his party’s nomination. A decade before, during debates over what became the Compromise of , Senator Seward had announced that a law beyond the Constitution, a ‘‘Higher Law,’’ the law of God, not only allowed but demanded that the opponents of slavery work to stop it. Yancey explained that those who desired a ‘‘higher law’’ government in fact ‘‘want a different Constitution,’’ and were the true disunionists in the country. Yancey acknowledged his own reputation as the premier disunionist in America, but contrasted himself with Seward; ‘‘My disunionism consists of this: I stand by the Constitution.’’ The Voice of the South

n



Next Yancey appealed to the fears and pride of white southerners. If Republicans took over the government, they ‘‘intend to make us hewers of wood and drawers of water,’’ that is, slaves. But before diabolical Republicans could enslave white southerners, Yancey predicted, southerners would emulate George Washington and ‘‘take the banner of liberty and plant it on the mountains of Augusta [County, Virginia], and there we will entrench ourselves as a body of freemen.’’ 16 Republicans, highly disciplined, led by eminent and able—if heinous—men, had proclaimed an ‘‘‘irrepressible war’ ’’ on slavery, sought to ‘‘give freedom to everything in human shape upon the face of the earth,’’ would disregard constitutional protections for slavery, and would base their government upon their ‘‘wild, insane, revolutionary, and incendiary notions.’’ Yancey asked if Lincoln or Seward would ever send federal troops to subdue another John Brown–like invasion of the South. On the contrary, he claimed that Lincoln’s Wide-Awakes formed an advance guard, ‘‘arming itself and training its midnight bands for the purpose of forcing the Union of a mere majority upon the South.’’ 17 According to Yancey, the entire basis of antislavery rested on a lie, the proposition that all men were created equal. The fact that slaveholding Virginians like Jefferson, and to some extent, Madison and Monroe, had at times publicly criticized the institution bothered Yancey not at all, nor did he consider these utterances meaningful precedents. Citing another Virginian, fellow fire-eater Edmund Ruffin, Yancey declared that Ruffin ‘‘and every gentleman in Virginia knows, that Mr. Jefferson was wrong in his ideas about slavery. . . . It is a matter of history, known to everybody.’’ When President Monroe signed the Missouri Compromise in  he backed an unconstitutional measure, as the Dred Scott decision confirmed in . Simply put, Yancey said, ‘‘The old fogies of that day entertained opinions in relation to slavery, which we of this day are unanimously agreed were not sound.’’ Yancey’s solution? ‘‘Away with old fogeydom. Give me new ideas; if necessary give me new men to carry out new ideas.’’ 18 Then Yancey turned to those skeptics who questioned the sincerity of his support for Breckinridge. He reminded his audience that the North had  electoral votes, the South but . The South alone could not stop Lincoln. The northern majority had all the power, and Lincoln and Seward had often promised to use the power of their numerical majority to stop the spread of slavery. However great northern power, though, Yancey submitted that the North could not determine the destiny of southern freemen. ‘‘That we hold in our own hands.’’ Again trying to turn the table by casting Republicans as the true disunionists, Yancey insisted that if northerners really wanted to save the 

n

The Voice of the South

Union they must band together behind Breckinridge and defeat all the other candidates. Then Yancey introduced a new theme: the glory that awaited a southern republic. Not only could a southern nation manage just fine without the North, Yancey promised that it would thrive. Baltimore, Norfolk, Charleston, Savannah, New Orleans, Pensacola, and Mobile would all emerge as dynamos once southern commerce stopped funneling through northern ports. In fact, Yancey asserted that the only people who would suffer from secession were northerners. The shipping industries of Boston and Philadelphia would collapse, their wharves and warehouses rot, and grass would grow in the streets of New York. All of this, according to Yancey, because the South could do without northern commercial facilities far better than the North could without southern agricultural staples. ‘‘The Union is everything to New York, Boston, and Philadelphia. The Union is much to the South.’’ If the South did secede, he asserted, ‘‘we are independent of the world; we have the great peace-maker, King Cotton, within our midst.’’ Yancey closed on this defiant note, vowing that the South alone could clothe the world. ‘‘Unless these people, therefore, want to go naked, and show their nakedness, they had better come and solicit the support of our cotton planters.’’ 19 After lingering for five days in the nation’s capital for discussions with several politicians, Yancey moved on to Maryland. He first spoke at Annapolis. There he claimed that the only objection to Breckinridge and Lane ‘‘is Yanceyism!’’ but he held that ‘‘Yanceyism is a stern, unflinching support of the Con[stitutio]n as expounded by the Democracy since  and by the Sup[reme] c[our]t in .’’ 20 Then Yancey boarded a steamship, and, accompanied by leading residents of Baltimore, a band, and a cannon, pushed upriver to Easton. There , people at the dock heard him deliver a two-hour oration. He then proceeded to Frederick, Maryland, and then to Wilmington, in the nominally slave state of Delaware.21 At Wilmington, surrounded by a party of local dignitaries, Yancey for the first time spoke of civil war as though it were certain. Tiny Delaware, he insisted, had more reason than any other state to fear a government based on raw power. If the North ignored the Supreme Court and the Constitution, the people of Delaware would be trampled into the dust. And if North and South split, where would the fighting occur but along the border? States such as Delaware lay in the most vulnerable positions. No people in the country, he warned, had more riding on the Constitution than those in Delaware.22 The slavery question, he continued, served as a symbol of what might come. The Voice of the South

n



Republicans denounced the institution as un-American and immoral, unfit to spread west and detrimental for the country. Yancey tired of these attacks on white southerners’ character. ‘‘Touch not the honor of my section of the country and she will not complain of almost anything else you do,’’ he insisted, ‘‘but touch her honor and authority and she will stand up in defence if necessary in arms.’’ Yancey reminded the crowd that governments only existed legitimately to protect the lives, liberties, and property of their people. He insisted that either a Lincoln or a Douglas presidency would threaten these rights because both candidates claimed that a simple majority could make all laws, either in Washington or in the territories. But this was not the American constitutional system, he warned. The Constitution provided minorities with rights and protections from majorities. Majorities, by virtue of their power, required little constitutional protection. Minorities, he claimed, were the real friends of the Constitution, because that document ‘‘is their shield and their protection against the unchecked and unlicenced will of the majority.’’ If fundamental rights, including slave property, shifted from a constitutional right to a political contest, ‘‘varied by chicanery used in the elections and the free use of whiskey,’’ it would leave white southerners’ ‘‘dearest rights of property floating in a barrel of whiskey.’’ Then Yancey played the race card. He called the ‘‘Black Republicans’’ the ‘‘negro party, or mixed negro and white party, making it the mulatto party, while the Breckinridge party was essentially the white man’s party.’’ He vowed that southerners opposed racial mixing, ‘‘and are opposed to elevating the negro to the social level of the white man, and do not want the negro introduced into either their blood, liberty, or rights.’’ He then asserted—as Stephen Douglas had for years—that the party of Lincoln desired ‘‘to elevate the negro by depressing the white man to his level.’’ 23 White southerners could yield to the North on tariffs and other issues, but not on slavery, ‘‘the tool of our industry, the source of our prosperity.’’ Yancey ended his tirade by swearing, ‘‘We stand upon the dark platform of southern slavery, and all we ask is to be allowed to keep it to ourselves. Let us do that, and we will not let the negro insult you by coming here and marrying your daughters.’’ The crowd roared its approval. After this demagogic appeal, Yancey magnified his efforts to focus attention upon himself. He stated that he had heard a Republican characterize him as ‘‘a disunionist,  feet high, weighing three thousand pounds and eating a little nigger broiled every morning for breakfast, and a roasted Union man for dinner.’’ He joked, ‘‘Why I never eat a broiled nigger in my life, I can make better use of him, I feed him on plenty of gravy and corn bread, and he grows big and 

n

The Voice of the South

strong, and fat, and makes me  a year, which is much better than making a  breakfast out of him. As for the Union man, instead of eating him roasted, I would have him come up to the polls this fall and cast his vote for those good Constitutional and Union Democrats, Breckinridge and Lane.’’ 24 On that note, he crossed the Mason-Dixon line. On October  Yancey passed quickly through Philadelphia, just as pivotal state elections concluded in Pennsylvania. That state had supported favorite son James Buchanan in , thereby helping to deny victory for Republican John C. Frémont. But now, the Republican Party had taken the governorship and a substantial number of offices statewide. These victories provided a clear sign to all who could count electoral votes: Lincoln would win, exclusively from the votes of free states. Even Douglas realized this, and selflessly abandoned his own campaign in a desperate effort to head South and prevent secession and war.25 On October  Yancey arrived at the Cooper Institute Hall in New York. On February  Abraham Lincoln had spoken in the same building and delivered a defiant challenge to secessionists, saying, ‘‘And now, if they would listen—as I suppose they will not—I would address a few words to the Southern people.’’ Lincoln rejected southern accusations that Republicans sought the destruction of slavery or that they had encouraged John Brown. Lincoln precisely summarized the essential conflict over slavery: ‘‘If it is right, we cannot justly object to its nationality—its universality; if it is wrong, they cannot justly insist upon its extension—its enlargement.’’ But despite this seemingly insoluble dilemma, southerners, Lincoln insisted, had no right to secede. Therefore the Republican both warned the South and rallied the North, ‘‘Neither let us be slandered from our duty by false accusations against us, nor frightened from it by menaces of destruction to the Government nor of dungeons to ourselves.        ,    ,  ,   ,         .’’ 26 Now, with only weeks before the election that seemed but a formality, Yancey stood where Lincoln had and responded. A loud chorus of boos and hisses merged with scattered cheering, making it impossible for Yancey to speak for a while. When he finally started, he began nearly as Lincoln had, only addressing the opposite section. ‘‘Fellow-Citizens of New York: I trust an Alabamian may yet speak to the citizens of New York in a spirit of fellowship. I trust that hour has not arrived when an Alabamian, speaking to his brethren of the city and State of New York as brothers, he will be received with jeers and hisses.’’ The crowd began to settle down and listen.27 Again Yancey argued that he had come to stump for the Constitution and The Voice of the South

n



the Union, for Breckinridge and Lane. That constitutional union, Yancey explained, included a South with four million slaves, descended largely from the slaves owned by the founding generation that had fought the Revolution, and had written the Declaration of Independence and the Constitution. Audaciously Yancey then claimed that the founders ‘‘were not satisfied with the , slaves which existed at the commencement of the Revolution, but demanded that the number be increased by importation until the year .’’ But now, in , ‘‘it is propounded in high quarters, and as a higher law, that there is an irrepressible conflict in the constitution between free labor and slave labor, and that the conflict must go on until Southern institutions and Southern citizens are destroyed.’’ There, in the home state of Republican William H. Seward, Yancey declared that the only irrepressible conflict was between Seward’s doctrine and the Constitution itself. And then, in a blast aimed at those northerners who violated federal laws by aiding the escape of fugitive slaves, Yancey demanded, ‘‘Enlarge your jails and penitentiaries, re-enforce and strengthen your police force, and keep the irrepressible conflict fellows from stealing our negroes and we are satisfied.’’ 28 Returning to the menace he predicted would accompany a Republican victory, Yancey asserted that the party of Lincoln would try to nullify fugitive slave laws and abolish slavery in Washington, D.C., and on federal military installations throughout the South. One New Yorker finally had enough and shouted, ‘‘Who says so?’’ Yancey replied sharply, ‘‘The abolitionists and black republicans say so,’’ and he saw no difference between the two groups. Yancey asserted that a Lincoln presidency ‘‘will build up an abolition party in every Southern state— there is no doubt of it.’’ Yancey predicted that Lincoln would search the South for ambitious and discontented men and appoint them as federal marshals, postmasters, and to other offices. By this means, ‘‘Emissaries will percolate between master [and] slave as water between the crevices of rocks underground. They will be found everywhere, with st[r]ychnine to put in our wells.’’ The WideAwakes would finish the job, Yancey claimed, ‘‘carrying it on in the darkness of the night, with the torch to burn and destroy,’’ and urging slaves to rise up in rebellion. To Yancey the result of a Lincoln victory would be no less than race war and genocide, a clash between four million blacks and eight million whites that would destroy civilization and make whites ‘‘the enemies of that race until we drench our fields with the blood of the unfortunate people.’’ After outbursts like that, many more in the Cooper Institute Hall shouted at the speaker, demanding what he would do to prevent such a catastrophe. If a man were elected president who sympathized with incendiaries, Yancey re

n

The Voice of the South

plied, he thought the South should not submit to it. ‘‘We thank God we are men who dare to maintain our rights,’’ he announced defiantly. More questions followed, some yelled out and others written and passed to the speaker’s platform, demanding a specific reply: what would Yancey do if Lincoln won the election? Would he plunge the South into revolution? ‘‘The right of revolution is the right of the serf: it is no right at all: it is only the last expiring throe of oppressed nationality.’’ Would Yancey advocate secession for the South? ‘‘In the first place, there is no such thing as the South seceding. I do not know how she would go about it. There is such a thing as a State seceding,’’ and he did allow that Alabama might, and that he believed in secession as a right. ‘‘But what will you do if Lincoln is elected?’’ a voice shouted desperately, once more. ‘‘I hope to God that something will not happen. I am doing my effort to avert that awful calamity,’’ he replied. But if the time came for him to decide, he would do so only in consultation with fellow Alabamians. ‘‘You in New York have nothing to do with it.’’ In closing Yancey again argued that the North alone had the ability to perpetuate the Union. The people of New York, by virtue of their electoral votes, had the power to forestall secession by preventing Lincoln’s election. Yancey proposed that Douglas and Bell supporters vote instead for Breckinridge in a last, desperate effort to prevent Lincoln from winning that state and, with it, the presidency. Yancey hoped that his tour would capture the attention of the nation. It did. The Nashville Patriot and Knoxville Whig, both Bell newspapers, dredged up Yancey’s killing of Dr. Earle in , reporting inaccurately that Yancey used a horsewhip to lash Earle’s ten-year-old son, and then simply shot Dr. Earle.29 The Washington National Intelligencer tried to undercut Yancey by reprinting his threat to stab to death Parson Brownlow, and brought up Congressman Yancey’s vote for Oregon, and therefore the Wilmot Proviso, back in .30 The Washington States and Mail reminded its readers that Yancey advocated reopening the African slave trade.31 The Huntsville Independent noted with concern, ‘‘The mere mention of Mr. Yancey’s name creates the wildest enthusiasm,’’ while alluding to Breckinridge barely created a stir. ‘‘Mr. Yancey is greater than his candidate,’’ they complained;32 Yancey must have been delighted. Editors of the prestigious Harper’s Weekly in New York sought southerners who knew most about Yancey to commission a long, biographical sketch of the Alabamian. They selected, of all people, Andrew A. Lipscomb and William A. Samford, two of Yancey’s closest friends and supporters, who replied with a predictably glowing article.33 Unionists reacted with horror, both at Yancey and at the effectiveness of his tour. From far-off San Francisco one unionist observed despairingly, ‘‘Mr The Voice of the South

n



Yancey was permitted to proclaim his views in the North without any great molestation,’’ but noted that Douglas was not.34 Abner Doubleday, a northern army officer assigned to federal forts in Charleston Harbor, complained bitterly that not only did Yancey escape harassment in the North, but also received ‘‘frequent and vigorous applause from the Democratic masses.’’ 35 A ‘‘Republican Campaign Songster’’ contained a piece of doggerel called ‘‘Old Abe and the Fire-Eaters’’: The ‘‘happy family’’ gathered in the Gulf State No. , Where waves the fierce Palmetto, And to seed Seceders run; Out spoke the valorous Yancey, ‘‘The Union is dissolved, If Douglas don’t go overboard, on that we are resolved.’’ Oh Yancey, the gay, now is your time of day, The ‘‘Honest Abe’’ is splitting rails to fence the Gulf, they say . . .36 Many southern radicals reacted with dismay or confusion over Yancey’s efforts. They preferred a forthright campaign for secession instead of Yancey’s support for Breckinridge and a ‘‘constitutional union.’’ The easily bamboozled James H. Hammond accepted Yancey’s message at face value, remarking, ‘‘Why even Yancey has come out for the Union.’’ 37 The fire-eating Edgefield Advertiser of South Carolina expressed disgust at Yancey’s efforts to couch his disunionism. Back in Alabama, Jeremiah Clemens reminded unionists in the northern part of the state that Yancey and other leading Breckinridge men had led the Southern Rights Conventions of  that demanded secession.38 Fellow secessionist Laurence Keitt continued to doubt Yancey’s ability to lead the disunion movement. Virginian Nathaniel B. Tucker considered Yancey ‘‘the great, and, it must be said, only consistent public Advocate of Disunion,’’ yet also worried that his efforts would come to naught.39 Edmund Ruffin read press accounts of Yancey’s tour with great admiration and even penned a letter to Yancey congratulating him on his ‘‘brilliant campaign of political warfare & defence of the claims of the South.’’ Ruffin admired Yancey’s ability to adapt his message to various northern audiences but, like Keitt and Tucker, worried that a Breckinridge victory would only ‘‘postpone the day of the death-sentence on southern institutions & welfare.’’ 40 

n

The Voice of the South

Yancey nevertheless continued his singular crusade. After attending a gala ball in New York for the touring Prince of Wales, Yancey proceeded to Massachusetts. On October  he arrived in Boston, the heart and soul of abolitionism. For over two hours he defied a wholly antagonistic audience that packed historic Faneuil Hall.41 From the start Yancey relished the animosity of his audience, which only heightened his resolve to offer a counterattack on behalf of his beloved South. Yancey complained that northerners could travel anywhere in the union with their labor, but white southerners alone were prohibited from carrying their slaves into the territories. A man in the hall shouted angrily, ‘‘No, sir, we can’t go South.’’ Yancey snapped, ‘‘Yes, sir, you can go South. There is not a man among you who is not welcome, if he don’t come to steal our ‘niggers.’ ’’ And if that were the case, if a northerner came south to disrupt slavery in any way, ‘‘the people there would be less than men should he not be swung to the highest limb.’’ Yancey tried to convince his listeners that the wealth produced by slave labor directly benefited the North, especially the cotton mills of New England, and that limiting slavery expansion struck a blow to northern prosperity. When another man cried out that the North had the right to restrict the spread of slavery, Yancey shot back, ‘‘Certainly; a man has a heap of rights, but he would be a big fool to undertake to exercise them, under all circumstances.’’ 42 Then Yancey launched into his most spirited defense of slavery yet. The Constitution guaranteed slave property, he reminded his listeners; any attack on the rights of slave property would, he vowed, result in civil war. ‘‘As a matter of humanity, of self-interest and law, the South treated the black servants well,’’ he claimed. Both statutes and public opinion, Yancey argued, restrained potentially cruel masters. ‘‘Suppose you have two horses, one worth , the other ,. I tell you I know a New Englander and the , horse will not suffer,’’ he quipped, evoking some laughter. Then, perhaps mindful of his own childhood with New Englander Nathan Beman, Yancey submitted, ‘‘You are allowed to whip your children; we are allowed to whip our negroes. There is no cruelty in the practice. . . . Our negroes are but children. . . . The negro that will not work is made to work. Society tolerates no drones.’’ 43 Taking direct aim at Harriet Beecher Stowe’s Uncle Tom’s Cabin, Yancey then protested, ‘‘The wild stories told in the novels and storybooks about the ill-treatment of slaves, are absurdly untrue.’’ Yancey explained that southern states looked at slaves in two ways: as people and as property. As people, slaves had legal protection for their lives. But as property, ‘‘we have something to do with them.’’ 44 Then, with more than a little exaggeration, Yancey boasted of his care for his slaves. ‘‘My The Voice of the South

n



negroes are well clothed, and bathed at least once a week.’’ Yancey claimed that when he walked through their quarters at night, he could hear them singing and dancing, often until sunrise. If he ever truly observed this, it probably resulted from his slaves learning to present their master with what he desired to see, since ‘‘sullenness’’ had resulted in quick sale out of the state.45 To underscore the benefits of slavery, Yancey contrasted life in the American South with that of societies with large numbers of free blacks. In Haiti, Yancey insisted, free blacks ‘‘sleep all day and prowl about all night. They make nothing themselves, and steal everything made by everybody else.’’ But even worse, according to Yancey, was the situation in Massachusetts. Rehashing the condemnation of race relations in New England that he had spouted in Congress fifteen years before, Yancey scoffed, the Bay State allowed blacks to practice law and to vote. In the South, he boasted, ‘‘we have a white government; yours seems to be a mulatto government.’’ America’s founders never designed that. On the contrary, Yancey lectured, the founders knew that whites were ‘‘the master race.’’ 46 Yancey closed by calling for three cheers for the Union and the Constitution, and then offered a eulogy for Daniel Webster. The incongruous closing confused and silenced many critics, but offered cause for enthusiastic cheers from some of the Democratic faithful in the hall.47 Scarcely catching his breath, Yancey took off again. Traveling westward through Massachusetts, passing by Williamstown and Lenox, scenes of his youth and adolescence, he crossed back into New York, bypassing Troy and Rev. Beman but stopping in Albany, just a few miles downriver from his childhood home. There local dignitaries escorted him to the state capitol building. He spoke on October , as fluidly and confidently as anywhere on his incredible tour.48 The next day he rushed off to Syracuse to give a speech, and then dashed to Rochester for another oration on the night of October . As he had done in Boston, at Syracuse again Yancey zealously defended slavery and attacked its foes. When the founding fathers said all men were created equal, Yancey insisted that they meant those among ‘‘the dominant race, the ruling race, the Caucasian race, the white race, their own race.’’ 49 Again he contended that southern slaves received good treatment. ‘‘You never saw a stronger, healthier, oilier set of people in your life,’’ he said, to the amusement and agreement of many in the crowd.50 Yancey spoke at length about esteem and honor. Southerners, Yancey offered, would give up much for the sake of the Union, ‘‘but we cannot afford to lose honor and equality and be treated with injustice.’’ He begged Lincoln’s supporters not to force the issue. ‘‘Do not destroy our self respect; do not do us 

n

The Voice of the South

that injustice, which, when done to a worm, it turns on the heel that crushes it; which, when done to the brute creation, gives evidence of some sort of resistance. Do not overtax our manliness.’’ 51 Exhausted but remaining poised, Yancey fell back upon humor to assail Republicans. He took aim now at Thurlow Weed, party organizer and ‘‘boss’’ of upstate Republicans, and his organ, the Albany Journal. Yancey jokingly complained that Weed had questioned Yancey’s commitment to the Union. Yancey asked, what if Weed were wrong? ‘‘The idea of arguing about Thurlow Weed as an ignorant man will not be entertained for a moment, at least not from one who comes from the benighted South,’’ he said, evoking rumbles of laughter. But if Weed were not an ignorant man, what was he? ‘‘I cannot say,’’ Yancey teased, bringing more laughter. Yancey then held up clippings from a recent Albany Journal under the title ‘‘Some of Yancey’s Misrepresentations.’’ Yancey repeated emphatically, ‘‘Some of them. That intimates that there are more back of these.’’ More laughter rose from the crowd. Yancey took particular issue with Weed’s history of the prohibition of the African slave trade. Yancey produced a book, the manual of the New York legislature, which contained the federal Constitution, and read from Article I, Section , clause , the guarantee that this trade not be touched before . ‘‘I recommend Thurlow Weed, before he undertakes to correct me again, to kiss this book, and if he does, he will have more of the Constitution on his lips than he ever had before.’’ Men like Weed had always made false accusations, Yancey explained. ‘‘But this is a fast age. We have the telegraph and railroads now, and truth travels faster than it used to.’’ 52 After only a few days’ rest, Yancey moved on toward the Ohio River valley and resumed a vigorous schedule. On October  at Florence, Kentucky, he repeated ‘‘that the government was made for [the] white man,’’ and that blacks were incapable of self-government. If Lincoln were to win the election, Yancey warned, the country ‘‘will be a Union of Slavery,’’ that is, with southern whites enslaved under a ‘‘Black Republican’’ government.53 On October  he spoke for about two hours to over , people behind the courthouse in Lexington, Kentucky. That night, he traveled north again, to Cincinnati, speaking there for another two hours at Pike’s Opera House.54 His voice a bit weak now, Yancey compensated by speaking even more defiantly. He insisted that the policies of Lincoln could not begin without bloodshed, and the South, though hoping for a Constitutional Union, stood ready to fight for the same principles they had during the American Revolution. Emulating Patrick Henry’s famous outburst long ago, Yancey declared that if the North were determined to oppress the South and if resistance to that threat constituted treason, then he stood beThe Voice of the South

n



fore them as a traitor and challenged them to make the most of it. The crowd erupted both in hisses and applause, as Yancey stood firm and calm on stage, his arms folded across his chest.55 Back across the Ohio River and into Kentucky, crowds of supporters greeted Yancey’s train as it passed through Paris and Cynthiana on its way to Louisville, where Yancey delivered a three-hour speech at City Hall on October . There he took particular exception to the Constitutional Union Party, their lack of a meaningful platform, their candidate, John Bell, and Bell’s supporters. Just as he had focused on the Republicans on their home turf, now he lashed out at the Constitutional Union Party in one of its strongest bastions. To mounting laughter, Yancey reminded the crowd, ‘‘There is another party in the field that says nothing—that proposes nothing, only that the people shall give them all the offices of the country.’’ Noting that Bell voters rang small bells at public gatherings like this one, Yancey joked that Bell’s supporters, from a ‘‘very quiet and unobtrusive party,’’ ‘‘are kind enough to give us a little music in the tinkle of a little brass bell.’’ Yancey called Bell’s party amiable and modest, but ill equipped to save the country.56 The Bell party, Yancey went on, ‘‘is, however, very terrible in its denunciations of Yancey,’’ drawing attention back to himself. ‘‘It says Yancey is a disunionist,’’ and yet, ‘‘It proposes nothing to save the Union from the calamity that this great Yancey is about to bring upon it.’’ If putting himself in a lunatic asylum, ‘‘or if burying him will save the Union, I will give myself up to you cheerfully,’’ he offered, to howls of laughter. Bell supporters ‘‘cover me with their calumny, but they do nothing for their country,’’ unlike his own efforts to save the Union—albeit on his own terms—or rally the South to leave it.57 Two days later, on October , Yancey arrived triumphantly in Nashville, Tennessee. Again a large crowd greeted him at the train station and followed his carriage to the Sewanee House hotel, where they persuaded the great orator to make some preliminary remarks. The residents of Nashville had erected a large stand near the east porch of the state capitol. Stephen Douglas himself had spoken there the evening before. Yancey, escorted by local Breckinridge Guards, Lane Guards, and Union Guards, mounted that same platform at eight o’clock in the evening, in front of an eager crowd of over ,. The pace and duration of the speaking tour had caught up with him. While always maintaining that he spoke and worked for the Union, in his exhaustion Yancey accidentally admitted what most people knew—that he wanted a dissolution of the Union. Stephen Douglas had made a reference to the ‘‘fire-eaters,’’ southern advocates of secession, and claimed they condemned the Democratic platform of . In 

n

The Voice of the South

his anger Yancey bellowed, ‘‘Douglas says that the fire-eaters denounce the Cincinnati platform. When and where, I ask, did I ever denounce it?’’ he demanded, without realizing that he had finally just admitted he was a fire-eater.58 Bell supporters, however, knew where Yancey’s heart lay. In early November they held a torchlight processional that included an image of Yancey being hanged and labeled the transparency ‘‘Doom of Yancey—The Alabama Traitor.’’ 59 From Tennessee Yancey proceeded directly toward New Orleans, taking a desperately needed rest just outside the city at Magnolia. He would need the break because he was about to face the climax of his incredible tour. For a month the people of New Orleans had prepared for the great event in their accustomed fashion, carefully mapping out parade routes, gathering volunteers from elite merchants and politicians, and forming marching clubs from among the ordinary citizenry. Yancey himself knew this would be a special occasion and prepared a written address ahead of time and ordered no fewer than , copies printed for distribution.60 On Monday, October , a committee escorted Yancey into New Orleans for the day-long political carnival. The procession began at : .. from the train station at Lake Pontchartrain, complete with a Grand Marshall, several marching clubs, including the ‘‘Yancey Guards,’’ and various other citizens on foot or in carriages. Yancey sat regally in an open coach pulled by four richly adorned horses as the parade wound its way through the city, from the old French Quarter to bustling Canal Street, then to Camp Street and the City Hotel where all stopped briefly for a salute of cannon fire. As Yancey passed LaFayette Square he received a thirty-one-gun salute, and finally stopped at the sumptuous St. Charles Hotel. Banners and flags lined the entire route, and multitudes of people waved and cheered from balconies and rooftops. Yancey tried to retire to his room to rest a while, but yielded to the incessant calls from the street to come out and say something. He merely bowed and said, ‘‘The scenes of the morning could leave no doubt of the devotion of New Orleans to the Constitution, and the Union of the Constitution.’’ The crowd then allowed him a bit of rest and quiet.61 Another parade awaited Yancey that evening before his formal address. Leaving from his hotel at : .., a torchlight procession led the Grand Mass Meeting of the Constitutional Democracy, with the same conglomeration of marching clubs from the morning. Again they wove through the city until they reached Canal Street. A stand had been built at the intersection of Canal and St. Charles, in front of a statue of one of Yancey’s many old nemeses, Henry Clay, the great hero of this normally Whiggish, unionist, city. Five hundred The Voice of the South

n



residents, every one of them elected a ‘‘vice president,’’ joined Yancey on the stand, a huge gas-illuminated arch over their heads. Canal Street filled with over , people—the largest crowd in the city’s history—straining to witness the event. When Yancey took center stage he had to beg for absolute quiet so that most of the immense crowd could hear him.62 With the general election but days away, Yancey explicitly sounded the call for secession. He still spoke of the ideal of maintaining a ‘‘Constitutional Union,’’ but now labored to convince the greatest city in the South to abandon what the Union had become. He began with flattery, explaining that while in New York City he told his audience that ‘‘great as is New York, in all its commercial relations, New Orleans is in many respects greater.’’ New Orleans, unlike New York, united interests of the South and the West, and much of the North as well. ‘‘The cotton, the sugar, and the tobacco of the country here find their chief mart; the grain, the meats, the manufacturers and the other products of the country also here find their market. Free and slave labor thus jointly contribute to the great prosperity of New Orleans.’’ 63 Implicitly, Yancey suggested that New Orleans could manage far better without the existing Union than the Union could without New Orleans. Then Yancey tried to frighten his listeners by describing the certain fate of New Orleans and the South in a Union under a Lincoln administration. Yancey asserted that Lincoln’s party would sent more incendiaries like John Brown to invade the South. Lincoln’s political appointees to ports, military bases, and post offices would bring with them the ‘‘irrepressible conflict’’ doctrine and propagate abolition agitation across the South through both written propaganda and public proclamations. And if white southerners would cry out to Lincoln for protection, ‘‘you will get very much that kind of protection which wolves bestow on lambs.’’ Yancey contended that abolition agitation would quickly weaken, then destroy, slavery along the Upper South, driving Maryland, Kentucky, Missouri, and Virginia into the hands of a menacing North. Even a more ‘‘conservative’’ policy, Lincoln’s avowed intention to simply prevent expansion of slavery into the territories, would soon result in the formation of enough free states so that the North could pass any constitutional amendment they desired, and legally abolish slavery in the South. Quickly or slowly, within or beyond the Constitution, Yancey insisted that slavery faced its doom under Lincoln.64 ‘‘But it will not be done, because before that time comes we shall take care of ourselves,’’ Yancey promised. Now as certain as anyone that Lincoln would 

n

The Voice of the South

win, Yancey explained, ‘‘We cannot resist the inauguration of Lincoln, conducted according to the forms of law. . . . It would be rebellion and treason.’’ But, he said, ‘‘there remains the right of self-preservation,’’ the natural right ‘‘to save ourselves from a government which endeavors to crush us’’ and to create a new government to preserve liberty (for whites, at least). Yancey promised his Deep South audience that his tour had convinced him the border states would never permit a hostile force to cross them in order to subjugate those further south, if only the Gulf States chose to secede. He assured them that, thanks to King Cotton, treaties between northern and southern republics would protect southerners’ slaves and ensure the return of fugitives better than existing laws within one Union, divided into warring camps. The North could not bear the loss of southern cotton and other crops, he insisted. And he vowed, ‘‘England needs our cotton and must have it.’’ 65 Yancey achieved the effect he desired. One visitor to New Orleans observed that Yancey ‘‘could have led the crowd into the Mississippi river’’ had he wanted to. A shaken Thomas Durant, a leading merchant and prominent unionist of the city, reported that even though Yancey did not have the lung power to reach the entire, gigantic crowd, Louisiana now seemed as prepared as more radical states to leave the Union.66 Immediately after Yancey’s speech in New Orleans, Percy Walker and other dignitaries from Mobile escorted Yancey to a steamer on Lake Pontchartrain to begin his voyage home. Arriving in the Alabama port on November , a crowd as large as that modest city had ever seen greeted their hero at the wharf and escorted him to the Battle House hotel. Again, thousands lined the route and cheered wildly. Mayor Jones M. Withers offered the official welcome for Yancey, who spent the day in his hotel room receiving guests and well-wishers. After a brief rest, by evening another parade began in his honor, far smaller than the one the previous night but impressive nonetheless. Marching units, transparencies, and bands filled Government Street, the broadest in Mobile, and Yancey delivered a two-hour oration, the last in his long crusade. As in New Orleans, Yancey declared that Lincoln would win, that resistance to his election would be treason, and that the only proper response was secession.67 A weary Yancey returned home to Montgomery at noon on November , coincidentally as Stephen Douglas prepared to address residents of the city. The townsfolk gave Yancey a few hours of peace with his family, but by dusk they gathered again at the base of Market Street and started toward Yancey’s home on Perry Street. Cannon blasted throughout the evening and bands filled the The Voice of the South

n



streets with noise. The people called Yancey out and into a carriage for a brief parade through the city. Thousands tried in vain to pack into the new theater building where he spoke; most had to remain outside. Ladies carpeted the stage with flowers, and several dignitaries gave perorations while continuing cannon fire punctuated the celebration. Yancey finally rose to speak, but had nothing left in him. For perhaps the only time in his life, his oration was notable for both brevity and dullness.68 The next day, November , Americans went to the polls and elected Abraham Lincoln president of the United States. News spread quickly across the country. Although Breckinridge did best in the South, gaining  electoral votes, and even Bell racked up , along with Stephen Douglas’s meager , all Lincoln’s opponents combined for  electoral votes, far short of Lincoln’s , drawn exclusively from free states. In Montgomery and around the nation apprehension and suspense mounted over what would happen next. The Montgomery Weekly Post, which had supported Bell and the Union, lashed out at Yancey, ridiculing him and other fire-eaters in a column called ‘‘Firing the Southern Heart,’’ and reprinted the Slaughter letter for good measure. Yancey was ready. Privately he told a friend, ‘‘I shall trod the path before me fearlessly—though filled with anxiety. I have done my duty by the Union—I shall do it by my State.’’ 69 Yancey’s opportunity came on November , as a bipartisan meeting gathered at Estelle Hall to determine what to do next. Similar meetings spread across the South. In normally Whiggish Montgomery, voters had cast  ballots for Breckinridge,  for Bell, and  for Douglas, giving a pretty clear indication of things to come. Governor Andrew Moore and others spoke first, joined by men like Thomas Watts, a Whig unionist, to call for the entire South to secede. Then Yancey spoke, and laid down the gauntlet. Yes, he agreed, the whole South should secede. But what if several slave states lingered in the Union? Should Alabama wait? ‘‘Shall we remain and all be slaves? Shall we wait to bear our share of the common dishonor? God forbid!’’ he cried, and received thunderous applause. Yancey called upon Alabamians to act for themselves. Secession would be peaceful, a mere withdrawal from the national compact by discontented states. Certainly the Buchanan administration would do nothing to impede secession, he promised. But if the Lincoln administration tried using force to stop or reverse secession, Yancey promised, ‘‘Our brethren from every southern State will flock to defend a sister State threatened by mercenary bayonets.’’ Even if disunion did result in war, Yancey declared, rather than live under a government that violated the Constitution ‘‘and places me in a position inferior to 

n

The Voice of the South

the Northern free negro,’’ he would gather a corps of brave men who, ‘‘however few in number, would find a grave which the world would recognize, my countrymen, as a modern Thermopylae.’’ 70 In  .., the outnumbered Spartans of Greece lost a heroic battle at Thermopylae against invading Persians. Secession waited just around the corner for Alabama, and with it Yancey, his state, and a southern republic would have their Thermopylae.

The Voice of the South

n



CHAPTER FOURTEEN

The Men and the Hours The Alabama legislature had passed a joint resolution on February , , compelling Governor Andrew Moore to call a special election for a state convention in the event a Republican won the presidency. After Lincoln’s election and the subsequent rally at Estelle Hall on November , Governor Moore appointed a committee to confer with him on the best date to set for elections and a meeting. Yancey and John A. Elmore were among his twenty-one advisers. On November  Moore decided to postpone this meeting until after presidential electors cast their official ballots and reported them in Congress on December , just in case the college of electors changed their votes. Other slave states had taken the same step. On December , after telegraphic confirmation of the inevitable from Washington, Moore announced that elections for delegates would take place on December  for a convention in Montgomery on January , .1 Similar movements occurred across the South. South Carolina took the lead.

Its convention assembled in Columbia on December , but adjourned to Charleston because of the fear of a smallpox outbreak in the capital. Meeting then in the hometown of Barnwell Rhett, on December  South Carolina delegates voted unanimously to withdraw from the Union. Rhett himself authored an invitation to all other slave states to do the same and to send representatives to confer about forming a new slaveholding republic. He suggested they meet on February , , exactly one month before Lincoln’s inauguration, and convene in Montgomery, Alabama, clearly a nod to his fellow fireeater and sometime friend, Yancey.2 A veteran of even more failed secession efforts than Yancey had experienced, Rhett knew that unless other slave states joined South Carolina quickly, secession would lose precious momentum. So on Christmas eve, when Alabamians elected delegates, they did so knowing that in fact the old Union had already been dissolved. Besides their apprehensions about what a Lincoln government might bring, they now also had to decide whether to stand with the Republic of South Carolina or against her. In Montgomery voters selected Yancey and Thomas H. Watts, old courtroom and party adversaries now united absolutely on secession. Barbour County selected fire-eaters John Cochran and Alpheus Baker, the latter a veteran of the Buford expedition to Kansas. Chambers sent James F. Dowdell; Dallas, John Tyler Morgan; Lowndes, James G. Gilchrist; Perry, William M. Brooks—all associates of Yancey’s radical southern rights crusades over many frustrating years. Secessionists in fact had a solid majority of the  total delegates.3 Alabamians and most other Americans endured a tense Christmas and New Year, fated to be the last peaceful holiday season in America until . Major Robert Anderson, commander of federal army forces in Charleston harbor, feared for the safety of his  men as Carolinians armed themselves by the thousands and itched for a fight. On December  Anderson moved his troops from Fort Moultrie to a new fort that controlled the entrance to the harbor, about three miles from rebel batteries at the tip of the city. Fort Sumter stood defiant but incomplete, lacking adequate food, medicine, and ordnance. Nevertheless, Anderson knew that the time had come to move. He ordered his men to spike guns and burn gun carriages as they left Fort Moultrie. Charleston residents awoke the next morning seeing smoke in the harbor. Governor Pickens, now effectively the president of the Republic of South Carolina, demanded that Anderson return to Moultrie, which he steadfastly refused to do. Meanwhile, South Carolina commissioners in Washington, D.C., attempted to negotiate for the transfer of all federal forts to their possession, and President Buchanan tried The Men and the Hours

n



desperately to keep matters from spinning further out of control. On December  he had issued a proclamation indicting disunion as unconstitutional, but also stating that he had no constitutional power to stop it.4 With his rather spineless back against a wall, Buchanan at least determined to defend Fort Sumter. On December  he authorized General Winfield Scott to send a relief expedition to Anderson aboard the warship Brooklyn. Scott suggested instead using a chartered merchant steamer, arguing that it would prove less provocative. Buchanan consented, and on January , , the Star of the West set out from New York with about  men and supplies.5 Two days before, Georgia state troops had seized Fort Pulaski on the Savannah River, and Alabama forces, under orders from Governor Moore, occupied federal forts in Mobile bay. And as the Star of the West chugged toward Charleston on January , Florida troops seized the federal arsenal at Apalachicola. Neither Alabama, Georgia, nor Florida had yet assembled their respective secession conventions, let alone cast their votes on disunion, yet each state had already made bold military moves.6 Montgomery reflected the militant mood of the Deep South. As early as November , a meeting of the St. Andrews Society offered a toast to a Southern Confederacy that did not even yet exist. By December militia units assembled and drilled: the old Montgomery True Blues, the Metropolitan Guards, the Mounted Rifles, the new Independent Rifles, the Montgomery Greys, and the Alabama Fusiliers.7 Then South Carolina seceded. Then the drama began in Charleston harbor. Then Georgia, Florida, and Alabama seized forts. And finally, on January , the Alabama convention assembled to consider secession. After years of running ahead of events, almost overnight Yancey had to scramble just to keep pace. Never fully recovering from his long bout with neuralgia, he needed to rest and to spend time with his family, his law practice, and his dairy farm after his exhausting speaking tour.8 But when the Alabama secession convention assembled in the statehouse chamber, it marked the culmination of his efforts for over a decade, and Yancey was ready to finish the task. From the start he dominated the proceedings. After delegates decided quickly upon a temporary chair and secretaries, Yancey offered the first motion: that every day’s business open with a prayer. All agreed, and Rev. Basil Manly fused together religion and politics. He offered praise and thanks to God for bringing Europeans to America, for the establishment of the American republic, the sovereignty of states and—in the past tense—for the continuation of the Union that ‘‘we had devoutly hoped might last, unperverted and incor

n

The Men and the Hours

ruptible.’’ Manly asked for divine protection for ‘‘the land Thou hast given us, the Institutions Thou hast established, the rights Thou hast bestowed!’’ 9 After the prayer, Yancey and Watts approached the desk in the front of the chamber to officially sign in. Many spectators in the small upstairs galleries applauded. Yancey’s old friend John T. Morgan rose at once to press for quiet from spectators. Morgan understood their excitement, but thought the business at hand—deciding whether or not to destroy the Union—required the utmost dignity and respect. Cheering or jeering speakers simply had no place in this meeting. The first real test of secessionist strength came in selecting a permanent president of the convention. William M. Brooks from Perry County favored immediate secession; Robert Jemison Jr. of Tuscaloosa favored cooperation and consultation with other states. Brooks won, –. The result was clear, but hardly overwhelming. Much of northern Alabama strongly opposed disunion, enough to trouble Yancey and his allies. Unionists in Athens burned Yancey in effigy. Even from the black belt, the Selma State Sentinel printed an ‘‘indictment’’ by ‘‘The Grand Jurors for the state of Alabama,’’ charging ‘‘this creature, Bill Yancey,’’ with manslaughter, dueling, voting for the Wilmot Proviso in the Oregon bill, bolting from the Democratic Party in  and , and splitting it in . Some care and maneuvering was in order; secession was not a foregone conclusion.10 The first debate centered on a resolution of resistance, one clearly used by the Yancey forces to test the resolve of their opposition. G. C. Whatley from Calhoun County offered a brief and direct indictment of Abraham Lincoln and the Republican Party for their antislavery positions and their desire to place slavery on a road toward ultimate extinction. For these reasons, Whatley concluded, Alabama was absolved of all obligations to the Union. Whatley then explained explicitly the aim of his resolution: to root out unionists, those ‘‘who are for absolute submission.’’ He knew that cooperationists were not united. Some wished for coordination with the entire South, some for cooperation with the ‘‘Cotton States’’ of the lower South. To Whatley the question simply came down to ‘‘submission or resistance.’’ If resistance was the choice, only then, he argued, should the convention discuss the kind and the method of resistance.11 Whatley clearly insinuated that anyone who did not stand openly for immediate secession might be a ‘‘submissionist,’’ a word degrading and servile to his proud, honor-conscious fellow delegates. Cooperationist William R. Smith of Tuscaloosa rose to say as much. ‘‘I am of that minority; but I do not associate with submissionists!’’ Smith cried. He labeled the resolution ‘‘ungenerous’’ and The Men and the Hours

n



‘‘inconsistent with the desires of harmony and conciliation.’’ Smith demanded of his colleagues, ‘‘Present a naked question of resistance to Black Republican rule, and you will doubtless receive a unanimous vote in favor of it,’’ but begged them not to intertwine that with the proposed resolution.12 Another cooperationist objected that the resolution implied that the only options for Alabama were submission or immediate and separate state action, but not cooperation. That was about all Yancey could stand. He endorsed the resolution as it stood. Admitting that it contained a test ‘‘is no objection to them in my mind,’’ in yet another dramatic reversal of his youthful protest against South Carolina’s test oath of . This test, Yancey argued, could only offend submissionists, and he claimed that this assembly contained no such miserable wretches. He explained that voting on the resolution would reveal as much to the world, that Alabama stood united in defying the North. But if submissionists sat among them, Yancey demanded, ‘‘I desire to know it.’’ During his recent speaking tour Yancey had assumed the offensive often enough, but was generally relaxed, affable, and witty, much to the surprise of those who knew his past and his reputation. With secession finally a reality in South Carolina and confronted by any sort of opposition from within his own state, the old Yancey returned. As far as the complaint that this resolution would create discord, not conciliation, he asserted that it was only unpalatable to those who favored Republican rule. ‘‘I, for one, have no desire to conciliate persons occupying such position. I wish here, and elsewhere, to antagonize them.’’ 13 Jeremiah Clemens, one of Yancey’s old Whig antagonists, responded with his own objections. If Yancey and Whatley had their way, Clemens predicted, ‘‘our session is likely to be a stormy one.’’ Outright secessionists could persuade the cooperationists to do much, he vowed, but ‘‘we cannot be driven an inch.’’ Clemens agreed that the time was near ‘‘when our very existence as an independent people’’ would depend upon a union among southerners, but while he stood ready to resist Republicans, his certainty that secession would result in war gave him pause. The test resolution distracted the convention from its business: resisting the North. Clemens declared that no man could test him, and that he would have no choice but to vote against the resolution. He believed that forty-five others would follow suit. Clemens said that result would imply what Yancey and Whatley expressed overtly—that forty-six members of the convention favored submission—and would signal weakness to the North.14 Another immediate secessionist, James Williamson of Lowndes County, revealed his surprise that the resolution produced any debate at all. Whatley rose 

n

The Men and the Hours

again to add that many northerners did not take seriously southern protests, and that even newspapers in Montgomery sounded equivocal. Debate continued, ‘‘with much animation,’’ one delegate reported, doubtless exacerbated by Yancey’s return to his hardcore fire-eating ways. At the end of the day, the convention agreed to a resolution that contained Whatley’s original grievances against the Republican Party and simply stated that Alabama would not submit to the Lincoln administration. They struck out Whatley’s original clause that resistance required abrogation of the compact of Union. The cooperationists held their ground, and the assembly adjourned for the day.15 The stubbornness of cooperationists sent Yancey and his faction scrambling overnight. By the second day, January , they had a new strategy. Yancey determined to remain quiet for the time, doubtless conceding his renewed inability to temper remarks. Instead, he let others speak, presenting Andrew P. Calhoun, son of John C. Calhoun and South Carolina’s commissioner to Alabama. Calhoun both flattered the delegates and strove to stiffen their spirit of resistance. He pointed out that Alabama was a leading cotton producer, and second to none in the South with the coal and iron reserves recently discovered in the northern part of the state. Implicitly, of course, Calhoun promised that Alabama contained the means for economic and even military resistance. He then manipulated the imagery of slavery and freedom, explaining that the moment his own state declared itself free, ‘‘the accumulated aggressions of a third of a century fell like shackles at her feet,’’ and the people stood ‘‘free, disenthralled, regenerated.’’ Alabamians could do the same. Then Calhoun tried to co-opt the cooperationists. South Carolina had already seceded; Alabamians no longer risked isolation through separate state action. Calhoun asked for cooperation with his state to form a Southern Confederacy. He played to the self-interest of his audience, reminding them that Barnwell Rhett had suggested that Montgomery serve as the host city for a convention of all the slave states. Calhoun subtly suggested that the Deep South not wait for Virginia or other Upper South states to act. But even just a united Gulf South, Calhoun promised, ‘‘cannot be conquered.’’ It would ‘‘hurl defiance at our assailants,’’ and at any rate it would be better to ‘‘die as free men rather than live slaves.’’ 16 Then Yancey used official reports from Governor Moore that made secession appear imminent. Through Watts, Yancey’s new supporter, Moore flooded the convention with breaking news. A telegram to Moore from Washington reported that Republicans refused to entertain any last-ditch compromise efforts. The Men and the Hours

n



Another message signaled Major Anderson’s determination to hold Fort Sumter. From Virginia came a wire stating that the assembly there had voted – ‘‘by all means in her power’’ to resist any northern attempt to forcibly coerce a seceding state. Moore himself explained that he feared some slave state legislatures would adjourn without calling for secession conventions, so he sent commissioners to all other slave states to confer with them, in the same way Andrew P. Calhoun came to Alabama. Among others, Moore sent John A. Elmore to South Carolina, James M. Calhoun (a brother of the late senator) to Texas, Edward C. Bullock to Florida, William Cooper to Missouri, Leroy Pope Walker to Tennessee, and John A. Winston to Louisiana. These and others were hardly neutral; all supported Yancey and secession.17 Moore informed the assembly of steps he had taken to defend the state. Acting on appeals from Alabamians who urged him to prepare the state’s economy for crisis, Moore asked the state’s banks to suspend specie payment (redemption of paper notes for gold or silver), to protect its specie reserve. South Carolina and Georgia had already done so.18 The governor also explained that his orders to seize federal forts on the Gulf Coast were necessary because secession lay but a few days in the future, and as demonstrated at Fort Sumter, federal forces were not likely to withdraw voluntarily.19 On the heels of Moore’s messages came telegrams from two of Alabama’s commissioners. The Mississippi convention voted on January  to draft an ordinance of secession and would likely vote accordingly within two days. Commissioner Bullock reported erroneously that Florida voted – to secede immediately. In fact, like Mississippi, Florida had resolved to draft an ordinance for discussion. Meanwhile, state troops in Florida fired on the few federal soldiers at Fort Barrancas, just outside Pensacola. No one was hurt, and federal troops withdrew to powerful Fort Pickens, a mile and a half from the Florida stronghold at Barrancas.20 Altogether, it seemed as though secession and war were certain; events played into the hands of Yancey and his faction, and the fire-eater knew it. As the convention closed its doors and began a secret session, Thomas Watts presented it with more urgent telegrams. From commissioners in Virginia came the word that if Alabama seceded immediately it might press the Old Dominion to follow suit. From the Gulf Coast, two ominous messages arrived. The governor of Florida urgently requested  men from Alabama to help at Pensacola. The other came from state troops in Mobile to Governor Moore, asking if they should shoot at federal naval vessels that tried to enter the harbor. On Yancey’s motion the convention created a committee of one, George A. 

n

The Men and the Hours

Ketchum, a secessionist from Mobile, to help the governor get more information from Florida. Before Ketchum could even confer with Moore, secessionist Cochran offered a resolution to empower the governor to take all necessary steps to protect the people of Alabama, including taking federal arsenals and forts in the state. Yancey went further. He proposed that the governor accept  volunteers for an expedition against Fort Pickens. During the debate that followed, cooperationists raised the point that no act of federal coercion had taken place and that Buchanan showed no intention of doing so. William Smith accused Yancey and Cochran of proposing an act of war, and therefore treason against the United States. Cochran’s resolution passed –, providing another tenuous victory for the embattled secessionists.21 The tenacity of Cooperationists was testing Yancey’s flimsy patience as the convention adjourned for the day. On January  an air of excitement and tension pervaded the convention. John Inzer, a cooperationist, recalled that vendors sold refreshments and peanuts to the crowd that gathered under the capitol rotunda, waiting for a chance to watch history.22 They would get to see that, highlighted by a spectacular Yancey explosion. Cooperationist Michael Bulger offered a resolution that set Yancey’s nerves on end. Bulger acknowledged that antislavery agitation, culminating in Lincoln’s election, now threatened slave property. He conceded that ‘‘the crisis is arrived,’’ and the time had come to decide whether or not to secede. But then he resolved that separate state secession ‘‘is unwise and impolitic.’’ Alabama instead should call a convention of delegates from all slave states ‘‘to determine what relief we will demand for the present, and security for the future.’’ His motion was referred to a Committee of Thirteen that included Yancey. As delegates returned to debate sending troops to Florida, Yancey received an unexpected blow from his old friend and secessionist John Tyler Morgan. Morgan referred to a fellow delegate who announced his readiness to secede that day, even if it were done by only a one-vote margin. Morgan disagreed. He noted that Alabama was divided geographically, with northern counties strongly resisting secession. Morgan had no doubt that north Alabamians could be persuaded to support secession if given enough time. Therefore, he preferred waiting ‘‘a month, or until some new danger should appear to follow from delay,’’ and preferred to secede with a majority of twenty, rather than leave the Union by a one-vote margin that day. Other delegates agreed that a narrow vote would reveal lack of unity and suggest uncertainty. Others questioned how real and immediate military threats truly were, or if rumors and exaggeraThe Men and the Hours

n



tion had taken hold during these intensely stressful hours and days. Because of the gravity of the situation, two secessionists, Yancey’s old comrade Yelverton and new ally Thomas Watts, supported a delay of up to a week.23 After over a decade of working for disunion and now seeing even opponents of secession agree that imminent danger faced the South, Yancey could tolerate no more delays. He rose to acknowledge that part of the state disapproved of secession, but then thundered that if the body passed an ordinance of secession by a solitary one-vote majority, ‘‘it will represent the fullness, and the power, and the majesty of the sovereign people of Alabama.’’ Once that ordinance became law, there could be no more majority or minority on that question, and the state ‘‘will expect and demand, and secure unlimited and unquestioned obedience to that Ordinance.’’ By definition, Yancey roared, opposition to the expressed will of the people could not come from Alabamians, ‘‘but from the enemies of the people of Alabama.’’ Yancey threatened that opponents represented ‘‘enemies of the State. There is a law of Treason . . . and those who shall dare oppose the action of Alabama, when she assumes her independence of the Union, will become traitors—rebels against its authority, and will be dealt with as such.’’ For Americans now, Yancey insisted that only two groups existed, northern and southern. And to Yancey, as always, southerners who did not match his vision of the South needed to be purged. ‘‘The misguided, deluded, wicked men in our midst, if any such there be, who shall oppose it, will be in alignment with the abolition power of the Federal Government, and as our safety demands, must be looked upon and dealt with as public enemies.’’ 24 The official record of the convention mentioned blandly that Yancey’s speech threw the meeting ‘‘into the highest excitement.’’ All hell broke loose on the floor as the erstwhile champion of the rights of a sectional minority seemed to call for the executions of all who opposed him and his cause. Thomas Watts tried desperately to restore order and reprimanded Yancey for his viciousness. But Yancey’s eruption proved extremely effective. Although just moments before Watts had offered to delay the vote on secession, he now suggested that members take that vote the next day, and said that he hoped it would pass unanimously.25 Jemison took the floor to admonish Yancey for his outburst, and to deny that any cooperationist there was a traitor. Yancey interrupted to say that he did not refer to delegates, but to some people in northern Alabama. Jemison asked if that made Yancey’s threat any better. Then Jemison directly attacked the great fire-eater. ‘‘Will the gentleman go into those sections of the State and hang all those who are opposed to Secession?’’ he demanded. With bitter sarcasm, Jemi

n

The Men and the Hours

son inquired, ‘‘Will he hang them by families, by neighborhoods, by towns, by counties, by congressional districts? Who, sir, will give the bloody order? Who will be your executioner? Is this the spirit of Southern Chivalry?’’ Clearly the great disruptionist Yancey had gone too far. The convention adjourned early that day.26 As delegates departed the capitol they found the city streets magically transformed. As late as ten o’clock a ‘‘whirl of excitement’’ had taken over, according to one witness. As the convention deliberated and Yancey threatened, news spread that Mississippi’s convention had voted to secede by a margin of –. And in South Carolina shore batteries fired upon the Star of the West, the ship that Buchanan had sent to reinforce Major Anderson. They leveled a warning shot across her bow, and the unarmed vessel pulled hard about, refusing to attempt entry into Charleston harbor and retreating impotently northward. The flag of the United States had been fired upon. In Montgomery militia companies once more poured into the streets, some now definitely headed for Florida’s Pensacola harbor. The word buzzed through the crowd that Alabama would secede the next day.27 As the convention met on the morning of January  Brooks presented delegates with the official reports from Mississippi and from Charleston. The lines between immediate and cooperative secession blurred as Alabama’s western border touched another independent slave republic. Yancey sensed that his hour had arrived, and wasted no time reporting an ordinance of secession from the Committee of Thirteen, which he chaired. The document stated that Lincoln’s election by a sectional majority hostile to slavery ‘‘is a political wrong so insulting and menacing’’ that it justified immediate withdrawal of the state from the Union. It also included an invitation to the other fourteen slave states to send delegates to Montgomery by February  and consult one another ‘‘as to the most effective mode of securing concerted and harmonious action.’’ Yancey had heard enough from the cooperationists to avoid pledging Alabama to join a slaveholding confederation, but the intent was clear enough.28 Former governor Jeremiah Clemens presented a minority report. It called for another convention in Nashville, like the one in  called to respond to Henry Clay’s compromise bill. At Nashville, further away from the Deep South and its concentration of fire-eaters, cooperationists hoped that a southern convention would call for faithful execution of the fugitive slave law, pledges that slavery not face abolition in Washington, D.C., guarantees for interstate slave trading and slavery in the territories, and the right of transit of slaveholders and their slaves through free states. The cooperationist minority even considered The Men and the Hours

n



these conditions alterable. Clemens also called for a little more time, hoping that cooler heads would prevail, and selected as a meeting date February , George Washington’s birthday. Then he called for a direct vote of the people to ratify this resolution, which failed –. Clemens then offered an amendment to delay Alabama’s ordinance until March , Lincoln’s inaugural. The precise same forty-five voted for, the same fifty-four against.29 Yancey, ready the previous day to take a simple majority, now saw a nine-vote margin and moved again to take up his ordinance. Some delegates made their last, desperate plea for the Union, and others jockeyed over minor amendments. Yancey refused to reply to any of these remarks. He only amended his own ordinance by acknowledging directly that when other states’ delegates came to Montgomery on February , they would do so in order to create a Southern Confederation of States, based upon the principles of the old federal constitution. The convention accepted it and adjourned, with few doubting what lay ahead.30 On January  the final blow hit the cooperationists. The previous day, Florida had voted to secede by a staggering tally of –. Robert Jemison, the cooperationist who lost the presidency of the convention to Brooks, literally surrendered. He announced that he was about to deliver some extended remarks, but after learning about Florida he gave up the fight. He would not vote for secession but he would campaign for it at home in Tuscaloosa. On behalf of the minority, Sidney Posey of Lauderdale only asked that the ordinance, sure to pass, be submitted to voters. Other cooperationists announced that while they too would vote against the ordinance, they knew it would pass and would stand by their state. Albert Crumpler, on behalf of George Taylor and Albert Leonard, all from Coosa County, declared their readiness to switch over from the opposition and vote for the measure.31 Then Yancey stood to deliver his last speech as a citizen of the United States of America. Knowing that his hour had finally arrived, he offered conciliation. Yancey referred to the ‘‘irritation and suspicion’’ that had prevailed earlier, and actually apologized for pressuring his colleagues to rush to vote on so momentous an issue. He praised the cooperationists and generously stated that any merit in the ordinance actually came from the opposition members on the Committee of Thirteen. Then Yancey began to promote secession as a panacea. He promised that a careful reading of the ordinance would show that the nature of resistance ‘‘may be called revolution, disunion, or secession, as each member may desire.’’ Simi

n

The Men and the Hours

larly, he brazenly asserted that ‘‘cooperation and separate state action . . . have been joined in this measure,’’ although of course he did not suggest how that was possible. Yancey then reassured all that in fact nothing new or really revolutionary was going on. Secession simply paralleled the birth of the republic in , when each colony, led by South Carolina and Virginia, first announced their independence from Britain and only then agreed to joint action on July , . Yancey guaranteed that the selection of delegates in Georgia and Louisiana promised the speedy withdrawal of those states from the North. Cooperationists had nothing to fear. With his goal in sight, Yancey even feigned humility. He argued that secession represented a popular movement that had built up for years, that cooperationist politicians could not stop it, but neither could secessionist politicians claim credit for it. ‘‘We of the majority have not been able to add a particle to its momentum.’’ But then he dug in against the last potential stumbling block, the proposal to submit the ordinance to the public. It had already effectively happened, he explained, because this convention represented the people of Alabama in their sovereign capacity. As such, the people gave the convention all power: ‘‘Life, Liberty and Property are in our hands.’’ Yancey feared that arranging a referendum offered potential delay that could jeopardize secession entirely. He hinted at mortal danger if the people delayed official action until after Lincoln’s inauguration on March . He reminded everyone, ‘‘Ours in not a pure Democracy. . . . Ours is a representative government,’’ and whatever representatives did was in fact law and represented the people’s will. Beyond that, he argued, no precedent existed for a popular referendum. The founding fathers created their state governments without submitting the work to their assemblies for public consideration, and the Constitution itself never faced a popular vote.32 His public arguments notwithstanding, Yancey surely remembered how quickly previous drives for secession had lost momentum, and he did not want that to happen again. Less because of Yancey’s arguments than a nod to the inevitable, no less than Jeremiah Clemens rose and effectively ended the debate. ‘‘I believe your Ordinance to be wrong,’’ he told Yancey. In fact, Clemens called it treason. ‘‘If I could defeat it, I would; but I know I cannot.’’ Speaking and acting in adherence to the southern code of honor, Clemens pledged, ‘‘Acting upon the convictions of a life-time, calmly and deliberately I walk with you into revolution.’’ After Clemens announced that he would support the ordinance, the roll was called. The Men and the Hours

n



In all, seven cooperationists switched sides, and the ordinance passed –. Brooks, the president of the convention, announced that ‘‘Alabama was a free, sovereign and Independent State.’’ 33 Delegates voted to end the secret session, and Yancey himself helped throw open the doors for the public. The people of Montgomery were ready to celebrate. Many had waited restlessly in the capitol rotunda for six hours. As Yancey marched out at : .., wild cheers filled the building, and a group of women, who had anticipated this hour, approached Yancey with a flag for the new Republic of Alabama. Painted hastily on one side was the goddess of Liberty, a sword held in one hand pointing down, a flag in the other raised with the single word Alabama and a solitary star upon it, and over that the words ‘‘Independent now and Forever.’’ A cotton plant appeared on the reverse of the flag, symbol of the state’s wealth, with a coiled rattlesnake before it and the words ‘‘Noli Me Tangere’’ (touch me not) below, a clear enough warning to the North. Yancey commended the ‘‘noble-hearted, pure and patriotic women of Montgomery,’’ who in turn presented him with a white ribbon to wear across his homespun coat that read, ‘‘We honor and love Hon. W. L. Yancey, the defender of the South.’’ 34 Speaker after speaker poured out of the chamber to address the crowd in front of the capitol, high atop Goat Hill. From the city below church bells peeled, cannons fired, steamboats on the river blasted their high-pressure whistles. As night fell, residents illuminated their homes and lit bonfires throughout the city. Fireworks soared into the dark as church bells and cannon continued to clamor and more militia companies prepared to join Floridians at Pensacola. The spirited celebration caused some to gloss over the closeness of the secessionist victory. James Dowdell considered the vote of – ‘‘a much larger number than at first anticipated,’’ and incredibly claimed ‘‘Harmony & good feeling characterized the discussion throughout.’’ A local resident reported, ‘‘An excellent spirit is now prevailing here—the division between Cooperationists & straight out Secessionists is ceasing. . . . Things grow better, & better. Had we remained in the Union, they would have grown worse & worse.’’ Another witness quipped in a letter to a distant friend that night, ‘‘Alabama is now a foreign country from you Kentuckians.’’ Yet he worried about the future. ‘‘I want to see WL Yancey join the ranks as a common soldier before I help them fight if we do have war.’’ 35 Without ever shouldering arms for his cause, the future nevertheless offered Yancey grave trials as well as great opportunities. News or rumors of all kinds 

n

The Men and the Hours

flowed into the convention when it reconvened on January . Robert Barnwell Rhett Jr. telegraphed from Charleston that a battle loomed there. Alabama’s commissioner to Tennessee, Leroy Pope Walker, wired that the Volunteer State was poised to secede. Both reports proved false. Governor Moore passed along news of the progress of the  Alabamians sent to Pensacola and the additional  at Mobile awaiting further orders. While these and other pressing issues occupied the delegates, Yancey remained notably quiet and often absent for several days at a time.36 After collecting his strength and his thoughts, Yancey resumed leadership of affairs on January  when he reported again from his Committee of Thirteen. This time he offered the convention a report on a plan for a provisional and a permanent government of the seceded states. The assembly ordered  copies printed and distributed for study and discussion. On January , Yancey officially offered his report.37 His committee carefully studied South Carolina’s resolutions on the matter. All agreed that southerners never had a grievance against the Constitution of the United States, only against northerners who had interpreted it as a tool to use their numerical advantage to dominate the South. The old Constitution served both as a logical starting place for future discussion and as the speediest path toward the creation of a new government. Yancey’s committee agreed with Carolinians that speed was essential in the face of the incoming Lincoln government. Alabamians naturally also agreed that seceded states ought to send delegates to Montgomery and to assemble on February . Yancey’s committee also urged the current secession convention to select delegates, rather than ordering a new public election. The latter would take too much time; February  was less than three weeks away.38 After dealing with less pressing issues, delegates returned to Yancey’s report on January . Some complained that Yancey’s plan did not allow for a state ratifying convention to examine any provisional plan of confederation. Instead Yancey wanted the current body to have that power, even though the people who had elected its delegates were not asked to consider ratification of a new national charter. Yancey responded just as he had before, that this convention represented the sovereign power of the people of Alabama; it could do anything. And over and over again, Yancey reminded his colleagues that time was running out. He now admitted that bloodshed might come soon, should the Union government adopt a coercive policy. If the people elected delegates to a new convention in a near future marked by warfare, men’s minds would not be as clear and calm as they were now—this from the man who only days before had threatened massive executions for treason.39 The Men and the Hours

