Secessionist
When South Carolina passed (1852) an ordinance that merely declared a state's right to secede, Rhett resigned his U.S. Senate seat. He continued to express his fiery secessionist sentiments through the Charleston Mercury, edited by his son, Robert Barnwell Rhett, Jr.
During the 1860 presidential campaign, a widely credited report in the Nashville Patriot said that Rhett, along with William Lowndes Yancey and William Porcher Miles, was a leader of a Southern conspiracy to end the Union that began in May 1858 with a plan, hatched at the Southern Convention in Montgomery, Alabama, in May 1858, to split the Democratic Party along Northern and Southern lines.
Rhett was a member of the South Carolina Secession Convention in 1860. In the Montgomery Convention which met to organize a provisional government for the seceding states, he was one of the most active delegates and was chairman of the committee which reported the Confederate Constitution.
Subsequently he was elected a member of the lower house of the Confederate Congress. He received no higher office in the Confederate government and returned to South Carolina, where he sharply criticized the policies of Confederate President Jefferson Davis of Mississippi.
After the end of the War, he settled in Louisiana. While it was rumored that he was a delegate to the Democratic National Convention in 1868, that was in fact his son, Robert Rhett, Jr., who had shared his father's editorship responsibilities.
Rhett died in St. James Parish near New Orleans. He is buried in Magnolia Cemetery in Charleston, South Carolina.
The Robert Barnwell Rhett House was declared to be a National Historic Landmark in 1973.
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