William Lowndes Yancey - Spreading The Pro-slavery Message

Spreading The Pro-slavery Message

After twelve years' absence from the national conventions of the Democratic Party, Yancey attended the Charleston convention in April 1860. The Douglas faction refused to accept a platform, modeled after Yancey’s Alabama Platform of 1848, committed to protecting slavery in the territories. When the platform committee presented such a proposal to the convention, it was voted down on the floor by a 165–138 vote. Yancey and the Alabama delegation left the hall and were followed by the delegates of Mississippi, Louisiana, South Carolina, Florida, Texas, and two of the three delegates from Delaware. On the next day, the Georgia delegation and a majority of the Arkansas delegation withdrew. As Eric Walther states, "Through his years of preparation and despite some brief wavering, William L. Yancey had finally destroyed the Democratic Party."

Failing to nominate a candidate, the convention adjourned and reconvened in Baltimore on June 18, 1860. In a last gasp effort to obtain party unity, Douglas supporter George N. Sanders made an unauthorized offer to Yancey to run as vice-president. Yancey turned this down, and the entire Yancey delegation from Alabama was refused credentials in favor of a pro–Douglas slate headed by John Forsyth. With the South Carolina delegation also being denied credentials, the Louisiana, Virginia, North Carolina, and Tennessee delegations left the convention. The Southern representatives reconvened in Baltimore on June 23 and adopted the Yancey platform from the Charleston convention and nominated John C. Breckinridge for president. In a speech before the convention, Yancey characterized the Douglas supporters as "ostrich like — their head was in the sand of squatter sovereignty, and they did not know their great, ugly, ragged abolition body was exposed". Yancey, who had already made thirty public addresses in 1860, delivered twenty more during the campaign. If he had not been before, he was certainly now a national figure — a figure making it clear that secession would follow anything other than a Breckinridge election.

Yancey’s speaking tour in favor of Breckinridge was not confined to the South. In Wilmington, Delaware, Yancey stated, "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."

On October 10, 1860, at Cooper Institute Hall in New York Yancey advised Northerners interested in preserving the Union to "Enlarge your jails and penitentiaries, re-enforce and strengthen your police force, and keep the irrepressible conflict fellows from stealing our negroes…" Yancey cited southern fears that with abolitionists in power, "Emissaries will percolate between master slave as water between the crevices of rocks underground. They will be found everywhere, with strychnine to put in our wells." He further warned the crowd that Republican agitation would make Southern whites "the enemies of that race until we drench our fields with the blood of the unfortunate people."

At Faneuil Hall in Boston, Yancey defended the practices of slavery:

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.

From Boston, Yancey’s tour included stops in Albany, Syracuse, Florence (Kentucky), Louisville, Nashville, and New Orleans, finally returning to Montgomery on November 5. When news of Lincoln’s election reached the city, Yancey rhetorically asked a public assemblage protesting the results, "Shall we remain and all be slaves? Shall we wait to bear our share of the common dishonor? God forbid!"