n



Yancey, along with his other longtime secessionist colleagues such as Barnwell Rhett, saw a new threat emerge: a possible reconstruction of the old Union. Yancey and Rhett feared that once southerners had finally taken their revolutionary step, second-guessing and fear of an unknown future might make them vacillate or even reverse their course. They knew for a fact that many considered secession a short-term stratagem, a bargaining chip to win political concessions from the North. Yancey worked assiduously to block such ideas. ‘‘No new guarantees—no amendments of the Constitution—no peaceful resolution—no repeal of offensive laws can afford any, the least, inducement to consider even a proposition to reconstruct our relations with the non-slaveholding States.’’ Yancey based his rigid stance on his notion that no defect in the federal Constitution had created the breech between the sections. He argued instead that ‘‘the disease’’ which destroyed the old Union came from ‘‘the hearts, heads, and consciences of the Northern people.’’ With a glancing shot at his stepfather and Beman’s associates, Yancey asserted that northerners ‘‘are educated to believe slavery to be a religious as well as a political wrong, and consequently, to hate the slaveholder.’’ Nothing could change this; northerners could not be reeducated. Yancey likened the attempt to putting salve over a ‘‘deep-rooted cancer.’’ 40 As far as those who objected that the states that had just seceded could or should not form a government for all fifteen slave states, Yancey prophesied, ‘‘If all the Southern States were in convention, who doubts that they would unanimously frame the government for a Southern Confederacy upon the principles of the Federal Constitution?’’ None of course, he answered himself. Yancey stated that to the best of his knowledge, the only fear other slave states had about the nature of a Gulf Coast Confederacy’s government touched upon the possible renewal of the African slave trade. Yancey noted correctly that Upper South states dreaded the possibility. Without taking an explicit stand on this issue, Yancey simply concluded that using the old Constitution as a model would ease all fears about the nature of this new nation. In fact he promised that it would actually work like a magnet to draw out of the Union other slave states. Relatively little debate followed; then the convention adopted the report by a vote of –.41 The primary business of the next day, January , centered around the selection of delegates to the February  southern convention. Cooperationist William S. Earnest of Jefferson County offered a resolution that no member of the current convention or legislature should be eligible for a seat at this meeting. Others agreed, explaining the dubiousness of letting elected officials run for 

n

The Men and the Hours

offices that they themselves had just created in a special session, usually meeting in secret, without popular ratification.42 Very probably, though, this resolution also represented another desperate attempt by cooperationists to take control of affairs and slow things down. After all, if this measure passed Yancey’s secessionist majority would lose its leadership. And its leader. Yancey objected. ‘‘I may say, I hope without being considered as an egotist, that many members of the Convention have expressed a desire to have me elected as one of the deputies’’ to this convention, he said, although he announced that he ‘‘positively declined to have my name considered in that connection.’’ Yancey, who had up until now consistently demanded that popular ratification of the secession convention’s actions was both unwise and unnecessary, suddenly returned to a democratic stance, a transmutation that he made whenever it suited him. This resolution would disenfranchise the people, deny them free choices through their representatives in the secession convention, and restrict the potential pool of candidates, however slightly, to ‘‘a particular class of people.’’ 43 Although Yancey might have actually believed these things, surely his greater motivation was to preserve his newfound majority that he had worked so long and hard to construct. William Earnest’s resolution was defeated. The convention then immediately set about selecting those delegates, two at-large and one for each congressional district. Publicly, Yancey denied desire for such a seat, and private correspondence at the same time suggests that he was sincere. But deep in his heart he may have entertained some desire for an active role in the final consummation of his dream, the joining of Alabama into a slaveholding confederation. He might have expected or wanted his colleagues to come to him with the offer in recognition of his vital role in the movement. As convention delegates caucused, Yancey and others realized that he would not win a seat, probably in part because he made no efforts on his own behalf. The convention selected William P. Chilton, Yancey’s most recent law partner, which perhaps took away some of the sting. But John Bragg, an old Whig from Mobile, reported, ‘‘Yancey is greatly mortified at his defeat.’’ Bragg himself cast a vote for Yancey ‘‘simply because I thought he was entitled to the position,’’ but added, ‘‘It is not to be disguised that Y. is personally unpopular—he has great talent in many things, but his temper is impracticable & he makes few personal friends.’’ 44 He had certainly won no new friends over the past several days. Along with Chilton, the convention selected Jabez L. M. Curry of Talladega and John Gill Shorter of Barbour, both solid secessionists. On the other hand, the only member of the secession convention selected for the provisional conThe Men and the Hours

n



gress, D. P. Lewis of Lawrence, was a cooperationist, as were the five remaining delegates, representing a clear defeat for Yancey and his ability to dominate events entirely. Perhaps on account of this rebuke, Yancey did not attend the next day’s session of the convention.45 In fact, he did not return until January . That day the committee on foreign relations offered resolutions to sever all ties between the Republic of Alabama and the United States, including an order that Alabama’s federal congressional delegates return home and a resolution to select two commissioners to replace them for negotiations with the Buchanan administration over the surrender of all federal property in Alabama. Yancey opposed sending commissioners. He argued that there was no point to that since in fourteen days the convention of seceding states would assemble and have jurisdiction over foreign affairs. And if a Confederate commissioner arrived in Washington after an Alabama commissioner had already commenced negotiations over the same issues, only confusion and delay would result. Besides, no pressing conflict existed between Alabama and federal armed forces, as was the case in South Carolina and Florida. Yancey argued that peace would depend upon careful negotiations and respect for the rights of all states, the seceded ones as well as those remaining in the Union. ‘‘The forts are built on land, the title to which Alabama never held,’’ he candidly admitted. Other military facilities had been created by revenue drawn from all American states. Yancey believed that in case of war Alabama had a right to seize these installations, but cautioned that if the new republic about to be created wanted its own property rights respected, they ought to recognize the property rights of others. Yancey’s unusually calm, sound logic swayed his colleagues; they sent no commissioners.46 At noon on the twenty-fifth the convention took a recess as its delegates gathered outside on the steps of the capitol to review the corps of cadets from the University of Alabama. Over  young men marched by, drilled on the capitol grounds, and received praise from Governor Moore and other dignitaries. Citizens of Montgomery organized a ball for that evening, which would be one of the last nights of frivolity before these young men would march off to war.47 That afternoon the convention resumed business and embarked on its last, hotly contested issue: the question of reopening the African slave trade. A resolution by Henry Jones of Lauderdale would have required Alabama delegates to the February  convention to press for a ban on all slave importations to the new southern republic, except from slave states still remaining in the old Union. John Morgan offered a preamble, accepted by the assembly: ‘‘Whereas, 

n

The Men and the Hours

the people of Alabama are opposed, on the ground of policy, to the reopening of the African Slave Trade—.’’ 48 Morgan explained that the African slave trade should remain a question of policy only. ‘‘Pure Christian philanthropy,’’ Morgan argued, cast the Atlantic slave trade as ‘‘the active work of Christian evangelization,’’ a means of transporting ‘‘poor, savage slaves to a country where they could be raised to the condition of Christian slaves, which is the highest point that the negro race can reach.’’ Although Morgan acknowledged the well-known objections to reopening the trade that came from Virginia, Maryland, and North Carolina, which all threatened not to join the other seceded states if they reopened the trade, he believed that it was a question that ought to be reserved for future consideration, and therefore remained strictly a matter of policy, rather than one of constitutional principle.49 Others objected that a declaration against the African slave trade would prove meaningless without an accompanying penalty for violations, which Morgan opposed. The debate stumbled forward along the same basic ideas for a while, interrupted by the more pressing question of withdrawing Alabama troops from Florida. Delegates could not resolve that either, so they left these question in the hands of the governor.50 When debate resumed on the African slave trade, inevitably Yancey returned to center stage. ‘‘When a question in the late Union, few public men took more pains to be understood upon it, then myself,’’ although he claimed that ‘‘no public man has ever had so little benefit from his own clearly defined positions.’’ Yancey then laboriously rehashed his public comments on the issue from – , reading his published documents into the convention’s official report. And as he had done before, Yancey focused his indignation on the idea of branding the Atlantic slave trade as piracy, on a par with murder, rape, and treason.51 Yancey now confessed that he had supported a renewal of the trade, but with secession a reality Yancey claimed to have changed his mind. With no more sectional conflict, ‘‘with a homogeneous people, accustomed to slavery, holding it in reverence for its origin and its effects,’’ the need to obtain more slaves beyond natural reproduction no longer existed. The convention voted nearly unanimously, with Yancey’s blessings, to instruct its delegates to the February  meeting to press for a ban of the African slave trade. The next day President Brooks made formal closing remarks and the convention adjourned until March .52 On January , Yancey relaxed. He penned a brief letter to his brother, outlining modest plans for living in the new nation he had just helped to create. Yancey prepared to send his son William to the state university at Tuscaloosa to join the corps of cadets that still trained and paraded in Montgomery. ‘‘They are admirably drilled,’’ with ‘‘splendid officers’’ in charge of the military school. The Men and the Hours

n



Yancey would later send his son Goodloe to the University of Alabama as well. As for his own plans, once the state convention resumed business on March , ‘‘I shall then resign my seat, as the chief matter (secession) has been determined. And my business calls imperatively for my close attention. I have no idea of ever again returning to public life.’’ 53 Yancey might have meant what he wrote. The letter was private, to his brother, his best friend and confidant. At age forty-six, his health remained impaired. His law practice demanded attention and he looked forward to developing his dairy farm on the outskirts of Montgomery, which likely would prove quite lucrative as the population of the city bulged to accommodate the new government about to form there.54 Yancey had accepted his own propaganda about secession providing a panacea. Whatever else needed to be accomplished would get done soon enough and easily enough. Things certainly looked that way. Georgia’s convention opted for secession on January ; on January  Louisiana seceded; three days later, Texas did too. But the ever ambitious Yancey would likely have been disappointed to have no further role in shaping the new republic, as well as concerned that Alabama cooperationists might quickly overwhelm the radical group that he had just led to victory. As Yancey turned to more mundane matters, his hometown continued to buzz with activity. From late January to early February delegates arrived from the other seceded states and started staking out accommodations and jockeying for influence and information. Hotels swelled with visiting dignitaries, and the streets—when not metamorphosing into mud—swarmed with people. Cadets from the university remained in town a while, their professional decorum evaporating over time as the young men ‘‘took Montgomery by storm— convention, legislature, women & all.’’ The capitol experienced a chimney fire, briefly evoking memories of a devastating blaze in . At least one woman bemoaned the hubbub, wishing that she could escape to the countryside. The excitement increased daily.55 Among the first delegates on the scene was Robert H. Smith of Mobile, who arrived on January . Recently opposed to disunion, Smith now cast his lot entirely with his state. But he was overwhelmed. ‘‘I feel like I was called on to build a great edifice in a short time without any tools or materials to work with. I do not yet see my way out. If any one has a fancy for such a position as I now occupy, he must be a very different man from me.’’ 56 Others had a fancy for the work, but that often resulted in intrigue and back-biting. The South Carolina delegation, ostensibly led by veteran fire-eater 

n

The Men and the Hours

Barnwell Rhett, caused much of the wrangling behind the scenes. Rhett would learn the hard way that most of his colleagues had no intention of toeing his line, or even communicating much with him. Rhett longed for the presidency of the new nation, but learned almost immediately that much of the gossip concerning that prize had it going to the hometown hero, Yancey.57 Rhett need not have worried that his younger fellow secessionist would triumph over him. Most of the talk regarding Yancey and the presidency hinged on preventing him—or any outright secessionist—from assuming the head of the new government. Speaking for the stop-Yancey group, former governor André B. Roman of Louisiana suggested to Pelican State delegate Duncan F. Kenner that Yancey ‘‘has shown himself expert in pulling down a government,’’ but hardly possessed the qualities needed to build one up.58 Nevertheless, Yancey literally had a presence during deliberations: among the huge portraits hanging in the convention hall, near images of Washington, Calhoun, and Dixon H. Lewis and poised between paintings of Andrew Jackson and Henry Clay, Yancey’s portrait gazed over the proceedings.59 One of three Georgians appeared likely to attain the presidency. Howell Cobb, a popular, amiable man, had served in the U.S. Congress as a representative, as House Speaker, and as Buchanan’s secretary of the treasury. Cobb’s standing at this gathering was remarkable, because his support for the Compromise of  a decade earlier earned him the condemnation of states’ rights men of that day. Cobb clearly had had presidential ambitions in the old Union and emerged as a serious contender for the South’s presidency. Other prominent Georgians included Yancey’s old Whig adversary from their days in the U.S. House, Alexander Stephens, and Democrat Robert Toombs, who, like Stephens and Cobb, had supported compromise a decade before but now loomed large as a possible force in a new regime.60 The very strength and relative popularity of these Georgians actually led to the failure of any of them capturing the new presidency. Other Georgia delegates failed to unite behind any one man and split their support three ways, as did many other delegations. In the face of that, Mississippi’s contingent stood firmly behind their favorite son, Jefferson Davis, who carried the selection on February , with Stephens as vice president.61 Privately, many of the assembled representatives expressed great disappointment that Davis would lead the new government. Too moderate for those who helped drive secession, the choice of Davis and Stephens stung the radicals. James Chesnut of South Carolina snapped to Barnwell Rhett, ‘‘Uncle! I suppose I must vote for him.’’ After promoting secession since the s and embittered The Men and the Hours

n



by his failure to even be a serious candidate for president, Rhett grumbled that ‘‘life is nothing but a continual series of disappointments.’’ Delegate Thomas Cobb, Howell’s brother, wrote to his wife, ‘‘I have felt like a whipped dog.’’ 62 Perhaps because Yancey did not seek the presidency himself, or out of relief that he could remain out of public office, or even out of genuine pleasure at the convention’s choice, Yancey never uttered a negative word about the selection of Davis. In fact, conspicuously among the fire-eaters, Yancey gave every indication that all would be well with President Davis at the helm.63 And given Yancey’s prominence in provoking secession and as a leading citizen in the new Confederate capital, Governor Moore selected him to give the official greeting for Davis when he finally arrived in Montgomery on the evening of February .64 As Davis took a circuitous train from his home in Mississippi to Montgomery, the people of Montgomery prepared for yet another mass demonstration. The docks on the river bustled with activity and local militia companies continued to draw large crowds as they paraded and drilled in the streets. Men continually poured into the city, jockeying for patronage positions in the new regime. Quite a commotion occurred with the arrival of two secessionist women from Kentucky, not because of their politics, but because of their sister and brother-in-law: Mary Todd and Abraham Lincoln.65 It was around : .. on February  before Davis’s train pulled into the depot in Montgomery. A few minutes before, outside of town, a delegation from the provisional Congress had joined their new chief executive aboard the train for a triumphant entrance into the city. The crowd broke into cheers and shouts as Davis emerged from his car; cannon fire and church bells punctuated the latest celebration. Yancey greeted Davis and joined him in a four-horse coach ride to the courthouse square. Fireworks burst overhead as the procession of carriages and men on foot worked their way through the lively crowd. They reached the Exchange Hotel, where Yancey and other dignitaries led Davis to his room. The hotel burst at the seams with men and women anxious to catch a glimpse of the new president. Outside, the crowd shouted ‘‘Davis.’’ And ‘‘Yancey.’’ 66 Davis finally stepped out onto the portico of the second floor. His remarks were few. Davis acknowledged that many trials lay ahead, perhaps even war. If war came, he assured his listeners, the Confederacy would prove itself worthy of the heritage of the American Revolution and would prevail. Davis was tired and his voice nearly spent after so many impromptu remarks on his way to Montgomery, and he excused himself for the night. 

n

The Men and the Hours

The throng responded with pleasure, but wanted more. They called out for Yancey, who did not disappoint them.67 Yancey followed with the shortest yet best-remembered speech of his life, a ringing endorsement of Jefferson Davis. ‘‘Fellow-Citizens: As the distinguished gentleman who has just addressed you has said, the country does not now look to men, but to principles.’’ But Yancey proclaimed that the new republic not only had the principles for right administration of government, ‘‘but also the man.’’ In Jefferson Davis, the South found ‘‘the distinguished gentleman . . . the statesman, the soldier and the patriot. She has the statesman—one eminently skilled in public affairs . . . skillful, wise and moderate.—She has the soldier, distinguished upon the field of battle, wise in council, terrible in the charge. She has a patriot, just, upright, and incorruptible.’’ Nothing, Yancey promised, could cause Davis ‘‘to swerve from the path of rectitude and duty. . . . The man and the hour have met. We may now hope that prosperity, honor, and victory await his administration.’’ 68

The Men and the Hours

n



CHAPTER FIFTEEN

In King Arthur’s Court Before Yancey could begin to focus on his return to private life, rumors circulated out of Montgomery about his next public role. Howell Cobb wrote his wife that the talk in the streets mentioned Yancey as a likely cabinet member, although Cobb admitted that he honestly had no idea whom Davis would select. Fellow Georgian and new vice president Alexander Stephens believed that Jefferson Davis offered places to both Yancey and to senior fire-eater Barnwell Rhett, but that both had declined. The Atlanta Daily Intelligencer reported that the president would soon appoint Yancey as his secretary of state. The Charleston Courier and the New Orleans Picayune both claimed that Davis would give Yancey his choice of positions in the cabinet.1 Urgent need and compelling political pressures largely shaped President Davis’s cabinet selections. The infant Confederacy required an effective central government almost immediately. As Davis himself explained to his wife, ‘‘We are without machinery without means and threatened by powerful opposition.’’ Realizing that the people of all seven states expected to—and should—have

high-ranking officials in his administration, Davis had to juggle expediency, geography, and qualification. The provisional constitution created six cabinet positions, so Davis decided that he would represent Mississippi and thereby save one slot for each of the other states.2 On February  the Confederate Congress formally established the six departments, and the next day Davis began to make his selections. The president generally made his appointments without consulting his choices ahead of time, operating under the assumption that everyone would rally to the cause of the South as quickly as he himself had done. One exception seems to have been Yancey. Contrary to assertions long after the fact, Yancey was hardly shoved aside by more moderate men like Davis once the Confederate government was formed, but instead had chosen to step aside, fully confident that a ‘‘regenerative power’’ of secession would complete the salvation of the South.3 Even in his fleeting retirement Yancey remained a force in Montgomery and in the state, so it made sense for Davis to talk to him. The two met on February , and Davis offered Yancey his choice of cabinets posts or a diplomatic assignment. Local newspapers reported that Yancey turned down the cabinet offer because he believed that he could not maintain his radical base of support within an administration that was shaping up to be quite moderate. On February  Davis announced his first round of choices: Robert Toombs of Georgia as secretary of state; South Carolina’s Christopher Memminger for the Treasury Department; and Leroy Pope Walker of Alabama, a committed secessionist, selected at least in part on Yancey’s recommendation for the War Department. Within the next several days Davis rounded out the cabinet with Judah P. Benjamin of Louisiana as attorney general, Stephen R. Mallory of Florida as secretary of the navy, and John H. Reagan of Texas as postmaster general.4 Although he opted out of a cabinet position, during Yancey’s conference with Davis the fire-eater received an offer to head the Confederate diplomatic mission to England and France. Much of the rhetoric and promise of secession had hinged upon the notion that cotton was king, that the industrialized world depended upon the availability of southern staples, especially this Deep South crop emblazoned now upon the flag of Alabama. Yancey himself had promised that if war came all the South had to do was withhold cotton to compel England and France into recognition of a southern republic and to send weapons and troops. In fact, much of the prosperity enjoyed by the South in recent years had stemmed from record exports of cotton to eager consumers in England, which received  percent of its cotton from the American South. With disunion now a reality and war looming, no one knew better than former In King Arthur’s Court

n



president Franklin Pierce’s secretary of war, Jefferson Davis, that Confederate survival required some sort of European intervention or at least aid, if only to break an expected Union blockade of southern ports. Therefore, securing aid from Britain and France played a central role in the administration’s strategy, and that made his offer to Yancey so important and improbable.5 Diplomat Yancey seemed like an oxymoron. Most of his public life had revolved around opposition, conflict, and agitation, as witnessed most recently in Alabama’s secession convention. South Carolina diarist Mary Chesnut, recalling inaccurately details of Yancey’s murder of his wife’s uncle in , exclaimed, ‘‘Send a man to England who had killed his father-in-law in a street brawl! That is not knowing England or Englishmen, surely.’’ She later noted that ‘‘Yancey will have no mobs to harangue. No stump speeches will be possible—superb as are his of that kind.’’ 6 Mrs. Chesnut was right, of course, but implicitly criticized Jefferson Davis for a lapse in judgment. The new president made his first key appointments much the same way that he would throughout his administration, with little if any input or advice from others and under the presumption that loyalty to the Confederate cause provided sufficient qualification for diplomatic, political, or military posts. Yancey himself later criticized Davis for precisely this problem. And Davis’s own dearth of diplomatic experience simply compounded the problem.7 Each of Davis’s early and most important diplomatic appointments carried these defects. In making Robert Toombs secretary of state, Davis did so to satisfy Georgians in general and in particular to recognize that Toombs might as easily have captured the presidency as Davis. For this position Toombs himself lacked experience or qualification, and shared with Yancey a deserved reputation for caustic and reckless talk. But Toombs also suffered from a drinking problem.8 Furthermore, Davis only casually asked his vice president, Toombs’s friend Alexander Stephens, what post Toombs might accept, and did that only after offering the position of secretary of state to Yancey and then to Robert Barnwell of South Carolina. Toombs accepted conditionally, promising to resign after the eight slave states remaining in the Union finally decided upon secession. But during this delay, Davis himself appointed Yancey and other diplomats,9 decisions that Toombs should have made, or at least in consultation with Davis. Toombs soon came to see his position as untenable. He seldom even used his office in the new Confederate government office building near the Exchange Hotel, wryly commenting that he could carry all departmental business in his 

n

In King Arthur’s Court

hat. Once, when approached by an office seeker, Toombs took off his hat and quipped, ‘‘Can you get in here, sir? That’s the Department of State, sir!’’ 10 As if to reinforce Toombs’s perceptions, he learned after the fact that Davis had designated two others to join Yancey’s commission: Ambrose Dudley Mann and Pierre Rost. Initially Davis offered the number-two position to the nearly seventy-year-old John Slidell of Louisiana. Slidell never liked Yancey; when secession fizzled in  he hoped his party would be rid of Yancey and Rhett for good. A moderate, a friend of Davis’s from the U.S. Senate, and a veteran diplomat fluent in French, Slidell flatly turned down the offer. He did so in part because he saw the lack of forethought Davis used in shaping the State Department, and implicitly because of a distaste for serving with Yancey. But even ‘‘if there had been no other objection the association with Mann would have been sufficient to decide my declension.’’ 11 The reasons for Slidell’s revulsion toward Mann remain unclear. Mann had a vast amount of diplomatic experience, serving as American consul to Bremen, as commissioner on several special assignments, and as assistant secretary of state in the Pierce administration. Mann also had experience with shipping and trade. Some Confederates chafed at his selection because he was a Virginian, and that state had not yet seceded.12 Pierre Adolphe Rost was born in France and left for the United States after the defeat of Napoleon at Waterloo. He settled in Natchez, Mississippi, where he became friends with Joseph Davis, the older brother of Jefferson Davis. In  Rost moved to Louisiana and acquired a sugar plantation at Destrehan, a few miles upriver from New Orleans. His ties to the Davis family, slavery, and his French origins served as his only qualifications for a diplomatic post.13 From the moment people learned of these appointments critics carped about them, although mostly in private like Mary Chesnut and John Slidell. The South did have enough seasoned foreign service personnel to establish a better State Department, thanks in part to the dominance of slaveholding presidents over many years and their largely southern patronage. One of these men, William Henry Trescot, advised Howell Cobb, presiding over the provisional Congress, about the urgency of creating a solid Confederate State Department, and relying on ‘‘some of the most efficient clerks in the Dep at Washington who are Southern men.’’ 14 But Jefferson Davis followed no one’s advice on these matters but his own. To make matters worse for Yancey, Mann, and Rost, Davis gave them no particular instructions. Always impatient and quick to criticize Jefferson Davis, an In King Arthur’s Court

n



irate Rhett marched the few blocks to Yancey’s home to consult with his old comrade. Yancey confirmed that Davis neither gave Yancey the power to negotiate commercial treaties, offer free trade, or guarantee access to Confederate ports, nor did Yancey believe the president would do so in the future. Rhett later recalled having asked Yancey, ‘‘Upon what then does the President rely to obtain our recognition?’’ Yancey replied, ‘‘I suppose on our cotton. He says that ‘cotton is king!’ ’’ Rhett then offered sensibly, ‘‘Do not accept the appointment. You will meet nothing but failure and mortification. Demand of the president the powers necessary to make your mission successful, or stay at home. . . . You will have nothing to propose; and nothing therefore, to treat about.’’ 15 Shortly after meeting with Yancey, Rhett, now chairman of the provisional Congress’s Foreign Affairs Committee, ran into Secretary Toombs at the Exchange Hotel. Rhett explained he had hoped that Davis instructed Yancey and the others to offer favorable trade inducements—guaranteed long-term, lowduty agreements—to secure recognition and military aid. Toombs had wished for all that and more, but replied dejectedly that that was not the case. Yancey and the others had to rely on pleading the righteousness of the Confederate cause, emphasizing the legality of secession and its peaceful intent, while also detailing the capacity of the Confederacy to defend itself.16 Yancey’s mission faced several more barriers. The most formidable of all came from the British government’s staunch opposition to slavery. Although once greatly involved in seizing and enslaving Africans and shipping them to her overseas colonies, by the early s the British had abolished slavery throughout their empire. The current foreign secretary, Lord John Russell, had served in a previous cabinet that had abolished slavery in the British West Indies. Since then England had taken international leadership in attempting to suppress the Atlantic slave trade, a practice that Yancey had recently advocated reviving. American abolitionists, black and white, had traveled to Britain for decades to work with them to end slavery across the transatlantic world. These included Frederick Douglass, William Wells Brown, Martin Delany, William and Ellen Craft, and Rev. Nathan Beman, who made several public addresses in England in  supporting abolition and Anglo-American cooperation.17 And if somehow Yancey was oblivious to all this, his diplomat-brother was not. Ben strenuously advised his older brother to reject the commission to Europe. Ben Yancey’s brief stay in London had convinced him ‘‘that England will never recognize the confederate Government unless that government at its initiation would abolish slavery.’’ Ben also assured William that Napoleon III 

n

In King Arthur’s Court

of France would not budge against England, and that the Confederacy could not hope to divide these two major powers.18 And even if the Confederacy could have used cotton to pressure European powers, Davis and other leaders could not agree on how to do so. Even before South Carolina seceded, Barnwell Rhett advocated that his state send commissioners to Europe, especially to the port of Liverpool, with a shipment of cotton in order to procure the latest weaponry. Now, as chairman of the Confederate Foreign Affairs Committee, Rhett urged the same. At Davis’s first cabinet meeting, Attorney General Judah Benjamin effectively agreed with Rhett that the Confederacy must expect imminent war with the United States and therefore that the government itself should immediately start shipping massive quantities of cotton to England to raise money, both for general expenditures and specifically for military purchases. Secretary of State Toombs agreed, as did Vice President Stephens. But Davis did not. Treasury Secretary Memminger objected to Benjamin’s plan on constitutional grounds, claiming that no legal provisions permitted the government to engage directly in commerce. Davis concurred with Memminger and decided that an immediate embargo of cotton would prove more effective in winning European favor.19 Another obstacle for Davis and Yancey came from Robert Bunch, the British consul in Charleston. Bunch loathed white southerners and exerted considerable influence on Foreign Secretary John Russell and, through him, the cabinet of Prime Minister Henry John Temple, Lord Palmerston. Bunch gained a reputation in the North as ‘‘the greatest secessionist in Charleston,’’ but nothing was further from the truth. Although Bunch had resided in that city since , the career diplomat was the embodiment of British imperial haughtiness, and his correspondence with Lord Russell hampered Yancey’s efforts well before he arrived in England.20 After secession became a reality, Bunch lost what little forbearance he had for the southern cause. In February the consul labeled Jefferson Davis an ‘‘extremist Southern and Pro-Slavery character,’’ Toombs ‘‘a violent and impulsive man’’ and ‘‘a secessionist of the worst kind.’’ Then Bunch unleashed his wrath, telling Lord Russell that no leaders of the new Confederacy rose above the standard of mediocrity that characterized all American politicians. Bunch concluded that the new Confederacy, based upon cotton, rice, slavery, and filibustering, ‘‘will have to be repressed.’’ 21 By March  Bunch learned of the appointments of Yancey, Mann, and Rost. Bunch told Russell that Mann was ‘‘the son of a bankrupt grocer in the eastern In King Arthur’s Court

n



part of Virginia,’’ whose personal character he described as ‘‘not good.’’ Bunch damned Rost as ‘‘unknown to me, and so far as I can learn, to everyone else.’’ The fact that Rost owned slaves, a plantation, and spoke French seemed his only qualifications. And then there was Yancey. Bunch acknowledged Yancey as ‘‘a lawyer of very considerable repute’’ and ‘‘undoubtedly, a man of ability,’’ although hardly a diplomat. Bunch described Yancey as a stump speaker ‘‘possessing much power over the masses, but he is impulsive, erratic, and hot-headed; a rabid Secessionist, a favourer of a revival of the Slave Trade and a ‘Filibuster’ of the extremist type of ‘Manifest Destiny.’’’ 22 Bunch admitted to Russell that he had learned nothing of the commissioners’ instructions, but presumed they would demand everything on their own terms. ‘‘Their exaggerated idea of the importance of the Southern States to Great Britain is really ludicrous,’’ he concluded, and marveled that they truly thought that one year without cotton would ruin England.23 Bunch’s efforts to prejudice Russell against Yancey, the other commissioners, and the Confederacy added to the challenges Yancey would have to overcome. No one could ignore Yancey’s temperament and inexperience as a diplomat, the ineffectiveness of Toombs, or the lack of meaningful support from Davis. But in reality neither Yancey nor his mission were doomed from the start. Several factors provided counterweights. Among them, President-elect Lincoln had campaigned in part on a promise not to interfere with slavery where it existed, and therefore offered the British no clear antislavery alternative in . Although British industry did not depend entirely upon cotton from the American South, a sudden decline in supply threatened disruption to the marketplace and anxiety to textile workers and the British public at large. For all of Britain’s antislavery sentiments, they conducted a lucrative commerce with slave regimes throughout the western hemisphere, especially Brazil. Citing humanitarian concerns, several British politicians openly preferred a peaceful division of America to a bloody war, and viewed secession as a fait accompli. And talk in the North of imposing a naval blockade on the South certainly sounded like recognition of belligerent status, if not implicit recognition of national status, under international law.24 Divisions within the British government and its Foreign Office offered another potential opening to Yancey. Although no Americans had knowledge of Lord Palmerston’s initial thoughts about American disunion, shortly after South Carolina seceded the prime minister penned a letter to John Russell contemplating an elaborate scheme whereby Britain would offer recognition of a Southern Confederacy in exchange for a treaty binding the South to refrain 

n

In King Arthur’s Court

from engaging in the African slave trade. Hoping to strike some blow against the spread of slavery, Palmerston did not give up on this idea for several months. Furthermore, the prime minister refused to give any indication about his future plans to the outgoing American minister to Britain, George Dallas.25 Other than Robert Bunch, British consuls in the American South gave misleading and confusing advice both to Confederates and to their own Foreign Office. From New Orleans in December , William Mure wrote to Russell about the sudden conversion of this normally conservative, commercial city to secessionism, complete with vigilance committees hunting down supposed abolitionists. Local leaders asked Mure what to expect from Britain, and the consul replied that his government had a long-standing practice ‘‘to recognize any ‘de facto’ Government, especially with a people, with whom it was her interest to cultivate the most intimate commercial relations.’’ Communications from Edmund Molyneaux in Savannah betrayed his faulty understanding of white southerners. On November  he believed that Georgians were not truly prepared to secede, and that northern concessions to the South could prevent disunion. But by December  he concluded that the ‘‘secession party is gaining ground,’’ and that disunion would occur peacefully. Early in  from Galveston, Arthur T. Lynn wrote that secession of the seven Deep South states was final, and that the North would be unable to coerce them back into the Union.26 Conflicting reports, uncertainty, and hesitation within the British Foreign Office created a window of opportunity for Yancey and the Confederacy. When Yancey, Rhett, and others had argued to hasten secession and creation of a new nation, they probably had not realized that swiftness also gave them a head start in foreign affairs on the incoming Lincoln administration. Yancey never expressed nor revealed any apprehension about achieving his task. Despite the private misgivings of some, public utterances across the South —even from slave states still within the old Union—lauded his appointment. A Washington correspondent for the Richmond Examiner opined, ‘‘The selection of Mr. Yancey was every way judicious. He possesses an unusual personal fascination and influence upon those who happen to be thrown with him. There is something winning in his address.’’ Other newspapers agreed.27 More important, Yancey enjoyed the full confidence of President Davis and a personal friendship with Robert Toombs.28 Although the official appointments for Yancey, Mann, and Rost did not come until March , on March  Yancey prepared to leave his home and his family for a journey of indeterminate time and weighty, uncertain consequence. Some ladies of Montgomery presented him with flowers and a walking stick as he In King Arthur’s Court

n



boarded a ship for New Orleans. John Walker Fearn joined Yancey as secretary to the commission. Fearn, a nephew of War Secretary Leroy Pope Walker, had recently served in the same position for American legations in Belgium and in Mexico.29 Toombs filled out the official charge and limited instructions for Yancey, Rost, and Mann. After first visiting London and Paris, they were to proceed to Russia and Belgium, then to Spain. They were to emphasize to European powers that the Confederacy’s only enemy was the United States of America, but also that the Confederate nation was well armed and prepared to defend herself. Toombs urged them to explain that the eight slave states remaining in the Union would soon join the Confederate States, and that the Confederacy would respect all international treaties with the United States that involved the South, save the portion of the Webster-Ashburton treaty of  that obliged America to help apprehend African slave traders. The commissioners could offer a treaty of friendship, commerce, and navigation, tempt Europe with modest import duties ‘‘closely approximating free trade,’’ and harp on the vitality of cotton to the British.30 On March  Yancey reached New Orleans, the scene of his massive reception five months before. But now the atmosphere was tense, as its people waited nervously for Abraham Lincoln to respond to secession. Yancey became quite ill the next day and took to bed at the home of a friend, John M. Hugers, a local cotton merchant. As Yancey slowly recovered he converted some of his currency into British sterling through a local office of Baring Brothers & Company of London, a huge shipping and brokerage firm. Finally ready to resume his trip, on March  Yancey, Rost, and Fearn departed on board the steam screw Habana, a -ton brig about to be commandeered into the Confederate Navy and renamed the  Sumter. Mann sailed separately to rendezvous with the others in London.31 After a pleasant three-day voyage across the warm spring waters of the Gulf of Mexico, Yancey and Rost steamed into Havana harbor on April . Over the next few days they found themselves invited to dinner by Joseph T. Crawford, the British consul to Havana, and a reception later hosted by Mrs. Crawford, surely good omens in Yancey’s mind. The Confederates later dined with Count San Antonio, Spain’s captain-general of the wealthy slave plantation colony. Afterward the count had an aide provide Yancey and Rost with a tour of the harbor fortifications. Another dinner followed, this time with the Confederate special agent to the West Indies, Major Charles J. Helm, and British captain Henry D. Hickman of the steamer Gladiator. The latter provided Yancey with 

n

In King Arthur’s Court

a tour of his warship, and ‘‘was kind enough to alter the painting of the flag of the Conf[e]d[erate] States’’ to a circle of stars on a blue field and two red horizontal bars separated by a white one.32 Newspapers in the Confederate and United States printed many of these details, cheering people in the former and infuriating many in the latter.33 On April  Yancey, Rost, and Fearn boarded the British mail steamer St. Clyde and reached St. Thomas in the Virgin Islands five days later. Throughout his months abroad Yancey seldom recorded personal feelings, thoughts, or observations, instead focusing his attention and energies on his mission. His diary contained a mostly bare-bones account of his trip. And yet, far from his family, churning under steam-powered engines for a few days on the open Caribbean, he surely thought of his father’s adventures aboard the  Constellation that had sailed the same waters over sixty years before. At St. Thomas the American consul, Robert P. Waring, provided ponies for a ride into the mountains. On April  Yancey and his colleagues finally left for England on another British mail steamer, the Seine, and reached Southampton on April . ‘‘After a mild & pleasant voyage,’’ Yancey and the other Confederates disembarked. Another American consul, William Thompson, ‘‘paid us agreeable attentions’’ before the final leg of their journey. On April , Yancey, Rost, and Fearn arrived in London, where supporters had arranged lodgings at the Westminster Palace Hotel. The India Board rented half of all its rooms, and members of Parliament visited it frequently.34 Yancey entered a world he had never known. Dudley Mann helped arrange this warm reception. He had already reached London on April  and immediately set to work. Mann reported to President Davis, ‘‘We shall make a vigorous fight for our recognition; and it cannot be too soon commenced.’’ That very day Mann had met with Sir William Gregory, a member of Parliament from Galway, Ireland, and one of the most prominent British defenders of southern secession. Like many Britons, his desire for free trade outweighed his antipathy toward slavery. As the satirical London magazine Punch had recently declaimed: Though with the North we Sympathize It must not be forgotten That with the South we’ve stronger ties Which are composed of cotton. Early in April, Gregory had announced in Parliament that he planned to make a motion to recognize Confederate independence. Now, Gregory paid a visit In King Arthur’s Court

n



to Yancey just days after he arrived, promising to arrange an informal meeting between the Confederates and Foreign Secretary John Russell. Mann also sought out various potential financiers, including an old acquaintance, Joshua Bates, a senior partner in Baring Brothers & Company. True to his Boston roots, Bates remained steadfastly loyal to the Union, but his partner Russell Sturgis clearly leaned toward the Confederacy.35 Yancey’s first days in London could hardly have gone better. Almost immediately after Yancey’s arrival news from home reached Britain that simultaneously sobered and heartened Yancey and his colleagues. Only weeks after Lincoln’s inauguration, a confrontation finally occurred between Confederate and Union forces in Charleston harbor. Lincoln attempted to send food and medicine to his troops at the ill-provisioned Fort Sumter. Jefferson Davis and his advisers determined not to allow this, and sent orders to troops in Charleston to demand the surrender of the fort. The federal commander refused, and early on the morning of April , , rebel batteries opened fire. On April , Lincoln called for , troops to subdue the rebellion. Reacting to this, Virginia seceded on April . Two days later, Lincoln ordered the closure of several ports in the South—virtually declaring a blockade. Arkansas seceded on May , Tennessee the next day, and North Carolina on May . Of slaveholding states, only Missouri, Kentucky, Maryland, and Delaware remained in the Union. And on April , the people of Richmond, Virginia, offered their city as a new capital for the Confederacy. On May  the Confederate Congress adjourned in Yancey’s hometown and reconvened in Richmond on July .36 Britain’s uncertain role in the American drama suddenly became murkier. Palmerston and Russell had despaired over the prospect of an American civil war, both on humanitarian grounds and for the trade and diplomatic complications that were bound to adversely affect their empire.37 With the secession of four more states, the Confederacy became a much more formidable military power, and the remaining, truncated Union that much weaker. And however questionable Yancey was as the chief Confederate commissioner to Europe, Lincoln’s new secretary of state, William Henry Seward, represented a powerful counterweight. As early as January, the mere thought that Lincoln might select the feisty New York senator infuriated the British. The British minister to Washington, Richard Lyons, warned John Russell that Seward ‘‘will be a dangerous foreign Minister,’’ and that Seward seemed to believe that nothing the United States did to subdue the South would provoke a British military response.38 A State Department dinner in Washington late in March confirmed what 

n

In King Arthur’s Court

Lyons most feared. There Seward explained his hope for a ‘‘counterrevolution’’ in the South within a few months that would bring those states back into the Union. But, he added, the North might need to hasten this by blocking southern shipping. Lyons replied that if the Union attempted to use force to stop ‘‘so important a commerce as that of Great Britain with the cotton growing States, I could not answer for what might happen.’’ Even if the supply of cotton remained steady but prices rose due to uncertain supply, pressure would build on Britain ‘‘to use all the means in her power to open those ports.’’ His anger aroused, Lyons then turned the table on Seward by announcing that the simplest solution was to grant recognition to the Confederacy, but added that he hoped things would not come to that. Undaunted, Seward defiantly informed Lyons and Henri Mercier, the French minister to Washington, and their Russian counterpart, Baron Edward de Stoeckl, that if a foreign ship left a southern port without the papers required by the laws of the United States, the American navy would seize it without compensation to their owners or nations. De Stoeckl argued correctly that for such a blockade to be respected in international law it had to be effective, and that considering the vast coastline of the Confederacy the federal navy was inadequate to that task. Seward replied with the policy that he and Lincoln would follow for the course of the war: federal actions would not constitute a blockade of a foreign power, but instead represented an effort to collect tariffs and enforce federal laws.39 One week later Lyons reported that Seward had grown even more confrontational. His ‘‘style of braggadocio’’ had become ‘‘more and more violent and noisy, saying things which it would be more convenient for me not to have heard.’’ By now Mercier also had lost patience with Seward and wanted Lyons to have the discretionary power to recognize the Confederacy. ‘‘This seems to me to be going too fast,’’ wrote Lyons, but he did favor a concert of action between England and France. Lyons then suggested to Russell that ‘‘it might perhaps be well . . . that the [Confederate] Commissioners . . . should not be met with too strong a rebuff in England or in France.’’ If they were, Lyons believed that it would only further embolden a reckless Seward.40 In April Lyons grew more pessimistic about keeping Britain out of the American conflict. If only for his selection of Seward for the State Department, Lyons concluded, Lincoln had proven that he lacked ‘‘any natural talents to compensate for his ignorance of everything but Illinois village politics.’’ Lincoln’s unenforceable ‘‘paper blockade’’ would almost certainly force Britain and France to recognize the Confederacy and to send their fleets to confront Union forces. Lyons concluded that neither Lincoln nor his cabinet knew anything about In King Arthur’s Court

n



foreign affairs, and yet remained overconfident about their strength in the community of nations. The fact that Lincoln’s minister to France, William L. Dayton, did not even speak French must have made Lyons (and Mercier) cringe; at least Rost and Mann could speak French. By May, Lyons found Seward even more ‘‘arrogant and reckless towards Foreign Powers,’’ and Lincoln’s cabinet in general to have ‘‘gone far beyond their constitutional Powers in their warmaking proceedings.’’ 41 Seward threatened trade restrictions and seizure of British ships; Yancey offered nearly free trade and cotton. Seward unwittingly strengthened Yancey’s hand. John Russell sadly concurred with Lyons about the federal government’s ‘‘foolish and aimless’’ diplomacy and the danger to British neutrality if the Union attempted a blockade. ‘‘I do not see how the Southern ports can be declared not to be ports of entry without forcing on the question of recognition,’’ Russell confirmed. The foreign secretary urged Lyons to rely on Lincoln’s leadership and patience, however, if only to keep Seward from dragging Britain into the conflict. ‘‘I shall see the Southerners when they come but not officially, & keep them at a proper distance,’’ Russell concluded on April .42 Seward’s blunders inadvertently helped pave the way for Yancey, Mann, and Rost to meet with Russell on May . William Gregory made the introductions and joined the informal discussion, which lasted about an hour. Yancey emphasized to Russell the bloodless nature of secession, Confederate preparations for military defense, and, of course, their sovereign status that allowed them to cancel their allegiance to the federal compact. Yancey argued that secession occurred only to preserve the rights and liberties of the southern people, and that the Union no longer offered that security. Slavery remained conspicuously absent from the conversation. Yancey, though, did remind Russell of the southern agricultural produce and enticed him with the possibility of favorable commercial agreements. Then Yancey directly asked for recognition. The foreign minister replied that was a matter for the cabinet to decide, and for now he must reserve all comment.43 Considering Yancey’s limited knowledge of European diplomacy, he had not done badly. After the meeting ended, he recorded in his diary that ‘‘favorable impressions seemed to have been made on Lord John, tho he was cautious & non-committal.’’ The Confederate commissioners met with Russell again on May , and with similar results. Without waiting for an official reply by Russell, Yancey sent Rost on to Paris to begin pleading the Confederate case in the court of Emperor Napoleon III.44 But both Yancey and Russell had made up their minds on some critical issues. 

n

In King Arthur’s Court

If only because of Lincoln’s blockade, Russell concluded that Britain must grant the Confederacy status as a belligerent, if not as a sovereign nation. The Confederacy ‘‘has . . . duly constituted itself, and carries on a regular form of administration of the Civil Government.’’ Russell deplored secession and held ‘‘the greatest apprehension and concern [for] the misery and desolation’’ sure to come. On May , Queen Victoria proclaimed that Great Britain would remain neutral, although the Palmerston government did, in fact, recognize the Confederacy as a belligerent.45 Despite this promising start, Yancey finally understood why the British would go no further and how difficult his mission would be. After spending just a few days talking to Englishmen and reading local newspapers, he concluded that public opinion in Britain was ‘‘entirely opposed to . . . slavery— and that the sincerity and universality of this feeling embarrasses the [Confederate] government in dealing with the question of our recognition.’’ And yet Yancey remained optimistic. ‘‘England in reality is not averse to a disintegration of the United States,’’ he reported, and leading British politicians presumed that complete recognition would come soon ‘‘unless the fortune of war should be against us.’’ 46 In fact, many English conservatives enjoyed the prospect of democracy’s death in America, and from the moment he arrived Yancey drew free trade advocates, such as William Gregory, like a magnet. But antislavery sentiment and the tide of battle, of course, would ultimately restrain further support from the British government. Meanwhile a war had begun. On April , the assistant secretary of state, William M. Browne, wrote to Yancey, Mann, and Rost that Captain Caleb Huse of the Confederate States Army had been appointed by Toombs to secure military ordnance in Europe. Huse had served as commandant of the corps of cadets at the University of Alabama before accepting this assignment. He arrived in England in early May and quickly secured a meeting with Fraser, Trenholm & Company in Liverpool, the English office of the Charleston firm headed by George A. Trenholm, who later served as Confederate secretary of the treasury. Company officials explained that they would not accept drafts of , Confederate dollars, but otherwise would try to help Huse any way they could. Huse left for London and conferred with Yancey on May . The two must have spoken briefly about Yancey’s sons at the university, Goodloe Harper and William Earle, but quickly set down to business. Although eventually Huse would procure substantial amounts of arms, supplies, and even paper for Confederate currency, his initial effort faltered, and he needed Yancey’s help.47 With matters stalled in England, Yancey and his colleagues turned their atIn King Arthur’s Court

n



tention toward France. Before Rost arrived in Paris, Russell had written to his minister there, Lord Cowley, about granting belligerent status. Cowley replied that the imperial government agreed, and so informed Mercier in Washington, D.C. Russell had hoped for Anglo-French cooperation in offering mediation in the American conflict, even with the certain knowledge that Seward resisted any form of European involvement. England and France also insisted that the United States abide by the Declaration of Paris of , even though it had never signed the document. This accord outlawed privateering, granted respect for ships sailing under neutral flags, and insisted that for other nations to respect a blockade, proof of its effectiveness had to come first.48 As in Britain, French opinion divided on secession. Orleanists and Republicans opposed slavery, supported free labor in the northern states, and—like Abraham Lincoln—believed that dissolution of the American Union could not take place legally without the consent of all its member states. On the other hand, as an emperor, Napoleon III clearly opposed democracy anywhere in the world. His semi-official newspaper, La patrie, gloated that ‘‘the work of George Washington has come to an end.’’ 49 Napoleon’s regime, however, had looked to the U.S. Navy as a check to Britain’s supremacy on the oceans, and the North as a damper to southern dreams of expansion into Latin America. France also worried about disruption to her supply of cotton, and cared far less than Britain about African American slavery.50 Rost took every advantage he could find, just as Mann and Yancey had in England. Almost immediately Rost met with Count de Morny, the illegitimate half-brother of Napoleon III and son of the French minister to England, Count Auguste Charles Joseph Flahaut. De Morny told Rost the Confederacy could rely on full recognition from France. In June, Rost met unofficially with the foreign minister, Antoine Edouard Thouvenel.51 Although he made no prediction about full recognition, Rost quickly apprised Yancey and Mann of these conferences, who in turn crowed to Toombs, ‘‘The opinion of the French people & of the gov’t, as far as could be learned, are considered to be quite favorable to our cause. . . . Anti-slavery sentiment is weak, & not active in Paris.’’ 52 While Rost helped lift Confederates’ spirits, Yancey began a series of meetings with pro-South Englishmen, including Thomas Baring and Joshua Bates of Baring Brothers. But his most important caller was William Shaw Lindsay, a wealthy shipowner and member of Parliament. After ‘‘a long & interesting interview’’ at Lindsay’s office, Lindsay invited the Alabamian to attend a meeting of Parliament. Yancey took his seat in the Peers’ gallery on the evening of May . After offi

n

In King Arthur’s Court

cial business concluded, Lindsay introduced him to several other members of Parliament. One of them, Edward Ball, lectured Yancey that ‘‘slavery was a sin & that God was displaying his displeasure to the South.’’ But Yancey’s other encounters more than offset Ball’s criticism. Yancey met John Arthur Roebuck, who would soon join Gregory and Lindsay in the Manchester Southern Club.53 John Laird immediately became an important new ally, both on the floor of Parliament and through his shipbuilding company. By June , Confederate agents contracted with the Laird Brothers to construct a cruiser named the  Alabama, which proved devastating to Union ships. Later, the Laird shipyards also produced two ironclad rams for the Confederacy. Laird and Yancey got along so well that the former had Yancey visit his country home for a few days in May. Despite the many, critical drawbacks that Yancey had as a diplomat, clearly his ‘‘unusual personal fascination and influence’’ worked well in small, unofficial circles.54 For one of the few times in his public life, Yancey had influential people taking the initiative and flocking to him. It went to his head. For Yancey especially, but for Mann and Rost as well, their early, apparent accomplishments and their absolute faith in their cause led them to misinterpret the motives of many of these Englishmen. Like William Gregory, Laird in fact proved a reliable proConfederate on the floor of Parliament. But it was personal and selfish political issues—free trade and the prospect of lucrative ship-building contracts—that drove these men to embrace Yancey and the Confederacy. Yancey never realized this. Yancey’s brief visit to the English countryside and his perceived initial diplomatic successes allowed him to do something else all but unprecedented for him: relax a little. Before he could fully unwind, on May  Yancey changed rooms from the sumptuous Westminster Palace Hotel to modest accommodations in a town house at  Half Moon Street in Picadilly. Always frugal, he happily noted that his new apartment cost only ‘‘½ guineas pr. week for the season, fires, lights, & attendance included.’’ The next day William G. Mann, son and private secretary to Dudley Mann, arrived from Montgomery, bearing letters for Yancey from his wife, Sarah, and from his son-in-law, John L. Harrell, who worked at the Confederate Post Office Department, adjoining Yancey and Elmore’s old law offices on Washington Street. With his spirits soaring, Yancey spent the following day sight-seeing. On May  he visited the zoological gardens, acquired a six-month ticket to use the British Library, and toured the Tower of London. Unable to divorce business entirely from pleasure, that evening he dined in Greenwich with Charles L. In King Arthur’s Court

n



Prioleau, a principal partner of Fraser, Trenholm & Company, the merchant firm that Caleb Huse had approached in vain a few days before. After his meeting with Yancey, Prioleau consistently provided credit for the Confederacy to purchase ships and weapons, and joined the Liverpool Southern Club when it formed in .55 A further, albeit quite temporary advantage for Yancey and company came from the conspicuous absence of their Yankee counterpart. Lincoln had designated Charles Francis Adams to serve as his minister to London. Descended from two presidents, both of whom had also held diplomatic posts in England, this Adams was a fervent abolitionist, and was just as stubborn and selfconfident as his presidential relatives. Despite the obvious urgency of the situation, Adams delayed his departure for London in order to attend the wedding of one of his sons.56 Arriving on May , Adams was shocked and angered to learn that Queen Victoria had proclaimed neutrality the previous day, before Adams even had a chance to speak to John Russell or any other cabinet member. Adams did not meet Russell until May , the very day a confident, composed Yancey played tourist. An agitated Adams made clear to Russell his and the Lincoln administration’s anger at the course of the British government to date. On behalf of Seward, Adams asked Russell for a pledge not to recognize Confederate independence. The foreign minister replied that Great Britain ‘‘must hold herself free to act according to the progress of events & as circumstances might require,’’ although he denied any sympathy for the rebellious slave states.57 Adams believed that he had helped prevent a bad situation from getting worse, but remained doubtful about how Seward would interpret his meeting with Russell. That evening Adams recorded in his diary, ‘‘The permanence of my stay is by no means certain.’’ 58 Seward was livid. Reacting to the limited successes of Yancey and his colleagues, Seward vowed to Charles Sumner, ‘‘God damn them, I’ll give them hell.’’ 59 Even before receiving Russell’s report of his meeting with Adams, Lord Lyons wrote to London that Seward barely remained ‘‘within the bounds of decency even in ordinary social intercourse.’’ Lyons feared that Seward’s hasty words could be ‘‘followed by violent deeds.’’ Unknown to Lyons when he penned that message on May , two days before Seward had sent Adams a dispatch instructing him to break off contact with Russell if the foreign minister met again with the Confederate commissioners, and adding that if Britain recognized the Confederacy, the United States would treat the British as an enemy. When Adams received this missive on June , even he doubted his superior’s mental stability. And on the very day that Adams read his instructions 

n

In King Arthur’s Court

in stunned privacy, the British government decided to strengthen its armed forces in Canada with three battalions, just in case Seward truly meant war.60 Adams met again with Russell and tempered the tone of Seward’s instructions, but emphasized that in fact Anglo-American relations had grown quite tenuous. Russell reassured Adams that he had never officially received the Confederates and had no plans to meet with their commissioners in the future. Adams’s report to Washington mollified the fiery secretary of state, to a degree.61 While Adams and Seward scrambled to catch up with Confederate movements in England, on June  Yancey left London and arrived in Paris to meet Rost. That night and the next day he met and dined with other Confederates, including Paul Pecquet Du Bellet, an attorney from New Orleans who had moved to Paris in . Du Bellet had already written articles for French newspapers defending the southern cause. Because Yancey was unable to converse in French and since Rost had already informed him that France would follow Britain’s lead, Yancey decided to rely on Rost’s efforts and relaxed and enjoyed the scenery and cuisine. He dined at Restaurant Des Trios Ferres Provencaux in Palais Royal and at Restaurant Durant at the corner of Rue Royale and Boulevard De La Madeleine, near the construction site of a new, opulent opera house. He visited the tomb of Napoleon Bonaparte—the man whose ships Yancey’s father had met in combat all those years ago—at Place des Invalides.62 Without any apparent involvement by Yancey or Rost, on June  France did follow the British lead and recognized the belligerent status of the Confederacy.63 William Dayton reported to Seward that Confederate efforts in France ‘‘have thus far been abortive.’’ They had little hope of gaining official recognition, and no success in their efforts to negotiate a loan or to procure arms. Yancey must have reached the same conclusion, and returned to London.64 Shortly after his return, Yancey turned his thoughts toward home. For the first time since his arrival in April, Yancey wrote to his brother. He discussed several legal matters, then turned to his family. Yancey had received a few letters from them. (In fact, personal correspondence managed to dodge the Union navy more quickly than letters sent by the Confederate government. One letter dated June  had come via Kentucky and was addressed to Baring Brothers & Co.) Yancey sorely missed his wife. ‘‘I have written to Sarah to come over,’’ especially if their daughter were to join her husband at his new position in the Confederate Post Office at Richmond. As it turned out, Mary and John Harrell did move to Virginia, but Sarah remained in Montgomery, so Yancey’s next request of his brother proved more poignant. Although Ben still lived in Atlanta, his brother wrote, ‘‘I must ask you to visit my family & farm, once a month In King Arthur’s Court

n



if possible, and see to my interests. None of the male members [of the family] are now with them.’’ Yancey’s son Ben had enlisted in the army, and Willie and Dalton were in Tuscaloosa at the university. Yancey begged his brother to ‘‘exercise your oral influence’’ over his young sons, and to encourage them ‘‘to remain quiet at school, & learn to be men. They are restless,’’ Yancey added, knowing that his teenagers ached to enlist in their country’s armed forces.65 Yancey needed more help from his brother, his most trusted friend and confidant. ‘‘Write once a week, & let me know the real condition of things, in both the civil and military aspect,’’ he asked. Most of Yancey’s news came from the North; no southern newspapers had made their way to London. He also admitted how ill prepared he had been for his mission: ‘‘Neither the [Confederate] Govt or I had a proper conception of European views & policy when I left.’’ France and Britain truly regretted the dissolution of the Union, and public opinion was strongly against the South at first, although Yancey now considered it ‘‘decidedly in our favor.’’ He believed that cotton supplies would run out by January, but that before that happened Britain would raise the Union blockade and recognize the Confederacy. He also repeated his conviction that ‘‘No[rthern] diplomats here are in bad odor—are contemptible. They are noisy, blustering & foolish.’’ By contrast, Yancey affirmed his vow to avoid the press and public demonstrations.66 On the same day that he penned a letter to Ben, Yancey also wrote to former governor Reuben Chapman and a young secessionist friend, Samuel G. Reid. To both he expressed concerns about his family’s financial well-being. The sudden shift of the Confederate capital to Richmond and disruptions caused by the war had an immediate and distressing impact upon the Yancey family. ‘‘My resources are drying up—my annual legal income is given up—My milk business is nearly destroyed—clients unable to pay old debts,’’ he groaned to Reid. Yancey asked both Reid and Chapman to repay loans they owed him, mostly for Sarah’s support.67 Of Reid, Yancey asked a special favor. Yancey had learned that the Montgomery Confederation—the paper of Yancey’s foe John J. Seibels—attacked the Confederate commissioners, demanded their recall, ‘‘& termed them broken down hacks & noisy demagogues—all this may be so,’’ Yancey jested, but asked Reid to use his influence to impress Seibels with the knowledge that northern newspapers reprinted such barbs, and that European journals did the same. ‘‘Could a northern tyrant do our commission more harm?’’ 68 To Chapman and to Reid Yancey also repeated his claims of initial success in his diplomatic mission. With Reid, Yancey let his guard down substantially, 

n

In King Arthur’s Court

both to confess error and to pat himself on the back. ‘‘In the first place, important as cotton is, it is not King in Europe,’’ Yancey at last understood. Furthermore, ‘‘The Anti-slavery sentiment is universal. Uncle Tom’s Cabin has been read & believed.’’ If he had known of the difficulty involved in this mission, Yancey now claimed, he would not have accepted it, but vowed to remain and to do his duty. He concluded that his efforts had helped change the minds of leading British officials, ‘‘an Herculean task & required Time & Tact.’’ When cotton supplies ran low at year’s end, he repeated, Britain would raise the blockade and the Confederacy would gain all it needed.69 After catching up on personal matters, on July  Yancey and Mann composed an official report for Secretary Toombs. They had not received a message since May , and would not again until November, due largely to a growing northern intelligence organization.70 They summarized both Rost’s meeting with Thouvenel, and reported that while most Englishmen did not consider secession a legal right, most saw the American conflict as a struggle for self-government, just as in . The English also now clearly understood the South’s determination to win independence. More than ever before Yancey believed that formal recognition was but a matter of time. Besides, Seward’s course ‘‘has been considered offensive,’’ and ‘‘Mr. Adams is considered a blunderer.’’ Yancey and Mann decided ‘‘to allow the blunders of our enemies to have full effect on the public mind.’’ In contrast they would remain reserved, but not passive, and continue to focus their efforts on key businessmen and government officials. Yancey and Mann then explained their plan for the next few months. As soon as Confederate troops achieved a major battlefield victory, Yancey and the others would demand official recognition. Otherwise, they would have to wait for what they considered the inevitable run on cotton supplies. Meanwhile, Yancey requested that the Confederate government keep the commissioners well informed about the effectiveness of the blockade. If they could prove it ineffective—a blockade on paper only—Britain would likely ignore it.71 On the first of August Yancey reported a slightly new strategy to Toombs. They were so certain that both the English and French governments’ views on the question of recognition hinged on ‘‘military events in Virginia that we have felt it useless & unwise to press that issue further than we have already done.’’ Meanwhile, the commissioners would turn their attention to shaping public opinion. Although Yancey had just boasted to Reid and others that, in sharp contrast to the Union, Confederate commissioners knew ‘‘diplomacy does not act through public journals here,’’ and that ‘‘we are sent here to deal with the In King Arthur’s Court

n



British Cabinet & not with the newspaper public,’’ Yancey and his colleagues now believed that over time public opinion would matter greatly.72 And then Yancey learned about the Battle of Bull Run. An impatient Lincoln finally forced his army into combat in northern Virginia. They met resistance on July  at Manassas Junction. After initial Union advances, Thomas J. ‘‘Stonewall’’ Jackson rallied his men and repelled the invading Union army, sobering the North and thrilling the South. Still unable to receive southern newspapers, Yancey, Mann, and Rost learned about this first major battle through northern and British sources. The three reported from London, ‘‘The sensation produced . . . both here and in Paris was profound.’’ Few believed now that the North could force the South back into the Union.73 Yancey had already summoned Rost to London and had sent a letter to John Russell asking for another informal meeting, but now he needed guidance from Richmond. The three commissioners could not agree on their next move. If Russell would not receive them officially, should they wait until he did or ‘‘respectfully demand and receive a reply’’? If rejected, should they proceed to other nations and make the same demand, or ask Richmond to call them home? The impatient tone of this letter betrayed Yancey’s heavy hand, as did the final passage. Russell had responded to their note just before they finished this letter, but asked the three to submit any communication to him in writing. Furthermore, the foreign minister signed his letter ‘‘Earl Russell,’’ without using his governmental title. Yancey told Toombs that the Confederates would respond as Commissioners of the Confederate States of America—an official response to an unofficial communication. They asked for Jefferson Davis’s personal attention to these matters, but would receive no orders until the end of the year.74 Meanwhile, Yancey took charge. With his colleagues Yancey composed a long letter to Russell. It repeated their earlier justification for secession, but Yancey now emphasized a slightly different, yet highly significant reason. Although he had declared secession a Constitutional right for over ten years, now, to ‘‘her Britannic Majesty’s Government,’’ he focused on the right of revolution as delineated in the Declaration of Independence that had toppled British rule in America generations before, an unwise decision to be sure. ‘‘Whether . . . government should be administered by one tyrant, or the more heartless and equally effectual despotism of a sectional and tyrannical majority, could make no difference in the application of the principle’’ that people had an inalienable right to protect their rights and to alter or abolish governments destructive of those rights. In the same breath Yancey also insisted that the position of the Confederate States ‘‘was not that 

n

In King Arthur’s Court

of rebels subject to be dealt with as traitors and pirates by their enemy, but the dignified and solemn conduct of a belligerent power, struggling with wisdom and energy to assume a place among the great States of the civilized world.’’ 75 The Confederates then objected to Britain’s supposed neutrality. Yancey explained that with no navy to speak of, the southern republic had no choice but to issues letters of marque—to commission commerce raiders. Yet Britain’s stance that no public or privately armed vessels of either side could enter British ports favored the North with its huge merchant fleet and effectively prohibited any Confederate shipping, since the vessels would have to be armed to run through the Union blockade.76 Then Yancey referred to the recent history of British diplomacy. He understood why at the initial meeting with Russell in May the British government was reluctant to antagonize Washington by recognizing the Confederacy, before there had been a major military conflict. And yet Yancey reminded the foreign minister that the British had recognized Texas independence while a Mexican army still sought to recapture that rebellious province, and did the same with republics in Latin America despite Spanish claims of sovereignty, as well as the de facto governments of Belgium, Greece, and Italy, too.77 And since the earlier meeting with Russell, the Confederate States had proven themselves a formidable power. They numbered eleven now, with millions more people and considerably greater resources. They defended themselves successfully ‘‘in a fair field’’ and drove to flight ‘‘the myriad of invaders’’ sent to crush them. And Yancey told Russell that even with unchecked naval supremacy, Lincoln’s blockade proved ineffectual.78 Next Yancey addressed slavery directly. He acknowledged England’s reluctance to embrace a government that considered ‘‘slavery part of the human race,’’ and therefore simply declared, ‘‘The question of the morality of slavery is not for the undersigned to discuss with any foreign power.’’ But then Yancey quickly reminded Russell that the American Declaration of Independence did not eradicate African slavery, and that British law had supported it at that time. Yancey correctly noted Lincoln’s promise not to interfere with the institution of slavery, and cited the recent resolution by the Federal Congress to maintain the ‘‘(pro-slavery) constitution and to enforce the laws (many of them proslavery),’’ as well as military orders to Union forces not to interfere with southerners’ ownership of their human property.79 Yancey closed the letter to Russell with a promise and a threat. Although in private Yancey had recently conceded that cotton was not king, he reminded Russell that the cotton harvest would begin soon and emphasized the ‘‘necesIn King Arthur’s Court

