William Lowndes Yancey - Road To Secession

Road To Secession

Yancey continued to support the most radical Southern positions and is generally included as one of a group of southerners referred to as "fire-eaters." Historian Emory Thomas notes that Yancey, along with Edmund Ruffin and Robert Barnwell Rhett, "remained in the secessionist forefront longest and loudest." Thomas characterized the whole fire-eater cause as reactionary in purpose (the preservation of the South as it then existed), but revolutionary in means (the rejection of the existing political order).

When the conflicts in Kansas Territory known as Bleeding Kansas erupted in 1855–1856, Yancey spoke publicly in support of Jefferson Buford’s efforts to raise 300 men to go to Kansas and fight for Southern interests. In 1856, Yancey was head of the platform committee for the state Democratic and Anti–Know Nothing Convention, and he succeeded in having the convention readopt the Alabama Platform. In June 1856, he participated in a rally condemning Charles Sumner while praising his assailant Preston Brooks, who nearly bludgeoned Sumner to death in the United States Senate Chamber. In June 1857, Yancey spoke at a rally opposing Robert J. Walker's actions as territorial governor of Kansas, and in January 1858, he participated in a rally supporting William Walker, the famous Nicaragua filibuster, calling the "Central American enterprise as the cause of the South."

Throughout the mid-1850s, he also lectured on behalf of the Mount Vernon Ladies Association of the Union, an organization that eventually purchased and restored Mount Vernon from John A. Washington in 1858. Yancey helped to raise $75,000 for this project.

Editor and fellow fire-eater James DeBow was a leader in establishing the Southern Commercial Conventions in the 1850s. At the 1857 meeting in Knoxville, DeBow had called for a reopening of the international slave trade. At the May 1858 convention in Montgomery, responding to a speech by Virginian Roger A. Pryor opposing the slave trade, Yancey, in an address that spanned several days, made the following points:

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?

Let us then wipe from our statute book this mark of Cain which our enemies have placed there.

We want negroes cheap, and we want a sufficiency of them, so as to supply the cotton demand of the whole world.

Yancey supported a plan originated by Edmund Ruffin for the creation of a League of United Southerners as an alternative to the national political parties. In a June 16, 1858 letter to his friend James S. Slaughter that was publicly circulated (Horace Greeley referred to it as "The Scarlet Letter"), Yancey wrote:

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 of 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.

Yancey was ill for much of the remainder of 1858 and early 1859. For the 1859 Southern Commercial Convention in Vicksburg, which passed the resolution to repeal all state and federal regulations banning the slave trade, Yancey could only contribute editorials, although by July 1859 he was able to speak publicly in Columbia, South Carolina, in favor of repealing the restrictions. When the Alabama Democratic Party organized in the winter of 1859-1860 for the upcoming national convention, they chose Yancey to lead them on the basis of the Alabama Platform. Both Stephen A. Douglas and popular sovereignty were the immediate targets, but by then Yancey also recognized that secession would be necessary if a "Black Republican" were to gain the White House.