n



sity of commercial relations’’ between their countries. If England did not offer recognition, Yancey vowed that the Confederacy would nevertheless fight on to victory and absolve themselves of moral responsibility for the bloodshed that would follow, or for the suffering inflicted upon millions of people in Europe when cotton famine toppled the economic foundations of industrial nations there.80 Ten days later, Russell sent a terse reply to the commissioners ‘‘of the so-styled Confederate States of North America.’’ The minister repeated his government’s regret that differences within the United States had resulted in war, but explained that Her Majesty considered it a civil conflict, not a war for southern independence, and therefore would continue to maintain strict neutrality. The only hope for a change in policy depended upon ‘‘the fortune of arms or the more peaceful mode of negotiation’’ between the two parties themselves.81 It was the last communication between the Foreign Office and the Confederate commissioners. Before he received Russell’s note, Yancey returned his attention to home. Unable to correspond with many of his friends and confronted by ‘‘angry seas, hostile fleets, blockaded ports, and a border of inquisitive Yankeedom,’’ on August  he composed a circular letter to catch up. He remained guarded in his comments in case the Federals intercepted his message, but he summarized his experiences and accomplishments to date. When he had arrived in Britain, Yancey explained, he was amazed at their ‘‘utter ignorance of the South, of its people its civilization, its resources, and of the corresponding idea of Superiority of the North.’’ It had first seemed to him that England might easily have joined the North in an effort ‘‘to wipe out slavery.’’ But things had changed considerably, and Yancey implicitly took most of the credit for that.82 Now, Yancey continued, England no longer saw the American conflict ‘‘with anti-slavery eyes,’’ but instead believed that selfish considerations alone motivated the North. Still blinded by the flattering attention of free trade and business leaders, Yancey incorrectly concluded that England desired ‘‘rather to control the master than to free the slave, with a cute view of profiting by the Slaves labor.’’ Without any factual foundation, Yancey reported that public opinion in England now favored Confederate independence and that the government conferred belligerent status in recognition of secession as a national movement. He correctly emphasized that Britain desired to stay out of an essentially American conflict, and that all Europe followed her lead. Despite official British neutrality, Yancey claimed that he, Mann, and Rost had accomplished a great deal. In boasting that the South had received ‘‘every

n

In King Arthur’s Court

thing but an actual & avowed recognition of her Commissioners, and treaties of commerce,’’ perhaps Yancey simply betrayed his ignorance about how critical those items were, or how regularly Britain unofficially greeted foreign guests with claims of sovereignty. At any rate, Yancey promised that those additional steps would follow ‘‘in the wake of military success—so overwhelming as to prevent the U.S. even from seeing its justice.’’ Meanwhile, even though he had just told Russell that the Union blockade was ineffectual, Yancey assured his Confederate friends that ‘‘All Europe’’ feels the blockade, especially the industrial communities of England and France. Yancey predicted that sooner or later England and France would demand that the Union end its blockade, or that the European powers would do so themselves. Either way, Yancey reasoned in the logic of blind optimism, ‘‘the U.S. will consider it as an unfriendly act and these countries, rather than risk offending the U.S. farther, will postpone recognition.’’ But regardless of the blockade, Yancey guaranteed that military victory would result in full recognition. Ten days after composing this optimistic report, Yancey provided evidence that he believed it himself. He attached a postscript to the circular for his brother that denied nothing he had written but modified a lot. ‘‘The war will be a long one, if the North can get the means.’’ If not, Yancey confidently predicted, ‘‘we will whip them so badly, that a Peace Party there will grow in to power.’’ Recognition from Britain would require not one, but ‘‘several great victories.’’ He urged Ben to fill him in about public men and issues and complained that he still could not get a southern newspaper. Yancey had not received a letter from home since June  and clearly longed to return. Although in his July  letter to Ben, Yancey had reported, ‘‘I am in perfect health,’’ now he marveled, ‘‘I am fattening and growing gray, but I am not in sound health— my bowels are not right—& my back pains me.’’ 83 At about the same time, Yancey composed a heartfelt letter to his eldest son. The younger Ben Yancey now served as an artillery captain in the Confederate army, stationed at Fort Morgan in Mobile Bay. Yancey scolded his son for writing so little to his faraway father, especially regarding personal matters. Yancey explained that he received war news regularly from northern and Canadian sources, but that he knew almost nothing of his son’s experiences: the name of his commander, the condition of the forts in Mobile, other officers, enlisted men, local militia, as well as more parental concerns such as how well Ben was learning his job. ‘‘None of that is to be found in the newspapers,’’ he quipped sarcastically. And while Yancey received four letters from Sarah in Montgomery dated since June , Sarah reported receiving none from her son in months. In King Arthur’s Court

n



‘‘In my eye all this is wrong—yea, it is cruel,’’ he scolded. Yet unable to work up much anger toward his son, Yancey sighed, ‘‘How you look at it is another thing.’’ Yancey then offered the same news of himself that he yearned for from his son. He reported his weight gain and claimed to feel well—very likely a lie so as not to trouble his son. The next news must have struck Ben as bizarre as he sweltered on the Gulf of Mexico in August. ‘‘The summer here has been delightful. I have worn broadcloth all the time and sleep under two blankets every night.’’ But Yancey complained that fruit was expensive and did not taste good—not like the food back home in the sunny South. The diplomatic news that Yancey gave his son repeated Yancey’s confidence to others, that ‘‘the South will win its cause.’’ But now he mentioned that the British could stretch out their cotton supply by importing more from her colonies in India. On a more positive note, Yancey added that Spain, Denmark, Belgium, and Prussia ‘‘are all ready to recognize us to-day, but will act only when the great powers act.’’ 84 Finally, the frugal father passed along money-saving tips to his son. The British fixed their high foreign postage rates by weight, ‘‘hence I write closely on silk paper.’’ The rates doubled if they were not pre-paid, and ‘‘I paid for your letter  cents.’’ A similar letter cost just over  cents in the Confederacy.85 And in case Ben did not get the hint, Yancey enclosed a pre-paid silk envelope and silk sheet for his son’s use. He instructed Ben to send future letters to George Foster in New Orleans, with a request to forward them through John Monroe & Co. of New York, who in turn should address them to Yancey under the name Arthur Dare,  Half Moon Street, London. Yancey played on the fact that the first English subject born in colonial America bore the name Virginia Dare, and over  years later Yancey was the first high-ranking Confederate to return to King Arthur’s court. The concerns about secure communications that Yancey had expressed in his circular letter had a sound foundation. In both Britain and America, Union operatives kept a close watch on Yancey and all those around him, reporting frequently to Secretary Seward or to his son, Assistant Secretary of State Frederick W. Seward. In May the superintendent of the New York city police department, John A. Kennedy, notified William Seward that he had detained two Texas families, acting on rumors that they were carrying dispatches for Yancey and Mann. Kennedy discovered no dispatches. On July , Alan Pinkerton, founder of the detective agency that bore his name, wrote directly to President Lincoln about ‘‘a reliable source’’ who told him that Yancey was about to re

n

In King Arthur’s Court

enter the United States through the North—in disguise. Pinkerton asked permission to arrest him: ‘‘It occurred to me that it might be advisable to have a few such hostages’’ in case the Confederates harmed unionists held in southern prisons. Of course, Yancey had not left London. But despite these sometimes stumbling efforts, Union intelligence did intercept Yancey’s letter to his son, dated August . Frederick Seward sent extracts of it to Superintendent Kennedy in New York and Postmaster General Montgomery Blair, requesting a close eye kept on John Monroe and Company, as well as all letters sent to London to ‘‘Arthur Dare.’’ 86 Sure that military actions in Virginia now superseded diplomacy per se and longing to reunite with his family, by the end of August Yancey decided to resign his commission and to go home. But one frustrating event after another delayed his homecoming. A new Confederate secretary of state, Robert M. T. Hunter of Virginia, did not officially acknowledge Yancey’s resignation until September .87 His replacements, James M. Mason and John Slidell, did not depart until October  and, after a delay that became an international incident, would not arrive in Europe until January . All this left Yancey with what he most detested: time to kill. Despite this, no record suggests that he renewed his earlier trips to the British Library or zoological gardens or visited country estates. Instead he busied himself by working with Confederate propagandists to sway the masses, and with agents and merchants to acquire war materiel. Jefferson Davis had charged Yancey with the task of gaining European recognition and aid for the Confederacy. Yancey failed to do so. But by June , even Charles Francis Adams admitted to Seward that the tide of war would ultimately determine the success or failure of Confederate (and therefore of Union) diplomatic efforts. Yancey had figured that out by August.88 And considering Yancey’s lack of experience, scant preparation, propensity to explode emotionally, and the insubstantial backing of the Davis administration, he certainly performed better than most could have imagined, and as well as anyone could have under the circumstances. He restrained his temper and his natural inclination to take to the stump for a cause. He proved disarming, if not charming, to hostile and skeptical listeners, just as he had recently done on his campaign swing through the United States. Yancey worked as a team leader, and for the first time in his life aimed at accomplishing the possible while striving for the ideal, rather than the other way around. He opened and maintained dialogue with politicians and established important connections with financial and industrial leaders.89 While Yancey impatiently waited for his successors to replace him, he continued these exertions on all fronts. In King Arthur’s Court

n



CHAPTER SIXTEEN

Journeys Home Yancey had no idea how long it would take for his replacements to arrive in London. While he waited, he worked to enlist popular support in Britain and to procure material aid for his country. A letter to Yancey from Sir Archibald Alison, author of a pamphlet on government reform, contained a suggestion that all North American republics ought to have a national church and a monarchy, and end slavery—in short, they should resemble Great Britain.1 Alison’s letter provided Yancey with an opportunity for a series of public salvos on behalf of the Confederacy. Yancey first attacked Alison’s contention that a national church would strengthen ‘‘the bonds of love, sincerity and liberty,’’ and replace ‘‘hatred, hypocrisy and oppression.’’ Religious orthodoxy had been a part of Yancey’s life from his childhood days in the Beman household through his strident opposition to the intolerance of Know-Nothings in the s. His passions triggered, Yancey replied unequivocally. ‘‘I have no doubt that a National Church in a considerable degree, controls public opinion,’’ but that control, Yancey argued, lim-

ited freedom of thought and personal conscience. He believed history revealed that over time all established churches became corrupt. The relationship between human beings and God, Yancey insisted in good American Protestant form, must neither be governed by state nor even by church, but left to each individual. The histories of national churches in Prussia, Italy, Spain, France, England, Mexico, and Turkey proved to Yancey that these institutions neither fostered love or liberty nor stamped out oppression or hatred. Rather than jeopardize people’s souls by shackling them with ‘‘a Procrustean religious faith in order to carry out political ideas,’’ Yancey concluded that it would be far better to plainly ‘‘devise a scheme of unmixed National despotism.’’ 2 Whatever ills befell the United States before secession, according to Yancey, did not result from religious freedom but instead from ‘‘too much personal freedom.’’ Yancey attacked northern values and contrasted them with an implicit statement of superior southern manners and morals. Echoing the sentiments of many Confederates, Yancey proposed that the great distinction between North and South rested upon the greed of the former. Tapping again some of the ideas that he had formulated after reading Frederick Law Olmstead a few years before, Yancey explained, ‘‘The chief motive power in the Northern Mind is that of acquisition,’’ at the expense of ‘‘the great quality of self-denial— or of pure honesty.’’ The result, Yancey offered, was plain to see: ‘‘The North . . . has proven itself to be in a great degree incapable of self government.’’ Rather than using restraint in political matters, the North used its numerical majority to carry on ‘‘a system of unconstitutional legislative robbery of their wealthier neighbors of the South.’’ 3 Yancey scoffed at the idea that North American states should have a monarchy, and ridiculed Alison’s suggestion that European royal families could provide such a ruler. What had anyone in any of those families ever accomplished, intellectually or morally, that would tempt Americans to submit to their leadership, Yancey asked? He juxtaposed European royalty to America’s home-grown leaders, including Washington, Jefferson, Madison, Jackson, Clay, Webster, Calhoun, and Davis. ‘‘As long as the American mind had not become tainted by negro fanatics,’’ Yancey concluded, the American federal government had proved its worth and distinction for three quarters of a century. Then Yancey turned directly to the slavery question for the first time in any public forum in Britain. Alison had criticized Abraham Lincoln for failing to make abolition of slavery a war aim, and stated that ‘‘while the South is honest in a wrong thing, the North is dishonest in a right thing.’’ Yancey fired back by repeating a widely held (but inaccurate) southern view that ‘‘the British govJourneys Home

n



ernment forced the African slave trade upon the American colonies.’’ 4 Yancey noted accurately that those slaves living in America at the end of its Revolution had increased to four million in number, worth on average , each. And Yancey was dead on target by adding that great social, commercial, manufacturing, agricultural, and political interests had long ago become ‘‘intimately interwoven’’ with black servitude. The founders of the United States recognized these facts and left the matter for each state to regulate. Alison, according to Yancey, encouraged the North ‘‘by the power of arms to rob the Southern owners of their slave property, and to set them free.’’ He concluded defiantly that, as a slaveholder with legal title to his slaves derived from English laws, he preferred to stand on his rights in the face of the civilized and Christian world rather than yield to the criticisms of Alison’s pamphlet. Yancey closed his letter by contesting Alison’s argument that a continuation of slavery meant a recurrence of the African slave trade. Whether he actually believed it or simply made a bald, false assertion, Yancey claimed that since Congress outlawed the trade in , fewer than  slaves had been brought to the United States and most of those over the past two years, ‘‘more as a political, than commercial transaction.’’ He correctly informed Alison that the new Confederate constitution outlawed the trade as well, and that ‘‘the great mass of the people of the Southern States’’ condemned it, as Yancey himself had discovered during his public discourse on the topic in recent years. Back in fighting form, Yancey eagerly accepted subsequent opportunities to defend the Confederate cause. And by the summer of , he had a lot of help. With the arrival in London of Edwin De Leon, Confederates continued to build on their early initiatives and further frustrated Charles Francis Adams and William H. Seward. A South Carolinian trained in law, friend of Jefferson Davis, and former editor of the Washington Southern Press, De Leon had served as consul to Alexandria, Egypt, from  to . De Leon arrived in Paris by May . He first met Dudley Mann, then Yancey and Rost. De Leon served as an unofficial Confederate propagandist, writing editorials in both France and England to combat those composed by his Yankee counterparts. Among others, De Leon worked with Paul Pecquet Du Bellet, the New Orleans attorney in Paris who had already penned pro-Confederate editorials and who met with Yancey in June.5 De Leon welcomed Yancey’s help, and considered him both ‘‘a great talker and a strong reasoner,’’ who never failed to impress prominent Englishmen.6 More help followed with the appearance of James D. Bulloch, a purchasing agent appointed by Navy Secretary Stephen Mallory, who arrived at Liver

n

Journeys Home

pool in June. A Georgian with a long and distinguished naval career, Bulloch immediately set to work trying to purchase or commission commerce raiders both to attack Union merchant vessels and to lure away federal blockade ships. Bulloch also worked closely with fellow Confederate purchasing agents Major Edward C. Anderson and Captain Caleb Huse to acquire naval ordnance. Yancey assisted Bulloch’s task through his meetings with the shipping firm of Fraser, Trenholm & Company; the firm started to send out blockade runners shortly after Bulloch’s arrival. The armed Bermuda, with a million dollars worth of goods, swiftly steamed out of England in August. This move evoked a sharp protest from Adams, who cited both the queen’s proclamation of neutrality and Britain’s own Foreign Enlistment Act. John Russell rejected the protest on the basis that the government itself remained neutral; only a few subjects of the crown aided the South. This paved the way for more supply ships and greatly angered Adams and Seward. By August , Bulloch had signed a contract with William Laird and Sons—other British shippers whom Yancey had already courted—for the construction of a specially designed warship, the Alabama, which devastated Union shipping, and two ironclad rams.7 Before the year’s end, a disgruntled William Seward complained to Charles Francis Adams, ‘‘The activity and success of the insurgents in getting military and naval stores and munitions out of Europe, and especially out of Great Britain, are a subject of deep concern.’’ 8 Yancey worked diligently to support the efforts of Bulloch, Huse, and Anderson. Sometimes, however, he was too enthusiastic. In August, Yancey met with an angry Major Anderson, who protested the Alabamian’s efforts to secure appointments in the Confederate army for British ‘‘adventurers.’’ In particular Anderson scolded Yancey for accepting the services offered by one man who had recently hounded Anderson for a military commission. Anderson protested that Yancey had ‘‘no knowledge whatever of the man,’’ who, according to Anderson, turned out to be a Yankee spy. Anderson reminded Yancey that each of them had separate and distinct jobs: Anderson represented the War Department, and Yancey the Department of State. ‘‘We had some very plain talk,’’ Anderson recalled. In fact, both exchanged harsh words and criticized each other. At one point, ‘‘as if to back up his venom,’’ according to Anderson, Yancey blamed him for a missed opportunity to acquire , muskets from France because of a single day’s delay in authorizing their purchase. Anderson snapped back that no such offer had come up, and at any rate that Yancey ‘‘had nothing whatever to do with purchases.’’ 9 Whatever acumen Yancey attained as a diplomat clearly surpassed his skills Journeys Home

n



at recruitment and acquisition of materiel. But even his tenure as a diplomat would end soon, due in part to changes in the Confederate State Department. On July  Secretary of State Robert Toombs resigned and took to the battlefield as a brigadier general. Virginian Robert M. T. Hunter replaced him the same day. Within a month, and not yet aware of Yancey’s determination to return home, Jefferson Davis named James Mason of Virginia and John Slidell of Louisiana to augment the Confederate diplomatic team in Europe. On August , Hunter sent new instructions to Yancey, Mann, and Rost: hurry to Madrid. ‘‘Of all the great powers of Europe, Spain alone is interested through her colonies in the same social system which pervades the Confederate States,’’ Hunter explained, referring of course to slavery. Particularly with regard toward Cuba, Hunter urged the commissioners to emphasize that the antislavery Union posed a great threat to Spanish colonies, where slave labor generated tremendous wealth. He also suggested that if Spain distrusted Confederate intentions because of frequent southern demands for the annexation of Cuba, Yancey and company should assure the Spanish that those efforts concerned the political balance of power between the sections of the old United States, and vanished with secession. Rost, because of his language skills, went alone to Madrid, but his mission came to naught.10 Letters, instructions, and information meandered slowly across the Atlantic, and these delays knocked out of sequence all sorts of actions and consequences. Jefferson Davis did not receive Yancey’s August letter requesting resignation until September , and Yancey did not receive acknowledgment of that until November .11 In between, Yancey wrote a letter to the Montgomery Advertiser which was reprinted across the South. ‘‘If I cannot finish my mission here, or shall not be honorably recalled before the first of January, I shall ask the President to recall me,’’ he explained. The weight and frustration of his mission and the long absence from home clearly manifested itself. Yancey complained, ‘‘I came here reluctantly, at his [ Jefferson Davis’s] request—at great personal and pecuniary sacrifice—which I cannot continue longer,’’ but promised that many able men in the Confederacy could replace him. But a greater motivation lured Yancey’s thoughts to home: his interest and expressed willingness to serve in the Confederate Senate.12 Before the Provisional Confederate Congress adjourned, Alabamians, like other Confederates, began considering who would represent their state in the first term of the regular Congress. Elections would take place on the first Wednesday of November. In a distinct and conscious effort not to resume the often disruptive, vicious partisan contests that characterized so many American elec

n

Journeys Home

tions, no formal party organizations appeared in the Confederacy, at least overtly. Gone were the days of petty bickering between Democrats and Whigs, or more recently secessionists, cooperationists, and unionists. All would unite in the cause of the South in a collective act of patriotic transcendence, at least in theory.13 By July candidates for Alabama’s legislature found themselves pressed to announce whom they would support for the Confederate Senate. W. C. Bibbs complained that all he heard from voters was their interest in Yancey. ‘‘This question seems to have become a fixture at every election,’’ Bibbs grumbled in a letter to the Montgomery Daily Post, and refused to announce his preference. The Post, which had supported Bell in , unabashedly revealed its Whig partisanship by declaring, ‘‘In the name of common sense I ask is Mr. Yancey the only man in the Confederate States fit to legislate for us? If so, let us proclaim him dictator at once.’’ The Post then praised Yancey’s abilities and patriotism, but proposed that Thomas Watts or William Chilton or Samuel F. Rice—all former Whigs—could better serve the state.14 Clearly some of this information made its way to Yancey, and stirred his politician’s blood. But Yancey remained in Europe and generally focused upon his diplomatic mission. By October he and his colleagues had already decided upon another round of talks with English and French leaders because of mounting public concerns in Europe over their cotton supplies.15 Private expressions of anxiety by British and French leaders might have leaked out as well. In August, John Russell wrote to Lord Lyons in Washington, boldly suggesting that small ships could defy the Union blockade and run cotton from the Confederacy to British ports in Jamaica and the Bahamas where it could be transferred to larger cargo vessels. In a subsequent letter Russell reiterated his concern: ‘‘I do not see how  miles of coast and  miles of land frontier are to be guarded against that . . . disciple of Adam Smith, the Smuggler.’’ Prime Minister Palmerston was more blunt, telling Russell that alone or with France, Britain must tell the United States ‘‘that we cannot allow some millions of our people to perish’’ on account of the American war, and ‘‘that the Blockade of the South must be so far relaxed as to allow Cotton loaded ships to come out.’’ 16 In September the French commissioner to Washington, Henri Mercier, showed Lyons a letter from Foreign Minister Thouvenel that expressed trepidations about cotton shortages in France. Thouvenel still wanted to coordinate his American policy with Britain, but now emphatically recommended official recognition of the Confederacy together with an announcement that the North must allow uninterrupted trade. Mercier thought this strategy could help end Journeys Home

n



the war, giving Union peace advocates more rationale ‘‘for protesting hopelessness of continued war.’’ 17 Yancey’s sources accurately reported to him that many British cabinet ministers were ‘‘anxiously considering the question of recognition.’’ An optimistic Yancey relayed that news to R. M. T. Hunter and passed along British newspaper reports that not enough cotton remained to last to the end of the year, that workers in cotton factories faced half-time work and reduced wages. Poor harvests in France exacerbated that country’s economic woes and raised fears about the loss of cotton. Yancey knew that ‘‘Exeter Hall’’ abolitionists in London and Orleanists and Red Republicans in France remained stubbornly opposed to Confederate recognition, but suggested that further efforts to influence public opinion would counter those voices. Yancey also conceded that a ‘‘signal triumph’’ over the Union army commanded by George B. McClellan would, more than anything, sway public opinion toward recognition. Meanwhile Yancey joined Rost in Paris by October  and asked for an interview with the emperor.18 Yancey and Rost never met Napoleon III, and waited until October  before obtaining an unofficial and fruitless interview with his foreign minister. Thouvenel repeated that France would follow Britain’s lead, but indicated that an important military victory would greatly influence the actions of both powers. He also informed Yancey that both nations were monitoring the Union blockade and agreed it was not fully effective, though ‘‘not so ineffective as to authorize a protest against it.’’ But Yancey still concluded that France was leaning toward recognition of the Confederacy, left Paris for the last time, and returned to London.19 A frustrated Yancey reached the British capital by November  with his thoughts mostly on his home and family. He must have wondered how much longer it would take before Mason and Slidell would arrive to relieve him. He had long complained of ‘‘gross neglect’’ by the Confederate government. Sarah Yancey had even passed along those remarks to the Montgomery Advertiser, and, in turn, a well-intentioned friend of the Yanceys sent word of that to Jefferson Davis, obviously unaware of the president’s hypersensitivity to public criticism. Yancey did not even know where his wife was at this time, in Montgomery or in Richmond with their son-in-law, John Harrell. He wrote to Secretary of State Hunter to help locate her.20 As matters drifted out of his control, Yancey anchored himself in the things that had always bolstered his self-confidence: public speaking and writing. He resumed his work with De Leon and others to publicize the Confederate cause in the British press. On his recent trip to Paris, Yancey had already penned a 

n

Journeys Home

letter to the editor of the Times of London in response to a recent remark by a member of Parliament, W. E. Foster, who said that Yancey supported revival of the African slave trade. As he had been forced to do so often since his statements in  at the Montgomery Commercial Convention, Yancey replied—literally, but disingenuously—that he had merely wished to condemn as unconstitutional federal laws that branded the trade as piracy.21 Of course, Yancey did not mention his advocacy of renewing the trade in . Tired of diplomatic tact and a defensive posture, Yancey seized upon an opportunity to launch an offensive. The Worshipful Company of Fishmongers, one of the oldest guilds in London, provided an unlikely but welcome public forum for Yancey on the evening of November . That night at the Greek revival hall near London Bridge, the Lord Warden hosted Yancey, Mann, Caleb Huse, and other Confederates, as well as a number of Americans from the North and the Lord Mayor of London, William Cubitt. Everyone sat together at tables arranged in a horseshoe formation, with Yancey seated to the left of the warden.22 Before dinner the Lord Warden began a series of toasts. Among the first was one to the ‘‘new nation,’’ to William L. Yancey, and ‘‘our guests from the Confederate States of America.’’ An apprehensive Caleb Huse, fearing that Yancey’s remarks would prove ‘‘anything but appropriate,’’ remained seated as Mann and other Confederate guests stood by Yancey as he rose to speak. ‘‘I could not have been more in error,’’ Huse later recalled. Yancey said that two American nations now existed, one Confederate, one Federal. ‘‘I am a Confederate, or—as the Federal American, unmindful of the character of our common forefathers, disdainfully terms me—a rebel.’’ Yancey explained that economic activities, soil, and climate in the South ‘‘are totally different from those of the North,’’ but he remained silent about slavery. Yancey expressed his gratitude that Britain and France had at least recognized the Confederacy as a belligerent, and then, most surprising to Huse, expressed his desire for peace and sat down.23 Within Fishmongers’ Hall, Huse remembered ‘‘a storm of applause’’ followed Yancey’s brief speech, drowning out the relative few who had tried to distract Yancey by stomping their feet and rattling their glasses. Public reaction in Britain and the Union, however, was quite different. J. Sella Martin, a fugitive slave actively involved in British abolitionism, refuted Yancey’s insinuation that the Confederate effort represented a nationalist, separatist movement, and chastised Yancey as a proslavery advocate. Another British abolitionist, George Thompson, found a copy of Yancey’s letter to De Bow’s Review in  in which the fire-eater denounced the ban on the African slave trade. William Lloyd Journeys Home

n



Garrison’s Liberator and the Washington National Intelligencer offered their own pointed criticism.24 Although reacting to Yancey’s letter to the Times of October  more than to the remarks at Fishmongers’ Hall, a grave and disparaging voice from Troy, New York, added his own criticism of Yancey. Rev. Nathan Beman spoke out publicly for the only time about his stepson. ‘‘But a few weeks ago, William L. Yancey declared in London that the abolition of the slave trade was in repugnance to the Constitution,’’ Beman explained in a Thanksgiving sermon. ‘‘To justify this revolution and to authorize disobedience to the established government of any country, revolutionists are required to make out a clear and indisputable case of wrong and oppression,’’ Beman continued. But while the Confederates claimed to have the same love of liberty that motivated the founders to rebel against Britain, in fact they did not. Their sole motive for seceding lay in the fact that the North considered slavery a curse to the master as well as the slave, ‘‘and because we like to speak freely on this subject as on all others.’’ 25 Before the news of and reactions to Yancey’s public remarks spread across the Atlantic, two things occurred that radically altered Yancey’s priorities. The first was his election to the Confederate Senate. As Alabama assemblymen gathered to cast their votes, even Yancey’s staunchest foes realized the certainty of his victory. From Limestone County in north Alabama, Joshua P. Coman grumbled, ‘‘No conservative man can possibly live in this Sea of Secession—he can’t touch bottom no where.’’ Coman believed that not only would any anti-Yancey candidate go down to defeat, but that he would ‘‘have his posteriors so ricked and mauled that he is bound to pass bloody urine for six months thereafter.’’ In August, Yancey’s fire-eating associate, John Gill Shorter of Eufaula, handily defeated Thomas H. Watts for the governorship. The writing on the wall was so clear that Yancey’s opponent for the Senate seat in , Ben Fitzpatrick, withdrew before the vote: Yancey won unanimously.26 Of greater significance, just one day before Yancey spoke at Fishmongers’ Hall, an international incident erupted that threatened not only to further delay his return home, but also threatened—or promised—the possibility of war between Great Britain and the United States. Yancey’s replacements, James Mason and John Slidell, had made their way from Charleston through the Union blockade to Nassau in the Bahamas, then to Cuba by October . There they obtained passage to Britain aboard the Trent, a royal mail steamship. The new commissioners did not try to hide their plans, confident of the protection that international law bestowed upon the sovereignty of every nation’s vessels. But Charles Wilkes, captain of the  San Jacinto, intercepted the Trent, fired 

n

Journeys Home

a shot across its bow, and had an armed crew board her and forcibly seize the Confederates. Eventually Mason and Slidell were held as prisoners at Fort Warren in Boston harbor under orders from William Seward.27 The Palmerston ministry reacted swiftly and severely. The prime minister formed a War Committee to study the matter; it concluded that Wilkes’s action had violated international law, and studied the possibility of war against the United States. In the North popular opinion overwhelmingly supported the capture of these rebels, and in the South, Confederates could barely conceal their joy at the prospect of a Yankee blunder winning them an active British military ally. Lord Russell instructed Lyons to deliver an ultimatum to Lincoln: release the prisoners and issue a public apology within a week. If Lincoln refused, Russell instructed Lyons and his staff to break off diplomatic relations and to return home. Even the hot-headed, defiant Seward realized the danger of this situation, and he and President Lincoln agreed to release Mason and Slidell and to offer Britain an apology. A British ship collected the commissioners in Boston on January , , for their voyage to England. Secretary of State Hunter wrote to Yancey, Mann, and Rost on November  to apprise them of the situation, although they had already learned of it through English newspapers. Before that information arrived, on November  Yancey wrote to Hunter both to acknowledge receiving Hunter’s letter of September  in which Davis accepted his resignation, but also to assure Hunter that he would remain in London until Mason and Slidell arrived. Yancey had a chance to sail home with Captain Robert B. Pegram aboard the  Nashville on November , but he knew that both duty and opportunity demanded that he remain in Britain.28 Yancey voraciously read every expression of outrage that appeared in the British press about the Trent affair, especially editorials he believed were penned by Palmerston for the London Morning Post and by Russell for the Times. Buoyed by other news, rumors, and a new batch of reports from home on successful blockade runs, Yancey got positively cocky. Karl Marx, living in London at the time as a correspondent for the New York Daily Tribune, reported Europeans’ bewilderment at the conduct of the United States in seizing Mason and Slidell, ‘‘while Messrs. Yancey and Mann are strutting in London.’’ In fact, Yancey, Mann, and Rost concluded that the time was ripe to fan the flames of British anger toward the North. They sent an official protest to Lord John Russell on November , and followed that up with another three days later.29 As they waited for Russell to reply, Yancey and company read heartening news. In early December a published report showed that of , textile Journeys Home

n



workers in Britain, , had lost their jobs due to short supplies of cotton and , more worked one to three days fewer per week. In response to the ‘‘cotton famine’’ and the Trent affair, the British reinforced militias in Canada. On December  two troop transports sailed to North America, leaving port to the tune ‘‘Dixie.’’ A few days after that, the Palmerston government readied another , troops for Canada. War between Britain and the United States seemed imminent.30 On December  Russell sent a terse note that burst Yancey’s optimism. The entire letter read: ‘‘Lord Russell presents his compliments to Mr. Yancey, Mr. Rost, and Mr. Mann. He had the honor to receive their letters of the th and th November, but, in the present state of affairs, he must decline to enter into any official communication with them.’’ Russell again eschewed the use of his title as foreign minister and avoided reference to the Confederacy.31 Mann urged Yancey to wait for his anger to subside before informing Hunter and Jefferson Davis about Russell’s rebuff. It took him two weeks to calm down. On Christmas Eve Yancey paid a visit to Edwin De Leon, who was about to return to the Confederacy. It was cold and foggy as the two sat by a fireplace and talked. The dreary weather and Yancey’s longing for home made him quite depressed. He told De Leon that Seward was too smart to let the Trent affair lead to war, and confessed his doubts that Britain would offer any kind of aid to the Confederacy. Yancey then said, ‘‘Do you know what I have learnt one thing since I came here? . . . That I ought never to have come here. This kind of thing does not suit me. . . . It requires a different kind of training from any I have had,’’ but it took Yancey nearly a year to learn that lesson. De Leon admired both Yancey’s ability to see his situation so clearly and his ‘‘manliness to avow it.’’ 32 Yancey’s melancholy blended with his continued anger toward Lord Russell by the time Yancey finally wrote to Davis. He termed Russell’s response ‘‘almost insulting—at least freezing.’’ Then he mentioned a publication in London of a letter to Russell from Charles Francis Adams, on Seward’s behalf, asking that the foreign minister no longer receive the ‘‘pseudo commissioners’’ from the South. Russell, Yancey wrote, ‘‘in a most contemptible and truckling tone & spirit,’’ said that he would see no more of the Confederates. Yancey still wanted to press Russell to accord them ‘‘the privilege of a belligerent’’ and to restate their cause, but again Mann wisely convinced Yancey to drop the matter.33 In the same letter to Davis, Yancey reported receiving news that he and Clement C. Clay had won election from Alabama to the Confederate Senate. ‘‘Although quite probable, yet I hardly know whether to believe it or not—in fact I had long since made up my mind to be shoved aside, in the new order of 

n

Journeys Home

things,’’ he wrote, finally conceding his disappointment when Alabamians failed to send him to the southern convention, but heartened that they had changed their minds and backed him once again. As anxious as he was to take his seat in the Senate, Yancey assured Davis that he would remain at his post until Mason and Slidell arrived and would continue trying to make treaties with England, France, and Spain, especially because ‘‘in the event of a war between Engd & the U-S- . . . our recognition will be soon made.’’ 34 Yancey concluded his letter on December  with a short, personal postscript: ‘‘Happy New Year to you & to Mrs D—and thro’ you to our country—’’ 35 As Yancey waited for Mason and Slidell, he passed some of his time working with Henry Hotze, commissioned on November , , as a commercial agent. In fact, Hotze’s mission was to establish the propaganda campaign that Yancey had called for months before. Hotze proved skilled at his job, establishing a pro-Confederate newspaper in London, the Index. Hotze aimed messages at working classes in areas hardest hit by the ‘‘cotton famine.’’ He realized that these workers held an ‘‘instinctive aversion’’ to slavery, but with the economy tightening Hotze thought that he could sway them. Time proved him wrong, and even Hotze admitted that most of the British working class blamed their plight upon the impact of slavery on world affairs.36 But Yancey played no minor role in the propaganda war. An irritated Charles Francis Adams remarked that Yancey’s efforts to influence the British press before Hotze took over had resulted in ‘‘a good deal of success,’’ although he attributed that achievement to money spent by the Confederates, and insinuated bribery. Karl Marx complained ‘‘the only remaining democratic weekly, Reynold’s paper, has sold itself to Messrs. Yancey and Mann.’’ 37 On January , Mason and Slidell finally arrived in London, and Yancey prepared to leave for home. He craved a return to politics, and hoped to make it to Richmond by February  for the opening session of the Senate.38 He left London for Southampton on the evening of February , carrying letters from Mason and Hotze to Hunter. William Seward hoped to intercept and capture Yancey as he sailed across the Atlantic, giving instructions to a U.S. marshal to hold him as a prisoner at the same Fort Warren that had just released Mason and Slidell. But Yancey managed to have a less eventful journey than his replacements. He reached Cuba by the end of February. He declined an opportunity to meet with the governor of the island, Don Francisco Serrano. Yancey cited ‘‘anonymous, irresponsible newspaper scribblers’’ who, he claimed, had rendered it indelicate for them to meet. Serrano appreciated the ‘‘noble sentiment,’’ but disregarded ‘‘unjust murmurs of those who think they see in simple Journeys Home

n



acts of politeness a political meaning which they neither have nor can have.’’ More likely, an impatient Yancey used this excuse to hurry back to the South. He left Havana on February .39 Avoiding the Union blockade that he had continually told European officials was ineffective proved quite a chore for Yancey. He arrived at Sabine Pass, between Texas and Louisiana, on March  aboard a schooner called, ironically, the Wide Awake, a name taken by Lincoln’s marching campaign supporters in . Only one day before he arrived, two Union ships sailed away from that harbor where they had been patrolling for weeks. Even after Yancey disembarked it took him a full week to traverse the swamps and bayous of south Louisiana. After a brief stop in New Iberia Yancey finally reached New Orleans on March .40 He did not like what he saw in the Crescent City. A single federal ship had successfully prevented ocean-going vessels from entering or leaving the mouth of the Mississippi River since May . Supplies ran low in New Orleans, prices soared, and banks suspended specie payments. The local Confederate commander, General Mansfield Lovell, did the best he could to prepare city defenses, but had meager resources: , short-term volunteer soldiers, a dozen small gunboats called the ‘‘mosquito fleet,’’ and two forts some seventy-five miles downriver. Lovell begged Jefferson Davis for help, but the president was too focused upon the Virginia front and convinced that the federal navy sought to attack New Orleans by moving downriver from the North, not upstream from the Gulf of Mexico.41 ‘‘This city is almost in a state of revolution,’’ Yancey reported to fellow senator Clement Claiborne Clay. Some , citizens had organized themselves and resolved to take over judicial and executive functions ‘‘to arrest, try, imprison, banish or hang!’’ Yancey heartily approved Lovell’s plan to declare martial law on March , although he hoped that the rebellious group would be treated as ‘‘unwise councilors’’ rather than ‘‘a mere lawless mob.’’ If, however, this body seized power from civil and military authorities in the Confederacy’s largest city, Yancey warned, it ‘‘would be the knell of our cause in Europe and perhaps in this continent.’’ Yancey assured Clay, ‘‘I am doing all I can to throw oil on the troubled waters, and I hope with some effect.’’ 42 For Yancey, ‘‘doing all I can’’ meant returning to the speaker’s stump. In this tense atmosphere, Yancey’s address to the people of New Orleans aimed at rallying the spirit of unity against a common enemy, but must have disheartened his audience. Yancey had plenty of time to contemplate his efforts abroad and their impact at home, and spoke with remarkable candor. ‘‘They looked coldly 

n

Journeys Home

on the South, because of its slavery institutions. There was not a country in Europe which sympathized with us.—Even the great principles of our revolution were not understood by them.’’ Then Yancey admitted that he and most Confederates miscalculated the power of cotton to break the blockade. Yancey said that southern cotton still had ‘‘a mighty part’’ in international commerce, but that it ‘‘has not absolute sway.’’ Again trying to sound a call for solidarity, but more likely further discouraging his audience, Yancey concluded, ‘‘We cannot look for any sympathy or help from abroad. We must rely on ourselves alone.’’ News of these dispiriting remarks traveled quickly to the Confederate capital.43 Just over one month after he left New Orleans, on April , the Union navy launched a daring assault and breached the Confederate defenses downriver from New Orleans. On April  northern troops took the defenseless city. Before New Orleans fell, Yancey finally arrived home. One of the first things he did was formally end his service in the State Department by sending his resignation to Jefferson Davis. The Montgomery Advertiser reported Yancey to be in good health and good spirits.44 But while Montgomery escaped the chaos he had just witnessed in Louisiana and faced no immediate threat of invasion, Yancey found his hometown transformed by war. The shock of suddenly hosting the first Confederate capital, losing it, and the commencement of war turned Montgomery inside out. As delegates had assembled to create a nation in early , the population had swelled beyond the capacity of the city, only to empty by July. In their enthusiasm for war, young men enlisted in droves and scattered throughout the Confederacy. By the end of , Montgomery had sent , men into the armed forces, reducing the white male population by half. Volunteers included James Holtzclaw, who had studied law under Yancey, John J. Seibels of the Montgomery Confederation, and Thomas H. Watts.45 Many of Yancey’s secessionist partners from across the state had also enlisted: John Tyler Morgan of Dallas; Bolling Hall of Elmore; John Cochran and Eli Shorter, brother of John Gill Shorter, as well as Edward Bullock, Alpheus Baker, and Henry D. Clayton, among others.46 But Yancey’s greatest concerns were for his sons Ben and Willie. By the time his father returned, Ben had been transferred from his original post as an artillery captain at Fort Morgan in Mobile Bay and now commanded a battalion of skirmishers in the Army of Tennessee. He served under the command of two Alabamians, Colonel Zachariah Deas and General Braxton Bragg. Just after his father departed for Richmond, Ben’s brother Willie left the University of Alabama in May against their father’s wishes and joined the th Alabama Infantry, organized in Mobile. He served as second lieutenant in that regiment and reJourneys Home

n



mained at Mobile through the end of the year.47 It was all the elder Yancey could do to prevent his two underage sons from enlisting as well. In , Dalton Huger remained at the University of Alabama, but itched for a fight. He would enlist in Company K of the th Alabama cavalry early in , as soon as he turned eighteen. After fourteen-year-old Goodloe Harper completed his term at the University of Alabama in , his worried father determined not to have his youngest son follow his brothers’ examples, and so sent him to the University of Georgia, where Goodloe’s uncle Ben, now a trustee of that school, could keep an eye on him while Senator Yancey served in Richmond.48 The bustle and demands of war had also transformed Yancey’s hometown. The great inland cotton port witnessed the buildup of thousands of bales of the crop that suddenly found no access to market. The city began to produce rifles, cannon balls, shoes, farm machinery, drugs, saltpeter for gunpowder, and metal sheeting for ship’s hulls in a small navy yard constructed on the Alabama River. On May , , leading women of the city formed a Ladies Aid Society, an ecumenical effort that combined efforts from Methodist, Catholic, Baptist, Presbyterian, and Episcopal churches as well as the Hebrew Ladies Sewing and Benevolent Society. These women sewed sandbags for fortifications, socks and uniforms for soldiers, and they worked in newly established Confederate military hospitals. Sarah Yancey served on the committee for soliciting donations. Just after William Yancey departed for Richmond, Montgomery created a military prison in an old cotton warehouse. Henry S. Wirz served as supervisor of its guards, and the lack of adequate clothing, medicine, and healthy food previewed the horror of Wirz’s later assignment as commandant of the infamous Andersonville Prison in Georgia. Prices soared as they did across the Confederacy. By  salt cost , percent more than it had a year before, and Governor Shorter and the assembly set aside  million for poor relief;  million more followed in .49 Another transformation of sorts centered around Yancey himself. Political opposition to Yancey had not vanished, but for most Alabamians and other Confederates his role in creating the new republic had transformed him into a hero. As he departed for Europe in April , a member of the Magnolia Cadets in nearby Selma painted a portrait of Yancey for auction to help raise funds for his infantry unit. An admirer in Kentucky purchased a pair of dark bay horses as gifts for Yancey. Roger Pryor, with whom Yancey had publicly tangled in  over the African slave trade question, publicly declared an end to ‘‘an ancient feud, which I now bury in oblivion,’’ and proclaimed Yancey ‘‘the Patrick Henry of this Revolution.’’ In Mobile Bay, soldiers named one of the guns at 

n

Journeys Home

Fort McRae ‘‘William L. Yancey.’’ Infantry companies paid homage to the secessionist by calling themselves the Yancey Grays, Yancey Rifles, and (in no fewer than three different units) Yancey Guards. A company of North Carolina partisan rangers called themselves the Yancey Boys, Tennesseans formed the Yancey Riflemen, Georgians created the Yancey Invincibles, and in Florida there was the Yancey Fire Eaters.50 By March , , Yancey finally reached the Confederate capital and took his seat in the Senate, his first appearance in a national assembly since his resignation from the U.S. Congress sixteen years before. Although his sons were spread far and wide, Yancey got to reunite with his daughter, Mary, and her husband, John Harrell, now chief of the finance bureau at the Confederate Post Office.51 Yancey found lodging for himself and Sarah at Mrs. Young’s boarding house at the corner of Marshall and th Streets, three blocks west and two blocks north of the Confederate White House. He shared accommodations with South Carolina senator Robert W. Barnwell. Yancey drew assignments to committees on Foreign Affairs, Public Lands, and Territories.52 Yancey enthusiastically threw himself into all facets of his new job. He arranged for a medical discharge from the army for one of his constituents and tried to work out a prisoner exchange for another, whose health and life were at stake in Camp Chase, Ohio. Yancey also tended to mundane matters, such as successfully amending a bill establishing new postal rates. With Senator Louis Wigfall of Texas, Yancey’s fellow secessionist and a friend of the family, he urged President Davis to support the nomination for promotion of Lt. Col. Evander M. Law of Alabama. When Yancey rose to speak on the Senate floor, his colleagues observed that the great orator was in top form.53 Of course, military matters received everyone’s primary concern. After receiving correspondence from Caleb Huse in England, on April  Yancey wrote to President Davis with several suggestions about arms procurement. Citing Huse’s preference for more modern but expensive and scarce rifled arms, Yancey urged Davis to press for more easily available smoothbore muskets and to find substantially more money for such purchases; current funds only covered the cost of , guns per month. Yancey closed this letter unlike any he had ever written; he apologized for writing it. He acknowledged that his commanderin-chief faced ‘‘immense pressure’’ from ‘‘every interest,’’ but explained that Davis could not fully understand this situation without ‘‘the aid of some plain spoken friends.’’ Davis replied with his thanks and asked Yancey for more information.54 Sobering news came to the Confederate capital on April . Two days before, Journeys Home

n



the Battle of Shiloh in Tennessee resulted in the bloodiest day to that point in American history, with over , casualties. The Confederate general Albert Sidney Johnston lost his life on the battlefield, and General Pierre G. T. Beauregard assumed command. General Ulysses S. Grant rallied his Union troops after initial setbacks, and a lack of Confederate reinforcements forced Beauregard to withdraw his forces to Corinth, Mississippi.55 On April , Yancey introduced resolutions to thank Beauregard for his services and to send thanks and condolences to the family of General Johnston.56 Privately, Yancey must have started to worry more about his sons in uniform. At the same time General George B. McClellan began landing about , Union troops around Yorktown, Virginia, the vanguard of an assault force of over , with designs on the Confederate capital. Fewer than , Confederates under the command of James B. Magruder waited on defensive lines at Yorktown.57 Among these was Major Benjamin C. Yancey, William’s brother.58 William Yancey could do little for his brother, but he had a job to do in the Confederate Congress and focused his energies there. When Robert W. Barnwell introduced a bill from the House to appropriate  million for local troops in Missouri, a slave state that never seceded but suffered terrible partisan warfare, Yancey objected. He compared this bill to the ‘‘the reckless expenditure which so characterized the government of the late United States.’’ Yancey backed down, though, after John B. Clark, a nonvoting senator from Missouri, explained that the appropriation included money for the service of soldiers prior to being mustered into Confederate service. Yancey also conferred with Judah P. Benjamin—Davis’s third secretary of state—about foreign consuls and whether or not aliens ought to be exempted from military service.59 To Yancey and most Confederates, the cause of their country was essentially moral: the preservation of republican liberty in an ordered society supported by well-treated slaves. A covenant theology emerged in the Confederacy, a belief that a particular relationship existed between Confederates and God, bestowing a unique blessing to their society but also demanding the highest ethical standards.60 Although long ago Yancey rejected his stepfather’s brand of religion, he remained steadfast in his own evangelical faith and tried to apply its values to his country. As he explained to the Senate on April , an insidious ‘‘crime’’ already permeated the Confederacy and threatened to undermine its moral underpinnings: drunkenness in the army. Yancey had read correspondence about the problem from army officers across the South and had seen the ‘‘evil’’ itself on his recent journey from Texas to Virginia. Yancey offered a resolution condemning this vice. The only opposition came from Senator Louis Wigfall of Texas, a se

n

Journeys Home

cessionist, friend of Yancey’s family, and unabashed supporter of the Confederate military, but a man with a severe drinking problem. The resolution passed.61 More immediate challenges came to the Confederacy as its military started a retreat from Yorktown, up the peninsula toward Richmond, shortly after the defeat at Shiloh. Even before Shiloh, President Davis asked Congress for help. On March  he called for something unprecedented in the history of American people who had always volunteered to join state or national armed forces: a draft. The Conscription Act of April , , mandated a three-year term of service for all able-bodied white men between the ages of eighteen and thirtyfive. One-year volunteers already in uniform had to remain active for two more years.62 Many problems arose. Would forced conscription by a central government overturn the principles of states’ rights that had led to the creation of the Confederacy in the first place? What did this bill imply about the vaunted notion of southern honor? Did brave men have to be forced to defend their wives, families, and homes? On the other hand was the relentless pressure of the enemy. One soldier in Alabama reconciled all this in a letter to Senator Clement C. Clay: ‘‘Despotism is the soul of efficient military organization, and our people . . . must temporarily submit to absolute discipline, as a part of the price of permanent civil liberty.’’ The governor of Alabama, secessionist John Gill Shorter, disagreed. Resorting to conscription could undermine ‘‘our ultimate triumph’’ by achieving military victory at the expense of principles.63 But when a Union force came menacingly close to Alabama’s borders, the same Governor Shorter wrote a desperate note to Senators Yancey and Clay, and to Congressman William P. Chilton, Yancey’s recent law partner. Pensacola, Shorter feared, would fall unless , muskets arrived immediately. He urged these congressmen to press Secretary of War Randolph for action to rally other representatives from Alabama and Florida to do the same. Yancey obliged, telling Randolph, ‘‘I earnestly request a compliance with this request.’’ 64 At least for the moment, military developments that swirled around him made Yancey—and other Confederate congressmen—yield principle for pragmatism. Debate in secret session did not take long, and the Conscription Act passed – in the House and – in the Senate. The Senate’s two great fireeaters, Yancey and Wigfall, overrode their long-standing concerns about the expansion of national power and voted with the majority to allow the Richmond government to compel military service.65 Immediately upon its passage, however, Yancey began a drive to amend the bill by providing exemptions for those whose labors were critical to maintain the war effort and local governments, as well as for the mentally disabled. That bill passed on April .66 Journeys Home

n



Even after some exemptions, the Conscription Bill aroused the concerns of many and focused attention on Davis’s military operations. On April  Senator Henry C. Burnett of Kentucky, usually a staunch Davis supporter, argued, ‘‘West-Pointism has already done great injury to the country.’’ Echoing the phrase and opinions of a growing number of Confederates, Burnett referred to Davis’s predisposition to rely upon men who, like himself, had attended the U.S. Military Academy at West Point, New York. Critics considered these men too cautious, too defensive. Burnett’s remark drew vigorous applause from citizens in the galleries, so much so that the Senate ordered the removal of the most boisterous. Louis Wigfall observed snidely, ‘‘This interruption might have been expected in Washington’’ but not in Richmond, and he asked the president of the Senate to clear the galleries. Yancey calmly but firmly replied that the galleries should not be cleared. Wigfall grew belligerent, now exclaiming that the Senate should do ‘‘something more than merely eject the offenders.’’ More forcefully now, Yancey demanded, ‘‘Why punish the innocent? The offenders have been put out. Would you inflict stripes?’’ 67 Yancey’s language was strangely and ironically similar to the scene at Alabama’s secession convention in  when Robert Jemison attacked Yancey for turning differences of opinion into matters of loyalty or treason. This confrontation came in the final days of this session of Congress. Before Yancey and Sarah left for Montgomery, he attended to other business. Yancey sent a check for  for military hospitals in Richmond, but specified that the donation go to those that served Alabama’s wounded. Yancey also enjoyed— or merely tolerated—a visit from his late mother’s sister, Frances Pamela Casey, from Georgia. He went to a festive social gathering at a local hotel that included several congressmen, but his thoughts again turned toward home.68 The first session of the Confederate Congress ended on April , less than a month after Yancey’s arrival in Virginia, and he reached Montgomery by May . Upon his return he quickly discovered that the fall of New Orleans and the Conscription Act that he had just helped pass into law produced grave concern. Northern Alabama, where Yancey had been burned in effigy after Alabama seceded, again reasserted its unionism. Jeremiah Clemens, who had dropped his opposition to secession in January  and promised to walk with Yancey into revolution, now walked away from it and joined the growing internal opposition to the Confederacy. And among loyal Confederate Alabamians, so many had already been mustered into service beyond its borders that Governor Shorter could not raise enough men to adequately defend his state.69 Yancey immediately wrote to President Davis about the gloomy situation in Alabama, 

n

Journeys Home

but he remained positive and constructive, assuring Davis that these setbacks only renewed the determination of many ‘‘to sacrifice all for the cause.’’ Of course, Yancey added, a decisive, large-scale battlefield victory would do much to arrest ‘‘submission and treason’’ within Alabama.70 In his restraint and industriousness while serving his country overseas, in his willingness to bend his states’ rights principles in order to pass legislation aimed at securing Confederate independence, Yancey revealed capacities that few believed he possessed: the ability to build. After Yancey helped cleave the Democratic Party in April , South Carolina senator James H. Hammond speculated that if the original agitators of the American Revolution—men like Patrick Henry and Samuel Adams—had not given way to ‘‘the silent men,’’ Washington, Franklin, and Jefferson, the result would have been a fizzle.71 William L. Yancey had come too far to watch his revolution ‘‘fizzle.’’ At stake was his home, the South that had accepted him and defined him as a man, a father, and a husband. The greatest challenge of his life was upon him.

Journeys Home

n



CHAPTER SEVENTEEN

The Main Pillar of the Confederacy Shortly after the Confederate Congress adjourned in April , over , Union troops advanced toward Richmond. After overcoming a vastly smaller Confederate force at Williamsburg, Virginia, General George B. McClellan’s ominous drive toward the Confederate capital began on May , . As Jefferson Davis worked doggedly with his military commanders to defend the capital, even he feared its capture by the Federal forces. On May  he sent his wife and children to safety in Raleigh, North Carolina, some  miles away.1 From his home in Montgomery, Yancey reflected on the course of the war. He considered the northern war effort wicked and unscrupulous, aimed at fastening upon southerners a government unknown to the founding fathers ‘‘and which our people have repudiated’’ through secession. Yancey admitted that the Union military effort had only intensified as the Confederacy entered its second year of existence. Citing the recent federal occupation of eastern Tennessee, he concluded that Abraham Lincoln sought to reduce the Confederacy

to a territorial condition and to establish over each state ‘‘a military dictatorship . . . to disfranchise our citizens—to reduce them to a level with negroes.’’ 2 In spite of the peril, or because of it, Yancey expressed none of the pessimism that characterized his remarks prior to the fall of New Orleans in March. He assured a fellow Confederate that southerners cheerfully abandoned ‘‘every luxury of life’’ and that ‘‘every privation has been cheerfully endured.’’ Over the past eighteen months the people of the South had acted on the principles of the American Revolution by abolishing one government and instituting another. The Confederacy had raised armies strong enough to hold back three-quarters of a million invaders, and had ‘‘revolutionized naval science’’ with use of ironclad vessels. ‘‘I have not abated an iota of my belief that if the resources of the South . . . are wisely used we will win this battle for freedom.’’ 3 Confederate victory in fact hinged on the sagacious use of a limited number of men and materiel in the face of an overwhelming enemy; mistakes and waste could not be tolerated. Mindful of this, Yancey wrote to the administrator of the Alabama hospitals in Richmond, Judge Arthur Francis Hopkins, to inquire about the  donation that had been made in April. For a change, Yancey was not exhibiting his chronic stinginess, but instead a concern over waste and mismanagement, qualities he considered fatal to the Confederate war effort. In September , Sarah had sent a box of supplies—mostly clothing and medicine—to Confederate soldiers in Virginia, but she never learned if her contribution made it to its destination. Yancey feared that it was lost in transit. His underlying message was concern and patriotism, not fault-finding or blame. ‘‘There is a determined spirit, in the land—my dear Judge—perhaps of a higher order than any that has heretofore prevailed.’’ If southern independence required the burning of cotton to keep it from invaders’ hands, or even the intentional destruction of Richmond if Confederates had to retreat and abandon it to the Union army, a defiant Yancey swore that ‘‘it will produce great results. It will . . . produce the conviction that we cannot be subjugated.’’ 4 While Yancey wielded his pen on behalf of Confederate solidarity, others, especially several of his fellow secessionists, launched a verbal offensive against Jefferson Davis. Some criticized his defensive war policy and called for offensive operations against the North. Many considered Davis indecisive and slow to act. Davis quickly became the obvious scapegoat for his infant country and its citizens who had convinced themselves that southern superiority ought to have already delivered the Union a knockout blow on the battlefield. With Richmond still threatened by McClellan’s armies, these voices became Pillar of the Confederacy

n



shrill. Robert Barnwell Rhett publicized his attacks through the Charleston Mercury. Senator Louis Wigfall remarked, ‘‘Jeff Davis ought to be hung in Richmond.’’ Later the Texas senator said the president should ‘‘get a rope and hang himself.’’ Laurence Keitt, a prominent disunionist and congressman from South Carolina, explained to his wife, ‘‘To be a patriot you must hate Davis.’’ And Robert Toombs, Yancey’s friend and Davis’s first secretary of state, decided that the South needed a new revolution to unseat Davis and set things on a proper course. Rumors swirled out of secret sessions in Congress that some hoped to depose their own president.5 Whenever intrigue or talk of overturning government cropped up in the South, many assumed that Yancey supported it. Some claimed that the great agitator led this movement. As the anti-Davis tide swept across the Confederacy, many of Davis’s supporters pointed fingers at Yancey.6 In June , Yancey’s old friend William F. Samford informed him of rumors that Yancey wanted to overthrow the Davis administration and establish his own dictatorship. Yancey responded to all this in the Montgomery Advertiser. Yancey acknowledged that discontent ‘‘pervades the land,’’ but again called for unity. He denounced everything that interfered with a vigorous prosecution of the war effort, as well as anything that denigrated the respect ‘‘due to the authorities appointed by the people.’’ Yancey stated that his opinion of Davis was well known, but took the opportunity to defend the president ‘‘as conscientious in discharge of the duties of his high office as the most exacting can require.’’ As far as plots to depose Davis, ‘‘Nothing could be more unwise, and more completely demonstrate our unfitness for self-government.’’ He termed all such schemes ‘‘mad.’’ But even at that, Yancey neither threatened nor condemned those who sought the ouster of Davis. In stark contrast to his outburst on the brink of secession, Yancey now refused to question the patriotism of those who differed with him. Yancey understood the sources of discontent. The relentless march southward of the Union forces commanded by General Ulysses S. Grant and the threat to Richmond from McClellan topped the list. But the ultimate culprit, Yancey argued, came from the overuse of secret sessions in the Confederate Congress. ‘‘This is the people’s government,’’ he explained to a friend; ‘‘. . . their’s are the lives—the fortunes—the liberties [that are] at stake.’’ Yancey explained that upon taking his seat in March proponents of secret sessions ‘‘reluctantly persuaded’’ him to support them as a war measure, to ensure that no vital military intelligence leaked to the enemy. But now Yancey concluded that 

n

Pillar of the Confederacy

this policy was ‘‘essentially wrong—it is greatly overbalanced by its evil effects, both upon the government itself, and upon the public mind.’’ 7 When he returned to the Senate, Yancey would make it a priority to limit secret sessions. While Yancey worked to subdue popular dissatisfaction, he traveled to Atlanta for a quick visit with his brother and his family in north Georgia. The joyful reunion had to be brief; Ben was on leave and his regiment still had much fighting to do against the Union Army of the Potomac. After horrific carnage at the battle of Seven Pines on May , McClellan’s army needed several days to regroup and recover, and after many small skirmishes and much maneuvering another major battle occurred on June  at Mechanicsville.8 War had changed north Georgia almost as much as it had Montgomery, affecting Yancey’s family in Atlanta and Athens. Caro, Yancey’s niece, emulated Sarah Yancey and countless others by offering her services to the local Ladies Relief Society. Goodloe Harper remained at the University of Georgia, but was about to defy his father’s wishes and join the fighting with his brothers, even though he was not quite fourteen years old. Days after William’s visit, Ben returned to duty and escaped unscathed in the ferocious fighting that ended the Peninsular Campaign. The Confederate capital remained safe, at least for the time. A few months later, Ben was transferred to northeastern Georgia where he served for the remainder of the war.9 By the end of July, the name of William L. Yancey emerged again as a leading opponent of Davis. Rumors swirled at the highest levels of the Confederate government that Yancey disparaged General Braxton Bragg, one of the few soldiers who retained Jefferson Davis’s absolute support. Bragg was a stubborn and quarrelsome man, unpopular with his own men, but his strategic thinking impressed his commander-in-chief, and newspaper criticisms of Bragg won Davis’s sympathy and support. At the advice of friends, Bragg sent some newspaper clippings to Davis on July , , particularly one from the Montgomery Advertiser. Bragg believed that the ‘‘false and malicious’’ remarks in that article came from the pen of Thomas H. Watts, Yancey’s old foe in politics and in the courtroom, who now served as Davis’s attorney general. Davis assured Bragg that Watts could not have written the piece and that the Advertiser never served as his mouthpiece. In fact, Davis showed Bragg’s message to Watts, who told Davis that the most likely author was Yancey. That was all the proof Davis needed.10 Davis considered Yancey’s alleged missive ‘‘a scurvey attack on the Administration.’’ He assured Bragg that public knowledge of their friendship made Bragg, like Davis, a victim of ‘‘malignant censure, by men regardless of Pillar of the Confederacy

n



truth’’ who also lacked principle. ‘‘Revolutions develop the high qualities of the good and great, but they cannot change the nature of the vicious and selfish.’’ And those qualities, in Davis’s mind, now became associated with Yancey.11 Although Yancey had written his share of anonymous letters in the past, no evidence suggests that he had authored the criticism that soured Davis toward him. Yancey spent his last few weeks between congressional sessions tending to his family and to his fledgling law practice, and quietly observing his fortyeighth birthday on August . He had no idea that Davis had turned on him. Yancey returned to Richmond in time for the second session of the first Confederate Congress on August , and determined to behave as a statesman: to support the administration and its war efforts whenever possible, to provide loyal opposition when necessary, and to strive for harmony and unity of purpose in all things. He made his first priority fulfilling his public promise to end secret sessions. Yancey spoke on August , announcing his plans to amend the rules of the Senate so that all sessions would remain open to the public unless ordered closed by a two-thirds vote of the members, and to have those votes recorded for the public record. Yancey reasonably questioned his colleagues about their justification for secrecy. He called it ‘‘an anomaly in republican government.’’ He acknowledged the necessity for occasional secrecy during the wartime crisis, but argued against its abuse. He reminded others that ‘‘no military plans are devised here,’’ and since the Congress published all its laws, both financial and military, the public had a right to know how the body came to those ends. ‘‘You conceal from them the propositions which are rejected, and the names of those who propose and who reject them,’’ and often who voted for or against certain bills. Yancey concluded that little but evil resulted, and that by lifting their selfimposed veil of secrecy, much good would result. He logically posited that if news of enemy invasion, occupation, and the imposition of conscription had not caused the Confederate citizenry to lose confidence in their cause, why did the Senate suppose that open sessions would ‘‘depress and . . . demoralize our people?’’ 12 Yancey then made a bold stand against one of the great, vaunted principles of the Confederacy. Before secession he had yelped as loudly as anyone about the baneful influence of political parties, reflecting the sentiments of most southerners that their young republic should avoid the plague of party politics that had corrupted the Union. But since the South had divorced itself from the free states and jettisoned the compromises needed to maintain national parties, Yancey had no fear of exclusively southern political factions. He suggested that 

n

Pillar of the Confederacy

a major justification for secret sessions was to discourage the rise of parties and factions. ‘‘Parties are incident to institutions based on elective franchise; and it has been a republican argument, that parties keep up a healthy public sentiment, and aid to check the improper assumption of power by those in office,’’ he now concluded. Besides, ‘‘the healthful sunlight of an enlightened public opinion’’ would produce fewer factions than the current ‘‘unhealthy shade of secret sessions—under the more poisonous miasma which is generated in darkness.’’ 13 Yancey argued in vain. On August  the Senate debated this proposal. James Phelan of Mississippi suggested instead that upon a motion to go into secret session the sergeant-at-arms would first close the doors, then a vote would be taken with a simple majority required to remain in closed session. Again striving to compromise for the cause, Yancey offered in turn to accept a simple majority, provided that the vote be recorded in open session. The Senate rejected Yancey’s motion – and adopted Phelan’s.14 Secrecy would dominate the Confederate Congress for the remainder of its brief existence. The next issue to command Yancey’s attention arose from the Federal Congress’s Confiscation Act of July , . A clear signal of a harsher war policy, this act provided for the confiscation of the property of ‘‘traitors,’’ including their slaves, who would then ‘‘be deemed captives of war and shall be forever free.’’ Actual implementation and enforcement of the act remained inconsistent, but when General John Pope took command of federal troops in Virginia later that month he issued a series of orders authorizing his officers not only to seize southerners’ property without compensation, but also to shoot guerrillas and expel civilians who refused to take an oath of allegiance to the Union. President Davis threatened to retaliate against the North by ordering the execution of their prisoners of war.15 In fact, General Pope never expelled anyone or had guerrillas shot—despite the fact that partisan rangers did try to fire on federal troops. But Union soldiers did begin to seize property, and Lincoln’s general-in-chief Henry W. Halleck ordered General Grant to implement that policy in the western theater as well. Across the occupied South, hundreds upon hundreds of slaves found themselves liberated and often put into some form of military service by advancing Union armies. And while Confederates feared it all along, they did not know that at this time Lincoln was well on his way to declaring a more sweeping confiscation of sorts, an end to African American slavery.16 Confederates were still reeling from General Benjamin Butler’s infamous Order No. —the ‘‘Woman Order’’—of May . It condemned women in occupied New Orleans, who ‘‘by word, gesture, or movement,’’ insulted or Pillar of the Confederacy

n



showed contempt toward Union troops, to be regarded and treated as prostitutes. As in the case of nearly every war, when Union troops advanced some soldiers did in fact threaten or actually rape southern women.17 These developments commanded Yancey’s attention and elicited from him the sort of emotionalism that, until recently, had always characterized his oratory. On August  Yancey called for ‘‘the sternest measures to deter the enemy from a cowardly and barbarous treatment of our people.’’ He hoped that President Davis would support proposals to aid civilians to defend themselves from ‘‘acts of murder, rape and robbery.’’ Yancey claimed that often young southern women ‘‘have been foully dishonored in the presence of their aged parents.’’ Melodramatically referring to Spaniards’ resistance to Napoleon’s invasion, he urged Confederates to emulate those martyrs to freedom. He argued that even if the Union’s numerical superiority overwhelmed the Confederates’ organized military efforts, ‘‘it will bring no despair of the cause to my mind as long as there exists a brave, united and patriotic people, to make each hill-top a fort, of each pass an ambuscade, and of each plain a battle field.’’ He offered a series of resolutions backing Davis in his efforts to ‘‘punish the perpetrators,’’ and to retaliate in order to deter the enemy from committing these outages. The Senate placed his resolutions on the calendar for August , but then tabled them.18 In the Confederate Congress a prolonged battle began over conscription. Many southerners had exploited the exemptions in the first bill to avoid military service, or decided to hire substitutes to fight for them. Some manipulated that provision as well, selling themselves as substitutes, deserting, then selling their services again. The law exempted one white man for every twenty slaves on plantations to assure control of the slave population behind the battle lines. But that provision, combined with the ability of those with money enough to hire substitutes, caused many soldiers and political leaders to complain that the war placed too much of a burden on those with the fewest resources. Overriding all these concerns for the Davis administration, though, was the chronic need for more troops.19 A new conscription bill reached the floor of the Senate, calling for the additional enlistment of able-bodied men from thirty-five to forty-five years old to fill depleted companies, battalions, and regiments before any spare men would form new units. On September , Yancey offered an amendment to the bill, one that gained the support of others who grew more concerned about the balance between states’ rights and growing centralized power. Yancey’s amendment called for the organization of additional troops under state auspices for a three-year enlistment, but once received from the governors of each state 

n

Pillar of the Confederacy

these soldiers would serve as the president directed, as part of the Confederate army. If state governors failed to raise enough men within thirty days, the bill returned conscription authority to the president.20 The fine distinction between the original bill and Yancey’s amendment centered on the essence of the Confederate experiment. He explained that when he voted for the bill of April , a ‘‘controlling necessity’’ dictated his actions: Richmond faced grave peril from an overpowering enemy. Since that crisis had passed, Congress had time to consider the larger principles connected to the mechanism of the conscription bills. Yancey alluded to the protests of Georgia governor Joseph Brown and of Zebulon Vance, governor of North Carolina, who claimed that conscription violated the Confederate Constitution by vesting Congress with sovereign powers, instead of the various states. Yancey announced unequivocally that he did not see any constitutional violation, nor any damage to state sovereignty. Demonstrating a new sophistication, Yancey cautioned ‘‘that State sovereignty, which in some respects is the strongest, may yet become the weakest point in our organic system.’’ Yancey recognized the right of each state to judge for itself ‘‘a question of the invasion of their rights by this government,’’ and to do so simply ‘‘from their own stand-point, and in favor of their own interests.’’ It was the task of a statesman, however, not to force such an issue on the states ‘‘without the sternest necessity.’’ 21 That necessity, Yancey repeated, absolutely existed back in April. Nevertheless, he knew that disagreements over issues like this often left lasting resentment and resurfaced once war ended and a common struggle no longer bound people together. Hoping to lay a solid foundation for a postwar Confederate nation, Yancey offered an amendment, ‘‘a peace offering.’’ 22 A ‘‘peace offering’’ by Yancey did not, however, signal that he had completely changed his stripes. An old Whig adversary from Georgia, Benjamin H. Hill, now sat with Yancey in the Confederate Senate and rankled the Alabamian as never before. As Yancey continued his elaboration on the distinctions between state and Confederate powers, he referred to Hill’s proposal that under its warmaking powers the Congress could lawfully conscript ‘‘every judicial officer of a state, from Justice of the Peace to the Chief Justice upon the supreme bench— can enroll every member of Congress.’’ Yancey insisted that such sweeping national power resembled that of the despised Abraham Lincoln. Hill denied ever justifying Lincoln’s actions, but Yancey fired back that Hill shared the philosophy of Lincoln by asserting that a threat to ‘‘‘National Life’ ’’ justified unlimited war powers. That phrase, Yancey said, was simply another term for national sovereignty. ‘‘We have no national life,’’ Yancey explained. ‘‘A nation is a SoverPillar of the Confederacy

n



eign State; the Confederacy is not a Sovereign State.’’ The Confederacy, he explained, only represented common interests of states to foreign governments. ‘‘As between itself and its creators, the States, it is but an agent and in no sense national.’’ 23 After a few days of debate the Senate soundly defeated Yancey’s amendment. The original measure, although changed by minor amendments, passed –. After that setback, Yancey’s colleagues in the House briefly lifted his spirits by passing a conscription bill more in line with his proposal. A conference committee, however, agreed upon the Senate version, which finally became law on September .24 With a conscription bill well on its way to passage, Yancey and Congress turned their attention to the related question of exemptions. Considering how those provisions and practices had been abused already, as well as how much more sweeping the second conscription bill had shaped up to be, debate again centered on the essential philosophical struggle of the Confederate republic: how to balance state sovereignty with centralized government. Yancey grew especially concerned when three colleagues, Benjamin Hill of Georgia, James Phelan of Mississippi, and William E. Simms of Kentucky, argued against virtually all exemptions, even those of officeholders and judges. If this reasoning prevailed, Yancey warned, the Confederate Congress itself would undermine the limited Constitutional Government that southerners had worked so diligently to establish and had defended so valiantly.25 Having labored and sacrificed so long for this end, Yancey could not sit idly now. Yancey began a protracted resistance to Simms, Hill, and Phelan on September . Yancey cast himself in the role of ‘‘watchman’’ as he reminded his colleagues that ‘‘eternal vigilance is the price of liberty.’’ Already, he argued, signs existed to show that ‘‘a change from a civil government, with constitutional checks and balances, to a military absolutism, is in progress.’’ For example, the Confederate military commander at Norfolk and Portsmouth, Virginia, under orders from President Davis, had declared martial law, with authority derived from Congress.26 Now, if Congress could coerce into military service every officer except the president, it could ‘‘suspend and supersede all civil government.’’ On top of that were reports that General Braxton Bragg had summarily executed a civilian without resorting to either civil or martial law, heightening threats to wartime civil liberties.27 Struggling to control his emotions and inclination to bitterly attack his opponents, Yancey could not help but accuse Simms, Phelan, and Hill of unwittingly following in the footsteps of ‘‘Lincoln despotism.’’ Yancey considered it 

n

Pillar of the Confederacy

ironic that any Confederate would favor an expansion of government powers that matched those undertaken by Lincoln. He asked these three senators if they truly wished President Davis to acquire these same powers: suspension of habeas corpus, imprisoning disloyal elected officials, and shutting down opposition newspapers.28 Simms interrupted to defend his position, and in the process addressed a recurring dilemma for free societies at war. If the Confederacy required all possible military powers to protect itself from invasion, then Congress not only had the power but also the duty to do so. Self-preservation, not a desire to destroy civil government, motivated him and his supporters to prevent ‘‘enslavement and overthrow by a foreign invader.’’ 29 Yancey interpreted Simms’s reply as an affirmation that, under certain circumstances, he would use Lincoln’s rationale that under the banner of preserving a way of life, Simms would forfeit the rights and sovereignty of their citizens. Yancey believed ‘‘it is far better for a free people to be vanquished in open combat with the invader than voluntarily yield their liberties and constitutional safeguards to the stealthy progress of legislative and executive usurpations.’’ 30 Having clearly established the danger of executive dictatorship, Yancey quickly separated his fears from any insinuation that Jefferson Davis wished to become a dictator. As Yancey continued his efforts to stand upon principle without disrupting the harmony required to prosecute the war effort, he now lauded the president. Although acknowledging occasional differences of opinion, Yancey announced firmly, ‘‘I have no fears of his assuming unconstitutional power. . . . No more determined opponent of usurpation will be found in the Confederacy.’’ Yet he also cautioned that congressional leaders might unwittingly begin a descent into dictatorship by citing necessity, ‘‘blood-covered, liberty-despoiling, ‘necessity.’’’ No matter how menacing the Yankee onslaught, Yancey concluded, ‘‘I do not believe we are weakened for war by too much constitutional liberty.’’ 31 Over the next several days Yancey softened the tone of his remarks toward Hill, Simms, and Phelan, even as he continued to fight for a reasonably generous list of exemptions. He tried to mollify these senators by conceding that he knew they had no intention to overthrow civil government. When Simms repeated his insistence that every available man ought to be put into military service, Yancey responded with a different tack. He reminded Simms of the ‘‘eight-tenths of our population’’ who depended upon local government, the women, the aged, and the children, who would be left without civil administration if all others grabbed guns and left home to fight. Yancey argued logically Pillar of the Confederacy

n



that at least a skeletal force had to remain at home to support noncombatants as well as to supply troops in the field.32 Debate over exemptions dragged on, and over time emotions cooled. Some moved to exempt justices of the peace; others, including Yancey, drew distinctions between militia duty and conscripted service. He hoped to exempt all college students, likely with his own sons in mind. Others proposed amendments to amendments to exempt mail carriers and ferryboat operators. After a series of votes beginning on September , an exemptions bill passed Congress on September . At almost every vote before final passage, Hill and Phelan (Simms was absent) voted against Yancey, adding to his festering anger toward the two. But the final bill reflected Yancey’s determination to protect normal civilian life as much as possible. The bill exempted virtually all officeholders and clerks at every level of government, as well as personnel who operated railroads and piloted boats, one overseer for every twenty slaves, and a huge list of professionals who could prove in writing that they had labored at their vocation for at least five years.33 The Richmond Whig and the Examiner lauded Yancey’s vigilant stand against ‘‘reckless legislation’’ that could have hurried the government toward military despotism, and the Montgomery Advertiser echoed those endorsements, which Yancey proudly clipped and saved for his scrapbook.34 But a flurry of other legislative and military activities eclipsed his brief sense of triumph. On September  the Senate and Yancey turned their attention to accusations that General Bragg had summarily executed men after the battle of Shiloh. Both before and after that engagement, Bragg reported to his superiors that his men were ‘‘disorganized and demoralized.’’ A West Pointer, Bragg commanded largely untrained volunteers who had not yet faced combat, death, and horrific casualties. Senator Wigfall, often callous toward human life, gave Bragg’s actions his unrestrained endorsement. If a soldier deserted and his example enticed others to desert, ‘‘he should be shot down . . . then and there,’’ the Texan insisted. Wigfall explained that a common law in the army empowered even a lieutenant to shoot down a soldier during battle if that man was about to desert or if he created disorder, and asserted as well that the Senate had no power to regulate the conduct of armies in the field. Yancey and others were stunned. The Senate went into closed session where, doubtless, the members exchanged heated words.35 After an evening to cool off, the Senate resumed business and took up the allegations against Bragg. James L. Orr of South Carolina offered a resolution to call on Jefferson Davis for any relevant information about Bragg. Yancey interrupted to offer an amendment that broadened the inquiry to ask about any exe

n

Pillar of the Confederacy

cutions of any Confederate soldiers without trial and in violation of military regulations. The Senate adopted Yancey’s amendment. On September  Davis responded by stating that no reports had reached him or the secretary of war concerning alleged executions by Bragg, and that ended the matter for the Senate.36 But for Yancey, who feared the unauthorized growth of military power in the Confederacy, this episode hardly allayed his concerns. As the father of a son serving under Bragg’s command, it caused him terrible anguish. While Yancey and the Senate scrutinized Bragg, Robert E. Lee’s invasion of Union-held Maryland approached its climax at the town of Sharpsburg, on Antietam Creek. On September  Lee’s forces collided with George McClellan’s army in what turned out to be the bloodiest day in American history, with almost , total casualties, , of them Confederate. McClellan held the field, but Lee retreated safely across the Potomac River and back toward Richmond. For Lee, Jefferson Davis, Yancey, and many other southerners, news of this engagement tarnished their hopes of English intervention on their behalf. And more ominously for the Confederacy, the battle convinced Abraham Lincoln that the time had come to issue his preliminary Emancipation Proclamation on September .37 On the day that Lincoln transformed the Civil War into a new, revolutionary phase, Yancey turned his thoughts to a matter closer to home, his persistent complaints about the ratio of brigadier generals from Alabama to those from other Confederate states. Before the end of the first session of Congress, Yancey and Clement Clay wrote to President Davis about their concerns that Alabama had far fewer than its share of general officers—five—relative to its forty regiments in the field. The senators asked Davis to remedy that. They knew Davis wanted an officer to ‘‘win his spurs’’ on the field of combat before securing a promotion, but also that precedent existed for exceptions.38 Yancey’s letter irritated the prickly Confederate president, who issued this terse reply: ‘‘It is the province of the Executive to nominate and of the Senate to confirm or reject.’’ Davis offered to consider recommendations, ‘‘but I will not argue as to their propriety’’ or tolerate second-guessing of his decisions.39 Yancey was more confused by Davis’s rebuff than offended, and waited until he returned to Montgomery to write back. After several days’ consideration Yancey informed Davis that he read the president’s reply ‘‘with surprise,’’ and considered it ‘‘an angry refusal to consider the request.’’ He added that Davis’s use of the title ‘‘Senators’’ also suggested that Davis had misunderstood their intentions. Yancey explained that he and Clay had simply written on behalf of their constituents. Yancey, who recognized his own propensity for angry words, Pillar of the Confederacy

n



assured Davis, ‘‘I have refused to entertain any feeling of resentment,’’ but now simply asked again that Davis look at this question based upon its merits. In wholly uncharacteristic language, Yancey used humility and deference in his effort to persuade Davis. ‘‘I do this as a simple citizen’’ in whom the people of Alabama had placed their confidence, ‘‘for I have no right as a Senator, to suggest nominations,’’ yet added defensively that custom supported the practice. Yancey concluded the letter by admitting that Davis might still not agree with him, but hoped that Davis appreciated Yancey’s motives in writing.40 Despite Yancey’s support for Davis on various matters before and after this exchange, the two began drifting further apart. In September , Yancey resumed his efforts to commission more generals from Alabama. In the Senate Yancey recognized that Virginia had borne an inordinate burden so far in the war, but suggested that, surrounded by so many Virginians, President Davis naturally most often sided with them. The result was that Virginia had twenty-nine brigadier generals and Alabama four. And now Yancey added his voice to the petty chorus that complained about West Pointers gaining too much influence in the army. Once again Phelan joined Hill in arguing against Yancey’s position, but Yancey still submitted a resolution that called upon the president to consider keeping a balance between the number of brigadier generals and the number of men serving from each state. His colleagues, including Clement C. Clay, argued wisely that merit should remain the primary rationale for promotions, and the Senate rejected Yancey’s motion by a vote of –.41 This episode drove a wedge further between Davis and the Alabama senator, but the rest of the second session of the first Congress passed without event for Yancey.42 The third session of Congress opened on September , and with it came several tests of Yancey’s resolve to behave as a statesman. Still worried about General Bragg and the men serving under his command, including his son, Yancey successfully amended a bill to organize military courts and define their powers so that officers and men would receive a speedy trial and so that an officer ordering an arrest must immediately notify a military court. The clerk of the Senate submitted a cryptic report on October , mentioning two hours of ‘‘personal explanations’’ by Yancey and Phelan, but omitting all other details so as not to dishonor either man.43 Clearly, Yancey had reverted to his antebellum form, and made some personal, insulting remarks. The full realization of the impact of Antietam and Emancipation must have further tested Yancey’s self-restraint. He quibbled again with Benjamin Hill on October  about when to adjourn business for the day. Four days later, in the 

n

Pillar of the Confederacy

course of his resolution calling for a Confederate census, he expressed his belief that war would continue at least until . Conceding that direct taxation on individuals would become necessary to pay for the effort, he reasoned that the government required an accurate population count. Almost as an afterthought Yancey acknowledged that conducting a census would prove difficult with so many thousands under enemy occupation, but a somber Senate agreed with him that the effort must take place.44 That same day, October , Yancey replied to three Floridians who sought his advice about the Confederate elections coming up in November. Again Yancey cautioned that ‘‘several years’’ of war lay ahead, and repeated his concerns about the reserved rights of states and the danger of ‘‘a consolidated nationalism.’’ Under the pressures of war, Yancey understood that even good citizens might be tempted to abrogate personal and state liberties to bolster defenses against a powerful and remorseless enemy, but he assured them, ‘‘Our government was designed for war as well as peace.’’ Contrary to his remarks in the Senate in August, Yancey now confessed his fear that political parties could emerge and damage the Confederate effort. He concluded that under all these circumstances it simply underscored the imperative for southerners to elect those with ‘‘moral courage’’ to defend liberty while they defended their homes as well.45 Following his own advice to rise to the considerable challenges ahead, Yancey redoubled his efforts to protect liberty. For the remainder of the year he worked diligently, but unusually quietly, on his duties and managed to avoid personal confrontations. His most notable work concerned securing pay increases for privates in the army and clerks in the Confederate government, who, like all Confederates, found their meager pay evaporating in the face of staggering inflation rates and steadily diminishing supplies of basic goods. When another senator objected that the increase in soldiers’ pay alone would add  million to the Confederate debt, the often miserly Yancey simply replied, ‘‘Let it be so. Curtail the leaks and corruptions in other branches of the Government, but pay the toil-weary soldier.’’ 46 As Yancey spoke, all of Richmond received the bitter news that Braxton Bragg’s offensive into Union-held Kentucky had met with the same fate as Lee’s Maryland campaign. A weary Yancey gladly retreated to Montgomery when Congress ended its third session in October. Called upon to address the Alabama assembly on December , Yancey gave a rousing endorsement to the various conscription acts that had left so many grumbling about fairness and individual liberties. Yancey defended both the legality of conscription and the Davis administration. Because the Congress had a constitutional power to declare war, without the Pillar of the Confederacy

n



power to raise an army, independent of state militias, the war power could not meaningfully exist. He also defended the exemption provision for overseers as a matter of internal security. Yancey reasoned that this provision did not, in fact, exempt overseers from serving in the war effort, but instead redefined their service as wartime managers of slaves, better enabling the Confederacy to maximize the number of white men it could put into military service while slaves remained closely supervised behind the lines to produce food and materiel for combat troops.47 Combat strength and military support proved more critical by the day as  drew to a close and a new year dawned. On December  at Fredericksburg, Virginia, General Lee again drove away advancing Federals, with heavy casualties on both sides. At Murfreesboro, Tennessee, from December  to January , Braxton Bragg’s forces suffered massive losses while defending their position, but his decision to withdraw his men reaped another round of criticism toward that general. And with New Year’s Day  came Abraham Lincoln’s formal Emancipation Proclamation. With the stakes higher than ever, Yancey hastened back to Richmond. As he boarded a train in Raleigh, North Carolina, on January  he joined Jefferson Davis, himself heading back to the capital after an extensive tour of the South. They both made brief remarks to a crowd that gathered at the depot, with Yancey warning the audience to ‘‘disregard party’’ and support their political and military leaders. Doubtless the two had a long conversation about war and politics before they reached Richmond the next day.48 The question of a foreign loan came to the Senate floor and received Yancey’s critical attention. John Slidell had negotiated a loan for over  million from French financier Emile Erlanger.49 From his time in the Confederate foreign service, Yancey remained acutely aware of the difficulty that Confederate purchasing agents had faced in obtaining supplies in Europe, since Confederate currency had no value overseas. Yancey had spent much of his time in Europe seeking financial backing, and since his return maintained correspondence with several of his former colleagues overseas.50 Yancey saw several drawbacks to the proposal. First of all, Confederate government cotton used to secure the loan was set at twelve cents per pound, and Yancey was certain that it should yield thirteen and a half cents. Furthermore, and yet another mark of his continued support for his president, Yancey offered a substitute bill that would have allowed Davis himself to negotiate a loan of  million. Twelve senators voted down Yancey’s proposal, and the original bill passed quickly through both houses.51 

n

Pillar of the Confederacy

When President Davis nominated John A. Campbell for assistant secretary of war, it instantly provoked Yancey’s anger. Although Campbell had helped Yancey draft the Alabama Platform in , since then Campbell had opposed southern radicalism at nearly every turn. He sought conciliation during Yancey’s campaign for secession in , and after Campbell’s elevation to the federal bench, he opposed southern expansionism to Cuba and Nicaragua. After Alabama seceded, Campbell remained for months in Washington as a member of the Supreme Court, and only after his failure to help work out some lastditch effort to save the Union did he return to Mobile.52 Yancey believed that Campbell had equated secession with treason, and feared that an appointment to the War Department indicated a likely future nomination for Campbell to chief justice of a proposed Confederate Supreme Court. Yancey asked his supporters in Campbell’s hometown to produce documentation of these dark suspicions. They found plenty. Thomas Butler accused Campbell of laboring with William H. Seward during the secession winter ‘‘to chain it [the South] forever to the car of the federal North.’’ H. G. Humphreys sent Yancey copies of Campbell’s letters, with the addendum, ‘‘They are sufficient to kill him!’’ 53 Despite Yancey’s efforts, Campbell secured his post in the War Department. This created more tension between Yancey and Davis and greater anxiety for Yancey about the creation of a Supreme Court.54 From the days of the provisional congress few issues remained more nettlesome in the Confederacy than the idea of a Supreme Court. If a Confederate appellate court could overrule decisions in states, Yancey feared that would undermine state sovereignty. On February , , President Davis had asked Congress to pass enabling legislation to finally establish a Supreme Court, but states’ rights proponents continued to block the matter. Early in  the issue achieved some urgency, since many states now questioned the authority of the Confederate Congress on matters such as conscription, taxation, and confiscation of property.55 For Yancey, the protracted debate over the court provided the supreme test of his resolve to build and unite. The complex Supreme Court bill, reported by sections from Benjamin Hill’s Judiciary Committee, left Yancey squirming on every point. He first objected to the number of justices to serve on that court. The committee bill called for a chief justice and three associate justices. Senator Hill moved to add a fourth associate, if only to reduce the likelihood of an evenly divided court. Phelan of Mississippi supported Hill’s amendment. Yancey offered his own amendment; he wanted only two associate justices. James Orr replied that a – decision on any important matter would satisfy very few people. Yancey observed that Pillar of the Confederacy

n



in his twenty years of practicing law he had never known a party to be satisfied with a court decision that went against them under any circumstances. But he added that among the problems in the ‘‘old Government’’ was the abuse of presidential patronage, and by creating a smaller Confederate Supreme Court, that problem would diminish. Yancey’s amendment passed.56 On January  the Senate turned to the issue of salaries for justices of the Supreme Court. Hill’s committee sought , for the chief justice. Clement Clay countered with , for the chief justice, and , for associate justices. Hill objected that prospective justices had no incentive to forego state positions that paid around , a year for the burden of relocating to Richmond and dealing with the most difficult or controversial cases in the land. Wigfall and other states’ rights men objected on various grounds. Yancey called for all three justices to receive the same pay, ,, insisting that ‘‘honors of the bench’’ would attract the top legal minds. But Yancey also echoed one of Wigfall’s concerns by asking if this Supreme Court would have more honor or dignity than state courts. ‘‘When we decide that the State Courts are of inferior dignity to this court,’’ Yancey demanded, ‘‘we have sapped the main pillar of this Confederacy.’’ The Senate rejected his motion on justices’ pay.57 But Yancey made a critical point. If southerners substituted one centralized national government for another, then all of his efforts to establish a southern republic would be for naught. Over the next few days Yancey gathered his energies and thoughts in his effort to stop Hill and the Supreme Court from destroying his dream. On January  he again labored to explain to his colleagues what was so palpably obvious to him. ‘‘Giving to the Supreme Court power to construe the Constitution involved an absurdity.’’ The separate, sovereign states created the Court; it therefore could not possess the power to declare constitutional something that any or all of the states considered unconstitutional. Yancey then confronted another nemesis, James Phelan, who had just made a remark about South Carolina nullifiers, a group that Yancey had opposed in his youth, but quickly came to revere. ‘‘If any fling had been intended at South Carolina,’’ Yancey fired back, but Phelan interrupted to deny that he intended any ‘‘fling.’’ Yancey, though, paid homage to those nullifiers and argued that they deserved the thanks of every man in the Confederacy for asserting the doctrine of states’ rights. He warned the Senate, ‘‘When you strain the powers of the [central] Government against the States you will have a war of intellect, which will soon become a moral war, [and] the flashing of judgments will soon become a flashing of swords.’’ 58 The war of words and ideas continued in the Senate through February , 

n

Pillar of the Confederacy

when they finally resulted in another infamous Yancey outburst. Yancey later recalled that Hill spoke for about fifteen minutes, indulging ‘‘in terms of sarcasm and disparagement’’ directed at Yancey. Neither the president of the Senate, Robert M. T. Hunter, nor other members called Hill to order, even after he attacked Yancey’s character and morals. Yancey rose to protest that Hill spoke from ‘‘malignity and long cherished spleen,’’ and condemned Hill’s comments about Yancey’s ‘‘autobiography’’ as malicious lies. Now Hunter called Yancey to order, and Hill rose to insist that it was Yancey who had accused Hill of willful animosity.59 The matter simmered even after the Senate went into secret session to deal with other matters. But quickly attention returned to the heated exchange between Yancey and Hill. Yancey’s housemate, Robert W. Barnwell, suggested that even though Yancey had offended Hill he had done so unintentionally. Yancey replied that he had said nothing either offensive or personal, and therefore politely declined Barnwell’s suggestion that he apologize to Hill. With the entire Senate listening, Barnwell continued to press Yancey to issue an apology. Yancey understood Barnwell’s desire to make peace, but felt that the Carolinian had unwittingly placed him in ‘‘an embarrassing and false position.’’ Yancey then announced that although he had said nothing before to insult Hill, he now regretted that he had not ‘‘used language of greater severity.’’ From his seat Hill shouted back, ‘‘You had better, then, do so now,’’ to which Yancey replied, ‘‘I have said all in that way consistent with my character as a gentleman to say.’’ Yancey then sat down, eyes directed at his desk, when he suddenly felt the impact of a glass inkstand that Hill hurled across the mere twelve feet between them, striking Yancey’s cheek bone, just below the temple and corner of his right eye. Blood flowed copiously onto Yancey’s collar, neck, and chest. Yancey rose to confront Hill, only to see the Georgian throw a heavy glass tumbler toward Yancey. This time, though, the glass missed him and exploded into pieces when it hit a window sill. Yancey lunged toward Hill, shouting, ‘‘It was a coward’s blow,’’ only to be restrained by several colleagues, as Hunter called in the sergeant-at-arms.60 The Senate immediately established a committee to deal with the embarrassing, disgraceful affair. It quickly censured Yancey but not Hill, by a vote of –. Yancey protested, citing several rule violations by Hill and Hunter (the latter for ignoring the escalating situation). Yancey denied that the phrase ‘‘I have said all in that way consistent with my character as a gentleman to say’’ constituted an uncalled-for remark, and argued that nine of twenty-four senators should not be permitted to judge him. Nevertheless, with the same defiant spirit of Pillar of the Confederacy

n



his jailhouse letter to his brother after his murder conviction twenty-four years before, Yancey vowed that his honor remained intact ‘‘which an unjust censure, even of the Senate of the Confederate States, cannot pierce.’’ 61 Oddly enough, Hill’s public version of the encounter matched Yancey’s. The two had a history of conflict, from Hill’s days as a Whig when Yancey was a Democrat, and from Hill’s strong unionism during the secession winter. At an election barbecue at West Point, Georgia, in October  the two had exchanged harsh words. That same year, Hill drew a challenge to a duel from Alexander Stephens, but backed out.62 The day after the inkstand incident, Attorney General Thomas H. Watts, Yancey’s old legal adversary, encountered Yancey on a walk through Richmond and was startled by Yancey’s wound. Watts found Yancey unusually evasive, but later learned what happened and that both Hill and Yancey were sworn to secrecy on the matter.63 It took almost thirty years for a different version of the story to emerge. In , the Richmond Dispatch ran a piece called ‘‘Yancey and Hill.’’ Anonymous sources stated that Hill had attacked Yancey’s entire public career and had claimed that it was not enough for Yancey to have destroyed the Union, but that Yancey sought the destruction of the Confederacy as well. Supposedly Yancey replied that Hill merely restated the slander of others over the past twenty years, charges leveled by third-rate politicians, and that nature had designed Hill ‘‘as an imitator; that he had been cast in a certain die, and it was vain to attempt to enlarge his dimensions.’’ At that point, the inkstand flew.64 The Alabama senator remained conspicuously absent from his duties for well over a week. Three days after the clash Yancey wrote to the secretary of the Senate to obtain Hill’s voting record on several key bills, and painstakingly began sketching the outlines of a caustic speech.65 Meanwhile, in the days of February –, Yancey and the Senate mostly turned their attention to yet another protracted debate on the exemption bill. The current exemption for overseers lay at the heart of the matter for many. Critics claimed that it favored the wealthy slaveholders over ordinary white farmers-turned-soldiers, and threatened to disrupt harmony across class lines among white southerners.66 Yancey vigorously defended the overseer exemption, despite his acknowledgment that the language of that portion of the bill unintentionally left the impression that it favored the wealthy. ‘‘In truth no man had been conscripted because he was poor or because he was rich,’’ Yancey began. If congressmen had spent their recess explaining to their constituents the background and intent of this exemption, ‘‘there would have been no discontent.’’ Long before secession, each southern state had required 

n

Pillar of the Confederacy

by law that each plantation have at least one white man on its premises to police its slave population. If the roughly , men currently serving behind the lines of battle as overseers could produce greater service to the Confederacy in the military, Yancey conceded that they must be pressed into service. But, he argued, that was not the case. First of all, Yancey pointed out that with current levels of supplies the armies of the South could not quickly absorb , more men, and that President Davis, knowing this, had called up only half the number of men authorized under the conscription law.67 Nine days after debate began, the Senate passed its exemption bill with the overseer provision intact, by a vote of –. Hill and Simms again voted against a bill that Yancey fought tenaciously to pass.68 For the next few days Yancey quietly prepared for two more battles: one over military impressment of private property, and the other a personal score with Benjamin Hill. For those who feared that the Confederate government had already grown out of control, proposals for confiscation seemed the next step down the road toward despotism. Yancey’s position on various versions of the bill matched his stance on conscription, exemption, and his general concerns about balancing individual liberties with the need for a strong military. If the armed forces faced a ‘‘case of absolute necessity’’ in the presence of the enemy, Yancey supported their ability to seize farmers’ livestock or provisions. He worried about the application of such a bill. Would it be invoked to seize property to compensate for shortages caused by neglect or mal-administration of commissaries and quartermasters? And what provisions existed to ensure that citizens received fair market value for their impressed property? 69 Yancey objected most strenuously to an amendment by Senator Semmes of Louisiana that would have allowed the president to appoint three commissioners to fix prices for compensation of impressed goods across the entire Confederacy. In effect, Yancey argued, this would empower the president himself, through his appointees, to set prices without effective appeal. Citing evidence from his home state, Yancey explained that prices varied widely on such basic commodities as corn, which cost  percent more in Mobile than in Huntsville. Yancey preferred Wigfall’s amendment to let local officials in each state set prices, but argued that the only law that made sense in the matter was that of supply and demand. Furthermore, Yancey objected that no version of the bill gave sufficient protection to owners of livestock and slaves, especially because of the role each played in producing crops required for the war effort.70 As a slaveholding farmer himself, Yancey’s grievances hit close to home. When the Senate passed its version of the impressment bill on March , it Pillar of the Confederacy

n



bore the mark of Yancey’s efforts to moderate and to compromise. The measure established clear provisions and protocols for seizing property and appraising its value, including a modicum of local controls on each as well as safeguards against wanton or unnecessary confiscation. At least until October , , the bill prohibited the military from taking slaves devoted exclusively to the production of grains and other provisions, unless the owner consented. The final bill signed by Davis later that month closely resembled the Senate version, and over the next several months no serious public protest greeted the new law.71 After the impressment bill passed, Yancey finally turned his wrath on Benjamin Hill. The six weeks since their fray had done nothing to temper the fireeater, who assailed his latest nemesis on March . Yancey’s verbal barrage occurred in secret session. Once again no one broke the Senate’s code of silence, but Yancey’s preparatory notes provide a clear indication of what he said, as well as what Hill had said during their previous altercation. As in his opposition to the creation of a Confederate Supreme Court, Yancey began by defending himself as the champion of states’ rights. Yancey charged Hill with using that arch-Federalist, Alexander Hamilton, long vilified by most southerners, to justify his arguments on the Supreme Court bill and other legislation. Yancey’s notes recorded his next series of thoughts and attacks. ‘‘Assails my intellect, history, and politics!’’ ‘‘Next assails my ‘Auto-Biography,’ ’’ because it subjected Hill ‘‘to fits of jealousy-envy-Mine an uninterrupted career of advocacy of true principles of the Con[stitutio]n.’’ But Yancey characterized Hill’s public life as ‘‘an uninterrupted career of opposition to those principles.’’ 72 Then Yancey launched a personal attack. According to Yancey, Hill had characterized the Alabamian’s speeches as ‘‘open his mouth & words rush out like shot from his bag.’’ Yancey explained, ‘‘Nothing new—We have disagreed always. He attacks and portrays my intellect!’’ But in fact, Yancey claimed Hill ‘‘is captive of my bow & spear—of principles long advocated!’’ Then Yancey reminded the Senate that recently Wigfall had made a statement that Hill said everyone but Yancey understood to be a joke. He tried to turn the table on Hill, who ‘‘sneers at State-Rights—only a Joke!’’; Hill, who considered the conscription law only a joke; Hill, who ‘‘Sneers at old opinions, but uses them’’ as a joke; Hill, ‘‘     .’’ Yancey added that Hill was a ‘‘Thimble Rigger & Little Joker,’’ the former a term for a swindler, a cheat, who rigged a trick that hid a pea under one of three thimbles.73 Neither that phrase nor Yancey’s calling him feeble, mediocre, and an imitator provoked any substantial response from Hill. No longer adhering to the code that might have 

n

Pillar of the Confederacy

led to a duel and death, Yancey contented himself with his rhetorical volleys. Hill and Yancey never again exchanged harsh words. For the next several weeks, Yancey again contented himself with the role of team player and avoided emotional altercations with his colleagues.74 One matter, however, compelled Yancey to directly challenge President Davis. The Senate had received numerous complaints about the army in the Trans-Mississippi Department, a vast area that began on the west bank of the Mississippi River and ran toward the Confederacy’s claim to Arizona Territory. General Theophilus H. Holmes commanded the district since July , . Another WestPointer and close friend of Davis, Holmes was simply not fit for his assignment. Western Confederates complained loudly about his ‘‘acts of usurpation and tyranny,’’ his ‘‘imbecility and mismanagement,’’ and while Holmes denied allegations of wrongdoing, even he admitted to Davis that ‘‘the Holy cause is suffering in my hands.’’ 75 Nevertheless, as Davis did with those few who pleased him, the commander-in-chief stuck tenaciously by his friend Holmes.76 On April  the Senate debated a resolution calling for the secretary of war to report on matters in the troubled Trans-Mississippi district. Yancey objected that the secretary had no real responsibility for these problems. All members of the Davis cabinet, Yancey stated, ‘‘were but creatures of the will of the President.’’ Davis alone must shoulder the responsibility, and if the Senate wanted a report on the district, they should address their resolution directly to Davis. Yancey’s version passed by a vote of –; even Hill and Phelan voted with him.77 Yancey did not intend to attack Davis. In fact, the thin-skinned president needed less provocation than Yancey to consider someone disloyal to the Confederate cause. In this minor conflict as with those before, Yancey had no idea that his words had upset Davis. When he attacked Benjamin Hill, Yancey certainly did not realize that the Georgian stood among the few men in the Confederate Congress whom Davis trusted. Yancey made matters worse with a letter to Davis on April  in which he complained about the ‘‘deleteriousness of the Gov’t’’ in settling a million dollar debt for supplies Yancey had ordered while in England, when in fact that account had been paid.78 A disturbing matter from Montgomery added to Yancey’s distress. On April  Yancey had received a telegram from his overseer stating that a military officer had impressed one of Yancey’s slaves to work on nearby fortifications and required that slave to report with thirty pounds of bacon to help feed himself over the next two months. Yancey fired off a blistering letter to Secretary of Pillar of the Confederacy

n



War James Seddon, calling him to account for ‘‘any military exercise of illegal power.’’ Having just helped draft and pass the impressment bill, Yancey stated with some authority that the new law was not yet in effect and that the impressment of his slave violated that law anyway, because no immediate military threat existed near Montgomery. Yancey asked Seddon to instruct the local authorities to withdraw their order, and he advised his overseer to defy the order and to consult a lawyer. The frugal Yancey also complained that rations for Confederate troops included a quarter pound of bacon per day, but that his slave was to have twice that much, of course, at Yancey’s expense. In his anger and haste, Yancey forgot about that ‘‘main pillar of the Confederacy,’’ state sovereignty. He reported to Seddon on April  that he had just learned the impressment of his slave had been executed in full conformity with Alabama law; Confederate officers had nothing to do with it.79 Before the Senate completed its third session on May , Yancey had already left for Montgomery. It almost cost him his life. As he left Augusta, Georgia, his train jumped the tracks. The accident killed one and injured several others, but Yancey escaped unscathed, returning home on April .80 Upon his arrival, Yancey had to deal with the desire of his son Dalton, now eighteen years old, to serve his country. Dalton told his father that in the face of declining fortunes for the Confederacy he could no longer avoid military service. Yancey finally resigned himself to the fact that his son would serve the Confederacy with or without his approval. Facing that fact, Yancey boasted to his friend and colleague Clement C. Clay, ‘‘He is a fine, manly fellow’’ with ‘‘uncommon strength of character,’’ then wrote directly to Jefferson Davis to recommend his son for an officer’s commission in the Confederate army.81 Davis denied Yancey’s request. Startled and perplexed, Yancey began to wonder if his occasional political criticism of Davis lay at the core of Davis’s decision. The same Yancey who had just lashed out at James Seddon and Ben Hill now wrote an almost sheepish letter to Davis. Working on the presumption that dispensing or denying such commissions often constituted rewards for friends and punishment for ‘‘enemies,’’ Yancey confessed that he was ‘‘entirely unaware that you entertained any personal enmity towards me.’’ Yancey stated that he would never have made the request in the first place if he had thought that honest differences of opinion with Davis would result in ‘‘personal dislike,’’ and withdrew his request. To Clay he wrote, ‘‘The boy is worthy of a commission and will get one on his merit.’’ 82 About the same time Yancey received a letter from Clay that only complicated his already tenuous relationship with Jefferson Davis. The two Ala

n

Pillar of the Confederacy

bama senators, along with Congressman William Chilton, had supported a man named Glackmayer for the position of Confederate postmaster in Montgomery. Davis preferred a person named Burton, mostly because Glackmayer was an immigrant and Burton was native born. Clay twice urged Davis to reconsider, to no avail, with Davis repeating his contention that his was the exclusive power to nominate even over objections of Confederate politicians such as Yancey and Chilton who lived in the place where the nominee would hold office. Then Clay announced that he would not vote for Burton. According to Clay, the president fired back defiantly, ‘‘Very well. If you think it right to reject a good man because you and your colleague preferred another, do so.’’ Clay sadly reported to Yancey that he had left Davis ‘‘in a bad humor with you,’’ and decided he had better not even raise the issue of Dalton at this point.83 Yancey was stung. On one hand, he was not surprised at Davis’s course because of the recent, though minor, political conflicts between the two. On the other hand, ‘‘for the sake of a regard of many years standing (for we commenced public life together in the same Congress), I was pained to learn it.’’ 84 On the heels of Clay’s letter, Yancey received another one directly from Davis. To Davis—who seldom even attempted to mend fences—it must have represented an olive branch of sorts, but it did little to settle the irritating, lingering feud that had developed with Yancey. Davis asked how Yancey had concluded that the president ‘‘entertained personal enmity’’ toward him. Davis claimed that he had never made such a declaration and therefore, ‘‘I think, I have a right to inquire.’’ The president admitted that ‘‘for some time’’ he had believed that Yancey opposed his administration, but that while Yancey’s supposed adversarial position ‘‘was not of that measured kind,’’ it nevertheless did ‘‘not disturb good wishes and desire to give support.’’ Davis even agreed with Yancey about the implications of rewards and punishments in the power to make appointments, but concluded his letter with a dramatic act of generosity. He decided not only to forward Yancey’s original recommendation for Dalton, but also to retain possession of Yancey’s complaint as a private letter.85 Emotion, ego, concern for his sons and for his country—all combined to shape Yancey’s reply in what became a running correspondence between the senator and the president. Yancey now stated that Davis had become ‘‘inimical’’ to him, and that since his return from Europe he had noticed a ‘‘change in your manner to me’’ from their brief time together inaugurating the Confederate republic early in . Yancey then complained that Davis had recently made governmental appointments in Alabama to some of his ‘‘most inveterate political foes,’’ and repeated his protest that Davis never consulted him about any Pillar of the Confederacy

n



appointments in his state, civil or military. Yancey dredged up his exchange of letters with Davis from April , , in which Yancey and Clay sought input on Davis’s selection of brigadier generals from Alabama, and Davis’s icy reply that these matters were the prerogative of the executive. Yancey now called that response ‘‘an act of grave discourtesy.’’ He then refuted Davis’s recent statement about his own opposition to the administration and urged Davis to ask fellow senator Clement Clay, a close friend of the president’s, for confirmation of that fact.86 The battle of pride and honor dragged on into the heat of early summer. Even as General Ulysses S. Grant collected over , Union troops to besiege the Confederate stronghold of Vicksburg on the Mississippi River, Davis fired off another letter to Yancey. The senator’s allegations of ‘‘personal hostility’’ were ‘‘utterly untrue.’’ The president again defended his power to appoint without the slightest consultation with members of Congress, and again asked Yancey how he had concluded that Davis harbored ‘‘personal enmity’’ toward him. Then Davis shifted the grounds of discussion and signaled his desire to end their squabbling. He stated that this was not the time for unfriendly relations between those whom the people of the country depended upon for leadership. ‘‘For myself, all of hostile feeling that I possess is reserved for the enemies of my country, not for those who, like yourself, are devoted to our common cause.’’ Davis acknowledged Yancey’s promise to make candid judgments about his administration and to continue to provide him with ‘‘generous support . . . whatever may be our personal relations.’’ He termed Yancey’s pledge ‘‘worthy of a patriot.’’ 87 Yancey also sought an end to the bickering, but could not resist one more defense of himself. He wrote that Davis’s conduct toward him, especially regarding Dalton, was proof enough of ‘‘enmity,’’ that Clay was the source of thirdparty information, and that regarding presidential appointments all Yancey ever asked for was the ‘‘courtesy’’ of consultation, not any infringement of presidential powers. Having purged himself of the last of his ire, Yancey then poured out his heart to Davis. ‘‘I have no interest apart from those of my country—I have three sons (two underage) in her services.’’ Willie was in the trenches of Vicksburg: ‘‘If God in his kind Providence has spared his life—I have not heard from, or of, him since th May.’’ He added, ‘‘You are the symbolic representative of the cause for which they risk their precious lives—and if I differ with you in some matters in the conduct of the war—it is the difference entertained by one who has his all at stake.’’ 88 That was Yancey’s last letter to Davis. By the end of June , Yancey had grown horribly ill. The recurrence of 

n

Pillar of the Confederacy

pain and difficulty sleeping in the hot Alabama summer tested his determination to act constructively. It may also have contributed to his uniquely personal and almost vulnerable language in his final letter to Davis. On June , Yancey received a troubling letter from Clay, who had met briefly with Davis just before he started his trip home. ‘‘I confess . . . surprise, not unmingled with indignation, at his positive and harsh denial of enmity towards you,’’ Clay explained, adding that everyone who had witnessed Davis denouncing Yancey over the past year felt the same. Desperately trying to understand Davis, Clay suggested that the president somehow retained friendship and respect for Yancey as a man, despite public ‘‘epithets and innuendo.’’ Clay added that he would never treat friends that way and that he believed from start to finish Yancey acted manfully, generously, and honorably. Clay concluded of Davis, ‘‘His official course grows daily more inscrutable, and the more I see of him the less I understand him.’’ 89 Yancey found himself tormented on multiple fronts. It had long ago become clear to him that the Yankees had intentionally tried to starve out the Confederacy by destroying farms, livestock, and equipment. Lincoln’s Emancipation Proclamation had surprised neither him nor many Confederates, but simply underscored in their minds how their entire way of life was now at stake. The bloody but stunning Confederate victory at Chancellorsville in early May had been tarnished by the death of General ‘‘Stonewall’’ Jackson, accidentally shot by one of his own men. Without his faithful lieutenant, Robert E. Lee nevertheless launched a daring attack on the North, colliding with Union forces at the colossal battle of Gettysburg. After three days of fighting there, on July  Lee was forced to retreat to Virginia, and to make matters worse that same day Confederates surrendered their entire force of , men at Vicksburg. Yancey finally learned of Willie’s fate; he had survived, although he suffered a horrible wound to his neck and shoulder. Paroled along with the rest of his comrades, Willie recovered slowly in a hospital in Mobile. Yancey pinned the blame for Vicksburg squarely on Davis’s ‘‘prejudice & littleness,’’ and predicted that ‘‘this will be the verdict of history.’’ After Gettysburg and Vicksburg, a public outcry emerged over the impressment bill that Yancey had labored so diligently to make fair. Price lists established by various local, state, and Confederate officials often paid only half of an open-market figure because of their failure to take into account rapidly rising prices.90 Surmounting everything was the rapid decline of Yancey’s health. He became ill by the middle of June, afflicted with fever, inflamation of his bladder, and tremendous pain. He could not rest nor eat, and rapidly lost weight. And yet his concern for Davis’s friendship moved Yancey to get out of bed and write Pillar of the Confederacy

n



again to Clay on July . Davis’s last letter, Yancey stated, ‘‘bore strange lack of frankness and a wonderful fullness of diplomacy.’’ Yancey asked Clay once more to ascertain whether or not Davis ‘‘appeared desirous of holding on to my regard.’’ Two weeks later Yancey wrote to his son Ben that pain and illness kept him bedridden. He suffered from fever and endured horrible kidney pain; he suspected kidney stones, but in fact it was a dangerous infection. He now confessed to his son that for years he had endured ‘‘bleeding piles, and they exhaust me.’’ 91 On July  Yancey received a sympathetic letter from Clay, and it boosted his spirits for a moment. Clay assured Yancey that Davis in fact desired a good relationship with him. Clay also expressed his surprise that Davis still could not admit to any lack of friendship toward Yancey, nor could Davis understand why Yancey could consider him in any way a foe. ‘‘I think he begins to find himself in want of friends, or adherents and I do not know really which he wishes,’’ Clay offered.92 On July , Yancey again wrote to his oldest son. His health had not improved. ‘‘Perhaps a little better today, but so wearied and exhausted,’’ he scribbled in incomplete sentences. Willie had recovered enough to leave Mobile for Montgomery. To Ben, Yancey pleaded, ‘‘Do not risk any thing my son but try & come & see your family. I will write Dalton to try & be here also.’’ The physical agony that Yancey experienced was matched by his pain at witnessing Sarah incapacitated with severe fever. ‘‘I have never known one to suffer as much in three days,’’ he told Ben. Yearning for renewed health and the first reunion of his family since before secession, Yancey was unable to recuperate before his boys came home. His kidney infection took his life later in the day that he concluded his letter to Ben. William Lowndes Yancey died two weeks shy of his forty-ninth birthday, fearful that the cause to which he had dedicated his adult life might die as well.93



n

Pillar of the Confederacy

LE GACY

Yancey’s body lay in his modest dogtrot farmhouse outside of Montgomery until July , . A funeral ceremony that day utterly stopped business in the city. It began at : .., after the most intense heat of the day, and lasted an hour. Most stores had already closed down in a show of respect, and many citizens, including soldiers and public officials, overflowed the First Presbyterian Church to hear minister George Petrie’s words and to pay homage to their most famous resident. Mourners then removed Yancey’s remains to Oakwood Cemetery, on a hill above Goat Hill, where the first Confederate Capitol stood. Later, an imposing obelisk was placed over his grave, inscribed with flowery praise for the man ‘‘called to public life in the most critical hour of his country’s fortunes,’’ praising Yancey’s ‘‘love of truth, devotion to right,’’ his ‘‘simple integrity and reverence for manly honor. . . . For his country’s sake he loved the South; for the sake of the South, he loved his country.’’ 1 Before Yancey had sailed for Europe he made out his last will and testament. He left most of his estate to his wife, their townhome, farmhouse, land, most furnishings, and all but one slave. He stipulated that Sarah should see to the completion of the education of their youngest sons, Dalton, Goodloe, and Willie, and that each would receive either , or the equivalent in property once they came of age. His eldest son, Ben, would receive , from the sale of his father’s farm produce, and, if sales fell short, would obtain the difference from Yancey’s , life insurance policy. He designated a slave named Henrietta for his daughter, Mary, and some real estate. Yancey also willed his investments in Minnesota to his faithful half-brother, Sam Beman, plus the money that Sam owed him. Clearly Yancey had exaggerated his frequent complaints of poverty. In a highly symbolic gesture, Yancey decided to leave the field glass of George Washington, given to him by the Ladies Mount Vernon Society of the Union, to the father of his new country, Jefferson Davis.2 News about Yancey’s death spread quickly over the Confederate nation he

had been so instrumental in creating. Yancey’s hometown newspaper, the Montgomery Advertiser, said Yancey ‘‘was to the politics of the country what ‘Stonewall’ Jackson was to the army in the field.’’ Similar tributes appeared across the Confederacy. The Atlanta Intelligencer exclaimed, ‘‘Like Moses, though one of the instruments in leading his people out of bondage, he was permitted to behold, at a distance, the promised land, but not to enter it.’’ In Richmond, four papers carried news of Yancey’s death, bemoaning the loss of his guidance in protecting and nurturing the infant Confederacy. The Dispatch noted that Yancey refused to lead the congressional opposition to Jefferson Davis.3 Rhett’s Charleston Mercury printed a long, laudatory obituary that praised— and exaggerated—Yancey’s entire life. Ignoring his youthful, bitter opposition to Calhoun and nullification, the Mercury eulogized Yancey as the protector of liberty, a leader who both ‘‘moved the popular heart’’ as well as provided the masses with a clear understanding of their rights. It extolled his career in the Confederate Senate, his fearless struggle to establish ‘‘liberty protected by law,’’ and asserted that no one in the Confederacy could truly replace his influence there. The Rhetts did not gloss over Yancey’s ‘‘ardent temper,’’ but recognized it as a mark of his devotion to the South.4 But as news traveled north, reactions obviously changed. Northern editors unanimously agreed that Yancey towered above all others in bringing secession and the horrors of war. In the aftermath of recent Union victories at Gettysburg and Vicksburg, the Philadelphia Inquirer gloated that Yancey had ‘‘staked much and lost all—honor, character, self-respect,’’ and had contributed nothing constructive to the Confederacy during his Senate career.5 The New York Herald initially reprinted a Richmond paper’s account of Yancey’s life and death, but then turned its fury on ‘‘that arch plotter of this terrible Southern rebellion.’’ While southern newspapers mourned ‘‘the loss of a saint,’’ the Herald proclaimed that in fact Yancey ‘‘was nothing more than a restless, plotting revolutionist, a noisy fire-eater, an eloquent blatherskite, always in hot water, and never satisfied with anything. With his decease a great bag of wind has collapsed, and nothing more.’’ 6 Harper’s Weekly followed suit, first printing a simple, brief death notice, then editorializing about ‘‘the most virulent but not one of the most able of the traitors who have conspired for the ruin of their country.’’ Like other northern papers, Harper’s concluded that ‘‘his sole distinction is that he hated his country, because his country loved liberty.’’ 7 Of course, personal reactions to Yancey’s death were markedly different. Rev. Nathan Beman, now seventy-seven years old, had just resigned his pastorate in 

n

Legacy

Troy, New York, on June , , and did not issue any public statement on the death of his notorious stepson. For a while Beman and his daughter, Louisa, lived in Illinois, but Rev. Beman moved back to Troy by  and died the next year at the age of eighty-four.8 Many of the politicians closest to Yancey expressed genuine sorrow at his demise. James L. Orr of South Carolina, no friend of Yancey’s during the secession winter, offered a long, laudatory eulogy on the floor of the Confederate Senate. In the House, William P. Chilton gave a long, public farewell to his former law partner. Several other congressmen added their voices of praise and sadness, and then that body adjourned for the day in honor of their late colleague. Privately, Clement C. Clay told Louis Wigfall about the death of ‘‘poor Yancey’’ and the efforts of the two Alabama senators to heal the breach that had developed with Jefferson Davis.9 Davis forgave Yancey. In a private letter to his widow, Sarah, Davis acknowledged receiving the spyglass of George Washington that Yancey had bequeathed to him. ‘‘I offer my heartfelt sympathy,’’ he wrote Sarah, and accepted the sacred relic as a token of ‘‘the kind feelings of my former associate and friend, the distinguished patriot and statesman whose loss is deplored by his country.’’ 10 Shortly after Yancey’s death, his secessionist colleagues in Alabama quickly fell from power.11 On April , , Robert E. Lee surrendered to Ulysses S. Grant. Three days later, a Union army force of , soldiers entered Montgomery, where , soldiers and municipal government officials wisely decided not to resist.12 By the war’s end, Oakwood Cemetery in Montgomery interred  Union veterans, along with about  Confederate dead, buried on the hill adjacent to Yancey’s final resting place.13 Sarah Yancey all but vanished from the historical record shortly after her husband’s death, though she survived him by twenty years. She died in June  in Athens, Georgia, likely during a visit with her brother-in-law, Ben. She was buried at the side of her husband in Oakwood Cemetery in Montgomery. Ten years later the magazine Confederate Veteran mentioned that its editor, S. A. Cunningham, had once met Mrs. Yancey on a train. Cunningham remarked to her that he had never known William L. Yancey, to which supposedly Sarah had replied, ‘‘No man knew my husband.’’ 14 Yancey’s brother survived the war, having commanded troops in northeastern Georgia and avoided the onslaught of William Tecumseh Sherman’s army. After the war he resumed farming and continued to serve as a trustee of the University of Georgia until . Ben Yancey also presided over the state AgriLegacy

n



cultural Society from  to . He passed away in  at the age of seventyfour.15 Yancey’s sons continued their military service until the end of the war. Goodloe and Willie suffered several wounds but survived.16 Goodloe honored his father’s wishes by attending a business school. He then engaged in various occupations, mostly in or near Athens, Georgia, culminating in a term as secretary of the state’s prison commission. He died on August , , in Fulton County, Georgia. Willie married in  while still serving under legendary cavalry general Nathan Bedford Forrest. After the war, Willie also worked at various jobs before joining the Republican Iron and Steel Company in Birmingham. His father-in-law, Major William Lewis, purchased William and Sarah’s home some time after the wedding. Willie survived his three brothers, living until . At the end of the war the eldest Yancey son, Ben, joined hundreds of other former Confederates in a flight from the Union to colonies in Brazil, the last major country to legally protect slavery. There he married in , before returning to the United States around . He settled in Umatilla, Florida, where he bought land and grew oranges, eventually dying in  at the age of seventy-two. Dalton, like Willie, served under General Forrest at the end of the war. He then completed his law degree, the only one of Yancey’s sons to do so. After securing approval from Sarah in , Dalton followed Ben to Brazil, but gave up on the venture and returned to Georgia by October .17 There he practiced law before moving to Florida, where he won election to the state senate in . By  he was serving as a registrar of the U.S. Treasury Department in Washington, the first Yancey to return to that city in an official capacity since his father left in . Dalton died on August , . All four Yancey sons named their firstborn sons William to honor their father. The four Yancey brothers held a family reunion in Birmingham in . After Ben passed away, the remaining three did not meet together again until , once more in Birmingham. At that gathering, Dalton and Willie donned Civil War medals, and the latter proudly wore his old uniform as the three ancient veterans posed proudly for a newspaper photograph. Mary and John Harrell drifted quietly into history. John Harrell operated a sawmill in Clayton, Alabama, and for a while after  his brother-in-law Dalton worked with him. However spread out the Yanceys were, they remained devoted to one another and to the memory of their historic father. Mary died on June , . In the wake of the death of William L. Yancey and the destruction of the 

n

Legacy

Confederate nation, a struggle began among Yancey’s closest supporters to create a fitting memorial to him. His son Ben had at least carried the family name to Brazil, where it remained on a monument to other ‘‘Confederados’’ until late in the twentieth century, but that was not enough. By , Dalton told his uncle, ‘‘The war has blasted all our hopes’’ and feared that history written by Yankees would ‘‘take from us our character & honor.’’ He desired to ‘‘rear a monument’’ for his father, a ‘‘fit emblem of his greatness,’’ one that ‘‘would outlive the nation that would dishonor him.’’ 18 Long before that, in September , William Yancey’s friend, William F. Samford, had the same idea. Coauthor of the laudatory biography of Yancey for Harper’s Weekly in , Samford scarcely waited for Yancey’s body to stiffen before asking Ben Yancey for help in writing a biography of his brother. This work, Samford argued, required ‘‘the right sort of a heart—in the right place.’’ Ben and other family members and friends collected materials, sent money, and tested their patience to the limits before all parties gave up on the project in .19 Three years later another author rose to take Samford’s place and to fulfill the Yancey family’s desire for a memorial. John Witherspoon DuBose, son of a South Carolina nullifier who once served with Yancey’s father in that state’s assembly and heir to over  slaves, contacted Ben and persuaded him that he was the man for the task. Working doggedly, DuBose completed his work by , just before the death of William’s brother. Published in , The Life and Times of William Lowndes Yancey: A History of Political Parties in the United States, from  to ; Especially as to the Origin of the Confederate States, an imposing tome of  pages, remained the only complete biography of the fire-eater for over a century. DuBose never intended detached analysis, only the memorial the Yancey family desired and a personal tribute to a man the author himself had briefly known and forever admired. DuBose did not attempt a detailed analysis of Yancey’s childhood, nor did he offer a sophisticated account of Yancey’s transition from unionist to a premier advocate of states’ rights. The Yancey legacy lived on primarily through DuBose’s book and through the pride and memory of his descendants. It also emerged during the Civil Rights struggles that bloodied Alabama so often a century after Yancey’s death. In Bay Minette, across the bay from Mobile, the state of Alabama created William Lowndes Yancey Community College in , so named by Governor George Wallace, a man well versed in the racism and defiance of federal auLegacy

n



thority that Yancey had stood for. In , the school changed its name to James H. Faulkner State Junior College, and now is called simply Faulkner State Community College.20 A decade later, citizens of Alabama created an Alabama Men’s Hall of Fame (to complement its Women’s Hall of Fame) at Samford University in Birmingham, named for the great-grandson of Yancey’s friend William Samford, the ‘‘penman of secession.’’ Yancey was selected in , talking his place among luminaries such as his friend John Tyler Morgan and—company that Yancey could have never imagined—Booker T. Washington, George Washington Carver, and Sequoyah.21 The conflicts that marked and marred Yancey’s early years shaped the man who attained such a conspicuous and prominent place in history. His clashes with Rev. Beman left the young Yancey craving order and stability, as well as attention and praise. The violence of his youth planted the seeds of violent acts later in his life, affairs of honor that won him the respect of many in the South. Yancey’s efforts to protect his mother, his siblings, and the good name of the Yancey family exposed a volatile temper that he only partially came to control late in his short life. Meanwhile, his inner demons drove him to see his world in terms of good versus evil, and he lashed out at anyone or anything that threatened his ideals of stability and order. In editorial columns, public speeches, and occasional acts of physical violence, Yancey labored incessantly to impose his values on his world. Ultimately, he considered secession the only way to preserve the values he cherished the most, as a husband, father, slaveholder, and American. Yancey’s search for order included a relentless drive to find someone to replace his late father and to provide an antidote for his stepfather, the cold, meddling, tyrannical, and hypocritical man that Yancey grew to see as the personification of all that was wrong with the North and that threatened the South. This pursuit resulted in a fantastic metamorphosis. As a teenager and young adult, Yancey embraced Benjamin Perry of South Carolina, as well as Perry’s unionism and abhorrence of states’ rights advocates such as John C. Calhoun and Robert Barnwell Rhett. But after Yancey’s move to Alabama and his association with cousin Jesse Beene, Yancey ventured into the very states’ rights camp he had recently vilified. From Beene it was but a short step to Dixon H. Lewis and, in turn, to John C. Calhoun, and his final abandonment of nationalism and new advocacy of state sovereignty. Yancey’s lifelong veneration of his father—a unionist, Federalist, and onetime enemy of Calhoun—produced a source of conflict that defied logic as 

n

Legacy

Yancey shifted from the values of the former to those of the latter. Somehow, though, Yancey reconciled the differences. DuBose realized this but never dealt with the issue in his biography. DuBose once told Ben Yancey, ‘‘I quoted from a speech of your brother’s in which he described the difference between his father’s politics & Calhoun’s at length. I have the speech, but there is no occasion to quote that part & [I] will omit it.’’ 22 There is no trace of that speech today. Yancey’s ability to come to terms with this seemingly unresolvable conflict emanated largely from his desire for acceptance by various political mentors. But after he felt betrayed by Lewis in  and following the deaths of Lewis and Calhoun, Yancey no longer followed men; instead he adhered tenaciously to his principles. By  those principles surpassed the radicalism of any of these men and led to pleas for disunion and the creation of a Southern Confederacy. From this point on, Yancey emerged as a leader of men instead of a follower. His strict adherence to his principles earned him the enmity of southern unionists but gained him a following of generally younger men who remained as devoted to Yancey as he had been to his political mentors. The failure of disunion in  left Yancey reeling, but also created the ‘‘leaven of disunion’’ that would finally rise in –. By keeping himself relentlessly in the public eye, as an attorney, public speaker, state party organizer, and creator of secessionist organizations, Yancey successfully planted the idea that the Union existed only as a means toward certain ends—specifically white southerners’ rights and interests in slavery—and that if the Union ceased to fulfill its mandate, a glorious alternative awaited after secession. These ideas placed him at the center of a loose regional network of disunionists—men such as Rhett, James De Bow, Louis Wigfall, and Edmund Ruffin—and provided the foundation for his stance at the fateful Democratic convention of  and the national speaking tour that followed. After finally forging the political platform he had demanded since , Yancey spoke more about these principles than he did about his candidate in order to convince both North and South that failure to gain national acceptance of a proslavery plank had but one alternative: secession. Despite strong opposition—and his own reckless outburst—Yancey led his state out of the Union in . Once he helped achieve his goal, Yancey worked assiduously to curb his passionate outbursts in order to serve the Confederate cause as commissioner to England and France, and to achieve a measure of statesmanship as a Confederate senator. In general, Yancey served as a constructive force in his final position, striving to balance wartime necessity with his constitutional principles. Even Legacy

n



when Yancey clashed with his president over issues or policies, in the Senate, in public addresses, and in private correspondence, Yancey sought to overcome personal conflicts on behalf of his country. By the time of his death in , Yancey had largely conquered the inner demons that had plagued and animated him since his youth. His epitaph could have easily read, ‘‘For his own sake he loved the South; for the sake of the South, he gave his all to the Confederacy.’’



n

Legacy

NOTES

Abbreviations ADAH BCY Papers CAH OR ORN PRO SHC SHML SHSP WLY Papers

Alabama Department of Archives and History, Montgomery Benjamin C. Yancey Papers, Southern Historical Collection, University of North Carolina, Chapel Hill Center for American History, University of Texas, Austin War of the Rebellion: A Compilation of the Official Records of the Union and Confederate Armies Official Records of the Union and Confederate Navies in the War of the Rebellion Public Record Office, Kew, England Southern Historical Collection, Wilson Library, University of North Carolina at Chapel Hill Sam Houston Memorial Library, Huntsville, Tex. Southern Historical Society Papers William L. Yancey Papers, Alabama Department of Archives and History

Introduction . Eaton, Mind of the Old South, . . DuBose, Notable Men of Alabama, :–; United States Census, Alabama, Schedule , Slaves, Morengo County, , –, –, –; DuBose to Ben Yancey, August , , July , , BCY Papers; Confederate Veteran  (November ): ; see DuBose to Benjamin Yancey, July , , March , , November , , and December , ; William E. Yancey to Benjamin Yancey, February , , all in BCY Papers. John W. DuBose was a frequent contributor to Confederate Veteran (see vols. , ,  [, , ]) and the SHSP (vols.  and  [, ]), as well as various newspapers around the country. DuBose to John W. Bush (n.d.), Confederate Veteran  (March ): –; DuBose to Robert Alonzo Brock, November , , Brock Correspondence. Hobson, in Tell about the South, , –, though never mentioning DuBose, shows how this author shared the same fears and aspirations of more prominent contemporaries. . Brown, Lower South, chap. , ‘‘Orator of Secession’’; McMillan, ‘‘Yancey and the Historians,’’ –; Stephenson, ‘‘Half Century of Southern Historical Scholarship,’’ –, and Southern History in the Making, ; Petrie, ‘‘What Will Be the Final Estimate of Yancey?’’

Petrie’s grandfather delivered a funeral oration for Yancey in  and Professor Petrie made Yancey a special subject of investigation in his upper division classes at Auburn University. Hergesheimer, Swords and Roses, chap. ; Draughon, ‘‘William Lowndes Yancey’’; Venable, Role of William L. Yancey in the Secession Movement; Eaton, Mind of the Old South, –. Essays include Venable, ‘‘William L. Yancey’s Transition from Unionism to State Rights’’; Venable, ‘‘William L. Yancey and the League of United Southerners’’; Venable, ‘‘Public Career of William Lowndes Yancey’’; Garner and Stott, ‘‘William Lowndes Yancey: Statesman of Secession’’; Draughon, ‘‘Young Manhood of William L. Yancey’’; McMillan, ‘‘William L. Yancey and the Historians.’’ Yancey appears as an important player in monographs on the South, secession, and the Civil War. See, for example, Barney, Road to Secession; McCardell, Idea of a Southern Nation; Heidler, Pulling the Temple Down; Thornton, Politics and Power. . See Brugger, Our Selves/Our Past; O’Brien, ‘‘Biography and the Old South,’’ esp. – ; Kohut, ‘‘Psychohistory as History’’; Woodward, on Tom Watson, in Thinking Back, –; Sitkoff, ‘‘Years of the Locust,’’ in Kirkendall, Truman Period as a Research Field, . . See Malinosky-Rummell and Hansen, ‘‘Long-Term Consequences of Childhood Abuse,’’ –, and Mintz and Kellogg, Domestic Revolutions. My evaluation of Yancey’s upbringing stems largely from the following sources: Greven, Spare the Child, and Greven, comp., Child-Rearing Concepts, –; Bushnell, Christian Nurture, esp. –; Fliegelman, Prodigals and Pilgrims; Ryan, Cradle of the Middle Class; Rotundo, American Manhood, –, and Rotundo, ‘‘American Fatherhood,’’ –; Pleck, Domestic Tyranny, esp. –; McLoughlin, ‘‘Evangelical Child-Rearing in the Age of Jackson,’’ –. . On the southern code of honor and a marked superficiality characteristic of antebellum southern white society, see Wyatt-Brown, Southern Honor; Greenberg, Honor and Slavery; Dickson, Violence and Culture; Steward, Duels and the Roots of Violence in Missouri; Stowe, ‘‘ ‘Touchiness’ of the Gentleman Planter,’’ –; Wyatt-Brown, ‘‘Community, Class, and Snopesian Crime,’’ –. Older studies lack the sophistication of recent work on honor, but still have value. See Franklin, Militant South; Osterweis, Romanticism and Nationalism. . See especially Thornton, Politics and Power, but in general for the South also see Cooper, South and the Politics of Slavery; Oakes, Ruling Race; Greenberg, Masters and Statesmen; McCardell, Idea of a Southern Nation; Ford, Origins of Southern Radicalism.

Chapter  . Hatcher, Georgia Rivers, –; DuBose, Yancey, :; Draughon, ‘‘William Lowndes Yancey,’’ –; Peterson, Divine Discontent, –. The Birds also had two sons. . O’Neall, Biographical Sketches, :, –; Draughon, ‘‘William Lowndes Yancey,’’ –, –; DuBose, Yancey, :–; biographical sketch of the Yancey family in BCY Papers. . Ferguson, Truxtun of the Constellation, –; Office of Naval Records Library, Naval Documents Related to the Quasi-War, :. DuBose, in Yancey, :, implies that Benjamin C. Yancey saw duty aboard the Constellation against the L’Insurgente. He could not have done so. That engagement was February , ; Yancey served from March , , to May , . See above. For an overview of the conflict with France, see Palmer, Stoddard’s War.



n

Notes to Pages –

. Office of Naval Records Library, Naval Documents Related to the Quasi-War, :–; :–; :–, , ; Ferguson, Truxtun of the Constellation, –. . Captain Alexander Murray to General Samuel Smith, April , , in Office of Naval Records Library, Naval Documents Related to the Quasi-War, :–. Yancey’s discharge, May , , ibid., :; on the partial sinking of the Constellation see the Philadelphia Aurora, April –, , , May , . Again DuBose, Yancey, :, misstated the facts, asserting that Benjamin Yancey resigned after Commodore Truxtun left command of the Constellation. . See Vipperman, William Lowndes; DuBose, Yancey, :; typescript of obituary for Benjamin Cudworth Yancey from Charleston Courier, , in DuBose Papers. See DuBose, Yancey, :. . Draughon, ‘‘William Lowndes Yancey,’’ ; Mt. Zion Hancock Advertiser, April , ; Louisa Cunningham to Benjamin C. Yancey, September , , BCY Papers; Peterson, ‘‘Nathan S. S. Beman at Mt. Zion,’’ . . DuBose, Yancey, :; Draughon, ‘‘William Lowndes Yancey,’’ –; Coulter, ‘‘AnteBellum Academy Movement in Georgia,’’ –. . Nason, Biographical Register of the Officers and Graduates, ; Peterson, Divine Discontent, –; Greven, Spare the Child; Greven, comp., Child-Rearing Concepts, –; Bushnell, Christian Nurture, esp. –. . Peterson, Divine Discontent, –. . Ibid., –, –. . Ibid., –, –, –, ; Larkin, Everyday Life, –. . Peterson, Divine Discontent, , –, ; Mt. Zion Missionary, May  and , . On the rough-and-tumble nature of common southerners’ fighting techniques, see Gorn, ‘‘‘Gouge and Bite, Pull Hair and Scratch,’’’ –. . Wedding announcement in Mt. Zion Missionary, April , . . Beman fits almost precisely the evangelical character of seventeenth- and eighteenthcentury America described by Greven, Protestant Temperament, esp. –, , –. For the impact of punishment and in Christian theology, see Greven, Spare the Child, , –, – . For the shifting roles of husbands and fathers and the challenge to patriarchy in the early s, see Fliegelman, Prodigals and Pilgrims; Mintz and Kellogg, Domestic Revolutions, –; Ryan, Cradle of the Middle Class; Rotundo, American Manhood, –; and Rotundo, ‘‘American Fatherhood: A Historical Perspective,’’ –. . Brief Account of the Origins and Progress of the Divisions in the First Presbyterian Church in the City of Troy, –. Beman’s biographer attributes authorship to Josephus Brockway. Peterson, Divine Discontent, n. . Oakes, Ruling Race, –; Loveland, Southern Evangelicals, –. . Peterson, Divine Discontent, ; Mt. Zion Missionary, May , June , and November , . Neither slave marriages nor divorces existed in law. Masters generally encouraged informal slave ‘‘marriages,’’ but also separated partners whenever they saw fit and often created new unions. For an outstanding summary of these issues see Cornelius, ‘‘Slave Marriages in a Georgia Congregation.’’ . See Mt. Zion Missionary, April  and June , , for examples. It is important to note that Beman, like many white opponents of slavery, could not fathom harmonious coexistence with free blacks. African colonization, he offered, would ‘‘rid ourselves of this super-

Notes to Pages –

n



flux of black population.’’ Mt. Zion Missionary, April . Prior to , all deeds of manumission in Georgia required approval by the state legislature. In  the law changed to allow owners to act independently, and by  another law required manumission to be coupled with removal from the state. From  to , a little over  masters in Georgia freed about , slaves with the intention of sending them to Liberia; throughout the United States, by , the American Colonization Society had brought only , people to Liberia. See Flanders, Plantation Slavery in Georgia, –; Scarborough, Opposition to Slavery in Georgia; s.v. ‘‘Georgia, Slavery in,’’ in Miller and Smith, Dictionary of Afro-American Slavery, ; Miller, Search for a Black Nationality; Staundenraus, African Colonization Movement. . Mt. Zion Missionary, July , ; copy of slave sale, registered with the Georgia supreme court June , , in BCY Papers. Ralph Draughon suggests that this slave sale might have involved slaves owned by Beman prior to his marriage to Mrs. Yancey, but offered no conclusive proof. See Draughon, ‘‘William Lowndes Yancey,’’  and n. . . Draughon, ‘‘William Lowndes Yancey,’’ –; Greven, Spare the Child, –, –, , –, –, and Protestant Temperament, , , –, –, , , –; Pleck, Domestic Tyranny, esp. –; Daniels and Kennedy, Over the Threshold. Greven concluded that the use of physical punishment has been ‘‘exaggerated in our portraits of the early American past.’’ Greven, Protestant Temperament, ; quotation is from . Also see McLoughlin, ‘‘Evangelical Child-Rearing in the Age of Jackson,’’ –. . In Ben Yancey’s hand, the note read, ‘‘I recollect distinctly that William was at school at , or , oclock in the day. He [Beman] said at one time I’ll be damned if you did not, at a subsequent time when I told him of it, he said who do you think will believe you.’’ See undated notes, box , folder , BCY Papers; Peterson, Divine Discontent, . One member of Beman’s church accused the minister of bringing the Rev. Charles G. Finney to Troy in the winter of – solely to distract the congregation from Beman’s ‘‘un-christian conduct.’’ See McLoughlin, Modern Revivalism, . On divorce, see Censer, ‘‘‘Smiling Through Her Tears,’ ’’ –; McCurry, Masters of Small Worlds, – and n. ; Griswold, ‘‘Evolution of the Doctrine of Mental Cruelty,’’ –. . Troy Directory (), –, . Census information comes from a database at the University of Virginia at (accessed August , ). The most important monograph on the market revolution is Sellers, Market Revolution. For race relations generally in the North at this time, see Litwack, North of Slavery. For the elimination of slavery in New York, see McManus, History of Negro Slavery in New York, –. . Wyld, Low Bridge! Folklore and the Erie Canal, , , –, , – (quotes from  and , in order); Sheriff, Artificial River, , ; Shaw, Canals for a Nation, , . . Troy Directory (–), ; (), –. . Brockway, Delineation of the Characteristic Features of a Revival of Religion in Troy, –, Beman quoted on viii; Peterson, Divine Discontent, –, –; Weise, History of the City of Troy, –, , ; Beman to Caroline Beman, December , , BCY Papers. For the impact of religious ferment in New York at this time, see Barkun, Crucible of the Millennium; Rowe, Thunder and Trumpets; Hardman, Charles Grandison Finney. . For Beman’s involvement with both religious revivals and abolition, see Abzug, Pas-



n

Notes to Pages –

sionate Liberator, esp. ; Howard, Conscience and Slavery, , , , ; McLoughlin, Modern Revivalism, , , . Caroline Beman’s proslavery reaction typified that emerging in the South at the time; see Faust, Ideology of Slavery, –. . Nathan to Caroline Beman, December , , February , , BCY Papers. . Beman to Caroline Beman, February , , April , ; Caroline Beman to Beman, May , , March  and April , , BCY Papers. For the complete story of the Beman marriage see Peterson, Divine Discontent, –. . Beman to Caroline Beman, April , ; James Raymond et al. to Caroline Beman, April , ; William L. Yancey to Ben Yancey, June , , BCY Papers; Troy Directory (), . . Peterson, Divine Discontent, . See correspondence between Beman and Caroline Beman, and Ben Yancey’s notes and endorsements, , and A. L. Alexander to Ben Yancey, January ,  (response to Ben’s request for an official copy of slave sale), in BCY papers. . William Bird to Ben Yancey, October , , BCY Papers; Draughon, ‘‘William Lowndes Yancey,’’ –. . Peterson, Divine Discontent, –; Louisa Cunningham to Ben Yancey, August , , BCY Papers; Mallary, Lenox and the Berkshire Highlands, , . . Nason, Biographical Register of the Officers and Graduates, ; Rezneck, Education for a Technological Society, ; Ricketts, History of Rennselaer Polytechnic Institute, –, , ; Phelan, Ross, and Westerdahl, Rennselaer, . . Besides the works by Philip Greven, see Malinosky-Rummell and Hansen, ‘‘Long-Term Consequences of Childhood Physical Abuse,’’ –.

Chapter  . Draughon, ‘‘William Lowndes Yancey,’’ –; Rudolph, Mark Hopkins and the Log, –, , –; Peterson, Divine Discontent, , –, ; Williams College Adelphi, October , . . Laws of Williams College, located at the Williamsiana Collection, College Archives and Special Collections, , . . Griffin quoted in Burr, ‘‘United States Senator James Dixon,’’ ; Peterson, Divine Discontent, –. The Williams Antislavery Society began at least as early as July , . See Perry, Williamstown and Williams College, . . Draughon, ‘‘William Lowndes Yancey,’’ –; Rudolph, Mark Hopkins and the Log, –, , –; Peterson, Divine Discontent, , –, ; Adelphi, October , ; on Griffith, see Burr, ‘‘United States Senator James Dixon,’’ . Beman received an honorary Doctorate of Divinity from Williams in . See Peterson, Divine Discontent, . . Laws of Williams College, . . Kett, Rites of Passage, –, –, –; Allmendinger, Paupers and Scholars, –, –, –; and Novak, Rites of Youth. See also Glover, ‘‘Education in Southern Masculinity,’’ –. . Laws of Williams College, –, , –. . Records of the Faculty of Williams College, Williamsiana Collection, College Archives and Special Collections; Pittsfield Sun, April , .

Notes to Pages –

n



. Records of the Faculty of Williams College. Besides the dates listed above, see August , November , and , , May , July , July , July , August , . . Ibid., August , October , , February , . . Yancey to Ben Yancey, April [n.d.],  (for Rosseter), and Yancey letters of introduction for Ben Yancey to Benjamin C. Prestman, February , , to Horace F. Clark, February , [], to J. M. Buchanan, February , [], to J. R. Brent, February , [], and to J. W. Pryor, February , [], all in BCY Papers; Dictionary of American Biography, :– , for Clark; Burr, ‘‘United States Senator James Dixon’’; and General Catalogue of the Officers, Graduates, and Non-Graduates of Williams College, –, . Dixon would spar briefly with Congressman Yancey in . The Connecticut Whig grew stridently antislavery, and served in the Senate in the years –. . Philological Society: Records, –, Williamsiana Collection, Williams College, book , pp. , , and –. . Peterson, Divine Discontent, –; Pittsfield Sun, November , . . Adelphi, August , . . Adelphi, September , December , , April , . On affairs in Georgia, see Ellis, Union at Risk, –; Phillips, Georgia and State Rights; and Watson, Liberty and Power, – (Troup quoted on ). President Jackson, of course, was happy to allow white Georgians to take matters into their own hands and drive out local Indians. . Adelphi, June , ; Mintz, Moralists and Modernizers, –; Peterson, Divine Discontent, . Yancey’s late father also favored a broad system of public education. See Draughon, ‘‘William Lowndes Yancey,’’ . . Adelphi, March  and June , . . Ibid., March , May , and June , . . Ibid., July , . . Peterson, Divine Discontent, –; William Bird to Ben Yancey, October , , BCY Papers; American Education Quarterly Register  (): –; Boston Atlas (reprinting story from Troy Whig), January , . Previously I have suggested that the pickle barrel incident was true; see Walther, Fire-Eaters, , and Draughon, ‘‘Yancey,’’ –. Yancey himself surveyed American colleges in the August , , issue of the Adelphi and found only fortynine institutions. Incomplete statistics allowed him to tally only , students enrolled at forty-four of these, with  instructors at forty-three colleges, and  graduates in . . See William L. Yancey to Ben Yancey, April  and June , , William L. Yancey letters of introduction for Ben Yancey to Benjamin C. Prestman, February , , to Horace F. Clark, February , [], to J. M. Buchanan, February , [], to J. R. Brent, February , [], and to J. W. Pryor, February , [], all in BCY Papers; Greenville Mountaineer, December , . . See chaps.  and  below, on Caroline Beman’s reaction to Yancey’s Cahaba Democrat, money, his wife, and his slaves. . Peterson, Divine Discontent, –, –. For descriptions of Yancey’s speaking style, see, for example, Foote, Bench and Bar of the West and Southwest, , and Reminiscences of Thomas H. Watts, in John W. DuBose Papers. . Beman quoted in Draughon, ‘‘Yancey,’’ ; Brockway, Delineation of the Characteristic Features of a Revival of Religion in Troy, , , –.



n

Notes to Pages –

. Yancey to James D. Meadows, June , , in DuBose, Yancey, :; Beman’s sermon in New York Herald, November , . . Draughon, ‘‘Yancey,’’ –; Caroline Beman to Ben Yancey, undated (box , folder ), Louisa Cunningham to Ben Yancey, July  and August , , BCY Papers; Maria Bryan to Julia Bryan Cunningham, [], in Bleser, Tokens of Affection, –. Bleser supplies the date , but Yancey was still in Massachusetts then;  seems more likely. . Louisa Cunningham to Ben Yancey, April , , BCY Papers; Wilkes, Rosemont and Its Famous Daughter, –; Richardson, History of Greenville County, . See also Stowe, Intimacy and Power. . The major works on the Nullification Crisis include Freehling, Prelude to Civil War and Road to Disunion, –; Ellis, Union at Risk; Peterson, Olive Branch and the Sword; Wilson, ‘‘Preview of the Irrepressible Conflict,’’ –, and ‘‘‘Liberty and Union,’’’ –. The best studies showing the link between white southerners’ concept of liberty and their defense of African American slavery are Cooper, South and the Politics of Slavery and Liberty and Slavery; Greenberg, Masters and Statesmen; Oakes, Ruling Race, –; Wyatt-Brown, ‘‘Honor and Secession,’’ in Yankee Saints and Southern Sinners, –. . See Walther, Fire-Eaters, –, –. . Boucher, Nullification Controversy, , –; Bassett, Correspondence of Andrew Jackson, Joel R. Poinsett to Jackson, December , , :. . Boucher, Nullification Controversy, – (William C. Preston to James H. Hammond, June , , quoted –); Charleston Mercury quoted on . . Huff, ‘‘Eagle and the Vulture,’’ –; Yancey’s Lodi speech appears in the Greenville Mountaineer, July , . . Perry, Reminiscences of Public Men, –; B. F. Perry to William F. Samford, August , , in BCY Papers. . Perry, Reminiscences, ; Thomas W. Gantt to Ben Yancey, February , , BCY Papers. . Greenville Mountaineer, November , ; Perry to W. F. Samford, August , , DuBose Papers. . Greenville Mountaineer, November , . To frame Yancey’s attack on lower class white voters—the tobacco juice spitters—in a national context, see Watson, Liberty and Power, esp. –, –. Racial solidarity generally triumphed over class tensions in the old South; see Hahn, Roots of Southern Populism; Harris, Plain Folk and Gentry in a Slave Society; Cecil-Fronsman, Common Whites. Watson also provides a concise summary of Jackson’s views on nullification, treason, and sovereignty in Liberty and Power, –. . Greenville Mountaineer, February , , , March , April , . . Ibid., February , , March , . . Ibid., March , ; Draughon, ‘‘Yancey,’’ ; Sparks, ‘‘Gentleman’s Sport,’’ –; Faust, James Henry Hammond, –, ; Breen, ‘‘Horses and Gentlemen,’’ in Puritans and Adventurers, –. . Greenville Mountaineer, March , ; Alvarez, Travel on Southern Antebellum, . The Charleston and Hamburg Railroad, in , was the longest in the world, stretching  miles. For the novelty of early rail travel, see Larkin, Reshaping of Everyday Life, –. . Greenville Mountaineer, April , May  and , .

Notes to Pages –

n



. Owen, Story of Alabama, :; Benjamin F. Perry Diary, August , , in Benjamin F. Perry Papers, SHC; Draughon, ‘‘William Lowndes Yancey,’’ –, –. . William L. Yancey to W. O. Baldwin, November , , WLY Papers. . See Mintz and Kellogg, Domestic Revolutions, esp. , . Friedman, in Enclosed Garden, –, notes the emphasis that evangelical religion placed on mutual responsibilities in marriage, with genuine partnership and ‘‘true union’’ as the ideal, although she notes that in fact men usually dominated. On companionate marriage in regional and national perspectives, see Censer, North Carolina Planters and Their Children, –, and Degler, At Odds, –; Jabour, Marriage in the Early Republic. . For a full discussion of Yancey’s legislative efforts on behalf of women, see chap. . . For a solid, concise review of the plight of women in antebellum America and the thrust of the women’s rights movement of the era, see Bernhard and Fox-Genovese, Birth of American Feminism, –. For the state of women’s property rights, see McGlen and O’Connor, Women’s Rights, –; Basch, In the Eyes of the Law; Bolt, Women’s Movements in the United States and Britain, –; Clinton, Other Civil War, ; Rabkin, Fathers to Daughters; Warbasse, Changing Legal Rights of Married Women. . Yancey, ‘‘Rights and Wrongs of Woman,’’ in WLY Papers. . Ibid., , –. . Scott, Southern Lady; Yancey, ‘‘Rights and Wrongs of Woman,’’ . . Yancey, ‘‘Rights and Wrongs of Woman,’’ –, , . . Ibid., –. . See Walters, American Reformers, –; Bernhard and Fox-Genovese, Birth of American Feminism, –; Hersh, Slavery of Sex; Yellin, Women and Sisters. . Greenberg, Honor and Slavery, esp. ; Patterson, Slavery and Social Death. . Yancey, ‘‘Rights and Wrongs of Woman,’’ . . Ibid., –. . Ibid., –. . Ibid., , . . Ibid., . . Ibid., –. . Beman to Caroline Beman, February , , March , , August , ; Caroline Beman to N. S. S. Beman, March , April , , in BCY Papers. . Caroline Beman to N. S. S. Beman, May , , and biographical sketch of Ben Yancey, in BCY Papers. . Francis S. Barlow to Ben Yancey, August , , and Settlement of Affair between George O. White and Benjamin C. Yancey, August , , in BCY Papers. . William L. Yancey to Ben Yancey, April, , June , September , , and biographical sketch of Ben Yancey, in BCY Papers. . William Yancey to Ben Yancey, September , , BCY Papers. For the antebellum fascination with violence see Osterweis, Romanticism and Nationalism in the Old South, esp. . ‘‘Southron’’ was an archaic Scottish word for ‘‘southerner,’’ used frequently in novels of Sir Walter Scott, a favorite among readers in the antebellum South. . See Rubin, Edge of the Swamp, esp. chaps.  and , and Owsley, ‘‘Pattern of Migration and Settlement on the Southern Frontier,’’ –.



n

Notes to Pages –

Chapter  . Greenville Mountaineer, April , ; Draughon, ‘‘William Lowndes Yancey,’’ ; L. Woodruff to Ben Yancey, February , , BCY Papers. The spelling of Cahaba varied. Many used ‘‘Cahawba’’; I use the more recent version unless quoting. See Foscue, Place Names in Alabama, –. Baldwin, Flush Times of Alabama and Mississippi, –. For scholarly work on the allure of the Southwest in the s see Watson, Liberty and Power, –; Eaton, Growth of Southern Civilization, –; Oakes, Ruling Race. . Brantley, Three Capitals, –; Brewer, Alabama, –. Today little remains of old Cahaba, a ghost town with a few pieces of foundation and brick from some old structures. . Moore, History of Alabama, –; Censer, ‘‘Southwestern Migration among North Carolina Planter Families,’’ –; Watson, Liberty and Power, . . United States Census, Alabama, , Dallas County,  (Beene); Brewer, Alabama, ; Fry, Memories of Old Cahaba, –, ; Garrett, Reminiscences, . See Draughon, ‘‘William Lowndes Yancey,’’ –, for more on Jesse Beene. . Owen, History of Alabama, :. . Yancey to Ben Yancey, September , , BCY Papers; for cotton prices and the impact of the Panic of  on the South see Cooper and Terrill, American South, –. . Fry, Memories of Old Cahaba, –, , ; Cahaba Southern Democrat, January , ; Ellison, History and Bibliography of Alabama Newspapers, –. . William Yancey to Ben Yancey, January , , BCY Papers. . Caroline Beman to Ben Yancey, February , , ibid. . Cahaba Southern Democrat, March , , April , June , . . Ibid., January , . . Ibid. . Ibid. . Calhoun quoted in Lence, Liberty and Union, ; Congressional Globe, th Congress, nd session, –. For detail on the Gag Rule see Freehling, Road to Disunion, –, esp. – on Calhoun’s role, and Miller, Arguing about Slavery. . Cahaba Southern Democrat, February  and , . For Beman’s growing abolition activities, see Theodore D. Weld to Lewis Tappan, October , , and Sarah Grimké to Weld, January , , in Barnes and Dumond, Letters of Theodore Dwight Weld, :–; :, and Abzug, Passionate Liberator, . . Cahaba Southern Democrat, September , . . The authoritative work on this political style remains Cooper, South and the Politics of Slavery, but also see Greenberg, Masters and Statesmen; McCardell, Idea of a Southern Nation; Thornton, Politics and Power; Ford, Origins of Southern Radicalism. . Cahaba Southern Democrat, February , . . Ibid., February , May , . . Ibid., February , . . Ibid., March , . The two southern Whigs were Joseph P. Underwood of Kentucky and Joseph Williams of Tennessee. . Ibid., March , . For conditions of slavery in Alabama, see Sellers, Slavery in Alabama. For the complete text of the James Williams narrative and the controversy surrounding

Notes to Pages –

n



it, see ‘‘Narrative of James Williams,’’ . . Cahaba Southern Democrat, June , September , . See Davis, Slave Power Conspiracy. . Cahaba Southern Democrat, March , , , . . Ibid., March , . The best overview of the many facets of Manifest Destiny is Haynes and Morris, Manifest Destiny and Empire. . Cahaba Southern Democrat, February , . See below, chap. , for Yancey’s later efforts at state bank reform. . Ibid., March , April , . Yancey offered as a model rules and regulations drawn up in recent North Carolina and Virginia conventions, which included resolutions calling for payment of subscriptions in advance and the publication of and strict adherence to advertisement rates. . Ibid., March , . . Ibid., May , June , July , ; W. W. Fambro to Ben Yancey, December , , BCY Papers. . Cahaba Southern Democrat, March , . On the Cilley-Graves duel, see Greenberg, Masters and Statesmen, –; for resolutions in Congress see Congressional Globe, th Congress, nd session, –, , , ; and ‘‘Bladensburg Dueling Grounds,’’ . . Brewer, History of Coosa County, . . Williams, ‘‘Crime and Punishment in Alabama, –,’’ esp. –, ; Howington, ‘‘Violence in Alabama,’’ –; Besson, History of Eufaula, Alabama, . For community justice superseding the written law, see Wyatt-Brown, ‘‘Community, Class, and Snopesian Crime,’’ in Burton and McMath, Class, Conflict, and Consensus. . See Wyatt-Brown, Southern Honor; Greenberg, Honor and Slavery; Dickson, Violence and Culture; and Stowe, ‘‘ ‘Touchiness’ of the Gentleman Planter,’’ –. . Gorn, ‘‘ ‘Gouge and Bite, Pull Hair and Scratch,’’’ –. In McLaurin’s Celia: A Slave, lawyers defending Celia for the murder of her master insisted that both law and custom granted all women—even slaves—the right to defend themselves from certain attacks, in this case a protracted series of rapes. The formal rules of this ethos can be found in Wilson, Code of Honor. . Again, see Baldwin, Flush Times of Alabama and Mississippi. Draughon, ‘‘William Lowndes Yancey,’’ –, quoted on . . Death notice in Cahaba Southern Democrat, September , . Wyatt-Brown, in Southern Honor, most effectively argues the case for southern society’s emphasis on external sources of honor or shame. Although Larkin, in Shaping of Everyday Life, –, –, argues that parents in the early republic often avoided emotional attachments to infants because of high mortality rates, evidence suggests that Yancey conformed to the model put forth by Censer, North Carolina Planters and Their, –, that no matter how commonly infant death occurred, parents grieved. Also see McMillan, ‘‘Antebellum Southern Fathers and the Health Care of Children,’’ –; Marten, ‘‘Fatherhood in the Confederacy,’’ –; and Griswold, Fatherhood in America, –. . Yancey to Ben Yancey, September , , typescript, in WLY Papers; Draughon, ‘‘William Lowndes Yancey,’’ –; see Greenville Mountaineer, November , .



n

Notes to Pages –

. Yancey to Ben Yancey, September , , WLY Papers; Draughon, ‘‘William Lowndes Yancey,’’ –. . Greenville Mountaineer, November , . . Yancey to Ben Yancey, September , , WLY Papers. . Ibid.; Jesse Beene to Ben Yancey, October , , BCY Papers; Greenville Mountaineer, November , . . Greenville Mountaineer, November , . The Mountaineer only reported the last names of all attorneys in this case; lawyers Henry and Young represented the state. . Cahaba Southern Democrat, June , November , ; G. B. Hayden to Ben Yancey, February , , BCY Papers. . Yancey to Ben Yancey, September , , WLY Papers; Yancey to Ben Yancey, December , , BCY Papers; Stowe, ‘‘‘Touchiness’ of the Gentleman Planter,’’ ; Greenberg, Honor and Slavery, –. . Yancey to Ben Yancey, December , , BCY Papers. In contrast to most prisons in the South, or elsewhere for that matter, the Greenville prison was comfortable. See Friedman, Crime and Punishment in American History, –. . Yancey to Ben Yancey, December , , BCY Papers; Draughon, ‘‘Note on William L. Yancey’s Opinion of W. Gilmore Simms’ Richard Hurdis,’’ –. . Yancey to Ben Yancey, December , , BCY Papers. . Ibid., postscript, December , . . Williams, ‘‘White Lawbreakers in Ante-Bellum South Carolina,’’ –, esp. , and Vogues in Villainy, Noble quoted on page ; Wyatt-Brown, ‘‘Community, Class, and Snopesian Crime.’’ . See chap.  for the details and conclusion of the Elias Earle story. . Cahaba Democrat, March , May , . Ben Yancey changed the name of the newspaper from the Southern Democrat to the Democrat in the July , , issue. George W. Gayle to Ben Yancey, December , , BCY Papers. . Louisa Cunningham to Ben Yancey, April , ; Yancey to Ben Yancey, May , , BCY Papers; Cahaba Southern Democrat, April , ; Wetumpka Argus, May , ; Ellison, History and Bibliography of Alabama Newspapers, –, . Although Yancey sold the Democrat in May, his last issue as editor was July . . Jackson, Rivers of History, –. . DuBose, Yancey, :–; notes of interview with Ben Yancey, March , , in DuBose Papers, ADAH. . DuBose, Yancey, :. . Cahaba Southern Democrat, March , May , June , ; Ellison, History and Bibliography of Alabama Newspapers, . . The following account comes from Yancey to Ben Yancey, November , , BCY Papers; again, see especially Greenberg, Honor and Slavery; Stowe, ‘‘‘Touchiness’ of the Gentleman Planter’’; Wyatt-Brown, Southern Honor; and Steward, Duels and the Roots of Violence in Missouri, esp. chaps. –. . On the significance of noses, see Greenberg, Honor and Slavery, chap. , ‘‘The Nose, the Lie, and the Duel.’’ . For the social acceptability of a man of honor to refuse to directly face or respond

Notes to Pages –

n



to an allegedly dishonorable man, see Greenberg, Honor and Slavery, esp. –, and Stowe, ‘‘‘Touchiness’ of the Gentleman Planter,’’ –. . Draughon, ‘‘William Lowndes Yancey,’’ –.

Chapter  . Cahaba Southern Democrat, April , . . Wetumpka Argus, May , ; Ellison, History and Bibliography of Alabama Newspapers, . . Cahaba Southern Democrat, March , April  (church), May , . . Wetumpka Argus, December , , ; Yancey to Ben Yancey, November , , Benjamin Cudworth Yancey Papers, UNC; United States Census, , slave schedules, Coosa County, Alabama, . . Greenville Mountaineer, March , ; Wetumpka Argus, May , , . On the federal government’s suppression of abolition literature in the South, see Levine, Half Slave and Half Free, , and Freehling, Road to Disunion, –. For the southern emphasis on slave issues in national politics, see Cooper, South and the Politics of Slavery, –, –, for the southern strategies to support the northern Van Buren. . Garrett, Reminiscences of Public Men in Alabama, ; Wetumpka Argus, May , . . Williams, ‘‘Dixon Hall Lewis,’’ –, description quoted from ; Garrett, Reminiscences of Public Men in Alabama, –. . See Jesse Beene to Dixon Hall Lewis, August ,  and various correspondence, volume , Dixon Hall Lewis Papers, CAH; Thornton, Politics and Power, , –, –; Garrett, Reminiscences of Public Men in Alabama, . John G. Shorter was also a college friend of William L. Yancey’s brother, Benjamin Yancey; see Shorter to Ben Yancey, July , , BCY Papers. Scattered correspondence between Lewis and John C. Calhoun are in the Dixon Hall Lewis Material, Sam Houston Memorial Library, Huntsville, Texas. On the Rhett-Elmore clique, or ‘‘Regency,’’ see Walther, Fire-Eaters, –, ; Faust, James Henry Hammond, – ; and Bleser, Secret and Sacred, , , , , , –, , , . . Yancey’s experiences with the Argus, in fact, proved so disappointing that he would later use his old Argus account book for a scrapbook of newspaper clippings about his political activities and speeches during the secession movement of –. See WLY Papers, Box . Organized by the Yancey brothers in April, the premier issue of the Southern Crisis appeared on May , . For Lewis’s support see Yancey to Lewis, June , , Lewis Material, Sam Houston Memorial Library, and Jesse Beene to Lewis, August , , Lewis Papers, CAH. Also see Ellison, History and Bibliography of Alabama Newspapers, . . Southern Crisis, May , ; Golden, ‘‘Presidential Election of  in Alabama,’’ ; Gunderson, Log-Cabin Campaign, ; Goebel, William Henry Harrison, –, , . Charges of Harrison’s alleged Federalism stemmed largely from a remark—subsequently retracted—by the eccentric John Randolph of Roanoke, who once blithely termed Harrison a ‘‘frank supporter of the sedition law and a black-cockade Administration.’’ See Goebel, Harrison, –, , , ; Randolph quoted on . . Southern Crisis, May , June , , ; Gunderson, Log-Cabin Campaign, ; Watson, Liberty and Power, esp. –.



n

Notes to Pages –

. See Goebel, Harrison, ; Gunderson, Log-Cabin Campaign, ; Watson, Liberty and Power, ; Southern Crisis, October , , . . Southern Crisis, July , ; Golden, ‘‘Presidential Election of ,’’ –. . Southern Crisis, May , . For Van Buren’s efforts to placate both pro and antislavery interests, see Cooper, Politics of Slavery, –, –, and Watson, Liberty and Power, –. . Cahaba Southern Democrat, February , ; Southern Crisis, esp. May , October , , ; Golden, ‘‘Presidential Election of ,’’ –; Gunderson, Log-Cabin Campaign, , ; Goebel, Harrison, –. Harrison’s refusal to directly address slave issues led many southern Democrats to tag him ‘‘General Mum.’’ See Gunderson, Log-Cabin Campaign, . . Some key works on this topic include Morgan, America Slavery, American Freedom; Cooper, South and the Politics of Slavery; Greenberg, Masters and Statesmen. The quotation is from Thornton, Politics and Power, . . Goebel, Harrison, –. . See, for example, Southern Crisis, May , October , . . Cooper, Politics of Slavery, . . Southern Crisis, June , , ; Wetumpka Argus, March ,  (secession). . Golden, ‘‘Presidential Election of ,’’ ; Thornton, Politics and Power, –. Williams, ‘‘Presidential Election Returns and Related Data for Ante-Bellum Alabama,’’ –, notes that the zeal of this campaign yielded over  percent voter turnout in six Alabama counties, in other words, fraudulent voting. . Wetumpka Argus, January , December , ; Southern Crisis, September , . . Wetumpka Argus, December , , April , . . Ibid., April , . . Ibid. His awareness of Bentham’s ideas placed Yancey into a small minority of southerners, but those few had little trouble jibing the Englishman’s ideals with the reality of slavery. Historian Daniel Kilbride pointed out that Professor Thomas Cooper of South Carolina College believed that the ‘‘greatest happiness’’ applied only to the ‘‘co-equal many,’’ and that slavery supported the greatest good for the greatest number both by the advantages it gave to whites and the supposed moral and intellectual improvements that proslavery advocates claimed it gave to slaves. See Kilbride, ‘‘Slavery and Utilitarianism,’’ –. . Wetumpka Argus, April , ; Williams, ‘‘Crime and Punishment in Alabama, – ,’’ –; DuBose, Yancey, :; Garrett, Reminiscences of Public Men in Alabama, –. For a summary of national antebellum criminal and penal reforms, see Mintz, Moralists and Modernizers, –. The best brief account of reform in the antebellum South is still Sydnor, Development of Southern Sectionalism, –. For thoughtful comparisons between North and South, see Quist, Restless Visionaries; Ayers, Vengeance and Justice; and Hindus, Prison and Plantation. For education, also see Mintz, Moralists and Modernists, –; Cremin, American Education; and Kaestle, Pillars of the Republic. . Wetumpka Argus, December , , April ,  (majority rights); Dixon Hall Lewis to Benjamin Fitzpatrick, January , , Benjamin Fitzpatrick Papers; James E. Belser to Lewis, February , , Lewis Material, SHML; Moore, History of Alabama, –; Jack, Sectionalism and Party Politics in Alabama –, –. Whigs would have won three of the five seats under the district system. . Wetumpka Argus, June , July , .

Notes to Pages –

n



. Wetumpka Argus, May , August , ; Moore, History of Alabama, –. . Thornton, Politics and Power,  (quote), . Thornton notes that only  percent of all those legislators elected served four or more terms. For a cumulative , legislative seats throughout the antebellum period, Alabamians elected , different men. Kenneth Greenberg found similar short-lived incumbency in Florida and Mississippi. In the s,  percent of Mississippi’s and  percent of Florida’s assemblymen served only one term. Greenberg, Masters and Statesmen, . . Thornton, Politics and Power, –. The median number of slaves owned by assemblymen stood at ; Democrats averaged  apiece and Whigs .. For senators, the median number was  and for representatives, . Twenty-seven legislators owned no slaves. As late as , there were only  attorneys in the entire state; it should not be surprising, therefore, to find only  percent of the legislators of  listing themselves as lawyers. See Garrett, Reminiscences, –. . Thornton, Politics and Power, –. . Journal of the House of Representatives of the General Assembly of Alabama, –, , , – , –, , . . Ibid., –; Wetumpka Argus, December , , ; DuBose, Yancey, :–; Thornton, Politics and Power, –. . Wetumpka Argus, January , February , March , , , . . DuBose, Yancey, :–; Draughon, ‘‘William Lowndes Yancey,’’ ; Brewer, Alabama, –; Wetumpka Argus, August , . Yancey’s first law office was above the Wetumpka Argus press, on the corner of Main and Company Streets, in east Wetumpka. Wetumpka Argus, March , . . Wetumpka Argus, May , ; DuBose, Yancey, :–. For the ‘‘passive ideal,’’ the tendency of especially southern politicians to deny interest in public office, see Greenberg, Masters and Statesmen, –. . DuBose, Yancey, :– (quote from ); Draughon, ‘‘William Lowndes Yancey,’’ –; Garrett, Reminiscences, –. For a succinct overview of the three-fifths clause, see Cooper, Liberty and Slavery, –. . Yancey to Ben Yancey, July , , BCY Papers; Brewer, Alabama, . Regional divisions paralleled those of class, with more north Alabamians voting Democrat and south Alabamians voting Whig; Yancey’s district lay in the middle. See Thornton, Politics and Power; Jack, Sectionalism, –; Draughon, ‘‘William Lowndes Yancey,’’ –. . Yancey’s address in DuBose, Yancey, –; Jacksonville Republican quoted in Draughon, ‘‘William Lowndes Yancey,’’ ; Wetumpka Argus, March , May , June , August , , . . Ayers, Vengeance and Justice, –, , –, –; Moos, State Penal Administration in Alabama, –; Friedman, Crime and Punishment in American History, –. . Journal of the Senate of the General Assembly of the State of Alabama, –, –, , , –, –; ‘‘Rules, Regulations, and By-Laws for the Government and Discipline of the Alabama Penitentiary [],’’ in Alabama. Governor. (–: Fitzpatrick). Administrative Files—Alabama Penitentiary Rules, April, , ADAH. See Ayers, Vengeance and Justice, –.



n

Notes to Pages –

. Alabama Senate Journal (), –, ; Draughon, ‘‘William Lowndes Yancey,’’ – . . Alabama Senate Journal () , , –, , ; Draughon, ‘‘William Lowndes Yancey,’’ –, . . Alabama Senate Journal (), . On the fear—founded or not—of British intrigue in Texas, see Haynes, ‘‘Anglophobia and the Annexation of Texas,’’ in Haynes and Morris, Manifest Destiny and Empire, –. . Draughon, ‘‘William Lowndes Yancey,’’ –. . Biographical sketch of Ben Yancey in BCY Papers. On the prolonged affair of honor, see James [ Jones] to Ben Yancey, August  and September , ; John J. Boyce to Ben Yancey, August ,  (on Jock Cunningham); James W. Gray to Ben Yancey, August , ; E. P. Alexander to Ben Yancey, December  and , , all in BCY Papers. . John Cunningham to Ben Yancey, February , , BCY Papers. On the rape, see Robert Barnwell Rhett to Edmund Rhett, November , , Robert Barnwell Rhett Papers, SHC (cited in Draughon, ‘‘William Lowndes Yancey,’’ n). . Preston Brooks to Ben Yancey, August , []; Louis Wigfall to Ben Yancey, January , , both in BCY Papers. On duels and shootings involving Brooks and Wigfall, see Walther, Fire-Eaters, –. . Notice of Laura Hines Yancey’s death in BCY Papers, January , ; see also J. D. Wright to Ben Yancey, January , , and Ben Yancey to E. P. Alexander, January , . . William L. Yancey to Ben Yancey, July , , September , , BCY Papers; Draughon, ‘‘William Lowndes Yancey,’’ n. When Yancey referred to slaves as ‘‘breeders,’’ he surely only meant that they were young, fertile women. On the possibility of literal slave breeding see White, Ar’n’t I a Woman?, , –, –n, and Lowe and Campbell, ‘‘Slave-Breeding Hypothesis,’’ –. . Selma Free Press, June , , in WLY Papers, box , folder . Yancey won the editorial endorsements of the Huntsville Democrat, the Hayneville Chronicle, the Dallas Gazette, the Talledega Watchtower, and the Wetumpka Argus. See Scrapbook, box , WLY Papers. . Yancey to J. R. Powell, J. A. Whetsone, B. L. Defreese, B. L. Rye, June ,  (typescript); Yancey to T. J. Frow, February ,  (typescript), both in WLY Papers; DuBose, Yancey, :–. Many Americans believed that the United States already had a claim to Texas through the Louisiana Purchase of , and therefore called for ‘‘re-annexation’’ rather than merely ‘‘annexation.’’ See Merk, Slavery and the Annexation of Texas; Morrison, ‘‘Martin Van Buren, the Democracy, and the Partisan Politics of Texas Annexation,’’ – (and n therein); and Haynes, James K. Polk, . The counties of the third congressional district were Autauga, Bibb, Coosa, Dallas, Jefferson, Lowndes, Perry, and Shelby. . Yancey to H. G. Lamar et al., August , , typescript, WLY Papers. The emphasis is mine. On Troup see Watson, Liberty and Power, . . Alabama Senate Journal (), –; Brewer, Alabama, . . DuBose, Yancey, :–; Thomas Watts’s recollection of the Watrous encounter in the Montgomery Advertiser, July , ; Congressional Quarterly, Guide to U.S. Elections, . . William L. Yancey to Ben Yancey, September , , BCY Papers.

Notes to Pages –

n



. Charleston Mercury, September , . See Coussons, ‘‘Thirty Years with Calhoun, Rhett, and the Charleston Mercury.’’ . Yancey to Ben Yancey, September , , BCY Papers; on the Bluffton Movement see Walther, Fire-Eaters, –, and Davis, Rhett, , .

Chapter  . Congressional Globe, : (), , , , App., ; : (),  (speaker’s chair). Author Joseph Hergesheimer, in Swords and Roses, aptly titled his chapter on Yancey ‘‘Pillar of Words.’’ . Congressional Globe, : (), –, App., . Yancey later issued his speech in pamphlet form; see Yancey, Speech . . . on the Annexation of Texas. Many of Clingman’s own constituents also felt betrayed by his stance on slave issues. They voted him out of office later in , and when he returned to public office soon after, he stood foursquare with southern ‘‘ultras,’’ even threatening secession by  if Congress did not actively protect slave interests. See Jeffrey, Thomas Lanier Clingman. . Congressional Globe, :, –. Weeks, in John Quincy Adams, , noted that as president, Adams ‘‘had fought hard to acquire Texas.’’ Adams, in fact, did not advocate secession, but believed secession inevitable ever since the Missouri Compromise, and hoped that civil war would destroy slavery. Thus, although he did not desire disunion, he believed that slavery was ‘‘precisely the question upon which it [the Union] ought to break.’’ And as a congressman, in  Adams presented petitions from a few dozen constituents urging dissolution of the Union over slave issues. After doing his duty, Adams offered ominously that the time for disunion had not yet come. See Richards, Life and Times of Congressman John Quincy Adams, ,  (quote), , , –. . Yancey, Speech . . . on the Annexation of Texas, , –; Weeks, John Quincy Adams, – , . . Yancey, Speech . . . on the Annexation of Texas, –; Congressional Globe, :,  and App., –; Draughon, ‘‘William Lowndes Yancey,’’ . On transatlantic efforts to abolish slavery, see Blackett, Building an Antislavery Wall. . Scrapbook, –, box , WLY Papers; Draughon, ‘‘Yancey,’’ –. . Scrapbook, –, box , WLY Papers. A personal acquaintance and admirer of Yancey’s, John Witherspoon DuBose, drew a different picture. He described a man with ‘‘a fine finish of muscular development with no tendency toward bulkiness. The chest was broad, neck full and rather long, with a head neither large or small but remarkable for the symmetry of the contour.’’ DuBose, Yancey, :. . Congressional Globe :, App., ; John M. McCalla to Maria F. McCalla, January , , John M. McCalla Papers; Yancey, Memoranda of the Late Affair of Honor, in WLY Papers. Yancey and Daniel E. Huger lived at Mr. Clement’s boardinghouse on Capitol Hill. Congressional Directory of the Second Session of the Twenty-Eighth Congress of the United States of America, . . Howell Cobb to Sarah Cobb, January , , Howell Cobb Papers; McCalla to Maria McCalla, McCalla Papers; Yancey, Memoranda of the Late Affair of Honor. See ‘‘Bladensburg Dueling Ground,’’ Harper’s  (): ; SHSP  (): .



n

Notes to Pages –

. Memoranda of the Late Affair of Honor; DuBose, Yancey, :–. . DuBose, Yancey, :–; Yancey, Memoranda of the Late Affair of Honor; Draughon, ‘‘Yancey,’’ ; Yancey to the editors of the Marion Alabama Baptist, February , , WLY Papers. . Adams, Memoirs of John Quincy Adams, :–; quotes from congressmen in DuBose, Yancey, –. Massachusetts congressman Robert Winthrop blurted out, ‘‘The House of Rep has taken no notice of the affair—???—’’; Winthrop to Brewster, January , , Misc. Mss., Massachusetts Historical Society. For the abortive effort to expel Yancey from Congress, see Congressional Globe, :, –. Jack K. Williams discusses the ability of duelists to escape serious legal consequence for their actions in ‘‘White Lawbreakers in Ante-Bellum South Carolina,’’ –. See also Wyatt-Brown, ‘‘Community, Class, and Snopesian Crime,’’ in Burton and McMath, Class, Conflict, and Consensus, –. . Boston Atlas, January ,  (long quote), , . . Charleston Mercury, January , ; George D. Phillips to Howell Cobb, February , , in Phillips, Correspondence of Toombs, Stephens, and Cobb, ; C. Henderson to Jane Clingman, January , , Clingman-Puryear Papers. . Undated newspaper clippings [], Scrapbook, –; Yancey to T. J. Frow, February ,  (typescript); Selma Free Press, February , ; Yancey to the editors of the Mobile Register and Journal, February , , in Undated newspaper clippings [], Scrapbook, –, all in WLY Papers. . DuBose, Yancey, : (Gov. Martin’s quote); Journal of the Senate of the General Assembly of the State of Alabama (Tuscaloosa: John M’Cormick, State Printer, ), ; Scrapbook, –, in box , WLY Papers. . Marion Alabama Baptist, February , , in scrapbook, –, Box , WLY Papers; Yancey to the editors of the Alabama Baptist, February , , ibid. . Yancey to William H. Mitchell, April , , WLY Papers; Peterson, Divine Discontent, ; Axford, Journals of Thomas Hubbard Hobbs, ; Caroline Beman to Ben Yancey, undated, box , folder ; Yancey to Ben Yancey, November , , both in BCY Papers. . See Wyatt-Brown, Southern Honor, and ‘‘Community, Class, and Snopesian Crime.’’ Contrary to Wyatt-Brown, two scholars argue that honor and evangelism were complementary. See Crowther, in ‘‘Holy Honor,’’ –, and Snay, Gospel of Disunion, –. These two, however, confuse honor and dueling, which, no matter how closely related, were two distinct things. See Wyatt-Brown, ‘‘God and Honor in the Old South,’’ –. . Wyatt-Brown, Southern Honor, ; Loveland, Southern Evangelicals, –; Mathews, Religion in the Old South, –. . Yancey, Memoranda of the Late Affair of Honor, ; James Buchanan to [unidentified], December , , Maupin-Washington Papers. . Yancey to John D. Kellogg et al., January ,  (typescript), WLY Papers. The best summary of northern racism and the rising conflict between free labor and proslave ideology is Levine, Half Slave and Half Free. . Congressional Globe :, –, . . Scrapbook, –, WLY Papers, box , June , ; Yancey to Dixon H. Lewis, September , , Lewis Material, SHML; DuBose, Yancey, :. . Scrapbook, –, box , June , , WLY Papers; Congressional Quarterly Guide

Notes to Pages –

n



to U.S. Elections, . For Yancey’s opposition to federal internal improvements, see Congressional Globe, :, . . Lewis to Yancey, [September ], Lewis Material, SHML. The others mentioned by Lewis—most of whom would continue associating with Yancey—were James McLung, Clement C. Clay Jr., John Gill Shorter, Franklin W. Bowdon, Samuel W. Inge, and Sampson Harris. . Yancey to Lewis, September , , Lewis Material, SHML. See Wetumpka Argus, September , , ‘‘Tariff and the next Congress.’’ Lewis at this time was fully enmeshed in Calhoun’s inner circle, which included radicals such as Franklin H. Elmore, Barnwell Rhett, James Rhett, Henry Gourdin, and William W. Boyce. See D. H. Lewis to John C. Calhoun, May , , in Boucher and Brooks, Correspondence Addressed to John C. Calhoun, . . Congressional Globe :, , , ; App., ; Congressional Directory first Session Twenty-Ninth Congress, iv–v, . For his second term, Yancey moved to Mrs. Johnson’s on the east side of th Street, between D and E Streets. This block now lies across the street from the J. Edgar Hoover FBI Building. . Congressional Globe, :, , –, ; Current, Daniel Webster, –; Peterson, Great Triumvirate, . Both authors point out that Webster knew nothing about the compensation beforehand, and both concur that while Webster saw nothing wrong with accepting this, other Whig congressmen and senators did (particularly John Quincy Adams, who turned down far more modest ‘‘gifts’’ from constituents). Yancey believed that Webster’s ‘‘pension’’ was , in manufacturing stock. ‘‘Here is shown the peculiar cunning of the Yankee. If the ‘godlike’ [Webster] shall succeed in preventing a repeal of the tariff, the stock will be very high; but if he does not, then his income will sink in proportion.’’ Congressional Globe, :, . Also see Remini, Daniel Webster, –, –. . Congressional Globe, :, , –. In fact, Webster did accept money from Baring Brothers and, during a debate on conscription during , suggested using state interposition to stop what he considered an unconstitutional proposal by a Madison administration and Republican Congress run amok. See Current, Webster, –, , –, and Remini, Daniel Webster, –. Four years later Yancey wrote to Webster to apologize for his remarks and to admit that his attitude toward Webster had changed a great deal. Wiltse and Birkner, Papers of Daniel Webster, :. See Scrapbook, –, box , WLY Papers. . Congressional Globe, :, ; :, , ,  (land claims);  (mail route); Yancey to [?], July , , Yancey Papers, Duke University. Yancey served on the Private Land Claims committee with, among others, Andrew Johnson and Robert Toombs, and on the Committee on Manufactures with John Q. Adams and David Wilmot. Congressional Directory . . . Twenty-Ninth Congress, . . Congressional Globe, :, – (Indian agents),  (blind). . Ibid., :, –. . Ibid., :, . Douglas replied that the same platform called on exclusive American occupation of Oregon up to °', and yet Yancey stood for compromise at ° north latitude, making the Alabamian ‘‘at least equally obnoxious to the charge of not adhering to the Democratic text-book.’’ For Yancey’s positions on Oregon, see below. . Ibid., :, –; quotes from , , . Also see ibid., :, ; ibid., :, , , , , , App., ; Peterson, Great Triumvirate, ; Watson, Liberty and Power, .



n

Notes to Pages –

. Congressional Globe, :, ; App., – (quote on ); Yancey to Ben Yancey, June , , BCY Papers. Yancey, like Dixon Hall Lewis, had hoped for passage of the McKay Bill, a proposal to lower tariffs more significantly than the Walker tariff. The Walker tariff carried the endorsement of the Polk administration. See Current, Webster, ; Peterson, Great Triumvirate, –. . Congressional Globe, :, App., . . Ibid., :, . . John C. Calhoun to Joseph Lesesne, February , , Joseph W. Lesesne Papers; Brewer, Alabama, –. . Congressional Globe, :, , . . Haynes, James K. Polk, –, , , –. Haynes called Polk’s position a ‘‘feeble if not wholly indefensible’’ claim (). . Congressional Globe, :, App., –, – (quotes from –); Haynes, James K. Polk, , –, –, . . Congressional Globe, :, App., . For similar sentiments from John A. Quitman of Mississippi, see Walther, Fire-Eaters, . . See Cooper, South and the Politics of Slavery, –; Freehling, Road to Disunion, – . Note, too, that John C. Calhoun opposed the war on the same grounds as the Whigs, fear of the consequences of renewed national agitation and discussion about slavery. See Lander, Reluctant Imperialists. . Stephens quoted in Schott, Alexander H. Stephens, ; Perkins, ‘‘Moderate Democrats, –,’’ in Braden, Oratory in the Old South, – (first quote); Coulter, ‘‘Alexander H. Stephens Challenges Benjamin H. Hill to a Duel,’’ –. . Congressional Globe :, App., – (Stephens’s speech); – (Yancey’s reply); Yancey to Ben Yancey, June , , BCY Papers; Scrapbook, –, box , WLY Papers; Washington National Intelligencer, June , ; Schott, Alexander H. Stephens, . . Yancey to Ben Yancey, April [ or ], BCY Papers. The letter must be  because it refers to voting on the Oregon issue. See biographical sketch, page , BCY Papers. . Congressional Globe, :, App., ; Yancey, Oration on the Life and Character of Andrew Jackson, . . Yancey to Voters of the Third Congressional District of the State of Alabama, July , , in Marion News, WLY Papers; Greenberg, Masters and Statesmen, –, –. . Yancey to Ben Yancey, August , , BCY Papers.

Chapter  . Davis, ‘‘Government of Our Own,’’ –; Brewer, Alabama, . . The population for Montgomery County in  stood at , whites and , blacks (almost all slaves); in , , whites and , blacks. Brewer, Alabama, –; Davis, ‘‘Government of Our Own,’’ . . Davis, ‘‘Government of Our Own,’’ , –; Flynt, Montgomery, . . Thomas Williams to John Witherspoon DuBose, February , , John Witherspoon DuBose Papers; Frederick M. Beatty to author, September , . Professor Beatty also remarked that several families occupied the old Yancey house on Mt. Meigs Road before

Notes to Pages –

n



it finally burned down in the s. As of this writing, several impressive antebellum residential buildings remain on Perry Street, including the  Teague House and the Mayor’s house, begun in . See Writers’ Program of the Work Projects Administration, Alabama, –. Nothing, however, remains of the Yancey home. . DuBose, Yancey, :; Yancey to Ben Yancey, October , , May , , December , , BCY Papers. The story of the construction of Yancey’s home is in Misc. Newspaper clippings, box , folder , George Petrie Collection, Auburn University. . Montgomery County, Alabama, Tax Book, , pp. –, in ADAH; Montgomery County, Alabama, Probate Judge, Misc. Probate Records –, vol. , –. . Yancey to Ben Yancey, January , May [n.d.], , BCY Papers; DuBose, Yancey, :. . Yancey to Charles Woodbury, August , , William L. Yancey Papers, Duke University. On the Elmore family, see Walther, Fire-Eaters, –, , and for John A. Elmore see Garrett, Reminiscences of Public Men in Alabama, . . Yancey to Charles Woodbury, August , , William L. Yancey Papers, Duke University; advertisement, Montgomery Flag & Advertiser, March , . . Yancey to Charles Woodbury, August , , William L. Yancey Papers, Duke University. . Scrapbook, –, box , WLY Papers; Peterson, Divine Discontent, , –. . Scrapbook, –, box , and Undated Newspaper Clippings, box , folder , both in WLY Papers; Congressional Quarterly, Guide to U.S. Elections, . . Yancey to the editors of the Montgomery Journal, March , , in WLY Papers; Owen, Story of Alabama, :. . Caroline Beman to Ben Yancey, June , , BCY Papers. . Yancey to I. Leander Starr, April , , Eldridge Collection; Yancey to Starr, April , , Misc. Mss., The New-York Historical Society. I am pleased to thank Tim Kubatsky for finding the latter document. . See Montgomery Flag and Advertiser, April , , for example; Cooper, South and the Politics of Slavery, –; Freehling, Road to Secession, –; Potter, Impending Crisis, – n (on Davis), – (new versions of Proviso, ). Wilmot proposed his measure not from ‘‘sympathy for the slave,’’ but rather to assure ‘‘a fair country, a rich inheritance, where the sons of toil, of my own race and color, can live without the disgrace which association with negro slavery brings upon free labor.’’ Quoted from Haynes, James K. Polk, . . Freehling, Road to Disunion, –; Mobile newspaper quote from Mayer, ‘‘‘Leaven of Disunion,’ ’’ . . Freehling, Road to Disunion,  (quote); Levine, Half Slave and Half Free, –; Venable, Role of William L. Yancey in the Secession Movement, –; Draughon, ‘‘George Smith Houston and Southern Unity, –,’’ –. . Thornton, Politics and Power, ; Montgomery Flag and Advertiser, May , . . Montgomery Flag and Advertiser, March , . . Ibid., April , May , July , ; Cooper, South and the Politics of Slavery, –  (Georgia resolution quoted). Charles Woodbury lived in Lowndes County until ; Thornton, Politics and Power,  and n. . . Montgomery Flag & Advertiser, July , ; Yancey to Charles Woodbury, August , , William L. Yancey Papers, Duke.



n

Notes to Pages –

. See especially Cooper, South and the Politics of Slavery, –, and McMillan, ‘‘Taylor’s Presidential Campaign in Alabama,’’ –; also Freehling, Road to Disunion, –; Thornton, Politics and Power, –; and Bauer, Zachary Taylor. . Montgomery Flag & Advertiser, July , ; for British designs of the Texas Republic see Haynes, James K. Polk, , , –, . . Montgomery Flag & Advertiser, July , . . Thornton, Politics and Power, –, –, quote from ; Draughon, ‘‘William Lowndes Yancey,’’ . . Lewis to Yancey, November , , D. H. Lewis Material, SHML; Brewer, Alabama, , . From  to , Sanford served as president of the state bank in Mobile—the one that assemblyman Yancey considered so corrupt. Johnson Jones Hooper gained national fame as a humorist for his fictional ‘‘Simon Suggs.’’ Bain, Flora, and Rubin, Southern Writers, –. . Thornton, Politics and Power, –; Draughon, ‘‘William Lowndes Yancey,’’ –; Williams, ‘‘Dixon Hall Lewis,’’ . . John A. Campbell to John C. Calhoun, March , , in Boucher and Brooks, Correspondence Addressed to John C. Calhoun, –; Calhoun quote from Draughon, ‘‘William Lowndes Yancey,’’ –. . Thornton, Politics and Power, –; Cooper, South and the Politics of Slavery, –, –; Yancey to Lewis, February , , Lewis Material, SHML. . Cooper, South and the Politics of Slavery, –; Draughon, ‘‘William Lowndes Yancey,’’ ; Potter, Impending Crisis, –. . Montgomery Tri-Weekly Flag & Advertiser, December , , . . Yancey to Lewis, February , , Lewis Material, SHML; James E. Saunders to George S. Houston, George S. Houston Papers; Draughon, ‘‘William Lowndes Yancey,’’ –, . Debate continues over who was most responsible for the Alabama Platform. DuBose, Yancey, :, assigns exclusive authorship to Yancey; Saunders, John Archibald Campbell, claims that Campbell deserves the most credit; Draughon, ‘‘William Lowndes Yancey,’’ –, assigns primacy to Yancey for authorship, but emphasizes Dixon Lewis’s guiding hand; and Thornton, Politics and Power, –, largely concurs with Draughon. Draughon and Thornton’s explanations seem most plausible. . Draughon, ‘‘William Lowndes Yancey,’’ –. . Ibid., –. Slavery—or its absence—within a state came under state regulation through the tenth amendment to the Constitution, reserving powers not specified in the Constitution to the states. . Ibid., –. . Ibid., ; Campbell to Calhoun, March , , in Boucher and Brooks, Correspondence Addressed to Calhoun, –. Campbell wrote unequivocally that the Constitution ‘‘no where provides that the rights of the slave owner shall be protected in all the territories of the U.S., or that the master shall be free to carry them as slaves to those territories. . . . I write you my opinion as a lawyer that you would not be safe in going to California or New Mexico without a change of laws with your slaves—that in all probability in a suit for freedom commenced by your slaves against you you would be lost.’’ . James E. Saunders to George S. Houston, February , , Houston Papers; Draughon, ‘‘William Lowndes Yancey,’’ –.

Notes to Pages –

n



. Yancey to Lewis, February , , Lewis Papers, CAH; Yancey to Lewis, March , , Lewis Material, SHML. . Montgomery Tri-Weekly Flag & Advertiser, March , , April , . In the April  issue, Yancey himself wrote an editorial that in part listed press support within the state. . John Bragg to George S. Houston, February , ; F. G. Norman to Houston, April , , Houston Papers; Yancey to Lewis, March , , Lewis Material, SHML. . Haynes, James K. Polk, –; Potter, Impending Crisis, –. . Yancey to Lewis, March , , Lewis Material, SHML. . Yancey to Lewis, March , , ibid.; Delano quoted in Potter, Impending Crisis, – . . Yancey to Lewis, March , , Lewis Material, SHML. . Yancey to Lewis, March , , Lewis Material, SHML; Alabama Reports  (): – , –, –, –, –;  (): –, –. See chap.  for more detail on Yancey’s law practice. . Yancey to Lewis, March , , , Lewis Material, SHML; Reuben Chapman to George S. Houston, March , ; A. C. Matthews to Houston, April , ; James E. Saunders to Houston, April , ; F. G. Norman to Houston, April , , all in Houston. . Franklin H. Elmore to Lewis, March , ; Yancey to Lewis, March , , Lewis Material, SHML. No evidence exists of a campaign involving Buchanan to undo the Platform. George Gayle of Alabama complained to Buchanan about the late hour of Yancey’s proposal at the state convention; Buchanan responded by trying to assure Gayle that standing on extending the °' line proved Buchanan’s fidelity to the South. Gayle to Buchanan, February , , and Buchanan to Gayle, February , , Buchanan Papers, in Nevins, Ordeal of the Union, nn–. . Montgomery Flag & Advertiser, April , , , including Yancey’s letter to the State Gazette editors. . These responses are summarized or printed in Yancey, Address to the People of Alabama, by W. L. Yancey, Late a Delegate . . . to the National Democratic Convention, –. . Draughon, ‘‘William Lowndes Yancey,’’ ; Nevins, Ordeal of the Union, ; Foote, Bench and Bar of the South and Southwest,  (for Yancey and Calhoun). . Washington Union, May , . . Ibid.; Cooper, South and the Politics of Slavery, ; Levine, Half Slave and Half Free, – ; Nevins, Ordeal of the Union, , –; Potter, Impending Crisis, –. . Washington Union, May , ; Draughon, ‘‘William Lowndes Yancey,’’ –; Potter, Impending Crisis, . . Washington Union, May , . The thirty-six yea votes came from Alabama, Arkansas, Florida, Georgia, Kentucky, Maryland, South Carolina, and Tennessee. For information on Philip A. Wray, see Howington, ‘‘Violence in Alabama,’’ ; Blue, City Directory and History of Montgomery, ; and Alabama Historical Quarterly  (): . . Nevins, Ordeal of the Union, ; Rayback, ‘‘Presidential Ambitions of John C. Calhoun,’’ ; Charleston Courier, June , ; DuBose, Yancey, :. The Whiggish Tuscumbia North Alabamian, June , , described the Charleston meeting that Yancey spoke at as being composed of ‘‘moral and political fanatics.’’ See Montgomery Flag & Advertiser, June , .



n

Notes to Pages –

. Draughon, ‘‘Yancey,’’ ; see Alabama State Gazette, June  (Woodbury), August  (Campbell), June  (Lewis). . James C. Dobbin to Howell Cobb, June , , and Henry R. Jackson to Cobb, June , , both in Phillips, Correspondence of Toombs, Stephens, and Cobb, , . . A. C. Matthews to George S. Houston, June , , and James E. Sanders to Houston, June , , in Houston Papers; comment of A. J. Saffold in Montgomery Flag & Advertiser, July , . . Montgomery Flag & Advertiser, June , ; Montgomery Alabama State Gazette, ‘‘requiem,’’ June , , cited in Draughon, ‘‘William Lowndes Yancey,’’ ; Montgomery Flag and Advertiser, June , , ; Wetumpka State Guard, June , , . . Yancey, Address to the People of Alabama, by W. L. Yancey, Late a Delegate . . . to the National Democratic Convention, ,  (quote), . . Ibid., , , . . Yancey to Calhoun, June , , in Boucher and Brooks, Correspondence Addressed to Calhoun, . . Mayer, ‘‘Leaven of Disunion,’’ .

Chapter  . Henry C. Semple, William L. Yancey, S. Heydenfeldt, John C. Campbell, W. Harris, J. A. Elmore, and Thomas S. Mays, to Littleton W. Tazewell, June , , Henry Churchill Semple Papers; Potter, Impending Crisis, , ; Cooper, South and the Politics of Slavery, –; Dixon H. Lewis to Yancey, June , , Lewis Material, SHML; Peterson, Littleton Waller Tazewell, esp. –, . . Yancey to Lewis, June , , in Williams, ‘‘Dixon Hall Lewis,’’ . . Yancey to John C. Calhoun, June , , in Mays, ‘‘‘Leaven of Disunion,’’’ ; Jameson, Correspondence of John C. Calhoun, :. See also Thornton, Politics and Power in a Slave Society, . . Lewis to Yancey, June , , Lewis Material, SHML. . Lewis to Yancey, June , , ibid. . Lewis to Yancey, June , , WLY Papers. . Ibid.; Tazewell to Committee, June , , Semple Papers. On Beman, see Brewer, History of Coosa County, –. . Yancey to Lewis, July , , in George Petrie Collection. . Ibid. Eaton, in Mind of the Old South, –, argued that Yancey’s dream of a new party stemmed from wounded pride. . James A. Calhoun to Joseph Lesesne, July , , Joseph Lesesne Papers. . Leroy Pope Walker to Dixon H. Lewis, July , , Lewis Material, SHML; Clement C. Clay Jr. to George S. Houston, July , , and James E. Saunders to Houston, July , , both in George S. Houston Papers. . John A. Elmore to Lewis, July , ; Thomas S. Mays to Lewis, August , , both in Lewis Material, SHML. . Mayer, ‘‘ ‘Leaven of Disunion,’’’ –; Potter, Impending Crisis, –. Thornton, in Politics and Power, –, counted a -vote majority for Cass.

Notes to Pages –

n



. Potter, Impending Crisis, –. . Ibid., ; Walther, Fire-Eaters, –, ; Calhoun’s address quoted from Mayer, ‘‘‘Leaven of Disunion,’ ’’ –. . Potter, Impending Crisis, ; Mayer, ‘‘‘Leaven of Disunion,’’’  (see Congressional Globe remark of Harris, July , ). . Potter, Impending Crisis, –; Walther, Fire-Eaters, ; Calhoun to James H. Hammond, February , , in Jameson, Correspondence of John C. Calhoun, ; Freehling, Road to Disunion, –; Cooper, South and the Politics of Slavery, –. . Mayer, ‘‘ ‘Leaven of Disunion,’’’ – (Advertiser quote on page ); Montgomery Advertiser, April , ; Judge to Calhoun, April , , in Jameson, Correspondence of John C. Calhoun, , . . Draughon, ‘‘William Lowndes Yancey,’’ –. . Brewer, Alabama, ; Mayer, ‘‘‘Leaven of Disunion,’’’ ; Draughon, ‘‘William Lowndes Yancey,’’ –. . Yancey to Hilliard, August , , and Hilliard to Yancey, August , , in DuBose, Yancey, :–. . Charleston Mercury, December ,  (quote), , ; Walther, Fire-Eaters, –, , –, . For the best study of affairs in South Carolina at this time, see Barnwell, Love of Order, –. . Potter, Impending Crisis, –; Mayer, ‘‘‘Leaven of Disunion,’’’ –. . Potter, Impending Crisis, –; Freehling, Road to Disunion, –. . Sanford quoted from Draughon, ‘‘William Lowndes Yancey,’’ . For southern reactions see Cooper, Liberty and Slavery, –; Thornton, Politics and Power, –; Walther, Fire-Eaters; Ford, Origins of Southern Radicalism, –. . Barnwell, Love of Order, –, ; Potter, Impending Crisis, –. . Montgomery Advertiser and State Gazette, April , ; Montgomery Alabama Journal, April , ; Alabama Reports, vols. –, passim. . Montgomery Advertiser and State Gazette, May , . . Campbell quoted from Draughon, ‘‘William Lowndes Yancey,’’ . See Saunders, ‘‘John Archibald Campbell,’’ –. Other Alabama delegates included Leroy Pope Walker, Benjamin Fitzpatrick, Reuben Chapman, George Goldthwaite, Governor John A. Winston, Thomas J. Judge, and Jefferson Buford. All had close ties to Yancey. See Thornton, Politics and Powery, , and Jennings, Nashville Convention, , –. . Saunders, ‘‘Campbell,’’ . . Charleston Mercury, June , ; Walther, Fire-Eaters, –; Davis, Rhett, –. . Yancey, An Address on the Life and Character of John Caldwell Calhoun, , –. . Ibid., . . Ibid., –, . . Ibid., , . . Ibid., , . . Potter, Impending Crisis, –, –, –. . Alabama Journal, July , , in George Petrie Collection. For Watts’s early opposition to the Nashville Convention, see Thornton, Politics and Power, .



n

Notes to Pages –

. Yancey to Ben Yancey, August , , BCY Papers. Ben Yancey developed his own reputation for defending southern interests. See R. O. Stark to Ben Yancey, February , , BCY Papers; Stark sought Ben Yancey’s help for a planned speech, ‘‘A Republican government can not exist without Slavery.’’ On Cochran, see Brewer, Alabama, –. . Nashville True Whig, September , ; James A. Meredith to Howell Cobb, August , , in Phillips, Correspondence of Robert Toombs, Alexander H. Stephens, and Howell Cobb, ; Columbia Telegraph, August , September , , in Nevins, Ordeal of the Union, n; Washington Daily Union estimate cited in Shyrock, Georgia and the Union, –, esp. . . Shyrock, Georgia and the Union, ; Walther, Fire-Eaters, –, , . . Meriwether to Cobb, August , in Phillips, Correspondence of Robert Toombs, Alexander H. Stephens, and Howell Cobb, . . Yancey quoted in Nevins, Ordeal of the Union,  (Columbia Telegraph, August , September , ); Macon Journal reprinted in Nashville True Whig, September , . Rhett’s speech appears in the Abraham Watkins Venable Scrapbook. . Charleston Mercury quoted in Nashville True Whig, September , ; Davis, Rhett, – . . Potter, Impending Crisis, –; Stegmaier, Texas, New Mexico, and the Compromise of , esp. , ; Nevins, Ordeal of the Union, –. . Potter, Impending Crisis, –; Freehling, Road to Disunion, ; Craven, Growth of Southern Nationalism, –; Nevins, Ordeal of the Union, –; Thornton, Politics and Power, . . Tyler quoted in Nevins, Ordeal of the Union, n; Walther, Fire-Eaters, –, – , , –, –, , –, , –, , , , for radicals’ responses to the Compromise of .

Chapter  . Barnwell, Love of Order, –, –, –, –, ; Craven, Growth of Southern Nationalism, –, –, –; Walther, Fire-Eaters, –, , , , , . . Montgomery Flag and State Gazette, October , , in Draughon, ‘‘William Lowndes Yancey,’’ –, and letter of September , , in Huntsville Democrat, October , , in Denman, Secession Movement in Alabama, . Besides previous works cited on southern honor, see Wyatt-Brown, ‘‘Honor and Secession,’’ in Yankee Saints and Southern Sinners, –. . Mayer, ‘‘ ‘Leaven of Disunion,’’’ –; Hodgson, Cradle of the Confederacy, – (quotes from ); Thornton, Politics and Power, , –. . Denman, Secession Movement, –; Thornton, Politics and Power, –. On Southern Rights Associations, also see Craven, Growth of Southern Nationalism, –. . Denman, Secession Movement, – (quote on ); Thornton, Politics and Power, –; Potter, Impending Crisis, –; Draughon, ‘‘William Lowndes Yancey,’’ –. . The southern rights Montgomery Advertiser stated that fewer than  unionists turned out, and the radical Montgomery Atlas put unionists’ numbers at ‘‘a few.’’ Draughon, ‘‘William Lowndes Yancey,’’ –.

Notes to Pages –

n



. Ibid., –; Thornton, Politics and Power, –. . Journal of the Southern Rights Convention . . . February , , –, ; Denman, Secession Movement, ; Draughon, ‘‘William Lowndes Yancey,’’ –. . Thornton, Politics and Power, –. There has been much scholarly debate over whether personal ambition and frustration with existing political institutions contributed to the making of fire-eaters. For arguments supporting the ‘‘outsider’’ thesis, see Faust, Sacred Circle, esp. –; Donald, ‘‘Proslavery Argument Reconsidered,’’ –, esp. ; Barney, Secessionist Impulse, –; McCardell, Idea of a Southern Nation, . For the view that fire-eaters were not fundamentally different in status or ambition than others, see May, ‘‘Psychobiography and Secession,’’ –; Walther, Fire-Eaters, , –, –; Carpenter, South as a Conscious Minority. . Journal of the Southern Rights Convention . . . February , , –. . Ibid., , , , , . . Ibid., –. . Ibid., –. . Ibid., . . Ibid., –. See Davis, Slave Power Conspiracy. . Journal of the Southern Rights Convention . . . February , , –; see Stegmaier, ‘‘Zachary Taylor Versus the South,’’ –. . Journal of the Southern Rights Convention . . . February , , –. . Ibid., –. . Ibid., –. On the Texas boundary dispute, see Stegmaier, Texas, New Mexico, and the Compromise of . . Journal of the Southern Rights Convention . . . February , , –. . Ibid., –. . Ibid., –. . Ibid., . . Ibid., –. . Ibid., . . Ibid., –. . William R. King to William T. King, March , , William R. King Papers; Wetumpka State Guard in Montgomery Daily Journal, March , , clipping in BCY Papers; Montgomery Advertiser, May , , in Thornton, Politics and Power, – and n. ; Yancey to Ben Yancey, May , , BCY Papers. On the Atlas also see Denman, Secession Movement, . . Montgomery Advertiser, February , , March  (quoting the Huntsville Democrat), May , , in Thornton, Politics and Power, – and n. ; Draughon, ‘‘William Lowndes Yancey,’’ –. . Yancey to Joel E. Matthews, C. C. Pegues, J. H. Campbell, C. H. Cleveland, George W. Gayle et al., May , , typescript, WLY Papers. . Louisa Cunningham to Sarah Yancey, March , , BCY Papers. On women’s involvement in politics see Varon, ‘‘Tippecanoe and the Ladies, Too,’’ –; Watson, Liberty and Power, –; May, ‘‘Southern Elite Women,’’ –; Walther, Fire-Eaters, . . Wyatt-Brown, Southern Honor, –.



n

Notes to Pages –

. Barnwell, Love of Order, –; Mobile Daily Register, May , , in Draughon, ‘‘William Lowndes Yancey,’’ ; Montgomery Advertiser and State Gazette, May , , , in Draughon, ‘‘William Lowndes Yancey,’’ ; Spirit of the South, June , , quoted in Draughon, ‘‘William Lowndes Yancey,’’ . . Thornton, Politics and Power, –; Wetumpka State Guard, in Montgomery Advertiser, March , , clipping, BCY Papers; see Advertiser, May , , June , , , , August , . The vote was –, with thirty-two delegates absent. . Draughon, ‘‘William Lowndes Yancey,’’ – (quoting Montgomery Advertiser, May , ; and see Advertiser, June , ). . Brewer, Alabama, ; Draughon, ‘‘William Lowndes Yancey,’’ –. For Abercrombie’s positions on issues, see Denman, Secession Movement, – and n. . . Mellon, ‘‘Henry W. Hilliard and William L. Yancey,’’ –. . Ibid., –. . Ibid., , . . Ibid., , , . . Thornton, Politics and Power, , –; Denman, Secession Movement, –; DuBose, Yancey, :. . Robert W. Barnwell to James Orr, August , , in Orr-Patterson Papers; Potter, Impending Crisis, ; Walther, Fire-Eaters. . Yancey to Ben Yancey, November , , BCY Papers; John Slidell to Howell Cobb, January , , in Phillips, Correspondence of Toombs, Stephens, and Cobb, –. . Denman, Secession Movement, –. . Thaddeus Sanford to John Bragg, March , , John Bragg Papers. . John E. Ward and Henry R. Jackson to Howell Cobb, February , , in Phillips, Correspondence of Toombs, Stephens, and Cobb, ; Potter, Impending Crisis, ; Thornton, Politics and Power, , . . Thornton, Politics and Power, –; Hodgson, Cradle of the Confederacy, . . Thornton, Politics and Power, –; Hodgson, Cradle of the Confederacy, –; May, John A. Quitman, . . George W. Gayle to Yancey, October , , in Montgomery Advertiser and State Gazette, October , , in Petrie Collection. . Yancey to George W. Gayle, October [], , in Montgomery Advertiser and State Gazette, October , , in Petrie Collection. . Potter, Impending Crisis, ; Thornton, Politics and Power, ; May, Quitman, . In Fire-Eaters, , I stated incorrectly that Yancey did not cast a vote in the  presidential contest. . Yancey to G. W. Williams, May , , in Eufaula Spirit of the South, June , , from Denman, Secession Movement, . . Walther, Fire-Eaters, –, ; Barnwell, Love of Order, ; Thornton, Politics and Power, –; Denman, Secession Movement in Alabama, ; John Cochran to Thomas Ritchie, September , , in Eufaula Democrat, September , .

Notes to Pages –

n



Chapter  . West Point (Georgia) Advocate, January , , in BCY Papers. . William Wirt quoted in Grammar, Pastoral and Politics, , –; Ferguson, Law and Letters in American Culture, ; James H. Hammond’s father quoted in Stowe, ‘‘‘Touchiness’ of the Gentleman Planter,’’ . . Montgomery County, Tax Book, , vol. , p. , and Tax Book , pp. –, each list the ten-dollar option. As Yancey’s health declined in –, so too did his earnings. In  he declared , in income from law (and paid . in tax), and in , no earnings at all. See Montgomery County, Tax Book, , –, and Tax Book, , . . Chroust, Rise of the Legal Profession in America, :–, cited in Pease and Pease, James Louis Petigru, , n. . Yancey to Caroline Beman, April , [?], BCY Papers. . Templeton, ‘‘Yancey and Journalism,’’ in Birmingham Age-Herald, October , , p. , col. ; Montgomery Advertiser, May , . . Watts, Reminiscences, in John Witherspoon DuBose Papers. . DuBose, Yancey, :–; Montgomery County. Tax Book, , –; Tax Book, , Real Estate, –, and Personal, ; Tax Book, , Real Estate, , and personal, – . Yancey’s simple two-crib dogtrot farm home is currently located on Hull Street’s ‘‘Old Alabama Town’’ historical area. . Census, Montgomery County, Alabama, schedule , –. . Grammar, Pastoral and Politics, –; Ferguson, Law and Letters in American Culture, . . DuBose, Yancey, :; Yancey to Ben Yancey, October , , and March , , BCY Papers. . For example, see Yancey to Ben Yancey, October  and , ; April , , BCY Papers. . Yancey to Ben Yancey, February , , February  [no year], and [April ], BCY Papers; Yancey to Benjamin F. Perry, December , , Benjamin F. Perry Papers, ADAH. . Montgomery Directory for –, –; Garrett, Reminiscences of Public Men in Alabama, –, lists  attorneys at law in ; Alabama Reports, vols. –, passim. .  Alabama, –. .  Alabama, –. .  Alabama, –. . Brewer, Alabama, ; Brewer, History of Coosa County, Alabama, . . Yancey to Ben Yancey, January , May [n.d.], , BCY Papers; DuBose, Yancey, :, . . DuBose, Yancey, :; Watts, Reminiscences, John Witherspoon DuBose Papers. DuBose implies that Yancey’s dairy farm adjoined his residence on Perry Street. It did not; it lay about five miles northwest of town, at the site of today’s Gunter Air Force Base. The name of Yancey’s overseer—or, more likely, the names of his several different ones—remains unknown. See Yancey to Ben Yancey, April , , BCY Papers. . Yancey to Caroline Beman, April  [?], BCY Papers. . Watts, Reminiscences, in John Witherspoon DuBose Papers; ‘‘William Lowndes Yan-



n

Notes to Pages –

cey,’’ in Montgomery Advertiser, September , , p. , col. ; Brewer, Alabama, –, ; Yancey to Ben Yancey, November , , BCY Papers. . Yancey to Ben Yancey, October , , BCY Papers; Brewer, Alabama, –; Garrett, Reminiscences, –. Chilton married Elvira Morgan, a daughter of John T. Morgan, a huge slaveholder from Dallas County and one of Yancey’s closest friends. See Chilton, Centenary Sketch of William P. Chilton, ; Brewer, Alabama, , on Morgan. . Reminiscences of Thomas H. Watts []; Alabama Reports, vols. –, passim; P. McGauly to John Witherspoon DuBose, May , , both in John Witherspoon DuBose Papers. . ‘‘Wm. L. Yancey,’’ in Montgomery Advertiser, August , , p. , col. ; Brewer, Alabama, . . Templeton, ‘‘Yancey and Journalism,’’ in Birmingham Age-Herald, October , , p. , col. ; Foote, Bench and Bar of the South and Southwest, ; Watts Reminiscences, in John Witherspoon DuBose Papers. . Foote, Bench and Bar, ; Watts Reminiscences, in John Witherspoon DuBose Papers; Templeton, ‘‘Yancey and Journalism,’’ Birmingham Age-Herald, October , , p. , col. . H. Hardy Perritt drew similar conclusions about Yancey’s speaking style in Braden, Oratory in the Old South, –, , but Braden himself offered no real analysis of Yancey’s effectiveness as a speaker in Oral Tradition in the South, –. . Clay, Belle of the Fifties, ; Yancey to Ben, April [], BCY Papers. . Templeton, ‘‘Yancey and Journalism,’’ Birmingham Age-Herald, October , , p. , col. ; Yancey to Ben Yancey, December , , BCY Papers. See advertisement in Montgomery Advertiser, December , . . Yancey to Ben Yancey, January , , March , , BCY Papers. Also see Yancey to Ben Yancey, April [], August , ; April , , ibid. . See, for example, Oakes, Ruling Race, –; Greenberg, Masters and Statesmen, esp. –; Grammar, Pastoral and Politics. . Yancey to Ben Yancey, May , BCY Papers. . Ibid.; Montgomery Advertiser, March , ; Wade, Slavery in the Cities. . Yancey to Ben Yancey, March , April , , April , , BCY Papers; Mississippi planter Joseph Ingraham quoted in Oakes, Ruling Race, . . Yancey to Ben Yancey, April , ; Benjamin C. Yancey (WLY’s son) to Ben Yancey, October, n.d., (box , folder ), BCY Papers; Rozier, Granite Farm Letters, for Wilson Bird and his relationship with the Yanceys. An ostler is one who tends horses. For selling slaves as a form of punishment, see Kolchin, American Slavery, –; Johnson, Soul by Soul, –. As a slaveholder, Yancey conforms to the model in James Oakes, Ruling Race. . Yancey to Ben Yancey, February , ; October , ; November , , BCY Papers; Genovese, ‘‘Our Family, White and Black,’’ in Bleser, In Joy and in Sorrow, –. . Yancey to Ben Perry, May , , Perry Papers, ADAH. . Yancey to Ben Yancey, May , BCY Papers. . Census, , slave schedule, Coosa County, Alabama, p. ; Census, , Montgomery County, Alabama, in Yancey Papers, ADAH, box , folder ; Montgomery County, Tax Book, , Personal Property, pp. –; , pp. –; , p. ; , pp. –. . J. C. Doyle to Ben Yancey, December , , and biographical sketch of Ben Yancey,

Notes to Pages –

n



–, all in BCY Papers;  Census, Alabama, Cherokee County,  (Doyle), – (Ben Yancey); Brewer, Alabama, –, –. Ben Yancey’s real estate was valued at ,, his personal estate (including slaves) at ,. . Yancey to Ben Yancey, March , ; October , , BCY Papers; Martis, Historical Atlas of United States Congressional Districts, . . Yancey to Ben Yancey, April , , BCY Papers; Brewer, Alabama, –, . . Yancey to Ben Yancey, July , , BCY Papers. . Yancey to Horace F. Clark, February , ; Yancey to Benjamin C. Prestman, February , , BCY Papers. Also see Yancey to J. M. Buchanan, J. R. Brent, and J. W. Pryor, all February , , BCY Papers. . Unless otherwise noted, the following narrative of the Yancey family comes from Charles Yancey to Ben Yancey, June , BCY Papers. . Heitman, Historical Register of Officers of the Continental Army, . . Charles Yancey to Ben Yancey, June [n.d.], , BCY Papers. . Yancey to Ben Yancey, September , ; February , , BCY, BCY Papers. . Ellison, Newspapers, –, ; Charles Yancey to Ben Yancey, June [n.d.], , BCY Papers. . Yancey to Ben Yancey, May , September , , BCY Papers. In other correspondence Yancey condemned one acquaintance as ‘‘a drunken bore,’’ and another as ‘‘dissipated.’’ Yancey to Ben Yancey, May , , BCY Papers. . Yancey to Ben Yancey, August  [], September , , BCY Papers; Owen, History of Alabama, :. . C. B. Stone to Yancey, August , September , ; Yancey to Ben Yancey, August  [], September , , BCY Papers. . Ben Yancey to Sarah P. Yancey, September , , , BCY Papers. . Elias Earle to Ben Yancey, September , ; Ben Yancey to Elias Earle, September , , BCY Papers. . Yancey to Ben Yancey, October , , BCY Papers. The emphases are mine. . Yancey to Ben Yancey, August , [], BCY Papers. . Yancey to Ben Yancey, September , , BCY Papers. . Yancey to Benjamin Perry, May , July , , Perry Papers, ADAH (microfilm). . Yancey to Perry, April , May , July , , ibid. . Yancey to Perry, September , , ibid. Also see Yancey to Ben Yancey, October , , BCY Papers, in which Yancey again briefly summarized Sarah’s verbal exchange with Stone. . Yancey to Perry, July , September , , Perry Letters, ADAH. . Yancey to Ben Yancey, March , ; Samuel Beman to Ben Yancey, March , , BCY Papers; Brewer, Alabama, ; Journal of the Assembly of the State of New-York, , . . Brewer, Alabama, ; Yancey to Ben Yancey, October , ; Yancey to Caroline Beman, April  [ or ], BCY Papers. Sam Beman married Caroline W. Whitten of Ohio, October , , in Carolia, Minnesota Territory. He won election to the Minnesota senate in . Jackson and Jackson, Marriage Notices from Washington County, New York, . . Sam Beman to Ben Yancey, June , , BCY Papers.



n

Notes to Pages –

. Montgomery County, Alabama, Tax Book, , pages –, in ADAH; Montgomery County, Alabama, Probate Judge, Misc. Probate Records –, vol. , –. . See Yancey to Perry, May , July , December  and , ; May , September , , in Benjamin F. Perry Letters, ADAH. . DuBose, Yancey, :; Montgomery Directory for – (Montgomery: Advertiser Book & Job Printing Office, ), . Other members of the Bible Society included Reverends Mitchell and Petrie, close friends of Yancey. The latter was Yancey’s minister at the First Presbyterian Church. . DuBose, Yancey, :; Yancey to Caroline Yancey, March , , BCY Papers; Gale, Cultural Encyclopedia of the s, –; Owen, History of Alabama, :. See Kane, Arctic Explorations. For important studies of fathers and sons, see especially Stowe, Intimacy and Power in the Old South, –; and Glover, ‘‘Education in Southern Masculinity,’’ –. . Owen, History of Alabama, :; Index, Oakwood Cemetery Records, Montgomery County, :; Foscue, Place Names in Alabama, . ‘‘Coosa’’ is probably from the Choctaw ‘‘Kusha,’’ meaning cane or canebrake. Yancey to Ben Perry, September , , B. F. Perry Papers, ADAH. . Yancey to Ben Yancey, May  and December , ; March , , November , , BCY Papers BCY Papers. . Yancey to Ben Perry, September , , Benjamin F. Perry Papers, ADAH; Owen, History of Alabama, :, ; Rozier, Granite Farm Letters, –. . Yancey to Ben Yancey, November , , BCY Papers. . Yancey to Ben Yancey, December , , BCY Papers; Owen, History of Alabama, :. On parental indulgence, see Censer, North Carolina Planters and Their Children, –, esp. –. . Yancey to Ben Yancey, December , , BCY Papers; Owen, History of Alabama, :–. . Most of the South suffered from a lack of public schools. See Cooper and Terrill, American South, –. . Yancey to Ben Yancey, August , , March , May [n.d.], December , , [April ], BCY Papers; Owen, History of Alabama, . . Yancey to Ben Yancey, July , , ; Yancey to Caroline Beman, August , , BCY Papers. . Yancey to Ben Yancey, August , September , ; the former letter accompanies a newspaper clipping advertising the Daphne Hotel. . Yancey to Caroline Beman, January , ; Yancey to Ben Yancey, May [n.d.] ; March , , BCY Papers; McMillan, ‘‘Antebellum Southern Fathers and the Health Care of Children,’’ –. . Index, Oakwood Cemetery Records, :. . Yancey to Caroline Beman, January , ; Caroline Beman to Ben Yancey, January , n.d.; February , ; Yancey to Ben Yancey, December , , BCY Papers. On Mrs. Beman’s wanderings also see Yancey to Ben Yancey, March , October , ; undated [April ]; July , ; January , [], all in BCY Papers. . Caroline Beman to Ben Yancey, May , , BCY Papers.

Notes to Pages –

n



. Ibid. While supporting the institution of slavery and white racism, Sarah Yancey, like many other mistresses, made personal exceptions in confiding in select slaves, even forming a ‘‘minimal kinship.’’ See Lebsock, Free Women of Petersburg, –, and Fox-Genovese, Within the Plantation Household, –,  (quote), –, . . Yancey to Ben Yancey, May [n.d.] , BCY Papers. In fact, periodically Yancey continued sending money to his mother. See, for example, Yancey to Ben Yancey, July , , BCY Papers. On the death of Caroline Beman, see Peterson, Divine Discontent, .

Chapter  . Potter, Impending Crisis, –. Unless otherwise noted, the following discussion is from Potter, –. . Potter, Impending Crisis, –. . Levine, Half Slave and Half Free, –; Potter, Impending Crisis,  (quote). . Levine, Half Slave, Half Free, ; Potter, Impending Crisis, –. . Levine, Half Slave, Half Free, –. . Ibid., . . Potter, Impending Crisis, –. . Thornton, Politics and Power, . . Potter, Impending Crisis, –; Montgomery Advertiser & State Gazette, April , . . Fleming, ‘‘Buford Expedition to Kansas,’’ –; Brewer, Alabama, –; Montgomery Advertiser, February , , , . Buford returned to Alabama in  and won election to the state’s constitutional convention. . Cooper, Politics of Slavery, –; Anbinder, Nativism & Slavery, esp. –. . Thornton, Politics and Power, –; Anbinder, Nativism & Slavery, –. . Peterson, Divine Discontent, –; Beman, Claims of Our Country on Young Men, – , . . Beman, Second Report of the Society for the Promotion of Collegiate and Theological Education at the West, –; New York Observer, May , , cited from Peterson, Divine Discontent, ,  (see latter, –). . See Walther, Fire-Eaters, , , –, –, . . Montgomery Advertiser & State Gazette, January , . . Ibid., February , March , ; Montgomery City Council Minutes, February through June , in ADAH. . Montgomery Advertiser & State Gazette, November ,  (Delta endorsement); April , ; May ,  (University of Alabama). . Yancey to Ben Yancey, April , , BCY Papers. . Ibid.; Cooper, Politics of Slavery, –; Thornton, Politics and Power, –. . William H. Northington to Yancey, June , , and Yancey to Northington, June , , in Montgomery Advertiser, July , , and Gainesville Independent, July , . . Montgomery Advertiser, July , . . Ibid. . Yancey to the editors of the Montgomery Journal, July , , in Montgomery Advertiser, July , .



n

Notes to Pages –

. Ibid. . Ibid.; italics in the original. . Montgomery Advertiser, September , . . Ibid., January , , . . Proceedings of the Democratic and Anti–Know Nothing Convention, –, in WLY Papers. . Ibid., –. . Yancey to the editors of the Montgomery Mail, in Montgomery Advertiser, January , . . William M. Samford to Yancey, January , , and Yancey to Samford, February , , in Huntsville Democrat, March , , and Montgomery Advertiser, February , . . Yancey to Samford, February , , in Huntsville Democrat. . Donald, Charles Sumner, –. . Montgomery Advertiser, June , . . Montgomery Advertiser, June , , ; Nevins, Ordeal of the Union, , –; May, Manifest Destiny’s Underworld. . Olmstead, Journey in the Seaboard Slave States. Olmstead would next publish Journey Through Texas () and Journey in the Back Country (). In , Olmstead had published a two-volume collection of these and other writings called Cotton Kingdom. Olmstead quoted from Beveridge, Papers of Frederick Law Olmstead, :. . Yancey, ‘‘Remarks on Olmstead’s Southern Tour’’ (), typescript, WLY Papers. . Ibid., –; Cooper, Liberty and Slavery, –. . Yancey, ‘‘Remarks on Olmstead’s Southern Tour,’’ . . Ibid., . . Ibid., . . Ibid. . Ibid., –. . Ibid., . . Ibid., . . See Walters, American Reformers; Yancey, ‘‘Remarks on Olmstead’s Southern Tour,’’ . . Yancey, ‘‘Remarks on Olmstead’s Southern Tour,’’ –. . Montgomery Advertiser, June , . . Ibid., July , . . Yancey to Ben Yancey, July , , BCY Papers. . Montgomery Advertiser, July , ; Brewer, Alabama, . . Yancey to Ben Yancey, July , , BCY Papers. . Montgomery Advertiser, July , , ; Yancey to Ben Yancey, July , , BCY Papers. Selma correspondent quoted July . . Yancey to Ben Yancey, July , , BCY Papers. . Yancey to Ben Yancey, July , , BCY Papers. See Hobson, Tell about the South; Grammar, Pastoral and Politics in the Old South; Rubin, Edge of the Swamp; Faust, Sacred Circle. . Yancey, ‘‘Gentlemen of the Philomathic Societies,’’ , , in WLY Papers. . Ibid., –. . Ibid., . . Ibid., .

Notes to Pages –

n



. Ibid., . . Ibid., . For women’s advances, see Bernhard and Fox-Genovese, Birth of American Feminism, –, –, , –, –. . Yancey, ‘‘Gentlemen of the Philomathic Societies,’’ –. . See McCurry, Masters of Small Worlds. . Yancey, ‘‘Gentlemen of the Philomathic Societies,’’ . . Ibid., . . Ibid., –. . Ibid., –; –. . Montgomery Advertiser & State Gazette, July , August , . . Ibid., July , . . Ibid., August , . . S. M. Meek to Yancey, August , ; Yancey to Meek, August , , both in Montgomery Advertiser, August , . Also see Advertiser, August , . . Montgomery Advertiser & State Gazette, August , . . Ibid. . Ibid. . Ibid. For a full account of the Crafts’ escape see Blackett, Running a Thousand Miles for Freedom. . Montgomery Advertiser, August , ; May, Southern Dream of a Caribbean Empire, – . Yancey referred to Daniel Drayton and Edward Sayres, pardoned under pressure from antislavery forces by Fillmore in  after their conviction for trying to liberate seventy-six fugitive slaves from Virginia. See Donald, Charles Sumner, –; Pierce, Memoir and Letters of Charles Sumner, :–. . Yancey to the editors of the Constitutionalist, August , , in Montgomery Advertiser, September , . . W. B. Figure to Ben Yancey, September , , BCY Papers; Montgomery Advertiser, September , . . Montgomery Advertiser, September , . . Yancey to Ben Yancey, September , , BCY Papers. . Montgomery Advertiser, October , . . Ibid., October , , November , . . Nichols, Disruption of American Democracy, . . Montgomery Advertiser, November , .

Chapter  . Yancey to Ben Yancey, December , , BCY Papers; Montgomery Advertiser, August , . . Yancey to Ben Yancey, December , , BCY Papers; Benjamin C. Yancey to Howell Cobb, December , , Howell Cobb Papers. On Cobb’s unionism in the early s, see Davis, Union That Shaped the Confederacy, –. . Cobb to his wife, December , , Cobb Papers; Ben Yancey to Cobb, December , , BCY Papers.



n

Notes to Pages –

. Cobb to Ben Yancey, December , , BCY Papers. In fact Cobb accepted Buchanan’s offer to be treasury secretary. . Yancey to Ben Yancey, December , , BCY Papers. . Yancey to Ben Yancey, January , []; Yancey to Caroline Beman, April , [] [both reel ], BCY Papers. . Yancey to Caroline Beman, April , [], BCY Papers. Most of the story of Ben Yancey’s appointment can be traced through William R. W. Cobb to Ben Yancey, April , ; Robert Toombs to Ben Yancey, February  and , ; and Buchanan’s appointment, June , , all in BCY Papers. . Yancey to Clement C. Clay, February , , C. C. Clay Letters, Perkins Library, Duke University. . Sam Beman to Ben Yancey, December , , BCY Papers; Governor Adams in Montgomery Advertiser, December , ; New Orleans Delta on fusion in the Montgomery Advertiser, July , . The Montgomery Advertiser also favored reopening the Atlantic slave trade; see February , August , . . For Walker, see Montgomery Advertiser, December , . . Montgomery Advertiser, February , . . See Fehrenbacher, Dred Scott Case; Allen, ‘‘Containing Slavery, Imposing Sovereignty’’; Stampp, America in , –. . Brewer, Alabama, ; Ellison, History and Bibliography of Alabama Newspapers, , . . William F. Samford to M. P. Blue, September , , Johnson J. Hooper Papers. . Owen, ‘‘William F. Samford,’’ –. . Henry Wise to William Samford, December , , [William F.] Samford— [Henry A.] Wise Papers; Samford to [Mathew P.] Blue, March , , Mathew P. Blue Papers; Simpson, Good Southerner, –. . Samford to Blue, July , , Mathew P. Blue Papers. Also see Samford to Blue, September , , Johnson J. Hooper Papers, and Samford to Blue, April , , Mathew P. Blue Papers. . Stampp, America in , –. . Ibid., –. . Montgomery Advertiser, July , ; Stampp, America in , ; Walther, Fire-Eaters, –, –, . . Speech at Chambers County, August , , box , folder , WLY Papers. . Wise to Samford, August , , Samford-Wise Papers. . May, Southern Dream of a Caribbean Empire, –. . Ibid., –; also see Stampp, America in , –. . May, Southern Dream of a Caribbean Empire, –. . Stampp, America in , –; Douglas quoted on . . Montgomery Advertiser, January , , . . Ibid., January , . . Ibid., February , . . Ibid. . Ibid. . Ibid.

Notes to Pages –

n



. Ibid. . Ross, ‘‘Group Remolds History,’’ in Washington Metropolitan Times, July , , C:–; Varon, We Mean to Be Counted, –; Everett, Mount Vernon Papers, . Edward Everett, best remembered for his peroration to Lincoln’s Gettysburg Address, grew concerned about his association with Yancey. He wrote to Robert C. Winthrop, who sat in Congress with Yancey, for more information. Winthrop recalled Yancey as ‘‘a dashing young fellow,’’ who spoke well and had ‘‘a reputation for the law.’’ Winthrop did not like Yancey’s attacks on Daniel Webster and John Quincy Adams, but ‘‘upon the whole, judged by the Young Southern Standard,’’ he was not so bad. Robert C. Winthrop to Edward Everett, September , , Edward Everett Papers. . Montgomery Advertiser, May , , , July , . . Ibid., January , . . Richmond Enquirer, February , , in Greensboro (Georgia) Gazette, March , ; William G. Guerrant to John R. Guerrant, February , , William Gibson Guerrant Papers; Lee, An Illustrated Guide to the Historic Sites of Confederate Richmond, . . Richmond Enquirer, in Greensboro Gazette, March , . . The following discussion is all drawn from ibid. . Marion (Alabama) Commonwealth, March , , in WLY Papers; Montgomery Advertiser, March , . See also Pamela Cunningham to Ben Yancey, March , , BCY Papers. . See Johnson, Men and the Vision of the Southern Commercial Conventions; Van Deusen, Ante-Bellum Southern Commercial Conventions; Wender, Southern Commercial Conventions; Peterson, ‘‘Speaking in the Southern Commercial Conventions,’’ in Braden, Oratory in the Old South. . In addition to the above, see McCardell, Idea of a Southern Nation, –; Walther, Fire-Eaters, –, , –, –, . . De Bow’s Review  (September ): –; Ben Yancey to Sarah Yancey (wife), August , , BCY Papers. . De Bow’s Review  ( June ): – (‘‘Africanizing the South’’); George Fitzhugh to De Bow, January , ; Yancey to De Bow, March , [], James D. B. De Bow Papers; Simpson, Good Southerner, –; Takaki, Pro-Slavery Crusade. . Yancey to Wigfall, April , , Wigfall Family Papers; Montgomery Mail, April , ; Montgomery Advertiser, May , ; De Bow’s Review  ( June ): ; Walther, FireEaters, , –, . . Montgomery Advertiser, March , May , ; Montgomery Mail, April , ; Richmond Whig quoted from Montgomery Mail, May , ; Scarborough, Diary of Edmund Ruffin, :– ; Peterson, ‘‘Speaking in the Southern Commercial Conventions,’’ . . Scarborough, Diary of Edmund Ruffin, :–. . The Montgomery Advertiser gave a nearly complete account of the assembly in its issue of May , ; within the text citations will appear simply in reference to the days of the meeting. . Cahaba Democrat, April , . . Newspaper clipping dated May , WLY Papers. See Daly, When Slavery Was Called Freedom. . See Barney, Secessionist Impulse, .



n

Notes to Pages –

. The Republican Party did eye these areas. See Foner, Free Labor, Free Soil, Free Men; Abbott, Republican Party and the South, –. . Scarborough, Diary of Edmund Ruffin, :. . Also see the upsurge of pro-secession editorials by De Bow in his Review after the convention, esp.  ( July ): ; (August ): ; and (August ): . . Scarborough, Diary of Edmund Ruffin, :–. . See, for example, the Greensborough Alabama Beacon, June , , and the Montgomery Advertiser, June , . . Yancey to Thomas J. Orme, May , , in DuBose, Yancey, :–. . Ibid., –, . . Scarborough, Diary of Edmund Ruffin, –. . Montgomery Advertiser, June , . . Scarborough, Diary of Edmund Ruffin, :. . Yancey to James S. Slaughter, June , , in DuBose, Yancey, :. . Ellison, Alabama Newspapers, , ; William F. Samford to M. P. Blue, September , , Johnson J. Hooper Papers; U.S. Census, , Fulton County, Georgia, . Married to a nineteen-year-old Georgian by  and father of a newborn son, Slaughter worked as editor of an Atlanta newspaper when, in August , he committed suicide. Montgomery Mail, August , , in Gandrud, comp., Alabama Records, :. . Charleston Mercury, July , ; Atlanta Intelligencer, in Richmond Enquirer, August , ; Huntsville Democrat, September , ; Montgomery Advertiser, July , . . Greeley and Cleveland, comps., Political Textbook for , ; Douglas in Congressional Globe, th Congress, st session, part , . . Cahaba Dallas Gazette, July , . . Ibid. . Ibid. . Both Yancey’s remarks at Benton from July  and Montgomery on July  appear in the Montgomery Advertiser, July , ; also see the Advertiser, July , , in WLY Papers. . See the Montgomery Advertiser, September , . . Yancey to Pryor, August , , in Montgomery Advertiser, September , . The remainder of the discussion comes from the same source. . See Walther, Fire-Eaters, and Barnwell, Love of Order. . Charleston Mercury, September , ; Richmond Enquirer, September , ; Montgomery Confederation, September ,  (in WLY Papers); Montgomery Advertiser, October ,  (reference to Nashville Union and American). . Richmond South, September , , WLY Papers. . Yancey to editors of the Richmond Enquirer, September , , in Montgomery Advertiser, October , . . Scarborough, Diary of Edmund Ruffin, :; Cahaba Dallas Gazette, July , . WyattBrown, in Southern Honor, , accepted uncritically Ruffin’s conclusion that Yancey was an alcoholic, but use and abuse of alcohol was common in a day that lacked non-alcoholic and non-narcotic pain relief. See Rorabough, Alcoholic Republic. . Yancey to Roger A. Pryor, August , , in Montgomery Advertiser, September , ; Yancey to Caroline Beman, August , , BCY Papers.

Notes to Pages –

n



. James Buchanan’s appointment of Benjamin C. Yancey, June , , by Secretary of State Cass, in BCY Papers; Yancey to Ben Yancey, November , , BCY Papers. . Yancey to Ben Yancey, November , , BCY Papers. . Ibid.

Chapter  . William F. Samford to Clement C. Clay, October , , Clement C. Clay Letters; Henry Wise to William F. Samford, November , , Samford-Wise Papers. . Montgomery Advertiser, October , . . Samford to Clay, October , , Clement C. Clay Letters. . Dallas Gazette, February , ; Yancey to J. S. Hamilton, March , , BCY Papers; Yancey to Caroline Beman, March , , Benjamin C. Yancey Letters, Duke University. . Yancey to Caroline Beman, March , , Benjamin C. Yancey Letters, Duke University. . Montgomery Advertiser, April , ; Yancey to the editors of the Montgomery Advertiser, June , , in WLY Papers. . De Bow’s Review  ( June ): –. . Ibid., ; De Bow’s Review  ( July ): , –. . Yancey to De Bow and De Bow to Yancey, June , , De Bow’s Review  (August ): –; Yancey to the editors of the Montgomery Advertiser, June , , typescript, WLY Papers. . James D. Meadows to William L. Yancey, June , , and Yancey to Meadows, June , , both in DuBose, Yancey, :–. . Yancey to Meadows, June , , ibid. Unless otherwise cited, the remaining discussion comes from this letter. . Walther, Fire-Eaters, –, –, –, –. . Yancey to Rev. William H. Mitchell, September , , WLY Papers; Charleston Mercury, July , . . Charleston Mercury, July , . . Ibid., July , October , . . Henry A. Wise to William F. Samford, July , , Samford-Wise Papers. . Huntsville Democrat, July , ; Samuel F. Rice to the editors of the Montgomery Confederation, July , , in WLY Papers, box , folder . . Yancey to William H. Mitchell, September , , WLY Papers. . Ibid.; Thornton, Politics and Power, –. . Thornton, Politics and Power, –, esp. n, for specific newspaper dates. See also the pro-Yancey editorial in the Huntsville Democrat, September , , and Edward C. Bullock to Clement C. Clay, December , , Clement C. Clay Letters. . Bullock to Clay, December , , Clement C. Clay Letters; Thornton, Politics and Power, –. . See Benjamin C. Yancey to Don Justo Jose de Urquiza, President of the Argentine Confederation, February , July , , BCY Papers. . Ben Yancey to Sarah Yancey, November , , Ben Yancey Letters, Duke Univer-



n

Notes to Pages –

sity; Brewer, Alabama, ; see also Sam Beman to Caroline Beman, May , , BCY Papers. . The best studies of Americans’ reactions are the essays in Finkelman, His Soul Goes Marching On. . DuBose, Yancey, :. . Bullock to Clay, December , , Clement C. Clay Letters. . Yancey, Speech . . . in the Democratic State Convention, –; DuBose, Yancey, :. . Yancey, Speech . . . in the Democratic State Convention, . . Ibid., . . DuBose, Yancey, :. . Ibid., –. . See Morrison, Slavery and the American West, –; Walther, Fire-Eaters, ; Potter, Impending Crisis, –. . Yancey to R. M. T. Hunter, February , , in Ambler, Correspondence of Robert M. T. Hunter, :–. . William Henry Trescott to William Porcher Miles, March , , William Porcher Miles Papers. . See Walther, Fire-Eaters, –; Channing, Crisis of Fear; Hesseltine, Three against Lincoln, –; De Bow’s Review  ( July ): . . Hesseltine, Three against Lincoln, ; Ben Yancey to John Witherspoon DuBose, October , , DuBose Papers; Rosen, Confederate Charleston, . . Hesseltine, Three against Lincoln, , . . Ibid., , ; Rosen, Confederate Charleston, . . Hesseltine, Three against Lincoln, ; also see –; Parrish, Richard Taylor, –. . Nevins, Emergence of Lincoln, :–. . Hesseltine, Three against Lincoln,  (party blows up), – (little eruption). . Nevins, Emergence of Lincoln, :; Hesseltine, Three against Lincoln, –. . Hesseltine, Three against Lincoln, –. . Ibid., . . Yancey, Speech . . . Delivered to the National Democratic Convention, . . Ibid., –. . Ibid., –. . Ibid., ; McCardell, Idea of a Southern Nation, –. . Yancey, Speech . . . Delivered at the National Democratic Convention, , . . Ibid., . . Ibid., –. . Ibid., , –. . Hesseltine, Three against Lincoln, . . Troy Whig, April , , ; Blockson, Underground Railroad, . . Taylor, Destruction and Reconstruction, . . Thornton, Politics and Power, – (quote); Parrish, Richard Taylor, –; Taylor, Destruction and Reconstruction, . . Charleston Mercury, April , ; Hesseltine, Three against Lincoln, ; Parrish, Richard Taylor, .

Notes to Pages –

n



. Hesseltine, Three against Lincoln, ; Parrish, Richard Taylor, –. . Hesseltine, Three against Lincoln, –; Charleston Mercury, May , . . DuBose, Yancey, :–. . Many years later, Ben Yancey claimed that W. A. Richardson, a Douglas delegate from Illinois, privately offered William Yancey a quid pro quo: if Yancey would bring the Alabama delegation back to the convention and support Douglas for president in , Douglas men would support Yancey for the White House in . No other evidence exists to corroborate this dubious claim. See Ben Yancey to John W. DuBose, October , , DuBose Papers. . Rosen, Confederate Charleston, . . Upwards of  attended the ‘‘Seceders’’ convention,  from slave states,  from free ones, but not everyone who signed in attended, and not everyone who attended registered. See Hesseltine, Three against Lincoln, –, –. . Ibid., . . Ibid., –. . Yancey to Clement C. Clay, May , , Clay Letters. . Ibid. . Congressional Globe, th Congress, st session, part  (May , ), . . R. B. Rhett Jr. to William Porcher Miles, May , , William Porcher Miles Papers. . Laurence Keitt to James Pettigrew, May , , Pettigrew Family Papers, North Carolina Office of Archives and History, Raleigh. . Hammond to William Gilmore Simms, May , , James H. Hammond Papers. . Scarborough, Diary of Edmund Ruffin, :. Also see Robert Toombs to Alexander Stephens, May  and , , in Phillips, Correspondence of Toombs, Stephens, and Cobb, – . . Potter, Impending Crisis, –; Nevins, Emergence of Lincoln, :. See also Crofts, Reluctant Confederates. . Yancey, Substance of the Speech . . . at Marion, Perry Co., – (quote from ), in WLY Papers; also see Montgomery Advertiser, May , ; Yancey to Ben Yancey, May , , BCY Papers. . Yancey, Substance of the Speech . . . at Marion, Perry Co., . . Ibid., –. . Ibid., –. . DuBose, Yancey, :; Hesseltine, Three against Lincoln, . . Benjamin F. Porter to Benjamin F. Perry, May , , Benjamin F. Perry Papers, SHC; Alfred Huger to William Porcher Miles, June , , Miles Papers, SHC; John Letcher to Robert M. T. Hunter, June , , in Ambler, Correspondence of Robert M. T. Hunter, . . DuBose, Yancey, –; Johannsen, ‘‘Stephen A. Douglas and the South,’’ ; Nevins, Emergence of Lincoln, :. Yancey would be dead by July , at age forty-eight, but Douglas passed away on June , , at age forty-seven. . Quote from Parish, Richard Taylor, ; also see DuBose, Yancey, :–; Hesseltine, Three against Lincoln, . . DuBose, Yancey, :–; Hesseltine, Three against Lincoln, . . DuBose, Yancey, :; Hesseltine, Three against Lincoln, .



n

Notes to Pages –

. Nevins, Emergence of Lincoln, :; Hesseltine, Three against Lincoln, –; Davis, Breckinridge, –, . . Hesseltine, Three against Lincoln, –. . Unless otherwise noted, the account of this speech comes from ‘‘Letter from Hon. Wm. L. Yancey,’’ Montgomery Advertiser, July , , in WLY Papers. This version differs slightly from the accounted written by DuBose, in Yancey, :–, and, I believe, is more accurate. . Prattsville Southern Statesman, July , , and Richmond Reporter, August , , both in WLY Papers. . New York Herald, July , . . ‘‘Letter from Hon. Wm. L. Yancey,’’ July , , in Montgomery Advertiser, July , , in WLY Papers. . DuBose, Yancey, :, –.

Chapter  . Yancey to Beverly Matthews, August , , typescript, WLY Papers. Other fire-eaters hoped for a Lincoln victory, believing that it would trigger secession. See Walther, FireEaters, , ; Charleston Mercury, September , . . Yancey, Issues Involved in the Presidential Contest,  (‘‘Fungus’’), –, in WLY Papers. . Ibid., –. . Nashville Patriot, August , ; Atlanta National American, August , , both in WLY Papers. . Huntsville Independent, in Montgomery Post, August , . . Gainesville Independent, in Montgomery Post, August , ; Davis, Breckinridge, –. . Yancey to Ben Yancey, August , , BCY Papers. . Montgomery Advertiser, August , , , in WLY Papers; William Yancey to [brother] Ben Yancey, August , , BCY Papers. William Yancey’s card and Seibels’s reply both appeared in J. J. Hooper’s Montgomery Mail, August , . . Montgomery Advertiser, August , , , in WLY Papers; William Yancey to [brother] Ben Yancey, August , , BCY Papers. . Yancey to Ben Yancey, August , , BCY Papers; Brewer, Alabama, ; Evans, Confederate Military History, :; DuBose, Yancey, :–. . DuBose, Yancey, :–. . Ibid., :–. Parson’s Brownlow’s recollections of the encounter bore a striking resemblance to DuBose’s account. See Brownlow, Sketches of the Rise, Progress, and Decline of Secession, –. . Potter, Impending Crisis, , –. . DuBose, Yancey, :–, emphasis in original. Yancey prepared few speeches ahead of time and usually moved to his next destination before he could offer the press his own written account, so speeches varied based on the note-taking and editorial work of each newspaper. . Yancey’s speech in Richmond Enquirer, September , .

Notes to Pages –

n



. Ibid. Several newspapers assumed Yancey referred to Augusta, Georgia, but the editor of the Washington States and Union correctly explained, ‘‘Now every school boy knows the allusion here made is to an incident in the life of Ge. Washington, and that the ‘mountains of Augusta’ here mentioned are the mountains of Augusta county, Virginia.’’ WLY Papers, ADAH, box , folder . . Richmond Enquirer, September , . . This part only from Washington States and Union, October , , in WLY Papers. . Richmond Enquirer, September , . . Outline of speech, September , in Robert Morton Hughes Collection. . DuBose, Yancey, :. . Wilmington Gazette, September , . . Ibid. For charges by Douglas that Lincoln desired racial equality, see Zarefsky, Lincoln, Douglas, and Slavery. . Wilmington Gazette, September , . . DuBose, Yancey, :–; Potter, Impending Crisis, . . Basler et al., Collected Works of Abraham Lincoln, :–, esp. . . DuBose, Yancey, :–. . New York Herald, October , . . Nashville Patriot, October , , from Knoxville Whig. . Washington National Intelligencer, October , , , . . Washington States and Mail, October , , WLY Papers. . Huntsville Independent in Montgomery Weekly Post, August , . . ‘‘Hon. William L. Yancey,’’ in Harper’s Weekly, –. . John Y. Lind to R. R. Hemphill, November , , Hemphill Family Papers. . Doubleday, Reminiscences of Forts Sumter and Moultrie, . . Burleigh, Republican Campaign Songster, . . Hammond to Isaac W. Hayne, September , , James H. Hammond Papers. . Montgomery Post, September , , in Johnson J. Hooper Papers. . Laurence Keitt to William Porcher Miles, October , , Miles Papers; N. B. Tucker to William W. Crump, September , , Tucker family Papers, University of Virginia. . Ruffin to Yancey, October , , in Scarborough, Diary of Edmund Ruffin, :, –. . DuBose, Yancey, :–, . . Ibid., –. . Ibid., . . Boston Post, October , , reprinted in Montgomery Advertiser, October , , in WLY Papers. . See Wyatt-Brown, ‘‘Mask of Obedience,’’ –, and Greenberg, Honor and Slavery. . Boston Post, October , in Montgomery Advertiser, October , , in WLY Papers. . DuBose, Yancey, :–. . Ibid., :. . Yancey, Speech . . . Wieting Hall, Syracuse, N.Y., –. . Ibid., –.



n

Notes to Pages –

. Ibid., –. . Ibid., . . Cincinnati Daily Gazette, October , , in WLY Papers. . DuBose, Yancey, :. . Lexington (Kentucky) Statesman, October , ; Cincinnati Daily Courier, October , , both in WLY Papers; DuBose, Yancey, :–. . DuBose, Yancey, :; Louisville Courier, October , , in WLY Papers; Memphis Daily Appeal, October , . . Louisville Courier, October , , in WLY Papers. . DuBose, Yancey, :–; Nashville Weekly Union, October , , WLY Papers; Memphis Daily Appeal, October , . . Bell parade cited in Montgomery Advertiser, November , . . New Orleans Delta, October , , , , ; DuBose, Yancey, :–. . New Orleans Delta, October , , ; DuBose, Yancey, :–. . New Orleans Delta, October , , , . . New Orleans Delta, October , , WLY Papers. . Ibid. . DuBose, Yancey, :–. . Rainwater, Civilian’s Recollections, ; Thomas J. Durant to James Maxwell, October , , Thomas J. Durant Papers, New-York Historical Society. . Mobile Daily Courier, November , , in WLY Papers; DuBose, Yancey, :. . DuBose, Yancey, :–. . Montgomery Weekly Post, November , ; Yancey to John W. Forney, November , , Ferdinand J. Deer Autograph Collection. . DuBose, Yancey, :–; Rogers, Confederate Home Front, .

Chapter  . Smith, History and Debates of . . . Alabama, –. William R. Smith, a cooperationist, successfully lobbied the state assembly to appoint him to report deliberations even before Governor Moore called for a secession convention. His account is mostly reliable, but it is telling that he gave himself thirteen index entries and Yancey but fifteen. See Fry, ‘‘Profit, Reputation, and Clio,’’ –. . Address of the People of South Carolina. See also Davis, Rhett, –. . Montgomery Advertiser, November , ; Smith, History and Debates of . . . Alabama, – ; Brewer, Alabama, . . Nevins, Emergence of Lincoln, :–, –. . Potter, Impending Crisis, . . Bowman, Civil War Almanac, –; Smith, History and Debates of . . . Alabama, –. . Rogers, Confederate Home Front, . . Yancey to David William Baine, December , , WLY Papers. . Smith, History and Debates of . . . Alabama, –. See Snay, Gospel of Disunion. . Selma Alabama State Sentinel, November , in WLY Papers; Axford, Journals of Thomas

Notes to Pages –

n



Hubbard Hobbs, –; Smith, History and Debates of . . . Alabama, –. Thornton, Politics and Power, –, provides the best analysis of divisions between cooperationists and immediate secessionists. . Smith, History and Debates of . . . Alabama, –. . Ibid., –. . Ibid., –. . Ibid., –. . Ibid., –. . Ibid., –. On each state’s commissioners to each other, see Dew, Apostles of Disunion. . Cooper, Walker, Winston, and Moore had been delegates to the Nashville Convention in . Jennings, Nashville Convention, ; Dew, Apostles of Disunion; Davis, ‘‘Government of Our Own,’’ . . Smith, History and Debates of . . . Alabama, –. . Ibid., –. . Ibid., ; Bowman, Civil War Almanac, ; Crist and Dix, Papers of Jefferson Davis, :n. . Smith, History and Debates of . . . Alabama, –. . John W. Inzer Recollections, n.d., ADAH. . Smith, History and Debates of . . . Alabama, –, Morgan quote on . . Ibid., –. . Ibid., . . Ibid., –, Jemison quoted on . . William H. Mitchell to his wife, January , , Alabama Historical Quarterly  (): –. . Smith, History and Debates of . . . Alabama, –. . Ibid., –. . Ibid., –. . Ibid., –. . Ibid., –. . Ibid., –. . Mitchell to his wife, January , , Alabama Historical Quarterly, –; Smith, History and Debates of . . . Alabama, –. The ribbon is with the WLY Papers. . Mitchell letter, January , ; James Dowdell to William F. Samford, January , , George Petrie Collection; E. Lewis to Mr. Kerr, January , , E. Lewis Letter; John Edmund Moore to Captain Jack & My friend Luke, January , , John Edmund Moore Papers; Rogers, Confederate Home Front, . . Smith, History and Debates of . . . Alabama, –. . Ibid., –. . Ibid., –. . Ibid., –. . Ibid., ; White, Robert Barnwell Rhett, –, on reconstruction. . Smith, History and Debates of . . . Alabama, – (Yancey), –. For fears about the slave trade from the Upper South, see Crofts, Reluctant Confederates, , , . . Smith, History and Debates of . . . Alabama, –.



n

Notes to Pages –

. Ibid., –. . J. Bragg to Genl. [Colin J. McRae], January , , Colin J. McRae Papers; Axford, Journals of Thomas Hubbard Hobbs, . On the ritualized denial of southern politicians’s desires for public office, see Greenberg, Masters and Statesmen, –; Thornton, Politics and Power, –. . Smith, History and Debates of . . . Alabama, –; Thornton, Politics and Power, –. . Smith, History and Debates of . . . Alabama, , – (quote on ). . Ibid., . . Ibid., –. . Ibid., –. . Ibid., –. . Ibid., –; quotes on –. . Ibid.,  (Yancey quoted), –. . Yancey to Ben Yancey, January , , BCY. . Yancey to Ben Yancey, February , no year (box , folder ), BCY. . Quoted from Rogers, Confederate Home Front, –. . Quoted from Davis, ‘‘Government of Our Own,’’ –. . Davis, Fire-Eater Remembers, ix–xiv, –; Davis, ‘‘Government of Our Own,’’ –. . A. B. Roman to D. F. Kenner, February , , Jean Ursin LaVillebeuvre and Family Papers, Louisiana and Lower Mississippi Valley Collection, LSU Libraries, Louisiana State University; Crist and Dix, Papers of Jefferson Davis, :n; F. M. Gilmer Memoir, May , in Rowland, Jefferson Davis, Constitutionalist, :–; Davis, ‘‘Government of Our Own,’’ ; Montgomery Weekly Mail, February , ; Montgomery Daily Post, February , . . New Orleans Delta, February , . . Davis, ‘‘Government of Our Own,’’ –. . R. Toombs, Barnwell Rhett, and Jackson Morton to Jefferson Davis, January , , in Crist and Dix, Papers of Jefferson Davis, :. . All quoted from Davis, ‘‘Government of Our Own,’’ –. . See Gilmer Memoir, Rowland, Jefferson Davis, :. . Davis, ‘‘Government of Our Own,’’ . . Ibid., , –. . Ibid., . . Ibid., –; Crist and Dix, Papers of Jefferson Davis, :. . Montgomery Weekly Post, February , .

Chapter  . Howell Cobb to Marion Cobb, February , , in Phillips, Correspondence of Toombs, Stephens, and Cobb, ; Davis, Union That Shaped the Confederacy, –; Atlanta Daily Intelligencer, February  ; Charleston Courier, February , ; New Orleans Picayune, February , ; Crist and Dix, Papers of Jefferson Davis, :–n. . Cooper, Jefferson Davis, , including quote. . Quote from Ford, Origins of Southern Radicalism, . . A sample works that have argued Yancey was shoved aside by moderates in the Confed-

Notes to Pages –

n



eracy include Davis, ‘‘Government of Our Own,’’ –; Thomas, Confederate Nation, , ; and Thomas, Confederacy as a Revolutionary Experience, ; Roland, American Iliad, ; McPherson, Ordeal by Fire, ; Eaton, History of the Southern Confederacy, , ; Hattaway and Beringer, Jefferson Davis. Although no documents exist from either Davis or Yancey about their meeting, too many contemporary accounts corroborate this. See Crist and Dix, Papers of Jefferson Davis, :–n; Cooper, Jefferson Davis, –; Davis, Union That Shaped the Confederacy, ; and Davis, ‘‘Government of Our Own,’’ –, ; Rable, Confederate Republic, –. Long after the war, Robert Barnwell Rhett Jr. also recollected that Davis had selected Walker at Yancey’s recommendation. See R. Barnwell Rhett, ‘‘Confederate Government at Montgomery,’’ , in Johnson, Battles and Leaders of the Civil War, :. . Cooper, Jefferson Davis, –; Davis, ‘‘Government of Our Own,’’ , –; Jones, Union in Peril, ; McPherson, Battle Cry of Freedom, –; Owsley, King Cotton Diplomacy; May, Union, the Confederacy, and the Atlantic Rim, . . Woodward, Mary Chesnut’s Civil War Diary, , . . Cooper, Jefferson Davis, –. . Davis, ‘‘Government of Our Own,’’ –, . . Davis, Union That Shaped the Confederacy, –. . Quoted from ibid., . . John Slidell to Howell Cobb, February , , Cobb Papers. . Crist and Dix, Papers of Jefferson Davis, :n; Robert Bunch to Lord John Russell, March , , General Correspondence, Foreign Office, America, United States of, FO/ , PRO. . Crist and Dix, Papers of Jefferson Davis, :–n. . William Henry Trescott to Howell Cobb, February , , Cobb Papers. For an overall assessment of foreign policy, see Owsley, King Cotton Diplomacy; Callahan, Diplomatic History of the Southern Confederacy; Blumenthal, ‘‘Confederate Diplomacy,’’ –. For concise overviews of initial diplomatic objectives and appointments, see Davis, ‘‘Government of Our Own,’’ –. . Davis, Fire-Eater Remembers, – (quote on ). . Davis, ‘‘Government of Our Own,’’ ; Davis, Union That Shaped the Confederacy, – ; Davis, Rhett, esp. –. . Peterson, Divine Discontent, –; Quarles, ‘‘Ministers without Portfolio,’’ –; Blackett, Building an Antislavery Wall; Blackett, Divided Hearts; Jones, Union in Peril, . . Notes, March , , interview with Ben Yancey, DuBose Papers. . Davis, ’’Government of Our Own,’’ ; Davis, Union That Shaped the Confederacy, . . Crist and Dix., Papers of Jefferson Davis, :n (quote); American Historical Review  (): –. . Robert Bunch to Lord John Russell, December , , in American Historical Review  (): –; Bunch to Russell, January , and February , , Russell Papers, FO/, PRO. . Bunch to Russell, March , , Russell Papers, FO/, PRO. . Ibid. . See McPherson, Battle Cry of Freedom, –; Ferris, Desperate Diplomacy; May, Union,



n

Notes to Pages –

Confederacy, and Atlantic Rim, esp. –; Crook, North, South, and the Powers; Jones, Union in Peril, esp. –. . Jones, Union in Peril, . . William Mure to Russell, December , ; Molyneaux to Russell, November  and December , , FO/, Russell Papers, PRO; Ferris, Desperate Diplomacy, . . Atlanta Daily Intelligencer, February , ; Washington correspondent of the Richmond Examiner, March , , in the New York Herald, April , ; Memphis Daily Appeal, February , ; Charleston Courier, February , ; New Orleans Picayune, February , . . Yancey and Toombs had much in common. After Toombs drew a gun on a fellow student while attending Georgia College, authorities expelled him just months before graduation, in a curious parallel to Yancey’s experience at Williams College a few years later. Toombs later graduated from Union College in Schenectady, New York, in , only a few miles from Troy, where Yancey spent much of his adolescence. See Davis, Union That Shaped the Confederacy, –. . New York Tribune, March , ; Robert Toombs to Yancey, Mann, and Rost, March , , ORN, ser. , vol. , –; Crist and Dix, Papers of Jefferson Davis, :n. . Toombs to Yancey, Mann, and Rost, March , , ORN, ser. , vol. , –. Toombs also told the commissioners to take along essential books and documents, especially Wheaton’s International Law. Each commissioner had an allowance of , a month, but had to front their own costs for newspapers, pamphlets, gazettes, stationery, and postage, and keep strict accounts for reimbursement. See Montgomery Advertiser, March , . . Hoole, ‘‘William L. Yancey’s European Diary,’’ –; Charleston Courier, April , . . Joseph T. Crawford to John Russell, April , , FO/, Russell Papers, PRO; Hoole, ‘‘Yancey’s European Diary,’’ . . See, for example, Charleston Courier, April , . . Hoole, ‘‘Yancey’s European Diary,’’ –; Smith, America’s Diplomats and Consuls, , . Yancey listed his expenses from New Orleans to Havana as , from Havana to London—with first-class accommodations—at £, or . The Westminster Palace Hotel is now the Abbey House, at – Victoria Street; Weinreb, London Encyclopedia. . A. Dudley Mann to Jefferson Davis, April , , in Crist and Dix, Papers of Jefferson Davis, :–; Punch, March , , in Sideman and Friedman, Europe Looks at the Civil War, –; Ferris, Desperate Diplomacy, , . . Bowman, Civil War Almanac, –; Davis, ‘‘Government of Our Own,’’ –; Robert Toombs to Yancey, Rost, and Mann, April , , ORN, ser. , vol. , –. . See Mann to Davis, April , , in Crist and Dix, Papers of Jefferson Davis, :; John Russell to Richard Lyons, January , February , April , , //, Russell Papers, PRO. . Lyons to Russell, January , , Russell Papers, FO //, PRO. For a general discussion of Seward’s impact on the British, see Ferris, Desperate Diplomacy. . Lyons to Russell, March , , //, Russell Papers, PRO. . Lyons to Russell, March , , //, ibid.

Notes to Pages –

n



. Lyons to Russell, April , , //, ibid.; Case and Spencer, United States and France, . . Russell to Lyons, February , March , April , , //, Russell Papers, PRO. . Yancey and Mann to Toombs, May , , in ORN, ser. , vol. , –. . Hoole, ‘‘Yancey’s European Diary,’’ ; Yancey, Rost, and Mann, to Toombs, June , , ORN, ser. , vol. , –. . Russell to Lyons, May , , Gladstone Papers, British Library, Add. Mss. ,, no. ; May, Union, Confederacy, and Atlantic Rim, . . Yancey and Mann to Toombs, May , , ORN, ser. , vol. , –. . William M. Brown to Yancey, Rost, and Mann, April , , OR, ser. , vol. , ; Caleb Huse to Officer in Charge of Ordinance Bureau, C.S.A., May , , OR, ser. , vol. , ; Crist and Dix, Papers of Jefferson Davis, :n; May, Union, Confederacy, and Atlantic Rim, . . Two letters from Russell to Lyons, May , , nos.  and , Gladstone Papers, British Library. The Declaration of Paris of  was an agreement between England, France, Austria, Prussia, Russia, Sardinia, and Turkey. . Case and Spencer, United States and France, –; La patrie quoted from May, Union, Confederacy, and Atlantic Rim, . . Case and Spencer, United States and France, –, –. The emperor would shortly send over , troops to invade the Republic of Mexico to overthrow the liberal regime of Benito Juárez and to install Ferdinand Maximillian, younger brother of Francis Joseph of Austria, as emperor. Mexico continues to celebrate their victory over the French on Cinco de Mayo. . Ibid., –; Yancey and Mann to Toombs, May , , ORN, ser. , vol. , –. . Yancey to Toombs, June , , WLY Papers. . Hoole, ‘‘Yancey’s European Diary,’’ –; Blackett, Divided Hearts, , ; Crist and Dix, Papers of Jefferson Davis, :. . Jones, Union in Peril, ; quote from Washington correspondent of the Richmond Examiner, March , , in the New York Herald, April , ; Hoole, ‘‘Yancey’s European Diary,’’ ; Current et al., Encyclopedia of the Confederacy, :. . Hoole, ‘‘Yancey’s European Diary,’’ ; Blackett, Divided Hearts, . . Jones, Union in Peril, . . Ibid., –; Ferris, Desperate Diplomacy, – (including Adams quote); Russell to Lyons, May , , Russell Papers, //, PRO. . Quoted in Crook, North, South, and Powers, . . Quoted from Donald, Charles Sumner and the Rights of Man, . . Ferris, Desperate Diplomacy, –, ; Lyons to Russell, May , , Russell Papers, //, PRO; Jones, Union in Peril, –. . Ferris, Desperate Diplomacy, –. . Hoole, ‘‘Yancey’s European Diary,’’ –. Yancey misspelled ‘‘Du Bellet’’ variously as ‘‘Du Beholt’’ and ‘‘Du Belley.’’ . Case and Spencer, United States and France, –; Crook, North, South, and Powers, . . Dayton to Seward, ca. June , , quoted in Case and Spencer, United States and France, ; Hoole, ‘‘Yancey’s European Diary,’’ .



n

Notes to Pages –

. Yancey to Ben Yancey, July , , BCY Papers. . Ibid. . Yancey to Samuel Reid, July , , and Yancey to R. Chapman, July , , typescripts, both in WLY Papers; Thornton, Politics and Power, n, on Reid. . Yancey to Reid, July , , WLY Papers. . Ibid.; Yancey to R. Chapman, July , , both in WLY Papers. . John L. Harrell to Jefferson Davis, November , , in Crist and Dix, Papers of Jefferson Davis, :; Yancey and Mann to Toombs, July , , ORN, ser. , vol. , –. Union intelligence operations will be discussed below. . Yancey and Mann to Toombs, July , , ORN, ser. , vol. , –. . Yancey to Toombs, August ,  (typescript); Yancey to Reid, July , , both in WLY Papers. . Yancey, Rost, and Mann to Toombs, August , , ORN, ser. , vol. , –. . Ibid.; Harrell to Davis, November , , Crist and Dix, Papers of Jefferson Davis, , . . Yancey, Rost, and Mann to Russell, August , , ORN, ser. , vol. , –. . Ibid., . . Ibid., . . Ibid., –. . Ibid., –. . Ibid., . . Russell to Yancey, Mann, and Rost, August , , ORN, ser. , vol. , –. . Yancey to , August , , London, BCY Papers. . Post Script, ‘‘My dear Ben,’’ August , ; Yancey to Ben Yancey, July , , both in BCY Papers. . Cotton shortages caused by the Civil War drove Britain to replace their supplies by tapping into their colonies in India, Turkey, Egypt, China, and Morocco. India alone supplied  percent of the British supply of cotton from  to . See Jones, Union in Peril, , , –n. By July , , Spain, Prussia, and the Netherlands followed the lead of Britain and France both by recognizing the Confederacy as a belligerent and by declaring their neutrality. Case and Spencer, United States and France, . . On April , , the Confederate Congress passed a bill setting postage rates at  cents for all letters under  miles,  cents for – miles, and  cents for all others within North America. SHSP  (): –. . John A. Kennedy to William Henry Seward, May , ; F. W. Seward to John A. Kennedy, November , ; F. W. Seward to Montgomery Blair, December , , OR, ser. , vol. , , , ; Alan Pinkerton to Lincoln, July , , Allan Pinkerton Collection, Chicago Historical Society (typescript copy from the Robert Todd Lincoln Papers, Library of Congress). Also see Freeman H. Morse to William H. Seward from London, July , , OR, ser. , vol. , . . Hunter to Yancey, September , , ORN, ser. , vol. , . . Jones, Union in Peril, . . Fry, Dixie Looks Abroad, –, argues that Yancey and the other Confederate commissioners proved ineffective.

Notes to Pages –

n



Chapter  . W. L. Yancey to A. Alison, Esq., August , . A typescript copy of Yancey’s letter to Alison in the WLY Papers varies from the version published by Yancey’s admirer, John Witherspoon DuBose, in Yancey, :–. All references here are to the typescript in the WLY Papers unless otherwise noted. . W. L. Yancey to A. Alison, Esq., August , , WLY Papers. . Ibid. On white southerners’ belief in their cultural superiority over the North see Genovese, Slaveholders’ Dilemma; Greenberg, Masters and Statesmen, esp. –; McCardell, Idea of a Southern Nation, esp. –; Rable, Confederate Republic, esp. –. . Yancey to Alison, August , , Yancey Papers, WLY Papers. . Crist and Dix, Papers of Jefferson Davis, :n; :–; –; Hoole, Diplomacy of the Confederate Cabinet. . Edwin De Leon Memoir in New York Citizen, January , , courtesy of William C. Davis. . Current et al., Encyclopedia of the Confederacy, :– and :; Ferris, Desperate Diplomacy, –. . Seward to Adams, November , , quoted from Ferris, Desperate Diplomacy, . . Diary, August , , Edward Clifford Anderson Papers. . Davis, Union That Shaped the Confederacy, –; Current et al., Encyclopedia of the Confederacy, :; Hunter to Yancey, Rost, and Mann, August , , ORN, ser. , vol. , – ; White and Baylen, ‘‘Pierre A. Rost’s Mission to Europe,’’ –. For Davis’s commissions for Mason and Slidell and the renewal of commissions for Yancey, Rost, and Mann, see ORN ser. , vol. , –, August , . . Hunter to Yancey, September , , ORN, ser. , vol. , ; Yancey to Hunter, November , , WLY Papers. . Portions of Yancey’s letter to the Montgomery Advertiser were reprinted in the Richmond Dispatch, October , , p. , and Atlanta Intelligencer, November , , p. . . Rable, Confederate Republic, esp. –. . W. C. Bibb to the Montgomery Daily Post, July , ; ‘‘Justice’’ in Montgomery Daily Post, July , , both typescripts in WLY Papers; Thornton, Politics and Power, –. . In May , the Confederate Congress supported Davis’s strategy by voting to withhold supplies of cotton. Jones, Union in Peril, , . . Russell to Lyons, August , , ; Palmerston to Russell, October , , Russell Papers, PRO. . Lyons to Russell, October , , Russell Papers, PRO. . Yancey and Rost to Hunter, October , , ORN, ser. , vol. , –. Yancey’s arrival date in France is unclear, but he wrote a letter to the editor of the Times of London from Paris on October , printed in the Times on October , , p. , and in the Washington National Intelligencer, October , . . [Yancey and Rost] to Hunter, October , , ORN, ser. , vol. , –. . Samuel G. Reid to Davis, October , , Crist and Dix, Papers of Jefferson Davis, :; Yancey to Hunter, November , , ORN, ser. , vol. , –.



n

Notes to Pages –

. Yancey to the editor of the Times of London, October , , in the Times, October , , p. , and in the Washington National Intelligencer, October , , p. . . Times (London), November , , p. , reporting from the London Globe; Huse, Supplies for the Confederate Army, ; Meryl G. Beamont, Archivist, Fishmongers’ Company, to the author, May , , in author’s possession. . Huse, Supplies for the Confederate Army, ; Times (London), November , , p. , reprinted from the London Globe, for Yancey’s remarks. . Blackett, Divided Hearts, . Yancey’s remarks were received more favorably in the Confederacy. See the Richmond Examiner reprinting the London Globe’s coverage of Yancey, November , . . New York Herald, November , , quoted from Peterson, Divine Discontent, . . Joshua P. Coman to George Houston, November , , George Houston Papers; Thornton, Politics and Power, –. As with all Confederate states, drawing lots determined tenure for senators in the first congress. In Yancey’s absence, Clay drew a two-year term; Yancey had a full six-year term. CSA Congressional Journal, :, –, ; Crist and Dix, Papers of Jefferson Davis, :. . For the Trent Affair see Ferris, Trent Affair; Jenkins, Britain and the War for the Union; Jones, Union in Peril, chap. ; Warren, Fountain of Discontent; Current et al., Encyclopedia of the Confederacy, :–; and ORN, ser. , vol. , –. . Hunter to Yancey, Rost, and Mann, November , , ORN, ser. , vol. , –; Yancey to Hunter, November , , ibid., ; Robert B. Pegram to Yancey, November , , Pegram Family Papers. . Yancey, Rost, and Mann to Hunter, December , , ORN, ser. , vol. , –; Protest of the Confederate Commissioners to the British Authorities regarding the capture of Messrs. Mason and Slidell, November , , ORN, ser. , vol. , –; Christman, American Journalism of Marx & Engels, . . Jones, Union in Peril, ; Dix and Crist, Papers of Jefferson Davis, :n. . Letter of Russell in Walker Fearn to Hunter, December , , ORN, ser. , vol. , . . De Leon Memoir, in New York Citizen, January , . . Yancey to Davis, December , , in Crist and Dix, Papers of Jefferson Davis, :–. . Ibid.; Yancey to Hunter, December , , ORN, ser. , vol. , –. . Yancey to Davis, December , , in Crist and Dix, Papers of Jefferson Davis, :–. . Blackett, ‘‘Pressure from Without: African Americans, British Public Opinion, and Civil War Diplomacy,’’ in May, Union, Confederacy, and Atlantic Rim, , – (quote on ); McPherson, ‘‘ ‘The Whole Family of Man,’’’ ibid., ; Current et al., Encyclopedia of the Confederacy, :; Jones, Union in Peril, –; Hotze to Hunter, February , , in ORN, ser. , vol. , –. . Charles Francis Adams to Seward, February , , in OR, ser. , vol. , ; Christman, American Journalism of Marx & Engels, –. George Reynolds published the Reynolds Newspaper. See Blackett, Divided Hearts, , –, , . . Yancey to Hunter, ‘‘about January , ,’’ in WLY Papers; Yancey to Davis, January , , in Dix, Crist, and Williams, Papers of Jefferson Davis, :; Mann to Davis, February , , ORN, ser. , vol. , –.

Notes to Pages –

n



. Mason to Hunter, February , , OR, ser. , vol. , –; Hotze to Hunter, February , , Henry Hotze Papers; DuBose, Yancey, :; William H. Seward to William Millwood, March , , OR, ser. , vol. , ; Charles J. Helm to Don Francisco Serrano, March , ; Serrano to Helm, March , , in OR, ser. , vol. , ; Yancey to Clement C. Clay, March , , Clay Letters. . Yancey to C. C. Clay, March , , Clay Letters; Yancey to Judah P. Benjamin, March , , ORN, ser. , vol. , . . McPherson, Battle Cry of Freedom, –; Davis, Jefferson Davis, –; Cooper, Jefferson Davis, –. . Yancey to Clay, March , ; Mansfield Lovell to Judah P. Benjamin, March , , ORN, ser. , vol. , –. . M. J. Solomons Scrapbook, , Duke University; Foote, Bench and Bar of the South and Southwest, –. . Yancey to Davis, March , , in Crist, Dix, and Williams, Papers of Jefferson Davis, :. This is the earliest date placing Yancey in Montgomery. The Montgomery Advertiser, March , , stated erroneously that Yancey arrived on March . . Napier, ‘‘Montgomery during the Civil War,’’ ; Brewer, Alabama, , , , , . . Brewer, Alabama, , , , , , , . . Owen, History of Alabama, :, –; Brewer, Alabama, –. . Owen, History of Alabama, :–, . . Napier, ‘‘Montgomery during the Civil War,’’ –, –; Rogers, Confederate Home Front, –; Confederate Veteran  (): ; Current et al., Encyclopedia of the Confederacy, :. . Selma Daily Reporter, April , ; Montgomery Advertiser, March ,  (horses), and April ,  (Pryor): Atlanta Intelligencer, December ,  (two other guns were called Braxton Bragg, after an Alabama general, and Jeff Davis); Amann, Personnel of the Civil War, :. . Montgomery Advertiser, April , ; Current et al., Encyclopedia of the Confederacy, – ; Robert W. Barnwell to Emily Barnwell, March , , Barnwell Family Papers, courtesy of Mike Reynolds. . SHSP  (): ; City Intelligencer; or, Stranger’s Guide by V. & C., reprinted in Illustrated Guide to Richmond, the Confederate Capital,  (board), – (committees). . Barnwell to Emily Barnwell, March , , Barnwell Family Papers; Yancey to Secretary of War [George W. Randolph], April , , , Letters Received by Confederate Secretary of War, M, roll , National Archives; George W. Randolph to Yancey, April , , OR, ser. , vol. , ; Proceedings  (): –; Yancey to Davis, April , , in Crist, Dix, and Williams, Papers of Jefferson Davis, :. . Foote, Bench and Bar, ; Yancey to Secretary of War [George W. Randolph], April , , Letters Received by Confederate Secretary of War, M, roll , National Archives; Yancey to Davis, April  and , , and Davis to Yancey, April , , in Crist, Dix, and Williams, Papers of Jefferson Davis, :, , . . Current et al., Encyclopedia of the Confederacy, –. . Proceedings  (): .



n

Notes to Pages –

. McPherson, Battle Cry of Freedom, –; Current et al., Encyclopedia of the Confederacy, –. . In June , Ben Yancey raised a cavalry company, the Fulton Dragoons, to join the Georgia Legion commanded by Thomas R. R. Cobb. Cobb took a seat in the Confederate Congress in November, promoted Yancey to major, and left him in command of his legion. By the spring of , Ben Yancey and the Georgia Legion served under General John B. Magruder. See Confederate Veteran  (): ; Owen, History of Alabama, . . Proceedings  ():  (quote), ; Judah P. Benjamin, Diary, April , , in John T. Pickett Papers, National Archives. . See Faust, Creation of Confederate Nationalism, ; Daly, When Slavery Was Called Freedom. . SHSP  ():  (quotes); Current et al., Encyclopedia of the Confederacy, :–; Walther, Fire-Eaters, –, , , , . . McPherson, Battle Cry of Freedom, –. . Both quotations from Rable, Confederate Republic, , . . John Gill Shorter to Yancey, Clay, and Chilton, April , , OR, ser. , vol. , pt. , . . Nuermberger, Clays of Alabama, ; Rable, Confederate Republic, . . Current et al., Encyclopedia of the Confederacy, –; Nuermberger, Clays of Alabama, ; Rable, Confederate Republic, . Among those exempted were Confederate and state government officials, factory workers, miners, telegraph and railroad employees, ministers, teachers of twenty or more students, and medical personnel. . Current et al., Encyclopedia of the Confederacy, :–; SHSP  (): . On ‘‘WestPointism,’’ see Rable, Confederate Republic, ; Davis, Union That Shaped the Confederacy, , –, –, , . . Yancey to [ Juliet Opie Hopkins], April , , Administrative Files, –, Alabama Hospitals in Richmond, SG , Folder , Scrapbook, , ADAH. Yancey addressed this letter from Montgomery, Alabama, but on this date he was definitely in Richmond. Rozier, Granite Farm Letters, xxii, ; Foote, Bench and Bar, . . Bailey, ‘‘Dissatisfaction in the Alabama Hill Country,’’ –; McMillan, Disintegration of a Confederate State, –; Owsley, ‘‘Defeatism in the Confederacy,’’ –; Freehling, South Versus the South. . Yancey to Davis, May , , in Crist, Dix, and Williams, Papers of Jefferson Davis, :–. . Hammond to William Gilmore Simms, May , , James Henry Hammond Papers.

Chapter  . Cooper, Jefferson Davis, ; Current et al., Encyclopedia of the Confederacy, –. . Yancey to J. R. Powell, May , , M. J. Solomons Scrapbook, –. . Ibid. In January , Union troop strength stood at approximately , men, compared to , for the Confederacy. Current et al., Encyclopedia of the Confederacy, . . Yancey to [Arthur Francis] Hopkins, May , , Alabama Hospitals in Richmond; Alabama Administrative Files –, SG , folder , ADAH. . For Rhett, see Charleston Mercury, February , ; Rable, Confederate Republic, 

Notes to Pages –

n



(Wigfall quote); Walther, Fire-Eaters, ,  (Keitt quote), , ; Davis, Union That Shaped the Confederacy, –, , , . Also see Cooper, Jefferson Davis, American, – ; McPherson, Battle Cry of Freedom, . . Hattaway and Beringer, Jefferson Davis, , refer to Yancey as ‘‘extremely’’ anti-Davis. . Yancey to Samford, June , , in Montgomery Advertiser, July , . . Current et al., Encyclopedia of the Confederacy, . . For the Yancey brothers, see Atlanta Intelligencer, June , ; for Caro Yancey, Atlanta Intelligencer, September , , November , , , ; Owen, History of Alabama, :, ; on women during the war, see Rable, Civil Wars; Faust, Mothers of Invention. . Rable, Confederate Republic, ; Braxton Bragg to Jefferson Davis, July , ; Davis to Bragg, August , , in Crist, Dix, and Williams, Papers of Jefferson Davis, :– and notes, – and notes. . Davis to Bragg, August , , in Crist, Dix, and Williams, Papers of Jefferson Davis, :– and notes. After this exchange with Bragg, Davis very likely made no reference to Yancey again, and would not even cross paths with him until January . Also see Cooper, Jefferson Davis; Davis, Jefferson Davis. . Yancey, Speeches . . . in the Senate of the Confederate States, –. . Ibid., . Rable, in Confederate Republic, argues convincingly that Confederate leaders thought they could liberate themselves altogether from party influences. . SHSP, :, –; –; Yancey, Speeches . . . in the Senate of the Confederate States, –. . Quotes from McPherson, Battle Cry of Freedom, –; Davis to Congress, August , , in Crist, Dix, and Williams, Papers of Jefferson Davis, :; Current et al., Encyclopedia of the Confederacy, :. . McPherson, Battle Cry of Freedom, –. . Current et al., Encyclopedia of the Confederacy, :–; Rable, Civil Wars, –; Drew Gilpin Faust, Mothers of Invention, , –. . Yancey, Speeches of William L. Yancey . . . Senator, –, quotes from , , ; SHSP, –. . McPherson, Battle Cry of Freedom, –; Rable, Confederate Republic, –; Cooper, Jefferson Davis, –; Current et al., Encyclopedia of the Confederacy, :–. . Yancey, Speeches . . . in the Senate of the Confederate States, . . Ibid., –. . Ibid., –. . Ibid., –. . Nuermberger, Clays of Alabama, –, ; SHSP, :. . Yancey, Speeches of William L. Yancey . . . Senator, –. . Ibid., –; Thomas, Confederate Nation, –. . Yancey, Speeches of William L. Yancey . . . Senator, . . Ibid., . On Lincoln’s expansion of power, see Current, Lincoln Nobody Knows, – ; William E. Gienapp, Abraham Lincoln and Civil War America, , –, ––. . In Yancey, Speeches of William L. Yancey . . . Senator, . . Ibid., , –. . Ibid., , . . SHSP, :.



n

Notes to Pages –

. Ibid., :–, , , –. . Richmond Whig, September , ; Montgomery Advertiser, September ,  (including reference to Richmond Examiner), both in WLY Papers. . Nevins, War for the Union, , ; SHSP, :–. On Wigfall’s blood lust, see Walther, Fire-Eaters, –. . SHSP, :, –, ; Crist, Dix, and Williams, Papers of Jefferson Davis, :. . Current et al., Encyclopedia of the Confederacy, :–, . . Clay and Yancey to Davis, April , , in Crist, Dix, and Williams, Papers of Jefferson Davis, :. . Davis’s endorsement and answer, ibid. . Ibid. . Ibid., :–; Yancey, Speeches of William L. Yancey . . . Senator, –; Nuermberger, Clays of Alabama, . . See SHSP, :–, , , –. . SHSP, :,  (quote). . SHSP, :, –. . Yancey to C. W. Jones, James Abercrombie, and J. W. Crary, October , , WLY Papers. . SHSP, :; Yancey, Speeches . . . in the Senate of the Confederate States, –, quote on . . DuBose, Yancey, :–; Montgomery Advertiser, December , . . Crist, Dix, and Williams, Papers of Jefferson Davis, :– and notes, :– and notes; SHSP, :. . Slidell’s daughter would soon be engaged to Erlanger, who had close relations to Emperor Napoleon. See Current et al., Encyclopedia of the Confederacy, :; Nuermberger, Clays of Alabama, –. . See, for example, Pierre Rost to Yancey, April , , WLY Papers; Caleb Huse to Yancey, July , , in DuBose, Yancey, :–; Edward Clifford Anderson Diary, September , , Edward Clifford Anderson Papers; Yancey to Jefferson Davis, April , , in Crist, Dix, and Williams, Papers of Jefferson Davis, :. . Notes, January , , box , folder , WLY Papers; Nuermberger, Clays of Alabama, –. . See Saunders, John Archibald Campbell. . Yancey to [?], January , , William P. Palmer Collection; H. G. Humphries to Yancey, January , , , , and Thomas J. Butler to Yancey, January , , (all typescripts), all in WLY Papers. . SHSP, :–, –. . Hamilton, ‘‘State Courts and the Confederate Constitution,’’ –; Current et al., Encyclopedia of the Confederacy, :–; Nuermberger, Clays of Alabama, –; Thomas, Confederate Nation, –. . SHSP, :–. . Ibid., :–. . Ibid., :–. Yancey’s entire speech appeared in the Montgomery Daily Advertiser, February , , and March , .

Notes to Pages –

n



. ‘‘Protest of W. L. Yancey, A Senator from Alabama,’’ n.d., in DuBose, Yancey, :. . Ibid., :. . Ibid., :–. . Hill, Senator Benjamin H. Hill, –; Coulter, ‘‘Alexander Stephens Challenges Benjamin H. Hill to a Duel,’’ –; Montgomery Advertiser, October , ; ‘‘Yancey and Hill,’’ in Richmond Dispatch, March , , reprinted in SHSP  (): –. . Reminiscences of Thomas H. Watts, , folder , DuBose Papers. . ‘‘Yancey and Hill,’’ in Richmond Dispatch, March , , reprinted in SHSP  (): –. . James H. Nash to Yancey, February , , WLY Papers. Various versions of Yancey’s outline for his attack on Hill are in ibid., Box , folders  and . . Rable, Confederate Republic, –. . SHSP, :–. . SHSP, :, , –, , , –, –, . . Yancey’s remarks in the Senate on March , , typescript, in WLY Papers; Current et al., Encyclopedia of the Confederacy, –; Rable, Confederate Republic, . . SHSP, :–, , , ; Yancey remarks of March , , typescript, in WLY Papers. . SHSP, :–; Current et al., Encyclopedia of the Confederacy, :. . Various versions of Yancey’s remarks are in Box , folders  and , WLY Papers. . Partridge, comp., Dictionary of Slang. I am indebted to Professor Bertram Wyatt-Brown for bringing this to my attention. . SHSP :–, , –, –; vol. . . Current et al., Encyclopedia of the Confederacy, :, :; quotations from Grandison D. Royston to Davis, January  ; Robert W. Loghery to Jefferson Davis, February , ; Holmes to Davis, February , , all in Crist, Dix, and Williams, Papers of Jefferson Davis, :, , , respectively. Also see Arkansas Citizens to Davis, February , ; Felix Batson to Davis, March , ; Augustus Garland, March , , all in Crist, Dix, and Williams, Papers of Jefferson Davis, :, , . . Davis to Holmes, January , , in Crist, Dix, and Williams, Papers of Jefferson Davis, :–; Cooper, Jefferson Davis, –. . SHSP, :. . Yancey to Davis, April , , in Crist, Dix, and Williams, Papers of Jefferson Davis, :; on Hill and Davis see Davis, Jefferson Davis, ; Cooper, Jefferson Davis, . . Yancey to Secretary of War [Seddon], April , , , Letters Received by Confederate Secretary of War, M, roll , NA. . Yancey to C. C. Clay, April ,  (typescript), Clay Letters. . Ibid. . Yancey to C. C. Clay, May , , (typescript), Clay Letters; Yancey to Davis, May , , in Crist, Dix, and Williams, Papers of Jefferson Davis, :; Yancey to C. C. Clay, May , , (typescript), Clay Letters. . Clay to Yancey, May , , in DuBose, Yancey, –; Yancey to Clay, April , May , , (typescripts), Clay Letters; Nuermberger, Clays of Alabama, –. On the friendship between Davis and Clay, see Cooper, Jefferson Davis, , –.



n

Notes to Pages –

. Clay to Yancey, May , , in DuBose, Yancey, –; Yancey to Clay, May ,  (typescript), Clay Letters. . Davis to Yancey, May , , in Crist, Dix, and Williams, Papers of Jefferson Davis, :. . Yancey to Davis, June , , ibid., :. . Davis to Yancey, June , , in DuBose, Yancey, –. . Yancey to Davis, June , , WLY Papers. . Clay to Yancey, June , , in DuBose, Yancey, . . SHSP, :; Rodgers, Confederate Home Front, –; Yancey to Ben Yancey [son], July , , , WLY Papers; Current et al., Encyclopedia of the Confederacy, :. . Yancey to C. C. Clay, July , , (typescript), Clay Letters; Yancey to Ben Yancey, July , , WLY Papers. . Clay to Yancey, July , , in DuBose, Yancey, . . Yancey to Ben, July , , ibid.

Legacy . News clipping, July , , WLY Papers; Rogers, Confederate Home Front, ; DuBose, Yancey, :. . Montgomery County Probate Judge, Miscellaneous Probate Records –, vol. , –, February , , ADAH. . Montgomery Advertiser, August , , including Atlanta Intelligencer; Richmond Dispatch, August , ; Richmond Examiner, July , ; Richmond Sentinel, August , ; Richmond Whig, July , ; Richmond Dispatch, August , , reprinted in the New York Times, August , . I am indebted to Kenneth Williams for finding most of the obituaries cited here and below. . Charleston Mercury, July , . . Philadelphia Inquirer, August , , . . New York Herald, August , , . . Harper’s Weekly, August , , p. ; August , , p. . . Peterson, Divine Discontent, –. . SHSP :–, –; Obituary Address of Malcolm C. Graham, , WLY Papers; C. C. Clay to Wigfall, August , , Wigfall Family Papers. . Jefferson Davis to Mrs. W. L. Yancey, December , , Jefferson Davis Papers, Tulane University. . Confederate Veteran  (March ): . See worldwide web for ‘‘Yancey Family Genealogical Database,’’ administered by Dennis J. Yancey, Miami, Florida, . . Unless otherwise noted, biographical information on Yancey’s children is derived from Owen, History of Alabama, :–, and ‘‘Yancey Family Database.’’ See also Brewer, Alabama, –. . Dalton H. Yancey to [uncle] Ben Yancey, February , , ; Dalton Yancey to Mamie Lou [Mary Lou, his uncle’s daughter], October , , all in BCY Papers. . Confederate Veteran  (): .

Notes to Pages –

n



. Thornton, Politics and Power, . . Rogers, Confederate Home Front, –. . Napier, ‘‘Montgomery during the Civil War,’’ –. . Dalton H. Yancey to [uncle] Ben Yancey, February , , BCY Papers. . See, for example, Ben Yancey to William F. Samford, September , ; Samford to Ben Yancey, October ,  (quote), November , December , , ; John W. A. Samford to Goodloe Harper Yancey, February , , all in BCY Papers. . Faulkner State Community College, , accessed February , . . Alabama Men’s Hall of Fame, , accessed April , . . John Witherspoon DuBose to Ben Yancey, December  [], BCY Papers.



n

Notes to Pages –

BIBLIO GRAPHY

Manuscripts Alabama Department of Archives and History, Montgomery Administrative Files, –, Alabama Hospitals in Richmond, SG  Mathew P. Blue Papers John Witherspoon DuBose Papers Benjamin Fitzpatrick Papers (Governors’ Papers) Johnson J. Hooper Papers John W. Inzer Recollections William R. King Papers Colin J. McRae Papers Benjamin F. Perry Letters Henry Churchill Semple Papers William Lowndes Yancey Papers Auburn University Libraries. Ralph Brown Draughon Library, Department of Special Collections & University Archives George Petrie Collection Samford-Wise Papers British Library, London, England Gladstone Papers Center for American History, University of Texas, Austin Dixon Hall Lewis Papers Chicago Historical Society Allan Pinkerton Collection Hargett Rare Book & Manuscript Library, University of Georgia Libraries Howell Cobb Papers Historical Society of Pennsylvania, Philadelphia Ferdinand J. Deer Autograph Collection Howard-Tilton Library, Tulane University, New Orleans Jefferson Davis Papers Huntington Library, San Marino, California Robert Alonzo Brock Correspondence Eldridge Collection

Library of Congress James H. Hammond Papers Henry Hotze Papers Wigfall Family Papers Louisiana and Lower Mississippi Valley Collection, LSU Libraries, Louisiana State University Jean Ursin LaVillebeuvre Family Papers Manuscript and Rare Books Department, Earl Gregg Swem Library, College of William and Mary Robert Morton Hughes Collection Maupin-Washington Papers Massachusetts Historical Society Edward Everett Papers Misc. Manuscripts (Robert Winthrop) National Archives Letters Received by Confederate Secretary of War, M, roll  John T. Pickett Papers The New-York Historical Society miscellaneous manuscripts (William L. Yancey) Thomas J. Durant Papers North Carolina Office of Archives and History, Raleigh Pettigrew Family Papers Public Record Office, Kew, England General Correspondence, Foreign Office, America, United States of John Russell Papers Rare Book, Manuscript, and Special Collections Library, Duke University Clement C. Clay Letters James D. B. De Bow Papers Hemphill Family Papers George S. Houston Papers Joseph W. Lesesne Papers John M. McCalla Papers John Edmund Moore Papers M. J. Solomons Scrapbook Abraham Watkins Venable Scrapbook Benjamin C. Yancey Letters William L. Yancey Papers South Carolina Historical Society, Charleston Barnwell Family Papers Sam Houston Memorial Library, Huntsville, Texas Dixon Hall Lewis Material Southern Historical Collection, University of North Carolina, Chapel Hill Edward Clifford Anderson Papers John Bragg Papers Clingman-Puryear Papers



n

Bibliography

Benjamin Fitzpatrick Papers Joseph Lesesne Papers William Porcher Miles Papers Orr-Patterson Papers Benjamin F. Perry Papers Robert Barnwell Rhett Papers Benjamin Cudworth Yancey Papers University of Virginia, Alderman Library Tucker Family Papers Virginia Historical Society, Richmond William Gibson Guerrant Papers Pegram Family Papers Williamsiana Collection, Williams College Philological Society: Records, – Records of the Faculty of Williams College from September [–]

Letters in Author’s Possession Frederick M. Beatty to author, September , . Meryl G. Beamont, Archivist, Fishmongers’ Company of London, to author, May , .

Federal, Confederate, and State Documents United States of America United States Census Alabama, Dallas County, . Alabama, Cherokee County, . Alabama, Coosa County, Schedule , Slaves, . Alabama, Montgomery County, . Alabama, Morengo County, Schedule , Slaves, . Georgia, Fulton County, . Office of Naval Records Library. Naval Documents Related to the Quasi-War between the United States and France.  vols. Washington, D.C.: Government Printing Office, –. U.S. Congress. Congressional Directory of the Second Session of the Twenty-eighth Congress of the United States of America. Washington, D.C.: Harris and Hart, . . Congressional Globe. th–th Congress. Washington, D.C., –. U.S. Naval War Records Office. Official Records of the Union and Confederate Navies in the War of the Rebellion.  vols. Washington, D.C.: Government Printing Office, –. U.S. War Department. War of the Rebellion: A Compilation of the Official Records of the Union and Confederate Armies.  vols. in . Washington, D.C.: Government Printing Office, –.

Confederate States of America Journal of the Congress of the Confederate States of America, –.  vols. Washington, D.C.: Government Printing Office, –.

Bibliography

n



Proceedings of the Confederate Congress. Southern Historical Society Papers, vols. – (– ).

Alabama Alabama Reports, –. Journal of the House of Representatives of the General Assembly of Alabama. Tuscaloosa, . Journal of the Senate of the General Assembly of the State of Alabama. Tuscaloosa: John M’Cormick, State Printer, , . Journal of the Southern Rights Convention Held in the City of Montgomery, February , , and the Address of the Committee. Montgomery: Book & Job Office of the Daily Atlas, . Montgomery City Council Minutes, . Montgomery County, Alabama, Probate Judge, Misc. Probate Records –. Montgomery County, Alabama, Tax Book, , , , . Smith, William Rusell, ed. The History and Debates of the Convention of the People of Alabama, Begun and Held in the City of Montgomery, on the Seventh bay of January, ; in Which is Preserved the Speeches of the Secret Sessions, and Many Valuable State Papers. . Reprint. Spartanburg, S.C.: The Reprint Company, Publishers, .

New York Journal of the Assembly of the State of New-York at their Seventy-Sixth Session. Albany: Charles Van Benthuysen, Printer to the Legislature, .

South Carolina [Rhett, Robert Barnwell]. The Address of the People of South Carolina, Assembled in Convention, to the People of the Slaveholding States of the United States. Charleston, .

Newspapers and Periodicals Alabama Journal (Montgomery) Alabama State Gazette Atlanta Daily Intelligencer Atlanta National American Atlanta Southern Confederacy Birmingham Age-Herald Boston Atlas Cahaba Dallas Gazette (Ala.) Cahaba (Southern) Democrat (Ala.) Charleston Courier Charleston Mercury Cincinnati Daily Courier Confederate Veteran Dallas Gazette (Ala.) De Bow’s Review Eufaula Democrat (Ala.)



n

Bibliography

Gainesville Independent (Ala.) Greensboro Gazette (Ga.) Greensborough Beacon (Ala.) Greenville Mountaineer (S.C.) Hayneville Chronicle (Ala.) Huntsville Democrat (Ala.) Kentucky Statesman (Lexington) Knoxville Whig Louisville Courier Marion Baptist (Ala.) Memphis Daily Appeal Mobile Register and Journal Montgomery Advertiser Montgomery Confederation Montgomery Mail Montgomery Post Mt. Zion Hancock Advertiser (Ga.) Nashville Patriot Nashville True Whig New Orleans Delta New York Citizen New York Herald New York Tribune New Orleans Picayune Philadelphia Aurora Philadelphia Inquirer Pittsfield Sun (Maine) Richmond Dispatch Richmond Enquirer Richmond Examiner Richmond Sentinel Richmond South Richmond Whig Selma Daily Reporter (Ala.) Selma Free Press (Ala.) Southern Crisis (Wetumpka, Ala.) Southern Historical Society Papers Talledega Watchtower (Ala.) Times (London) Troy Whig (N.Y.) Washington National Intelligencer Washington States and Mail Washington States and Union Washington Union

Bibliography

n



Wetumpka Argus (Ala.) Wetumpka State Guard Williams College Adelphi (Ma.) Wilmington Gazette

Books, Pamphlets, and Broadsides Abbott, Richard H. The Republican Party and the South, –: The First Southern Strategy. Chapel Hill: University of North Carolina Press, . Abzug, Robert. Passionate Liberator: Theodore Dwight Weld and the Dilemma of Reform. New York: Oxford University Press, . Adams, Charles Francis, ed. Memoirs of John Quincy Adams, Comprising portions of his Diary from –.  vols. J. B. Lippincott & Co., –. Alabama Historical Quarterly  (): . Allmendinger, David F. Jr. Paupers and Scholars: The Transformation of Student Life in NineteenthCentury New England. New York: St. Martin’s Press, . Alvarez, Eugene. Travel on Southern Antebellum Railroads, –. University: University of Alabama Press, . Amann, William F., ed. Personnel of the Civil War.  vols. New York: T. Yoseloff, . Ambler, Charles Henry, ed. Correspondence of Robert M. T. Hunter –. Annual Report of the American Historical Association for the year ; Washington, D.C.: Government Printing Office, . Anbinder, Tyler. Nativism & Slavery: The Northern Know Nothings & the Politics of the s. New York: Oxford University Press, . Axford, Faye Acton, ed. The Journals of Thomas Hubbard Hobbs. University: University of Alabama Press, . Ayers, Edward L. Vengeance and Justice: Crime and Punishment in the th-Century South. New York: Oxford University Press, . Bain, Robert, Joseph M. Flora, and Louis D. Rubin Jr., eds. Southern Writers: A Biographical Dictionary. Baton Rouge: Louisiana State University Press, . Baldwin, Joseph G. The Flush Times of Alabama and Mississippi: A Series of Sketches . Reprint. Baton Rouge: Louisiana State University Press, . Banner, James M. Jr. To the Hartford Convention: The Federalists and the Origins of Party Politics in Massachusetts, –. New York: Alfred A. Knopf, . Barkun, Michael. Crucible of the Millennium. Syracuse: Syracuse University Press, . Barnes, Gilbert, and Dwight L. Dumond, eds. Letters of Theodore Weld, Angelina Grimké Weld and Sarah Grimké.  vols. New York: D. Appelton-Century, . Barney, William L. The Road to Secession: A New Perspective on the Old South. New York: Praeger, . . The Secessionist Impulse: Alabama and Mississippi in . Princeton: Princeton University Press, . Barnwell, John. Love of Order: South Carolina’s First Secession Crisis. Chapel Hill: University of North Carolina Press, .



n

Bibliography

Basch, Norma. In the Eyes of the Law: Women, Marriage, and Property in Nineteenth-Century New York. Ithaca, N.Y.: Cornell University Press, . Basler, Roy P., et al., eds. The Collected Works of Abraham Lincoln.  vols. New Brunswick, N.J.: Rutgers University Press, . Bassett, John S., ed. Correspondence of Andrew Jackson.  vols. Washington, D.C.: Carnegie Institution, . Bauer, K. Jack. Zachary Taylor: Soldier, Planter, Statesman of the Old Southwest. Baton Rouge: Louisiana State University Press, . Beman, Nathan. The Claims of Our Country on Young Men. Troy, N.Y.: N. Tuttle, . . Second Report of the Society for the Promotion of Collegiate and Theological Education at the West. New York: J. F. Trow, . Bernhard, Virginia, and Elizabeth Fox-Genovese, eds. The Birth of American Feminism: The Seneca Falls Convention of . St. James, N.Y.: Brandywine Press, . Besson, J. A. B. History of Eufaula, Alabama, the Bluff City of the Chattahoochee. . Reprint. Spartanburg, S.C.: The Reprint Company, Publishers, . Beveridge, Charles E., ed. Papers of Frederick Law Olmstead.  vols. Baltimore: Johns Hopkins University Press, . Blackett, Richard M. Building an Antislavery Wall: Black Americans in the Atlantic Abolitionist Movement, –. Baton Rouge: Louisiana State University Press, . . Divided Hearts: Britain and the American Civil War. Baton Rouge: Louisiana State University Press, . , ed. Running a Thousand Miles for Freedom: The Escape of William and Ellen Craft from Slavery. Baton Rouge: Louisiana State University Press, . Bleser, Carol, ed. Secret and Sacred: The Diaries of James Henry Hammond, a Southern Slaveholder. New York: Oxford University Press, . , ed. Tokens of Affection: The Letters of a Planter’s Daughter in the Old South. Athens: University of Georgia Press, . Blockson, Charles L. The Underground Railroad. New York: Hippocrene Books, . Blue, Mathew P. City Directory and History of Montgomery, Alabama. Montgomery: T. C. Bingham & Co., Printers and Binders, . Bolt, Christine. The Women’s Movements in the United States and Britain from the s to the s. Amherst: University of Massachusetts Press, . Boucher, Chauncey Samuel. The Nullification Controversy in South Carolina. Chicago: University of Chicago Press, . Boucher, Chauncey S., and Robert P. Brooks, eds. Correspondence Addressed to John C. Calhoun –. Annual Report of the American Historical Association for the Year . Washington, D.C.: Government Printing Office, . Bowman, John S., ed. The Civil War Almanac. New York: Gallery Books, . Braden, Waldo W. The Oral Tradition in the South. Baton Rouge: Louisiana State University Press, . , ed. Oratory in the Old South. Baton Rouge: Louisiana State University Press, . Brantley, William H. Three Capitals: A Book about the First Three Capitals of Alabama, St. Stephens, Huntsville & Cahawba. University: University of Alabama Press, .

Bibliography

n



Breen, T. H. Puritans and Adventurers: Change and Persistence in Early America. New York: Oxford University Press, . Brewer, George E. History of Coosa County, Alabama. . Reprint. Easley, S.C.: Southern Historical Press, . Brewer, Willis. Alabama: Her History, Resources, War Record and Public Men, from  to . . Reprint. Spartanburg, S.C.: The Reprint Company, Publishers, . [Brockway, Josephus]. Brief Account of the Origins and Progress of the Divisions in the First Presbyterian Church in the City of Troy: Containing also Strictures upon the New Doctrines Preached by the Rev. C. G. Finney and N. S. S. Beman, with a Summary Relation of the Trial of the Latter before the Troy Presbytery, By a Member of the late Church and Congregation. Troy: Tuttle and Richards, . . Delineation of the Characteristic Features of a Revival of Religion in Troy, in  and . Troy: Francis Adancourt, . Brown, William Garrott. The Lower South in American History. . Reprint. New York: Greenwood Press, Publishers, . Brownlow, W. G. Sketches of the Rise, Progress, and Decline of Secession. . Reprint, New York: DaCapo Press, . Brugger, Robert, ed. Our Selves/Our Past: Psychological Approaches to American History. Baltimore: Johns Hopkins University Press, . Burleigh, William H., ed. The Republican Campaign Songster for . New York: H. Dayton, Publisher, . Burton, Orville Vernon, and Robert C. McMath Jr., eds. Class, Conflict, and Consensus: Antebellum Southern Community Studies. Westport, Conn.: Greenwood Press, . Bushnell, Horace. Christian Nurture. . Reprint. New Haven: Yale University Press, . Callahan, James M. Diplomatic History of the Southern Confederacy. New York: Frederick Ungar, . Carpenter, Jesse. The South as a Conscious Minority: A Study in Political Thought. . Reprint. Gloucester, Mass.: Peter Smith, . Case, Lynn, and Warren F. Spencer. The United States and France: Civil War Diplomacy. Philadelphia: University of Pennsylvania Press, . Catalogue of the Officers, Graduates, and Non-Graduates of Williams College, –. Williamstown: Published by the College, . Cecil-Fronsman, Bill. Common Whites: Class and Culture in Antebellum North Carolina. Lexington: University of Kentucky Press, . Censer, Jane Turner. North Carolina Planters and Their Children. Baton Rouge: Louisiana State University Press, . Channing, Steven A. Crisis of Fear: Secession in South Carolina. New York: W. W. Norton, . Chilton, Claudius Lysias. Centenary Sketch of William P. Chilton. Montgomery: Paragon Press, . Christman, Henry M., ed. The American Journalism of Marx & Engels: A Selection from the New York Daily Tribune. New York: New American Library, . Clay, Virginia. A Belle of the Fifties: Memoirs of Mrs. Clay of Alabama, Covering Social and Political Life in Washington and the South, –. New York: Doubleday, Page & Co., .



n

Bibliography

Clinton, Catherine. The Other Civil War: American Women in the Nineteenth Century. New York: Hill & Wang, . Collins, Bruce. White Society in the Antebellum South. London: Longman, . Congressional Directory First Session Twenty-Ninth Congress. Washington, D.C.: J. and G. S. Gideon, Printers, . Congressional Quarterly. Guide to U.S. Elections. nd ed. Washington, D.C.: Congressional Quarterly, . Cooper, William J. Jr. Jefferson Davis, American. New York: Alfred A. Knopf, . . Liberty and Slavery: Southern Politics to . New York: Alfred A. Knopf, . . The South and the Politics of Slavery. Baton Rouge: Louisiana State University Press, . Cooper, William J. Jr., and Thomas E. Terrill. The American South: A History. rd ed. New York: McGraw-Hill, . Craven, Avery O. The Growth of Southern Nationalism, –. Baton Rouge: Louisiana State University Press, . Cremin, Lawrence A. American Education: The National Experience, –. New York: Harper & Row, . Crist, Lynda Lasswell, and Mary Dix, eds. The Papers of Jefferson Davis.  vols. to date. Baton Rouge: Louisiana State University Press, –. Crofts, Daniel. Reluctant Confederates: Upper South Unionists in the Secession Crisis. Chapel Hill: University of North Carolina Press, . Crook, David Paul. The North, The South, and the Powers, –. New York: John Wiley & Sons, . Current, Richard N. Daniel Webster and the Rise of National Conservatism. Boston: Little, Brown, . . The Lincoln Nobody Knows. New York: Hill & Wang, . Current, Richard N. et al., eds. Encyclopedia of the Confederacy.  vols. New York: Simon & Schuster, . Daly, John Patrick. When Slavery Was Called Freedom: Evangelicaism, Proslavery, and the Causes of the Civil War. Lexington: University of Kentucky Press, . Daniels, Christine, and Michael V. Kennedy, eds. Over the Threshold: Intimate Violence in Early America. New York: Routledge, . Davis, David Brion. Slave Power Conspiracy and the Paranoid Style. Baton Rouge: Louisiana State University Press, . Davis, William C., ed. A Fire-Eater Remembers: The Confederate Memoir of Robert Barnwell Rhett. Columbia: University of South Carolina Press, . . Breckinridge: Statesman, Soldier, Symbol. Baton Rouge: Louisiana State University Press, . . ‘‘A Government of Our Own’’: The Making of The Confederacy. New York: Free Press, . . Jefferson Davis: The Man and His Hour. New York: Harper Collins Publishers, . . Rhett: The Turbulent Life and Times of a Fire-Eater. Columbia: University of South Carolina Press, .

Bibliography

n



. The Union That Shaped the Confederacy: Robert Toombs and Alexander H. Stephens. Lawrence: University of Kansas Press, . DeConde, Alexander. The Quasi-War: The Politics and Diplomacy of the Undeclared War with France –. New York: Charles Scribner’s Sons, . Degler, Carl N. At Odds: Women and the Family in America from the Revolution to the Present. New York: Oxford University Press, . Denman, Clarence P. The Secession Movement in Alabama. Montgomery: Alabama State Department of Archives and History, . Dew, Charles B. Apostles of Disunion: Southern Secession Commissioners and the Causes of the Civil War. Charlottesville: University of Virginia Press, . Dickson, Bruce D. Violence and Culture in the Antebellum South. Austin: University of Texas Press, . Dictionary of American Biography.  vols. New York: Scribner, –. Donald, David Herbert. Charles Sumner and the Coming of the Civil War. New York: Alfred A. Knopf, . . Charles Sumner and the Rights of Man. New York: Knopf, . Doubleday, Abner. Reminiscences of Forts Sumter and Moultrie in –. New York: Harper & Brothers, . DuBose, Joel C. Notable Men of Alabama: Personal and Genealogical. . Reprint.  vols. Spartanburg, S.C.: The Reprint Company, Publishers, . DuBose, John Witherspoon. The Life and Times of William Lowndes Yancey: A History of Political Parties in the United States from  to ; Especially as to the Origin of the Confederate States. . Reprint.  vols. New York: Peter Smith, . Eaton, Clement. Freedom-of-Thought Struggle in the Old South. New York: Harper & Row, . . The Growth of Southern Civilization, –. New York: Harper & Brothers, . . A History of the Southern Confederacy. New York: Free Press, . . The Mind of the Old South. Baton Rouge: Louisiana State University Press, . Ellis, Richard E. The Union at Risk: Jacksonian Democracy, States’ Rights, and the Nullification Crisis. New York: Oxford University Press, . Ellison, Rhonda Coleman. History and Bibliography of Alabama Newspapers in the Nineteenth Century. University: University of Alabama Press, . Evans, Clement A., ed. Confederate Military History.  vols. Reprint. Wilmington, N.C.: Bradfoot Publishing Company, . Everett, Edward. The Mount Vernon Papers. New York: D. Appleton & Co., . Faust, Drew Gilpin. The Creation of Confederate Nationalism: Ideology and Identity in the Civil War South. Baton Rouge: Louisiana State University Press, . . The Ideology of Slavery: Proslavery Thought in the Antebellum South, –. Baton Rouge: Louisiana State University Press, . . James Henry Hammond and the Old South: A Design for Mastery. Baton Rouge: Louisiana State University Press, . . Mothers of Invention: Women of the Slaveholding South in the American Civil War. Chapel Hill: University of North Carolina Press, . . A Sacred Circle: The Dilemma of the Intellectual in the Old South. Baltimore: Johns Hopkins University Press, .



n

Bibliography

Fehrenbacher, Don E. The Dred Scott Case: Its Significance in American Law and Politics. New York: Oxford University Press, . Ferguson, Eugene S. Truxtun of the Constellation: The Life of Commodore Thomas Truxtun, U.S. Navy, –. Baltimore: Johns Hopkins University Press, . Ferguson, Robert A. Law and Letters in American Culture. Cambridge, Mass.: Harvard University Press, . Ferris, Norman. Desperate Diplomacy: William H. Seward’s Foreign Policy, . Knoxville: University of Tennessee Press, . . The Trent Affair: A Diplomatic Crisis. Knoxville: University of Tennessee Press, . Finkelman, Paul, ed. His Soul Goes Marching On: Responses to John Brown and the Harper’s Ferry Raid. Charlottesville: University of Virginia Press, . Flanders, Ralph B. Plantation Slavery in Georgia. Chapel Hill: University of North Carolina Press, . Fliegelman, Jay. Prodigals and Pilgrims: The American Revolution against Patriarchal Authority, –. Cambridge, Mass.: Harvard University Press, . Flynt, Wayne. Montgomery, An Illustrated History. Woodland Hills, Calif.: Windsor Publications, . Foner, Eric. Free Labor, Free Soil, Free Men: The Ideology of the Republican Party before the Civil War. New York: Oxford University Press, . Foote, Henry S. The Bench and Bar of the South and Southwest. St. Louis: Soule, Thomas & Wentworth, . Ford, Lacy K. Jr. Origins of Southern Radicalism: The South Carolina Upcountry, –. New York: Oxford University Press, . Foscue, Virginia O. Place Names in Alabama. Tuscaloosa: University of Alabama Press, . Fox-Genovese, Elizabeth. Within the Plantation Household: Black and White Women of the Old South. Chapel Hill: University of North Carolina Press, . Franklin, John Hope. The Militant South. Cambridge, Mass.: Belknap Press of Harvard University Press, . Freehling, William W. Prelude to Civil War: The Nullification Movement in South Carolina, – . New York: Harper & Row, . . The Road to Disunion: Secessionists at Bay, –. New York: Oxford University Press, . . The South Versus the South: How Anti-Confederate Southerners Shaped the Course of the Civil War. New York: Oxford University Press, . Friedman, Jean E. The Enclosed Garden: Women and Community in the Evangelical South, – . Chapel Hill: University of North Carolina Press, . Friedman, Lawrence M. Crime and Punishment in American History. New York: Basic Books, . Fry, Anna M. Gayle. Memories of Old Cahaba. . Reprint. Huntsville, Ala.: The Strode Publishers, . Fry, Joseph A. Dixie Looks Abroad: The South and United States Foreign Relations, –. Baton Rouge: Louisiana State University Press, . Gale, Robert L., ed. A Cultural Encyclopedia of the s in America. Westport, Conn.: Greenwood Press, .

Bibliography

n



Gandrud, Pauline J., comp. Alabama Records: vol. , Montgomery County.  vols.; Easly, S.C.: Southern Historical Press, . Garrett, William. Reminiscences of Public Men in Alabama, For Thirty Years. Atlanta: Plantation Publishing Company’s Press, . Genovese, Eugene D. The Slaveholders’ Dilemma: Freedom and Progress in Southern Conservative Thought, –. Columbia: University of South Carolina Press, . Gienapp, William E. Abraham Lincoln and Civil War America: A Biography. New York: Oxford University Press, . Goebel, Dorothy Burne. William Henry Harrison: A Political Biography. . Reprint. Philadelphia: Porcupine Press, . Grammar, John M. Pastoral and Politics in the Old South. Baton Rouge: Louisiana State University Press, . Greeley, Horace, and John F. Cleveland, comps. A Political Textbook for . New York: Tribune Association, . Greenberg, Kenneth S. Honor and Slavery: Lies, Duels, Noses, Masks, Dressing as a Woman, Gifts, Strangers, Humanitarianism, Death, Slave Rebellions, The Proslavery Argument, Baseball, Hunting, and Gambling in the Old South. Princeton: Princeton University Press, . . Masters and Statesmen: The Political Culture of American Slavery. Baltimore: Johns Hopkins University Press, . Greven, Philip J., comp. Child-Rearing Concepts, –: Historical Sources. Itasca, Ill.: F. E. Peacock, . . The Protestant Temperament: Patterns of Child-Rearing, Religious Experience, and the Self in Early America. New York: Alfred A. Knopf, . . Spare the Child: The Religious Roots of Punishment and the Psychological Impact of Physical Abuse. New York: Alfred A. Knopf, . Griswold, Robert L. Fatherhood in America: A History. New York: Basic Books, . Gunderson, Robert Gray. The Log-Cabin Campaign. Lexington: University of Kentucky Press, . Hackney, Sheldon. Populism to Progressivism in Alabama. Princeton: Princeton University Press, . Hahn, Steven. The Roots of Southern Populism: Yeoman Farmers and the Transformation of the Georgia Upcountry, –. New York: Oxford University Press, . Hardman, Keith. Charles Grandison Finney, –: Revivalist and Reformer. Syracuse: Syracuse University Press, . Harris, William J. Plain Folk and Gentry in a Slave Society: White Liberty and Black Slavery in Augusta’s Hinterlands. Middleton, Conn.: Wesleyan University Press, . Hatcher, George, ed. Georgia Rivers: Articles from the Atlanta Journal and Constitution Magazine. Athens: University of Georgia Press, . Hattaway, Herman, and Richard E. Beringer. Jefferson Davis, Confederate President. Lawrence: University of Kansas Press, . Haynes, Sam W. James K. Polk and the Expansionist Impulse. New York: Longman, . Haynes, Sam W., and Christopher Morris, eds. Manifest Destiny and Empire: American Antebellum Expansionism. College Station: Published for the University of Texas at Arlington by Texas A&M University Press, .



n

Bibliography

Heidler, David S. Pulling the Temple Down: The Fire-Eaters and the Destruction of the Union. Mechanicsburg, Pa.: Stackpole Press, . Heitman, Francis B. (with addenda by Robert Kelby). Historical Register of Officers of the Continental Army during the War of the Revolution April, , to December, . Baltimore: Genealogical Publishing Co., . Hergesheimer, Joseph. Swords and Roses. New York: Alfred A. Knopf, . Hersh, Blanche Glassman. The Slavery of Sex: Feminist-Abolitionists in America. Urbana: University of Illinois Press, . Hesseltine, William B. The South in American History. New York: Prentice-Hall, . , ed. Three against Lincoln: Murat Halstead Reports the Caucuses of . Baton Rouge: Louisiana State University Press, . Hill, Benjamin H. Jr. Senator Benjamin H. Hill of Georgia: His Life, Speeches and Writings. Atlanta: H. C. Hudgins & Co., . Hindus, Michael S. Prison and Plantation: Crime, Justice, and Authority in Massachusetts and South Carolina, –. Chapel Hill: University of North Carolina Press, . Hobson, Fred. Tell about the South: The Southern Rage to Explain. Baton Rouge: Louisiana State University Press, . Hodgson, Joseph. The Cradle of the Confederacy; Or, the Times of Troup, Quitman and Yancey. . Reprint. Spartanburg, S.C.: The Reprint Company, Publishers, . Hoole, William Stanley, ed. The Diplomacy of the Confederate Cabinet in Richmond and Its Agents Abroad: Being Memorandum Notes Taken in Paris during the Rebellion of the Southern States from  to , by Paul Pequet Du Bellet. Tuscaloosa: Confederate Publishing Company, . Howard, Victor B. Conscience and Slavery: The Evangelical Calvinist Domestic Missions, –. Kent, Ohio: Kent State University Press, . Howington, Arthur F. ‘‘Violence in Alabama: A Study of Late Antebellum Montgomery.’’ Alabama Review  (): –. Huse, Caleb. The Supplies for the Confederate Army. Boston: Press of T. R. Marvin & Son, . Illustrated Guide to Richmond, the Confederate Capital. A Facsimile Reprint of the City Intelligencer of . Richmond: Confederate Museum, the Valentine Museum, . Index, Oakwood Cemetery Records, Montgomery County, Alabama, –.  vols. Montgomery: Department of Archives and History, . Inscoe, John C. Mountain Masters, Slavery and the Sectional Crisis in Western North Carolina. Knoxville: University of Tennessee Press, . Jabour, Anya. Marriage in the Early Republic: Elizabeth and William Wirt and the Companionate Ideal. Baltimore: Johns Hopkins University Press, . Jack, Theodore H. Sectionalism and Party Politics in Alabama –. Menasha: Collegiate Press, . Jackson, Harvey H. III. Rivers of History: Life on the Coosa, Tallapoosa, Cahaba, and Alabama. Tuscaloosa: University of Alabama Press, . Jackson, Mary S., and Edward F. Jackson. Marriage Notices from Washington County, New York, Newspapers, –. Bowie, Md.: Heritage Books, . Jameson, J. Franklin, ed. Correspondence of John C. Calhoun.  vols. Washington, D.C.: Government Printing Office, .

Bibliography

n



Jeffrey, Thomas E. Thomas Lanier Clingman: Fire-Eater from the Carolina Mountains. Athens: University of Georgia Press, . Jenkins, Brian. Britain and the War for the Union.  vols. Montreal: McGill-Queen’s University Press, , . Jennings, Thelma. The Nashville Convention: Southern Movement for Unity, –. Memphis: Memphis State University Press, . Johnson, Paul E., and Sean Wilentz. Kingdom of Matthias: A Story of Sex and Salvation in thCentury America. New York: Oxford University Press, . Johnson, Robert Underwood, ed. Battles and Leaders of the Civil War.  vols. . Reprint. New York: Thomas Yoseloff, . Johnson, Vicki Vaughn. The Men and the Vision of the Southern Commercial Conventions – . Columbia: University of Missouri Press, . Johnson, Walter. Soul by Soul: Life inside the Antebellum Slave Market. Cambridge, Mass.: Harvard University Press, . Jones, Howard. Union in Peril: The Crisis over British Intervention in the Civil War. Chapel Hill: University of North Carolina Press, . Kaestle, Carl F. Pillars of the Republic: Common Schools and American Society, –. New York: Hill & Wang, . Kane, Elisha Kent. Arctic Explorations: The Second Grinnell Expedition in Search of Sir John Franklin, , ’, ’.  vols. Philadelphia: Childs & Peterson, –. Kett, Joseph F. Rites of Passage: Adolescence in America  to the Present. New York: Basic Books, . Kirkendall, Richard S., ed. The Truman Period as a Research Field: A Reappraisal. Columbia: University of Missouri Press, . Klein, Rachel N. Unification of a Slave State: The Rise of the Planter Class in the South Carolina Backcountry, –. Chapel Hill: University of North Carolina Press, . Kolchin, Peter. American Slavery –. New York: Hill & Wang, . Lander, Ernst M. Jr. Reluctant Imperialists: Calhoun, The South Carolinians, and the Mexican War. Baton Rouge: Louisiana State University Press, . Larkin, Jack. The Shaping of Everyday Life –. New York: Harper & Row, Publishers, . Laws of Williams College. R. Bannister, Printer, . Lebsock, Suzanne. The Free Women of Petersburg: Status and Culture in a Southern Town, – . New York: W. W. Norton, . Lee, Richard M. An Illustrated Guide to the Historic Sites of Confederate Richmond. McLean, Va.: EPM Publications, . Lence, Ross M., ed. Liberty and Union: The Political Philosophy of John C. Calhoun. Indianapolis: The Liberty Fund, . Levine, Bruce. Half Slave and Half Free: The Roots of the Civil War. New York: Hill & Wang, . Lewis, W. David. From Newgate to Dannemora: The Rise of the Penitentiary in New York, – . Ithaca: Cornell University Press, . Litwack, Leon F. North of Slavery: The Negro in the Free States, –. Chicago: University of Chicago Press, .



n

Bibliography

Loveland, Anne C. Southern Evangelicals and the Social Order, –. Baton Rouge: Louisiana State University Press, . Mahon, John K. History of the Second Seminole War, –. Gainesville: University of Florida Press, . Mallary, R. DeWitt. Lennox and the Berkshire Highlands. New York: G. P. Putnam’s Sons, . Martis, Kenneth C. The Historical Atlas of United States Congressional Districts –. New York: Free Press, . Masur, Louis P. Rites of Execution: Capital Punishment and the Transformation of American Culture, –. New York: Oxford University Press, . Mathews, Donald G. Religion in the Old South. Chicago: University of Chicago Press, . May, Robert E. John A. Quitman: Old South Crusader. Baton Rouge: Louisiana State University Press, . . Manifest Destiny’s Underworld: Filibustering in Antebellum America. Chapel Hill: University of North Carolina Press, . . The Southern Dream of a Caribbean Empire, –. Athens: University of Georgia Press, . , ed. The Union, the Confederacy, and the Atlantic Rim. West Lafayette, Ind.: Purdue University Press, . McCardell, John. The Idea of a Southern Nation: Southern Nationalists and Southern Nationalism, –. New York: W. W. Norton, . McCurry, Stephanie. Masters of Small Worlds: Yeoman Households, Gender Relations, & the Political Culture of the Antebellum South. New York: Oxford University Press, . McGlen, Nancy E., and Karen O’Connor. Women’s Rights: The Struggle for Equality in the Nineteenth and Twentieth Centuries. New York: Praeger, . McLaurin, Merton. Celia: A Slave. Athens: University of Georgia Press, . McLoughlin, William G. Jr. Modern Revivalism: Charles Grandison Finney to Billy Graham. New York: Ronald Press Company, . McManus, Edgar J. A History of Negro Slavery in New York. Syracuse: Syracuse University Press, . McMillan, Malcolm C. The Disintegration of a Confederate State: Three Governors and Alabama’s Wartime Home Front, –. Macon, Ga.: Mercer University Press, . McPherson, James M. Battle Cry of Freedom: The Civil War Era. New York: Oxford University Press, . . Ordeal by Fire: The Civil War and Reconstruction. New York: Alfred A. Knopf, . McWhiney, Grady. Cracker Culture: Celtic Ways in the Old South. Tuscaloosa: University of Alabama Press, . Merk, Frederick. Slavery and the Annexation of Texas. New York: Alfred A. Knopf, . Miller, Floyd K. The Search for a Black Nationality: Black Emigration and Colonization, –. Urbana: University of Illinois Press, . Miller, Randall M., and John David Smith, eds. Dictionary of Afro-American Slavery. Westport, Conn.: Greenwood Press, . Miller, William Lee. Arguing about Slavery: The Great Battle in the United States Congress. New York: Alfred A. Knopf, .

Bibliography

n



Mintz, Steven. Moralists and Modernizers: America’s Pre–Civil War Reformers. Baltimore: Johns Hopkins University Press, . Mintz, Steven, and Susan Kellogg. Domestic Revolutions: A Social History of American Family Life. New York: Free Press, . Montgomery Directory for –. Montgomery: Advertiser Book & Job Printing Office, . Moore, Albert Burton. History of Alabama. Tuscaloosa: Alabama Book Store, . Moos, Malcolm C. State Penal Administration in Alabama. University: Bureau of Public Administration, University of Alabama, . Morgan, Edmund S. America Slavery, American Freedom: The Ordeal of Colonial Virginia. New York: W. W. Norton, . Morrison, Michael A. Slavery and the American West: The Eclipse of Manifest Destiny and the Coming of the Civil War. Chapel Hill: University of North Carolina Press, . Nasaw, David. Schooled Order: A Social History of Public Schooling in the United States. New York: Oxford University Press, . Nason, Henry B. Biographical Register of the Officers and Graduates of the Rennselaer Polytechnic Institute, –. Troy: William H. Young, . Nevins, Allan. Ordeal of the Union: The Fruits of Manifest Destiny. New York: Charles Scribner’s Sons, . . The Emergence of Lincoln.  vols. New York: Charles Scribner’s Sons, . . The War for the Union: The War Becomes Revolution, –. New York: Charles Scribner’s Sons, . Nichols, Roy Franklin. The Disruption of American Democracy. New York: Macmillan Company, . Novak, Steven J. The Rites of Youth: American Colleges and Student Revolt, –. Cambridge, Mass.: Harvard University Press, . Nuermberger, Ruth Ketring. The Clays of Alabama: A Planter-Lawyer-Politician Family. Lexington: University of Kentucky Press, . Oakes, James. The Ruling Race: A History of American Slaveholders. New York: Alfred A. Knopf, . Olmstead, Frederick Law. A Journey in the Back Country. New York: Mason Brothers, . . A Journey in the Seaboard Slave States. New York: Dix & Edwards, . . A Journey Through Texas: Or, a Saddle-Trip on the Southwestern Frontier. New York: Dix, Edwards & Co., . O’Neall, John Belton. Biographical Sketches of the Bench and Bar of South Carolina.  vols. Charleston: S. G. Courtenay & Co., . Osterweis, Rollin. Romanticism and Nationalism in the Old South. Baton Rouge: Louisiana State University Press, . Owen, Marie B. The Story of Alabama: A History of the State Personal and Family History.  vols. New York: Lewis Historical Publishing Company, . Owen, Thomas McAdory. History of Alabama and Dictionary of Alabama Biography.  vols. . Reprint. Spartanburg, S.C.: The Reprint Company, Publishers, . Owsley, Frank L. King Cotton Diplomacy: Foreign Relations of the Confederate States of America. Chicago: University of Chicago Press, .



n

Bibliography

Palmer, Michael A. Stoddard’s War: Naval Operations during the Quasi-War with France, – . Columbia: University of South Carolina Press, . Parrish, T. Michael. Richard Taylor: Soldier Prince of Dixie. Chapel Hill: University of North Carolina Press, . Partridge, Eric, comp. A Dictionary of Slang and Unconventional English. New York: Macmillan, . Patterson, Orlando. Slavery and Social Death. Cambridge, Mass.: Harvard University Press, . Pease, Jane, and William Pease. James Louis Petigru: Southern Conservative, Southern Dissenter. Athens: University of Georgia Press, . Perry, Arthur Latham. Williamstown and Williams College. New York: Charles Scribner’s Sons, . Perry, Benjamin F. Reminiscences of Public Men. Philadelphia: John D. Avil & Co., Printers and Publishers, . Peterson, Merrill D. The Great Triumvirate: Webster, Clay, and Calhoun. New York: Oxford University Press, . . The Olive Branch and the Sword—The Compromise of . Baton Rouge: Louisiana State University Press, . Peterson, Norma Lois. Littleton Waller Tazewell. Charlottesville: University Press of Virginia, . Peterson, Owen. A Divine Discontent: The Life of Nathan S. S. Beman. Macon, Ga.: Mercer University Press, . Phelan, Thomas, D. Michael Ross, and Carl A. Westerdahl. Rennselaer: Where Imagination Achieves the Impossible. Troy: Rennselaer Polytechnic Institute, . Phillips, Ulrich Bonnell, ed. The Correspondence of Robert Toombs, Alexander H. Stephens, and Howell Cobb. Washington, D.C.: Government Printing Office, . . Georgia and State Rights: A Study of the Political History of Georgia from the Revolution to the Civil War, with Particular Regard to Federal Relations. . Reprint. Yellow Springs, Ohio: Antioch Press, . Pierce, Edward L., ed. Memoir and Letters of Charles Sumner. nd ed.  vols. Boston: Roberts Brothers, . Pleck, Elizabeth. Domestic Tyranny: The Making of Social Policy against Family Violence from Colonial Times to the Present. New York: Oxford University Press, . Potter, David M., completed and edited by Don E. Fehrenbacher. The Impending Crisis, – . New York: Harper & Row, . Quist, John W. Restless Visionaries: The Social Roots of Antebellum Reform in Alabama and Michigan. Baton Rouge: Louisiana State University Press, . Rabkin, Peggy A. Fathers to Daughters: The Legal Foundations of Female Emancipation. Westport, Conn.: Greenwood Press, . Rable, George. Civil Wars: Women and the Crisis of Southern Nationalism. Urbana: University of Illinois Press, . . The Confederate Republic: A Revolution against Politics. Chapel Hill: University of North Carolina Press, .

Bibliography

n



Rainwater, P. L., ed. A Civilian’s Recollections of the War between the States. Baton Rouge: Claitor, . Remini, Robert V. Daniel Webster: The Man and His Time. New York: W. W. Norton, . . Henry Clay: Statesman for the Union. New York: W. W. Norton, . Rezneck, Samuel. Education for a Technological Society: A Sesquicentennial History of Rennselaer Polytechnic Institute. Troy: Rennselaer Polytechnic Institute, . Richards, Leonard L. The Life and Times of Congressman John Quincy Adams. New York: Oxford University Press, . Richardson, James M. History of Greenville County South Carolina. . Reprint. Spartanburg, S.C.: The Reprint Company, Publishers, . Ricketts, Palmer C. History of Rennselaer Polytechnic Institute, –. New York: Wiley, . Ripley, Peter, et al., eds. The Black Abolitionist Papers.  vols. Chapel Hill: University of North Carolina Press, –. Rogers, William Warren Jr. Confederate Home Front: Montgomery during the Civil War. Tuscaloosa: University of Alabama Press, . Roland, Dunbar, ed. Jefferson Davis, Constitutionalist: His Letters, Papers and Speeches.  vols. Jackson: Mississippi Department of Archives and History, . Rosen, Robert N. Confederate Charleston: An Illustrated History of the City and the People during the Civil War. Columbia: University of South Carolina Press, . Rotundo, E. Anthony. American Manhood: Transformations in Masculinity from the Revolution to the Modern Era. New York: Basic Books, . Rowe, David. Thunder and Trumpets: Millerites and Dissenting Religion in Upstate New York, – . Chico, Calif.: Scholars Press, . Rowland, Charles P. An American Iliad: The Story of the Civil War. New York: McGraw-Hill, . Rorabough, W. J. The Alcoholic Republic: An American Tradition. New York: Oxford University Press, . Rozier, John, ed. The Granite Farm Letters: The Civil War Correspondence of Edgeworth & Sallie Bird. Athens: University of Georgia Press, . Rubin, Louis D. Jr. The Edge of the Swamp: A Study in the Literature and Culture of the Old South. Baton Rouge: Louisiana State University Press, . Rudolph, Frederick. Mark Hopkins and the Log: Williams College, –. New Haven: Yale University Press, . Ryan, Mary. The Cradle of the Middle Class: The Family in Oneida County, New York, –. New York: Cambridge University Press, . Saunders, Robert Jr. John Archibald Campbell, Southern Moderate, –. Tuscaloosa: University of Alabama Press, . Scarborough, Ruth. Opposition to Slavery in Georgia prior to . . Reprint. New York: Negro Universities Press, . Scarborough, William Kauffman, ed. The Diary of Edmund Ruffin.  vols. Baton Rouge: Louisiana State University Press, –. Scott, Anne Firor. The Southern Lady: From Pedestal to Politics. Chicago: University of Chicago Press, .



n

Bibliography

Schott, Thomas E. Alexander H. Stephens of Georgia: A Biography. Baton Rouge: Louisiana State University Press, . Sellers, Charles G. The Market Revolution: Jacksonian America, –. New York: Oxford University Press, . Sellers, James B. Slavery in Alabama. University: University of Alabama Press, . Shaw, Ronald E. Canals for a Nation: The Canal Era in the United States –. Lexington: University Press of Kentucky, . Sheriff, Carol. The Artificial River: The Erie Canal and the Paradox of Progress, –. New York: Hill & Wang, . Shyrock, Harrison. Georgia and the Union in . Durham, N.C.: Duke University Press, . Sideman, Belle Beeker, and Lillian Friedman, eds. Europe Looks at the Civil War: An Anthology. New York: Orion Press, . Simpson, Craig M. A Good Southerner: The Life of Henry A. Wise of Virginia. Chapel Hill: University of North Carolina Press, . Sinha, Manisha. The Counterrevolution of Slavery: Politics and Ideology in Antebellum South Carolina. Chapel Hill: University of North Carolina Press, . Smith, Walter Burgess. America’s Diplomats and Consuls of –. Washington, D.C.: Government Printing Office, . Snay, Mitchell. Gospel of Disunion: Religion and Separatism in the Antebellum South. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, . Stampp, Kenneth M. America in : A Nation on the Brink. New York: Oxford University Press, . Staundenraus, Philip J. The African Colonization Movement, –. New York: Columbia University Press, . Stegmaier, Mark J. Texas, New Mexico, and the Compromise of : Boundary Dispute and Sectional Crisis. Kent, Ohio: Kent State University Press, . Stephenson, Wendell H. Southern History in the Making: Pioneer Historians of the South. Baton Rouge: Louisiana State University Press, . Steward, Dick. Duels and the Roots of Violence in Missouri. Columbia: University of Missouri Press, . Stowe, Steven. Intimacy and Power in the Old South: Ritual in the Lives of the Planters. Baltimore: Johns Hopkins University Press, . Sydnor, Charles. The Development of Southern Sectionalism, –. Baton Rouge: Louisiana State University Press, . Takaki, Ronald T. A Pro-Slavery Crusade: The Agitation to Reopen the African Slave Trade. New York: Free Press, . Taylor, Richard. Destruction and Reconstruction: Personal Experiences of the Late War. New York: D. Appleton & Co., . Thomas, Emory M. The Confederacy as a Revolutionary Experience. Englewood Cliffs, N.J.: Prentice Hall, . . The Confederate Nation: –. New York: Harper & Row, . Thornton, J. Mills, III. Politics and Power in a Slave Society: Alabama –. Baton Rouge: Louisiana State University Press, .

Bibliography

n



Troy Directory –, . Van Deusen, John G. The Ante-Bellum Southern Commercial Conventions. Trinity College Historical Society, Duke University, series , . Varon, Elizabeth R. We Mean to Be Counted: White Women & Politics in Antebellum Virginia. Chapel Hill: University of North Carolina Press, . Venable, Austin. The Role of William L. Yancey in the Secession Movement. Nashville: Joint University Libraries [Vanderbilt], . Vipperman, Carl J. William Lowndes and the Transition of Southern Politics, –. Chapel Hill: University of North Carolina Press, . Wade, Richard C. Slavery in the Cities: The South, –. New York: Oxford University Press, . Walters, Ronald G. American Reformers, –. New York: Hill & Wang, . . The Anti-Slavery Appeal: American Abolitionism after . New York: Norton, . Walther, Eric H. The Fire-Eaters. Baton Rouge: Louisiana State University Press, . Warbasse, Elizabeth B. The Changing Legal Rights of Married Women, –. New York: Garland Publishers, . Warren, Gordon H. Fountain of Discontent: The Trent Affair and Freedom of the Seas. Boston: Northeastern University Press, . Watson, Harry L. Liberty and Power: The Politics of Jacksonian America. New York: Noonday Press, . Weeks, Earl William. John Quincy Adams and American Global Empire. Lexington: University of Kentucky Press, . Weinreb, Ben, ed. The London Encyclopedia. London: Macmillan, . Weise, A. J. History of the City of Troy from the Expulsion of the Mohegan Indians to the Present Centennial Year of the Independence of the United States of America, . Troy: William H. Young, . Wender, Herbert. Southern Commercial Conventions, –. Baltimore: Johns Hopkins University Press, . White, Deborah Grey. Ar’n’t I a Woman? Female Slaves in the Plantation South. New York: W. W. Norton, . White, Laura. Robert Barnwell Rhett: Father of Secession. . Reprint. Gloucester, Mass.: Peter Smith, . Wilkes, Marion. Rosemont and its Famous Daughter. Washington, D.C.: Published by M. R. Wilkes, . Williams, Jack K. Vogues in Villainy: Crime and Retribution in Ante-Bellum South Carolina. Columbia: University of South Carolina Press, . Wilson, John Lyde. The Code of Honor; or, Rules for the Government of Principals and Seconds in Dueling. Charleston: J. Phinney, . Wiltse, Charles M., and Michael J. Birkner, eds. The Papers of Daniel Webster: Correspondence. Vol. , –. Hanover, N.H.: University Press of New England, . Woodward, C. Vann, ed. Mary Chesnut’s Civil War Diary. New Haven: Yale University Press, . . Thinking Back: The Peril of Writing History. Baton Rouge: Louisiana State University Press, .



n

Bibliography

Work Projects Administration. Alabama: A Guide to the Deep South. New York: Richard R. Smith, . Wyatt-Brown, Bertram. Southern Honor: Ethics and Behavior in the Old South. New York: Oxford University Press, . . Yankee Saints and Southern Sinners. Baton Rouge: Louisiana State University Press, . Wyld, Lionel D. Low Bridge! Folklore and the Erie Canal. Syracuse: Syracuse University Press, . Yancey, William L. An Address on the Life and Character of John Caldwell Calhoun, Delivered before the Citizens of Montgomery, Alabama, on the Fourth July, . Montgomery: Job Office Advertiser and Gazette Print, . . An Address to the People of Alabama, by W. L. Yancey, Late a Delegate, at Large, for the State of Alabama, to the National Democratic Convention, Held at Baltimore, on d May, A.D. . Montgomery: Flag & Advertiser Job Office, . . Issues involved in the Presidential Contest. Speech of Hon. William L. Yancey, of Alabama, Delivered at Memphis, Tenn., August , . Frankfort, Ky.: Yeoman Office, . . Memoranda of the Late Affair of Honor between Hon. T. L. Clingman, of North Carolina, and Hon. William L. Yancey, of Alabama. N.p., . . An Oration on the Life and Character of Andrew Jackson: Delivered before the Jackson Monument Convention, Of the City of Baltimore, By Hon. William Lowndes Yancey of Alabama, on the d day of May, A.D. . Baltimore: Printed by James Lucas, . . Speech of the Hon. William L. Yancey of Alabama at Wieting Hall, Syracuse, N.Y., October th, . Published by Direction of the National Democratic State Committee, . . Speech of Hon. Wm. Lowndes Yancey, of Alabama, on the Annexation of Texas to the United States. Delivered in the House of Representatives, Jan. , . [Montgomery]: Harris & Heart, []. . Speech of Hon. W. L. Yancey, Delivered in the Democratic State Convention, of the State of Alabama, Held at Montgomery, on the th, th, th, & th January, . Montgomery: Advertiser Book & Job Steam Press Print, . . Speech of the Hon. William L. Yancey, of Alabama Delivered to the National Democratic Convention. Charleston: Walker, Evans & Co., . . Speeches of William Lowndes Yancey, Esq., Senator from Alabama; Made in the Senate of the Confederate States, during the Session Commencing on the th day of August, A.D. . Montgomery, Ala.: Montgomery Advertiser Book & Job Office, . Yellin, Jean Fagan. Women and Sisters: The Antislavery Feminists in American Culture. New Haven: Yale University Press, . Zarefsky, David. Lincoln, Douglas, and Slavery in the Crucible of Debate. Chicago: University of Chicago Press, .

Articles American Education Quarterly Register  (). Bailey, Hugh C. ‘‘Dissatisfaction in the Alabama Hill Country, .’’ Civil War History  ( June ): –.

Bibliography

n



‘‘The Bladensburg Dueling Ground.’’ Harper’s  (): . Blumenthal, Henry. ‘‘Confederate Diplomacy: Popular Notions and International Realities.’’ Journal of Southern History  (May ): –. Burr, Nelson. ‘‘United States Senator James Dixon: – Episcopalian Anti-Slavery Statesman.’’ Historical Magazine of the Protestant Episcopal Church  (March ): –. Censer, Jane Turner. ‘‘ ‘Smiling Through Her Tears’: Antebellum Southern Women and Divorce.’’ American Journal of Legal History  ( January ): –. . ‘‘Southwestern Migration among North Carolina Planter Families: ‘The Disposition to Emigrate.’ ’’ Journal of Southern History  (August ): –. Cornelius, Janet. ‘‘Slave Marriages in a Georgia Congregation.’’ In Class, Conflict and Consensus: Antebellum Southern Community Studies, ed. Orville Vernon Burton and Robert C. McMath Jr., –. Westport, Conn.: Greenwood Press, . Coulter, E. Merton. ‘‘Alexander H. Stephens Challenges Benjamin H. Hill to a Duel.’’ Georgia Historical Quarterly  (): –. . ‘‘The Ante-Bellum Academy Movement in Georgia.’’ Georgia Historical Quarterly  (December ): –. Crowther, Edward R. ‘‘Holy Honor: Sacred and Secular in the Old South.’’ Journal of Southern History  (): –. Despatch from the British Consul at Charleston to Lord John Russell, , in American Historical Review  (): –. Donald, David. ‘‘The Proslavery Argument Reconsidered.’’ Journal of Southern History  (): –. Draughon, Ralph B. Jr. ‘‘George Smith Houston and Southern Unity, –.’’ Alabama Review  (): –. . ‘‘A Note on William L. Yancey’s Opinion of W. Gilmore Simms’ Richard Hurdis.’’ Alabama Review  (): –. . ‘‘The Young Manhood of William L. Yancey.’’ Alabama Review  (): –. Fleming, Walter Lynwood. ‘‘The Buford Expedition to Kansas.’’ American Historical Review  (): –. Fry, Joseph A. ‘‘Profit, Reputation, and Clio: A Note on William Russell Smith’s Debates.’’ Alabama Review  (): –. Garner, Alto L., and Nathan Stott. ‘‘William Lowndes Yancey: Statesman of Secession.’’ Alabama Review  (): –. Genovese, Eugene. ‘‘ ‘Our Family, White and Black’: Family and Household in Southern Slaveholders’ World View.’’ In In Joy and in Sorrow: Women, Family, and Marriage in the Victorian South, –, ed. Carol Bleser, –. New York: Oxford University Press, . Glover, Lorri. ‘‘An Education in Southern Masculinity: The Ball Family of South Carolina in the New Republic.’’ Journal of Southern History  (): –. Golden, B. G. ‘‘The Presidential Election of  in Alabama.’’ Alabama Review  (): – . Gorn, Elliott J. ‘‘ ‘Gouge and Bite, Pull Hair and Scratch’: The Social Significance of Fighting in the Southern Backcountry.’’ American Historical Review  (): –. Griswold, Robert. ‘‘The Evolution of the Doctrine of Mental Cruelty in Victorian American Divorce, –.’’ Journal of Social History  (Fall ): –.



n

Bibliography

Hamilton, J. G. De Roulhac. ‘‘The State Courts and the Confederate Constitution.’’ Journal of Southern History  (): –. Hansen, David J. ‘‘Long-Term Consequences of Childhood Physical Abuse.’’ Psychological Bulletin  (): –. Hoole, W. Stanley, ed. ‘‘Notes and Documents: William L. Yancey’s European Diary, March– June, .’’ Alabama Review  (April ): –. ‘‘Hon. William L. Yancey.’’ Harper’s Weekly  (): –. Howington, Arthur F. ‘‘Violence in Alabama: A Study of Late Antebellum Montgomery.’’ Alabama Review  (): –. Huff, A. V. ‘‘The Eagle and the Vulture: Changing Attitudes Toward Nationalism in Fourth of July Orations Delivered in Charleston, –.’’ South Atlantic Quarterly  (): –. Johannsen, Robert W. ‘‘Stephen A. Douglas and the South.’’ Journal of Southern History  (): –. Jones, Virginia K., ed. ‘‘Letters of Rev. William H. Mitchell to His Wife, January, .’’ Alabama Historical Quarterly  (Spring ): –. Kilbride, Daniel. ‘‘Slavery and Utilitarianism: Thomas Cooper and the Mind of the Old South.’’ Journal of Southern History  (): –. Kohut, Thomas A. ‘‘Psychohistory as History.’’ American Historical Review  (April ): – . Lowe, Richard G., and Randolph B. Campbell. ‘‘The Slave-Breeding Hypothesis: A Demographic Comment on the ‘Buying’ and ‘Selling’ States.’’ Journal of Southern History  (): –. Malinosky-Rummell, Robin, and David J. Hansen. ‘‘Long-Term Consequences of Childhood Abuse.’’ Psychological Bulletin  (): –. Marten, James. ‘‘Fatherhood in the Confederacy: Southern Soldiers and Their Children.’’ Journal of Southern History  (May ): –. May, Robert E. ‘‘Psychobiography and Secession: The Southern Radical as Maladjusted ‘Outsider.’ ’’ Civil War History  (): –. . ‘‘Southern Elite Women, Sectional Extremism, and the Male Political Sphere: The Case of John A. Quitman’s Wife and Female Decedents, –.’’ Journal of Mississippi History  (): –. Mayer, Henry. ‘‘ ‘A Leaven of Disunion’: The Growth of the Secessionist Faction in Alabama –.’’ Alabama Review  (): –. McLoughlin, William G. ‘‘Evangelical Child-Rearing in the Age of Jackson: Francis Wayland’s Views on When and How to Subdue the Willfulness of Children.’’ Journal of Social History  (): –. McMillan, Malcolm. ‘‘Taylor’s Presidential Campaign in Alabama, –.’’ Alabama Review  (): –. McMillan, Malcolm C. ‘‘William L. Yancey and the Historians: One Hundred Years.’’ Alabama Review  (): –. McMillan, Sally G. ‘‘Antebellum Southern Fathers and the Health Care of Children.’’ Journal of Southern History  (August ): –.

Bibliography

n



Mellon, George F. ‘‘Henry W. Hilliard and William L. Yancey.’’ Sewanee Review  (): – . Morrison, Michael A. ‘‘Martin Van Buren, the Democracy, and the Partisan Politics of Texas Annexation.’’ Journal of Southern History  (November ): –. Napier, John H., III. ‘‘Montgomery during the Civil War.’’ Alabama Review  (): –. O’Brien, Michael. ‘‘Biography and the Old South.’’ Virginia Magazine of History and Biography  (October ): –. Owen, Thomas M. ‘‘William F. Samford: Statesman and Man of Letters.’’ Publications of the Alabama Historical Society  (): –. Owsley, Frank. ‘‘Defeatism in the Confederacy.’’ North Carolina Historical Review  ( July ): –. . ‘‘The Pattern of Migration and Settlement on the Southern Frontier.’’ Journal of Southern History  (May ): –. Perkins, Lindsey S. ‘‘The Moderate Democrats, –.’’ In The Oral Tradition in the South, ed. Waldo W. Braden, –. Baton Rouge: Louisiana State University Press, . Peterson, Owen. ‘‘Nathan S. S. Beman at Mt. Zion.’’ Georgia Historical Quarterly  ( June ): –. Petrie, George. ‘‘What Will Be the Final Estimate of Yancey.’’ Transactions of the Alabama Historical Society  (): –. Quarles, Benjamin. ‘‘Ministers without Portfolio.’’ Journal of Negro History  (): –. Rayback, Joseph G. ‘‘The Presidential Ambitions of John C. Calhoun, –.’’ Journal of Southern History  (): –. Ross, Delia M. ‘‘Group Remolds History.’’ Metropolitan Times (Washington), July , , C:–. Rotundo, E. Anthony. ‘‘American Fatherhood: A Historical Perspective.’’ American Behavioral Scientist  (): –. Sparks, Randy J. ‘‘Gentleman’s Sport: Horse Racing in Antebellum Charleston.’’ South Carolina Historical Magazine  ( January ): –. Stegmaier, Mark J. ‘‘Zachary Taylor Versus the South.’’ Civil War History  (): –. Stephenson, Wendell H. ‘‘A Half Century of Southern Historical Scholarship.’’ Journal of Southern History  (): –. Stowe, Steven M. ‘‘The ‘Touchiness’ of the Gentleman Planter: The Sense of Esteem and Continuity in the Antebellum South.’’ Psychohistory Review  (): –. Varon, Elizabeth R. ‘‘Tippecanoe and the Ladies, Too: White Women and Party Politics in Antebellum Virginia.’’ Journal of American History  (September ): –. Venable, Austin. ‘‘The Public Career of William Lowndes Yancey.’’ Alabama Review  (): –. . ‘‘William L. Yancey and the League of United Southerners.’’ Proceedings of the South Carolina Historical Association (): –. . ‘‘William L. Yancey’s Transition from Unionism to State Rights.’’ Journal of Southern History  (): –. White, William W., and Joseph O. Baylen. ‘‘Pierre A. Rost’s Mission to Europe, –.’’ Louisiana History  (Summer ): @.



n

Bibliography

Williams, Clarence W., ed. ‘‘Presidential Election Returns and Related Data for Ante-Bellum Alabama.’’ Alabama Review  (): –. Williams, Jack K. ‘‘Crime and Punishment in Alabama, –.’’ Alabama Review  (): –. . ‘‘White Lawbreakers in Ante-Bellum South Carolina.’’ Journal of Southern History  (): –. Williams, Thomas M. ‘‘Dixon Hall Lewis.’’ Alabama Polytechnic Institute Historical Studies. th Series. Auburn, : –. Wilson, Major. ‘‘ ‘Liberty and Union’: An Analysis of Three Concepts Involved in the Nullification Controversy.’’ Journal of Southern History  (August ): –. . ‘‘A Preview of the Irrepressible Conflict: The Issue of Slavery during the Nullification Controversy.’’ Mississippi Quarterly  (): –. Wyatt-Brown, Bertram. ‘‘Community, Class, and Snopesian Crime: Local Justice in the Old South.’’ In Class, Conflict, and Consensus: Antebellum Southern Community Studies, ed. Orville Vernon Burton and Robert C. McMath Jr., –. Westport, Conn.: Greenwood Press, . . ‘‘God and Honor in the Old South.’’ Southern Review  (April ): –. . ‘‘The Mask of Obedience: Male Slave Psychology in the Old South.’’ American Historical Review , no.  (December ): –.

Theses and Dissertations Allen, Austin. ‘‘Containing Slavery, Imposing Sovereignty: Federalism, Corporate Law, and the Origins of the Dred Scott Case.’’ Ph.D. dissertation, University of Houston, . Coussons, John Stanford. ‘‘Thirty Years with Calhoun, Rhett, and the Charleston Mercury: A Chapter in South Carolina Politics.’’ Ph.D. dissertation, Louisiana State University, . Draughon, Ralph B. Jr. ‘‘William Lowndes Yancey: From Unionist to Secessionist, –.’’ Ph.D. dissertation, University of North Carolina, Chapel Hill, . Saunders, Robert S. Jr. ‘‘John Archibald Campbell: A Biography.’’ Ph.D. dissertation, Auburn University, .

On-Line Sources Bladensburg Dueling Grounds: http://theshadowlands.net/famous/dueling.htm Faulkner State Community College: http://www.faulkner.cc.al.us/info/history.htm James Williams Narrative, University of North Carolina at Chapel Hill Libraries, Documenting the American South, at http://docsouth.unc.edu/williams/williamsdebates.html Samford University: http://www.samford.edu/groups/amhf/id m.htm United States Census Browser, University of Virginia Libraries: http://fisher.lib.virginia .edu/cgi-local/censusbin/census/cen.pl?year= Yancey Family Surname Resource Center: http://www.geocities.com/Heartland/Acres/ /

Bibliography

n



This page intentionally left blank

INDEX

Abbeville, S.C., ,  Abercrombie, James,  Abolition, , , , , . See also Antislavery Abolitionists, , –, , –, , –,  Adams, Charles Francis, –, , , –, – Adams, James H., ,  Adams, John, ,  Adams, John Quincy, , , , , –, , , , ,  (n. ),  (nn. , ),  (n. ) Adams, Samuel, ,  Adams-Onís Treaty,  Adelphi, – Africa, –,  African slave trade, , , , –, , , –, , , –, , , –, , –, –,  Agrippa (slave), ,  A Journey in the Seaboard Slave States,  Alabama: , ; assembly, –, –, , ; banks, , –, , ; Bible Society, , ; Democratic Convention (), ; Democratic Convention (), ; Democratic Convention (), ; Democratic Party, –, , , , –; electoral reform, –, –; internal improvements, , , ; Men’s Hall of Fame, ; penitentiaries, –; Secession Convention,

–, ; Senate, –, –; State Gazette, , ; Supreme Court, –, ; violence in, –; Whigs, –,  Alabama, CSS,  Alabama Baptist,  Alabama Journal,  Alabama Platform, –, –, –, , , , , , –, , , ,  Albany Journal,  Alien and Sedition Acts, , ,  Alison, Archibald, – Alston, Joseph,  American Indians,  American Colonization Society, , ,  (n. ) American Party. See Know-Nothing Party American Protestant Society,  American Revolution, , , , , – , , –, , , , , , , ,  Anderson (slave), – Anderson, Edward C.,  Anderson, Robert, , ,  Andersonville Prison,  Antietam, battle of, – Antislavery, , , –, , , –, , , , , –, , . See also Abolition Arizona Territory,  Arkansas, , –, 

Asia, ,  Atchison, David,  Athens, Ga., ,  Atlanta, Ga., – Atlanta Intelligencer,  Auburn Gazette,  Augusta Constitutionalist,  Austin (slave),  Autauga County, Ala., , , ,  Bagby, Arthur P.,  Baker, Alpheus, ,  Baker, Benjamin,  Baldwin, Joseph G., ,  Ball, Edward,  Baltimore, , , ; Democratic Convention (), –, , ; Democratic Convention (), – Baltimore Sun,  Banks, –, –, , –, ,  Barbour County, Ala., ,  Baring, Thomas,  Baring Brothers & Company, , , , , ,  (n. ) Barlow, Francis,  Barnwell, Robert W., , , –,  Bates, Joshua, ,  Battle, Cullen A.,  Bayard, James A., – Bibbs, W. C.,  Beecher, Henry Ward, – Beecher, Lyman, , ,  Beene, Jesse, , –, , , , , , , ; as lawyer, ; and Lewis, –; and Yancey,  Beene, William,  Bell, John, , , , –, , , ,  Belser, James E., ,  Beltsville, Md., – Beman, Carlisle, , ,  Beman, Caroline (mother), , , –, , , , , , , , , –, – ; and Nathan Beman, –, –; and



n

Index

children, –; as slaveholder, –, ; and Sarah Yancey,  Beman, Eliza, ,  Beman, Henry,  Beman, Louisa,  Beman, Nathan S. S. (stepfather), –, – , , –, , , , , , , , , , , , , , , , –, , , –, , , –, , , –, ; as abolitionist, , , , ; as orator, , ; as preacher, – , –; and separation from Caroline, –; as slaveholder, –, ; and violence, ; and Williams College, ,  (n. ); and Yancey, –, –, , , , ; youth of, – Beman, Samuel S., , , –, , , , , ,  (n. ) Beman, Silence Douglas,  Benjamin, Judah P., , ,  Bentham, Jeremy, –, ,  (n. ) Berrien, John M.,  Beuregard, Pierre G. T.,  Bird, Catherine,  Bird, Fitzgerald,  Bird, Louisa,  Bird, William, , , , , , –,  Bird, Wilson, ,  (n. ) Bladensburg, Md., , ,  Blair, Montgomery,  Blockade, –, –, –, –, –,  Blue, Mathew P.,  Bluffton Movement, ,  Boston, Mass., , –,  Boston Atlas, , – Bowdon, Franklin W.,  (n. ) Boyce, William W.,  (n. ) Bragg, Braxton, , , , – Bragg, John, ,  Brazil, , , – Breckinridge, John C., , , –, –, ,  Brooks, Preston, , –, –, 

Brooks, William M., – Brown, Albert G.,  Brown, John, –, , , ,  Brown, Joseph,  Brown, William Wells,  Browne, William M.,  Brownlow, William ‘‘Parson,’’ –,  Bryant, William Cullen,  Buchanan, James, , , , , –, , –, –, , , , , , , , ,  (n. ); and Kansas, –; and secession, , –, , , ; and William Walker, , ; and Yancey, –,  Buford, Jefferson, , , ,  (n. ) Buford Expedition,  Bulger, Michael,  Bulloch, James D., – Bullock, Edward C., , –, ,  Bull Run, battle of,  Bunch, Robert, – Burnett, Henry C.,  Burr, Aaron, ,  Burrows, W. E.,  Burt, Armistead, ,  Buskirk, S. H.,  Butler, Andrew P., – Butler, Benjamin, – Butler, Thomas,  Butler, William O.,  Cahaba, Ala., –, , –, , , , –,  (n. ) Cahaba and Marion Railroad Company, ,  Cahaba Dallas Gazette,  Cahaba Southern Democrat, , –, , ,  Calhoun, Andrew P., , – Calhoun, James M., , , , ,  Calhoun, John C., , , –, , – , , , , , –, –, , , , , , –, , , , , , , , –; and Lewis,

; and nullification, ; and Oregon, ; and secession, , ; and Southern Address, –; and Southern Party, ; and Yancey, , –, , –, , –, –, ,  California, , , –, , , ,  Campbell, John A., , , –, , , , , , –, ,  (n. ) Canada, , ,  Cark, Horace F.,  Caroline (slave),  Carroll, William H.,  Carver, George Washington,  Casey, Frances Pamela,  Cass, Lewis, –, –, , , –, , ,  Cassin, John M. S.,  Cedar Bluff, Ala., – Central America,  Centreville, Ala., ,  Chancellorsville, battle of,  Chapman, Reuben, –, , –,  (n. ) Chappell, Absalom H., ,  Charleston, S.C., , –, , ; Southern Rights Association, – Charleston Mercury, , , , , , , , , , –, –, ,  Charleston Standard,  Chase, Salmon P., ,  Cherokee County, Ala.,  Cherokee Indians,  Chesnut, James,  Chesnut, Mary, – Chilton, William P., –, , , , , , ,  Cilley, Jonathan, ,  Civil liberties, –,  Civil War: prospects of, , , , , , –, –, –, , ,  Clark, Horace, – Clark, G. W., , 

Index

n



Clark, John B.,  Clay, Clement C., , , –, , , –, –, ,  (n. ) Clay, Henry, , , , , –, , , , , , , ; and Compromise of , , , – Clay, Virginia Clopton,  Clayton, Henry D.,  Clemens, Jeremiah, , –, , , –,  Clingman, Thomas L., –, –, ,  (n. ) Cobb, Howell, , , , –, , ,  Cobb, Thomas R. R., ,  (n. ) Cochran, John, , , , , , , , ,  Code of Honor,  Collier, Henry W., –, , ,  Colquitt, Walter T., ,  Columbia Sentinel,  Columbia Telegraph,  Columbus, Ga.,  Coman, Joshua P.,  Compromise of , –, , , , , , , –, , , , , , ,  Confederados,  Confederate States of America: census, ; and civil liberties, –; Congress, , ; and conscription, –, –, –; and diplomacy, , , ; and dissent, ; exemptions bill, – , –, –; martial law, ; and military impressment, –, –, ; provisional government, –, –, , , ; secret session, – , , , ; and states’ rights, , –, ; Supreme Court, ,  Congress, U.S., , , , –, . See also Slavery: in federal territories Constellation, USS, –, , ,  Constitution Union Party, –, –, 



n

Index

Cooper, James Fenimore,  Cooper, Thomas, ,  (n. ) Cooperationists, –, ,  Cooper Institute, ,  Coosa County, Ala., , , ,  Corinth, Ms.,  Cotton, , –, , , , , , –, , , , , ; in Alabama, ; and Southern foreign policy, , , , , –, –, –, –, , –, –, , – Cottrell, James L., – Cowley, first earl of (Henry Richard Charles Wellesley),  Craft, Ellen, ,  Craft, William, ,  Crawford, Joseph T.,  Crawford, Thomas,  Creek Indians, , , ,  Crittenden, John J.,  Crumpler, Albert,  Cuba, , , , , ,  Cubitt, Wiliam,  Cudworth, Abigail,  Cunningham, Ann Pamela,  Cunningham, John, ,  Cunningham, Louisa Bird, , , , , , , ,  Cunningham, Robert, , , , , , ,  Cunningham, S. A.,  Curry, Jabez L. M., , ,  Cushing, Caleb,  Dallas, George,  Dallas, George M., , –,  Dallas County, Ala., , , ,  Dare, Arthur, – David, Henry P.,  David, Milly,  Davis, Jefferson, , , , , , , –, , ; as Confederate commander-in-chief, , , , ;

and foreign affairs, –, , , ; opposition to, , , –; and Sarah Yancey, ; and William L. Yancey, , –, , , –, –, –, – Davis, John,  Davis, Joseph,  Dayton, William L., ,  De Bow, James D. B., –, , ,  De Bow’s Review, –, ,  Deas, Hamilton Franklin, – Deas, Zachariah,  Declaration of Independence, , – Declaration of Paris (),  Delano, Columbus,  Delany, Martin,  Delaware, , –,  De Leon, Edwin, , ,  Democratic Party, , , –, –, , –, –, –, , –, – , –, –, –, –, , –, –, –, –, – , , ; Convention of , , , , ; Convention of , , ; Conventions of , , –, , , , ; and Kansas-Nebraska, –,  Demopolis, Ala.,  Demosthenes, – Dexter, Andrew,  DeYampert, T. J.,  Diana (slave),  Dickson, Daniel S.,  Disunion. See Secession Dixon, James, , , ,  (n. ) Donelson, Andrew Jackson,  Doubleday, Abner,  Douglas, Stephan A., , , –, – , , –, –, –, –; and Compromise of , –; and Kansas-Nebraska, –, ; and Lecompton, –, ; as presidential candidate, –, –; and Yancey, , , , , , –

Douglass, Frederick,  Dowdell, James, , , ,  Doyle, Joseph C.,  Drayton, Daniel,  (n. ) Dred Scott case, , , , , – Du Bellet, Paul Pecquet, ,  DuBose, John Witherspoon, , , ,  (n. ),  (n. ) Dueling, , , , –, , –,  Durant, Thomas,  Earle, Elias, –, , –, , , ,  Earle, Elizabeth, , , , , – Earle, Robinson, –, , , –,  Earle, Washington,  Earnest, William S., – Edgefield, S.C., – Edgefield Advertiser,  Elections: of , , , –; of , –; of , –, , , , , – Elmore, Benjamin,  Elmore, Franklin H., , ,  (n. ) Elmore, John A., , , , , , , ; and Yancey, –, , , –, , – Elmore, John A. (general),  Elmore, Rush, , ,  Elmore, Susan, – Emancipation Proclamation, , ,  Emigrant Aid Societies, – Emmons, Ebenezer,  England. See Great Britain Erie Canal,  Erlanger, Emile: loan proposal,  Eufaula, Ala., , , , ,  Eufaula Democrat,  Eufaula Southern Shield,  Eufaula Spirit of the South, ,  Everett, Edward, –, ,  (n. ) Evins, Daniel,  Exchange Hotel, , , , , 

Index

n



Fambro, William W., , , ,  Faneuil Hall,  Fashion,  Faulkner State Community College,  Fearn, Walker, – Federalist Party, , , –, , , , , –,  Feminism, , . See also Women’s rights Figures, William B.,  Fillmore, Millard, , , , , , –, ,  (n. ) Finney, Charles G., ,  Fitzhugh, George,  Fitzpatrick, Benjamin, , , , , , –, ,  (n. ) Flahaut, Count Auguste Charles de,  Florida, , , , ,  Flush Times of Alabama and Mississippi,  Foote, Henry S., ,  Force bill,  Forrest, Nathan Bedford,  Forsyth, John, – Fort Barrancas,  Fort Morgan,  Fort Moultrie,  Fort Pickens, – Fort Pulaski,  Fort Sumter, –, ,  Fort Warren,  Foster, George,  Foster, W. E.,  Fox, Charles James,  France, , , , , – Franklin, Benjamin,  Franklin College,  Fraser, Trenholm & Company, , ,  Fredericksburg, Va.,  Free blacks, , , , ,  Free Soilers, , , –, , –, ,  Free Soil Party, , , ,  Frémont, John C., , , ,  Fugitive slaves, –, –, , , ,



n

Index

, , ; fugitive slave laws, , , , ,  Fuller, Margaret,  Fusion Party,  Gadsden, James,  Gag Rule, , –, , , ,  Gainesville Independent,  Gantt, Thomas F., , ,  Garrison, William Lloyd, , ,  Gayle, George W., , ,  Gayle, John,  George (slave),  Georgia, , , , , ,  Georgia Platform, , , , , ,  Georgia Telegraph,  Germany,  Gettysburg, battle of, ,  Giddings, Joshua, ,  Gilbert, John F.,  Gilchrist, James G.,  Gold Rush,  Goldthwaite, George, ,  (n. ) Goodin, John,  Gott, Daniel,  Gourdin, Henry,  (n. ) Grant, Ulysses S., , , , ,  Graves, William J., ,  Great Awakening,  Great Britain, , , , , , , , –; and antislavery, , , –, , , , –, –, , ; and Confederacy, –, , ; and cotton, –, –, , –,  (n. ) Greeley, Horace,  Greenville, S.C., , , , , , , , , , – Greenville Mountaineer, –, , , , ,  Gregory, William, –, –,  Griffin, Edward Dorr, ,  Guthrie, James, 

Haiti,  Hale, John P.,  Hall, Bolling,  Hall, Dixon, – Halleck, Henry W.,  Halstead, Murat, –, –,  Hamburg, S.C.,  Hamilton, Alexander, ,  Hamlin, Hannibal,  Hammond, James H., , ,  Hancock, John,  Hancock County, Ga., , , , , ,  ‘‘Hard Cider Campaign,’’  Harper, Robert Goodloe,  Harpers Ferry,  Harper’s Weekly,  Harrell, John B., , , , , , ,  Harrell, Mary Elizabeth, –, –, , , , , ,  Harris, Sampson W., , , , , , ,  (n. ) Harrison (slave),  Harrison, William H., , , –,  Harrowgate Springs, Ala., , ,  Harry of the West,  Hartford Convention, , , – Havana, Cuba,  Hayden, George B.,  Hayne, Isaac,  Helm, Charles J.,  Hendrix, J. M.,  Henrietta (slave),  Henry (slave),  Henry, Patrick, , , , ,  Hickman, Henry D.,  Hill, Benjamin H., –, –, – , –, , – Hilliard, Henry W., , –, , –, , –,  Hitler, Adolph,  Holmes, Theopholus,  Holtzclaw, James T., –,  Honor, , , –, –, , –, –

, –, –, –, , , –, , , , –, , , –, , , , –, , –, , , , , ,  Hooper, Johnson Jones, , –, , , ,  (n. ) Hopkins, Arthur Francis, ,  Hopkins, Mark,  Horse racing, ,  Horseshoe Bend, battle of,  Hot Springs, Ark., ,  Hotze, Henry,  Houston, George, , ,  Howe, Samuel Gridley,  Huger, Alfred, – Huger, Daniel E., , , , , ,  Huger, Daniel H.,  Huger, John M., – Hugers, John M.,  Hull, Isaac,  Humphreys, H. G.,  Hungerford, Orville,  Hunter, Robert M. T., , –, , , , ,  Huntsville, Ala.,  Huntsville Democrat, , ,  Huntsville Independent,  Huse, Caleb, , , , ,  Index (of London),  India,  Inge, Samuel, ,  (n. ) Internal improvements, , , , , , – Inzer, John,  Irving, Washington,  Jackson, Andrew, , , , , , , , , ,  Jackson, Thomas J., ,  Jacksonville (Ala.) Republican,  Jacksonville Sunny South,  James (slave),  Jane (slave), , , , 

Index

n



Jefferson, Thomas, –, , , , , ,  Jemison, Robert, , , –,  Joe (slave), ,  Johnson, Andrew, ,  (n. ) Johnston, Albert Sidney,  Jones, Charles Lee, ,  Jones, Henry,  Judge, Hilliard M.,  Judge, Thomas J., ,  (n. ) Kane, Elisha,  Kansas, –, –, –, , , , , , ; Topeka government, – Kansas-Nebraska Act, –, , , ,  Keitt, Laurence, , , , , , ,  Kennedy, John A., – Kennedy, Lewis,  Kenner, Duncan F.,  Kentucky, , ,  Ketchum, George A., – King, Horace,  King, Preston,  King, William R., , , , , –, –, ,  Know-Nothing Party, , –, –, –, , , ,  Knoxville, Tenn., , – Knoxville Whig,  Ku Klux Klan,  Kyle, William S.,  Laird, John,  Laird, William,  Laird Brothers,  Lamar, L. Q. C.,  Lane, Joseph, , –, , –,  Langdon, C. C.,  La Patrie,  La Vengeance, 



n

Index

League of United Southerners, –, , , , –, – Lebanon, Tenn.,  Lecompton, –, –, , ,  Lee, Henry,  Lee, Robert E., , ,  Lenox, Mass.,  Lenox Academy, ,  Leonard, Albert,  Lesesne, Joseph W., ,  Letcher, John,  Lewis, D. P.,  Lewis, Dixon Hall, –, , –, , –, , –, , –, , , , , , , –; as senator, , –; and Yancey, –, –, ,  Lewis, William,  Liberia,  (n. ) Libertator,  Liberty Party,  Lincoln, Abraham, , , , , , , , –, –, , –, , , , , , , , , , , , , –, –; and Emancipation Proclamation, , –, ; and Great Britain, –; Yancey on, –, –, –, – Lincoln, Mary Todd,  Lincoln, Trent,  Lindsay, William Shaw, – L’Insurgente, – Lipscomb, Andrew A., , ,  Liverpool, ,  Liverpool Southern Club,  Lodi, S.C., –,  London Morning News,  Louisiana, , ,  Louisiana Purchase, , ,  Louisiana Territory,  Louisville, Ky.,  Lovell, Mansfield,  Lowndes, William, , ,  Lowndes County, Ala.,  Lynn, Arthur T., 

Lyon, Chittendon,  Lyon, Matthew,  Lyons, Richard, –, , ,  López, Narciso,  MacDonald, Charles,  Macon, Ga., , –, ,  Macon Telegraph,  Madison, James, , , , ,  Magruder, James B., ,  (n. ) Mallory, Stephen R., ,  Manchester Southern Club,  Manifest Destiny, , , – Manly, Basil,  Mann, Ambrose Dudley, –, –, , –, , , , , – Mann, Horace,  Mann, William G.,  Manumission,  Marshall (slave), – Marshall, John,  Martin, Joshua L., – Martin, Stella J.,  Marx, Karl, ,  Mary (slave),  Mary Douglas (slave),  Maryland, ,  Mason, James M., , , , –,  Massachusetts,  Matthews, Joel E.,  Mays, Joseph,  Mays, Thomas,  McCalla, John,  McClellan, George B., , , –,  McDonald, C. J.,  McGowen, Samuel,  McKay Bill,  (n. ) McLung, James,  (n. ) Meadows, James D., ,  Meek, Alexander B., ,  Memminger, Christopher, , ,  Memphis, Tenn.,  Mercier, Henri, –, , – Mexican War, –, –, –, ,

, , ; and Mexican cession, ,  Mexico, –,  (n. ) Middlebury College, Vt.,  Miles, William P.,  Miller, William,  Mississippi, , , ,  Missouri, , ,  Missouri Compromise, , –, , , , , , , –, , , , , ,  Mitchell, William, ,  (n. ) Mobile, Ala., ,  Mobile Register, , , , ,  Mobile Tribune,  Molyneaux, Edmund,  Monroe, James,  Monroe, John,  Monroe, John & Company,  Montgomery, Ala., –, , –, , –, , , , ; city council, ; as Confederate capital, , , , –; Southern Rights Association, ; wartime, – Montgomery, Lemuel Purnell,  Montgomery Advertiser, , –, , , , –, , , , , –, –, , , , –, , ,  Montgomery Alabama Journal, ,  Montgomery Atlas, ,  Montgomery Commercial Convention (), –,  Montgomery Confederation, –, , , –,  Montgomery County, Ala., , , ,  Montgomery Mail, , ,  Montgomery True Blues, ,  Montgomery & West Point Railroad Company,  Montgomery Weekly Post,  Moore, Andrew, , , , –, , ,  Moore, Arthur, 

Index

n



Morengo Gazette,  Morgan, John Tyler, , , –, –,  Morgan, William S.,  Mormons,  Morny, Count de (Charles Louis Joseph),  Morris, H. N.,  Morris, William W., – Mt. Meigs, Ala.,  Mt. Zion Missionary, , , , , ,  Mount Vernon Ladies Association of the Union, –, ,  Mouton, Alexander,  Munford, George W.,  Mure, William,  Murfreesboro, Tenn.,  Nalle, Charles,  Napoleon III (emperor of France), –, , , ,  (n. ) Nashville, Tenn., –,  Nashville Convention, –, –, –,  Nashville Patriot,  Nashville True Whig,  Nashville Union,  Native Americans,  Nativism, –. See also Know-Nothing Party Nebraska,  Nebraska Bill,  New Mexico Territory, , , ,  New Orleans, La., , , , , , –, , –, , – New York, ; slavery in, – New York, N.Y., , –,  New York Daily Tribune,  New York Herald,  New York Tribune,  Nicaragua, , , –, , , ,  Noble, Patrick, , , ,  Norfolk, Va., 



n

Index

Norman, Felix G.,  North Carolina, , ,  Northington, William,  Northwest Ordinance,  Nullification, , , , , , , –, ; Nullification Crisis, , –,  Oakwood Cemetery, , , ,  Ohio,  Olmstead, Frederick Law, –, , ,  (n. ) O’Neal, John Benton,  Oregon Territory, , –, –, , , –, ,  Orr, James L., –,  Palfrey, John G.,  Palmerston, Henry John Temple, –, , , , – Panama,  Panic of , –, ,  Paris, France,  Parker, Theodore,  Paulding, Hiram, , ,  Payne, William W.,  Pegram, Robert B.,  Penal reform,  Peninsular campaign, – Penitentiaries, ; reform of, , , – Pensacola, Fla., , , , –,  People’s Party,  Perry, Benjamin F., , , , , –, , , , , ; and Yancey, , –, , , , –, , – Petigru, James Louis,  Petrie, George, , – (n. ),  (n. ) Phelan, James, , –, , –, ,  Phenix City, Ala.,  Philadelphia, Pa.,  Pickens, Francis W.,  Pierce, Franklin, –, , –, –, , , , , – Pinkerton, Alan, –

Point Clear, Ala.,  Polk, James K., , , , , , , , ,  Pope, John,  Popular sovereignty, , , , , , –, , – Posey, Sidney,  Pratt, Daniel,  Prattville, Ala.,  Prentiss, Samuel,  Preston, John,  Preston, William B.,  Prioleau, Charles L., – Pryor, Roger A., –, , –,  Public education,  Pugh, George E.,  Pugh, James L., , ,  Punch,  Quasi-War, –, ,  Quitman, John A., , , , –, , –,  (n. ) Raleigh, N.C.,  Randolph, George Wythe,  Randolph, John,  (n. ) Rayner, Kenneth, ,  Reagan, John H.,  Reconstruction,  Reid, Samuel G., – Rensselaer County, N.Y., – Rensselaer Polytechnic Institute,  Republican Party, –, , , – , , , , –, , , , –, , , –, –, , –; and Yancey, ,  Rhett, James,  (n. ) Rhett, Robert Barnwell, , , , , , , , , , , , , , , –, , –, , , ,  (n. ); and Yancey, , , , , , –, , – Rhett, Robert Barnwell, Jr., , , ,  (n. )

Rice, Samuel F., ,  Richardson, W. A.,  (n. ) Richmond, Va., ,  Richmond Dispatch,  Richmond Enquirer, , –,  Richmond Examiner,  Richmond South, – Richmond Whig,  Ritchie, Thomas, – Roebuck, John Arthur,  Roman, André B.,  Rose, Howell,  Rosseter, Nathan, – Rost, Pierre, , –, –, , –, , , , , – Royston, Young,  Ruffin, Edmund, , , –, , , , , , ,  Runaway slaves. See Fugitive slaves Russell, John, –, , , , , ; belligerent status of, –; and Charles F. Adams, –; and Trent affair, ; and Yancey, –, ,  Rynders, Isaiah,  Saffold, Benjamin F., – St. Thomas,  Samford, William F., , , –, –, , ,  Samford University,  Sanders, George N.,  Sanford, Thaddeus, , , , – San Francisco, Calif.,  San Jacinto, USS, – Saunders, Ethelbert,  Saunders, James E., , , ,  Saunders, Romulus M.,  Savannah, Ga.,  Sayre, Nathan,  Sayres, Edward,  (n. ) Schultz, Henry,  Scott, Dred,  Scott, Winfield, , , ,  Seabrook, Whitemarsh, 

Index

n



Secession, –, –, , , , , , –, –, –, , –, –, , –, –, , –, –, –, –, , –, –,  Seddon, James A., , – Sedition Act (),  Seibels, John J., , , , , , – , , –, –, , ; attacked by Ben Yancey, – Selma Free Press,  Selma Sentinel,  Seminole War, ,  Seneca Falls Convention (),  Sequoyah,  Serrano, Francisco, – Seward, Frederick W., – Seward, William H., , , , , , , , ; as secretary of state, –, –, , –, –, ,  Sherman, William Tecumseh,  Shields, Benjamin, –,  Shields, James,  Shiloh, battle of, – Shoals of the Ogeechee,  Shorter, Eli,  Shorter, George H.,  Shorter, John Gill, , , , , , , , –,  (n. ) Simms, William E., –,  Simms, William Gilmore,  ‘‘Simon Suggs.’’ See Hooper, Johnson Jones Slaughter, James S., , , ; and Slaughter letter, –, , –, ,  Slavery, , –, , , , , , ; in California, ; expansion of, –, , –, , , , , – , , , , , , –, , , , ; in federal territories, , –, –, , , , –, – , , –, , , , , , , –, , –, ; in North, –; and slave trade, , , , ,



n

Index

–, –, ; in Washington, D.C., ; and whites’ liberty, , , , –, , –, , –, , , , –, , . See also Fugitive slaves Slidell, John, , , , , –, ,  Smith, Gerrit,  Smith, Morgan,  Smith, Robert H.,  Smith, William R., –, ,  (n. ) South Carolina, , , , , , , , , ; secession of, – South Carolina College,  South Carolina Telegraph,  Southern Address (Calhoun, ), – Southern Commercial Conventions, ; Montgomery Convention (), – , ; Vicksburg Convention (), ,  Southern Crisis, – Southern Democratic Convention, , ,  Southern Rights Associations, –, –, –,  Southern Rights Convention (), – ,  Southern Rights Party (), – Spain, ,  Sparta, Ga., ,  Spratt, Leonidus, ,  ‘‘Squatter sovereignty,’’ –,  Star of the West, ,  State Gazette (Alabama), ,  State sovereignty, , , –, , –, – States’ rights, –, , , , , ,  Stennett, Samuel,  Stephens, Alexander H., –, , , , , , , ,  Stoeckle, Baron Edward de,  Stone, C. S., – Stone, Nancy Earle, 

Stowe, Harriett Beecher, ,  Sturgis, Russell,  Sugar, ,  Sumner, Charles, , –, ,  Sumner-Brooks affair,  Supreme Court, U.S., , , , ,  Syracuse, N.Y.,  Talledega Springs, Ala.,  Talledega Watchtower,  Tamany Hall,  Taney, Roger B.,  Tariffs, , , , , , –, –, , ; tariff of , –; tariff of , ; tariff of , –; Walker Tariff (), , –,  (n. ) Taylor, George,  Taylor, John,  Taylor, Richard, – Taylor, Zachary, , , , , –, –, –, , ,  Tazewell, Littleton W., –, ,  Temperance, ,  Temple, Henry John,  Tennessee, , –,  Territorial expansion, , , –, –, , , , –, –, –, – , , , , , , , –, , –,  Terry, Nathaniel,  Test oath, ,  Texas, –, , , , , –, , , , , ; annexation of, –, –, , , , ,  (n. ) Thomas, John H.,  Thompson, George,  Thompson, Jacob,  Thompson, Waddy,  Thompson, William,  Thornton, J. Mills,  Thouvenel, Antoine Edouard, , , – Three-fifth’s compromise, , , , 

Times (of London), , – Toombs, Robert, , , –, , –, ,  (n. ),  (n. ); as Confederate secretary of state, –, –, ,  Townes, Sam, – Transcendentalism,  Transcontinental railroad, – Treaty of Guadalupe Hidalgo, – Trenholm, George A.,  Trent affair, – Trescott, William Henry, ,  Troup, George M., , , , – Troy, N.Y., , –, , , , ,  Troy Whig, , , – Truxtun, Thomas, –,  Tucker, Nathaniel B.,  Turner (slave),  Tuscaloosa, Ala., , , ,  Tuskegee True Union, ,  Twenty-First rule. See Gag Rule Tyler, John, , , ,  Tyler, Robert,  Uncle Tom’s Cabin, , ,  Underwood, Joseph P.,  (n. ) Union Confiscation Act,  United States Military Academy,  University of Alabama, –, , –, –, , , , – University of Georgia, , , , , ,  Utah, – Van Buren, Martin, , , –; as Free Soiler, , , ,  Vance, Zebulon,  Vermont,  Vicksburg, Miss., , –,  Victoria (queen of England), ,  Virginia, –, , , , , , , , –, , ,  Virginia and Kentucky resolutions, –, 

Index

n



Walker, Leroy Pope, , , –, , , , ,  (n. ) Walker, Percy, ,  Walker, Robert J., –, ,  Walker, William, , , –, , , ; and Yancey, ,  Wallace, George, – Walshe, John T.,  Wardlaw, David,  Waring, Robert P.,  Warm Springs, Ga.,  War of , , , , –, , –, ,  Warren, J. W.,  Washington, Booker T.,  Washington, D.C., , , , , , , , , , , , ; slavery in, , ,  Washington, George, , , , –, , , , , , ,  Washington Daily Union,  Washington Monument,  Washington National Intelligencer, , ,  Washington States and Mail,  Washington Territory,  Watervleit, N.Y., ,  Watrous, Daniel,  Watterson, H. M.,  Watts, Thomas H., , , , –, , , , , , , , –, , , , , ,  Webster, Daniel, , –, , , , ,  (nn. , ),  (n. ) Webster-Ashburton Treaty,  Weed, Thurlow,  Weld, Theodore Dwight,  Wells, O. H.,  West Point, Ga.,  Wetumpka, Ala., , –, , , , , , –,  Wetumpka Argus and Commercial Advertiser, –, , , , –, , ,  Wetumpka Courier, ,  Wetumpka Southern Crisis, , 



n

Index

Wetumpka State Guard, ,  Whatley, G. C., – Whig Party, –, –, , , , , , , , ; and Mexican War, ; and Kansas-Nebraska, ; and Know-Nothing Party, – White, George O.,  Whitney, Asa,  Wide Awake (schooner),  Wide-Awakes, –,  Wigfall, Louis T., , , , –, , , , –, ,  Wilkes, Charles, – William Lowndes Yancey Community College,  Williams, James,  Williams, James (slave), , – (n. ) Williams, Joseph,  (n. ) Williams, Thomas,  Williamsburg, Va.,  Williams College, , –, , ; and Adelphi, –; and Williams AntiSlavery Society,  Williams College Adelphi, – Williamstown, Mass.,  Wilmington, Del., – Wilmot, David, –, , ,  (n. ),  (n. ) Wilmot Proviso, –, , , , , , , ,  Wilson, Mary,  Winston, John A., , , , , , , ,  (n. ) Winthrop, Robert,  (n. ) Wirz, Henry,  Wise, Henry, –, , , – Withers, Jones M.,  Witner, Joseph,  Woman in the Nineteenth Century,  Women’s rights, –, . See also Feminism Wood, Fernando,  Woodbury, Charles,  Woodbury, Levi, , –, –, , 

Worshipful Company of Fishmongers, – Wray, Philip Augustus,  Yancey, Benjamin Cudworth (father), – , , , , , , , –, , , –,  (n. ) Yancey, Benjamin Cudworth, Jr. (brother), , , , , , , , –, –, , , , , –, –, –, , –, –, , , , , , –; in Alabama, , –; in Atlanta, , –; during Civil War, , ,  (n. ); as diplomat, , , , –; as editor, –, , ; and honor, –, , –; as lawyer, –, , , , , , ; as planter, –, ; as politician, , , ,  Yancey, Benjamin Cunningham (son), , , , , , –, ; attacks Seibels, –; as lawyer, , ; in Brazil, –; during Civil War, ,  Yancey, Caroline (niece), ,  Yancey, Charles, – Yancey, Dalton Huger (son), , –, , , , –; in Civil War, , –,  Yancey, Ella Bird (daughter), ,  Yancey, George Earle (son), ,  Yancey, Goodloe Harper (son), , –, , , , ; in Civil War,  Yancey, Hamilton,  Yancey, Henry,  Yancey, James,  Yancey, Laura Hines, – Yancey, Leighton,  Yancey, Lewis Davis,  Yancey, Mary Elizabeth (daughter). See Harrell, Mary Elizabeth Yancey, Mary Louisa,  Yancey, Richard,  Yancey, Robert, ,  Yancey, Sarah Earle (wife), –, , ,

–, , , , , –, –, , , , , , –, –, ,  (n. ); and Caroline Beman, , –; during Civil War, –, ; criticizes Davis, ; and honor, , ; on secession,  Yancey, Sarah Hamilton,  Yancey, William Earle (son), , , , , , , , ; during Civil War, –, ,  Yancey, William Lowndes: ancestry of, –; and Caroline Beman (mother), , , , –; childhood of, –, , , , –, , –, , ; in college, –; daily life of, ; death of, – ; family of, , –, –, , , –, , , , ; health of, – , , , , –; home of, –; horses of, , , , ; marriage of, – ; and Nathan Beman (stepfather), –, –, –, , , , , , , , –, , , , , , ; oratory of, , , , , , –, , , , , –, , –, , – , ; in prison, –; restlessness of, , –, ; and Samuel Beman, , , –, , ; self-esteem of, , , , , ; social life of, –, , – —career: and Alabama assembly, –; and Alabama Platform, –; and Alabama secession convention, –; as alderman, , ; and Congress, , –; as delegate to Democratic Convention (), –, ; as delegate to Democratic Conventions (), , –, –, ; as editor, –, –, , –, –, , , , – , , , , ; as farmer, , , , –, , , , , , ,  (n. ); as lawyer, , , , , , , , , , , , , –, , – , ; and League of United Southerners, –, , , , –,

Index

n



–; and Montgomery Commercial Convention (), –; and speaking tour of , –; and test oath controversy, –; as unionist, –, –, , ,  —and Confederate States of America: and civil liberties, –, ; and conscription, , –; and Davis cabinet, –; and presidency, ; and provisional government, ; and diplomatic commission, –, –, –, –, –, –, , –; and exemptions bill, , –, –, –; and generals, –; and impressment bill, –, –, ; and secret sessions, –, –; and Senate, , , –, –; and Supreme Court, – —observations: on Abraham Lincoln, – , –, –, –; on Braxton Bragg, –; on Charles Sumner, ; on Franklin Pierce, –, –, ; on Frederick Law Olmstead, –, ; on George Troup, –; on Henry Wise, ; on John C. Breckinridge, – , –; on Lewis Cass, –; on Martin Van Buren, –; on William H. Harrison, , –, , ; on William H. Seward, ; on Zachary Taylor, – —personal attitudes: on civil war, , ; on cotton, , , , , ; on England, , ; on dueling, ; on honor, , –, , –, , –, , , –, –, , –, –, , , , –, , , ; on North, –, –, –, , , –, –, , –, , , ; on reform, , , –, , ; on religion, , , –, , , , , , –, ; on South, , – —political positions: on African slave trade, , , –, , , , ; on



n

Index

banks, –, –, –, ; on civil liberties, –, ; on Compromise of , , , ; on Constitution Union Party, ; on Cooperationists, –, ; on Democratic Party, , , –, –, , –, –, , , –, –, –, –, – , , –, , , –; on free blacks, ; on internal improvements, , , , , , , , ; on Kansas, , , , ; on Kansas-Nebraska Act, ; on Know-Nothing Party, , –, –, –, ; on League of United Southerners, –, , , , –, –; on majority rule, ; on Mexican War, , , –; on Missouri Compromise, , , ; on nullification, –, , , , , – ; on Oregon, , –, –, ; on partisanship, , , –, , –, –, –, , , , –, – , , , , , ; on Republican Party, , , , –, , , , ; on secession (advocating), – , , –, , –, , –, –, , –, –, –, – , , , –, ; on secession (opposing), –, , , , ; on Southern Party, –; on state banks, , , ; on state sovereignty, , , –, , –, –; on states’ rights, , , , , , ; on tariffs, , , , , , –, ; on Texas annexation, –, ; on Whigs, –, , , , ; on Wilmot Proviso, ; on women’s rights, –, ,  —relationships: with Alexander H. Stephens, –; with Benjamin F. Perry, , , , , –; with Benjamin Hill, –, –, – , –; with C. S. Stone, –; with Daniel Webster, , –; with Dixon H. Lewis, –, –, –, –, , ; with Edmund Ruffin,

, –; with Elias Earle, –, –; with James Buchanan, –, –, , , ; with James Phelan, –, ; with Jefferson Davis, , –, , , , –, –, , –, , –; with Jeremiah Clemens, –; with Jesse Beene, , –, ; with John A. Elmore, –, , , –; with John A. Winston, –; with John C. Calhoun, , – , –, , , , –, , –, –, , ; with John Campbell, –, , ; with John J. Seibels, , , –; with John Quincy Adams, , , , ; with John Russell, , –, –, ; with Judah P. Benjamin, ; with Henry Clay, – , , –, , ; with Henry W. Hilliard, , , –, –; with Henry Wise, ; with Levi Woodbury, , , –; with Robert Barnwell Rhett, , , , , , , – ; with Roger Pryor, , –; with Slaughter, James S., –; with Stephen A. Douglas, , , –, , , , –, , –; with

Thomas L. Clingman, –, ; with William Brownlow, –; with William E. Simms, –; with William F. Samford, –; with William Gregory, –, –; with William Walker, , ,  —and slavery: defends slavery, –, , , , , , , , , –, – ; and poisoning of slaves, , ; on slave expansion, , , , –, ; as slaveholder, , , , –, , –, , , –, –, –, –, ; in territories, , –, –, , , , –, –, – , –, , , , , , , –, , –,  —violent confrontations: with Alexander H. Stephens, –; with Benjamin Hill, –; with C. S. Stone, –; with Elias Earle, –, –; with Robinson Earle, –, , –; with Thomas L. Clingman, –, ; with William Brownlow, – Yelverton, G. T.,  Yorktown, Va.,  Yulee, David, 

Index

n

