William Lowndes Yancey and the Coming of the Civil War

Eric H. Walther

• Publisher: The University of North Carolina Press
• Year: 2006
• Print ISBN: 9781469628424, 9780807830277
• eBook ISBN: 9780807877340
• Topic: History
• Subtopic: Historical Biographies
• Index: History

IWilliam Lowndes Yancey (1814–63) was one of the leading secessionists of the Old South. In this first comprehensive biography, Eric H. Walther examines the personality and political life of the uncompromising fire-eater.

Born in Georgia but raised in the North by a fiercely abolitionist stepfather and an emotionally unstable mother, Yancey grew up believing that abolitionists were cruel, meddling, and hypocritical. His personal journey led him through a series of mentors who transformed his political views, and upon moving to frontier Alabama in his twenties, Yancey’s penchant for rhetorical and physical violence was soon channeled into a crusade to protect slaveholders' rights.

Yancey defied Northern Democrats at their national nominating convention in 1860, rending the party and setting the stage for secession after the election of Abraham Lincoln. Selected to introduce Jefferson Davis in Montgomery as the president-elect of the Confederacy, Yancey also served the Confederacy as a diplomat and a senator before his death in 1863, just short of his forty-ninth birthday.

More than a portrait of an influential political figure before and during the Civil War, this study also presents a nuanced look at the roots of Southern honor, violence, and understandings of manhood as they developed in the nineteenth century.

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 10, 1814, at a nearby plantation owned by William Bird. Bird, a Revolutionary War veteran, had moved to Georgia in 1796 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 8, 1808, 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 1810 to 1813 and Charleston from 1816 to 1817. He chaired the House Judiciary Committee and acted as military aide to Governor Joseph Alston during the War of 1812. In 1814, 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 1817, 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 26, 1817, 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 USSConstellation during the Quasi-War 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 320. Truxtun and his ship would score two remarkable victories in engagements with the French. The first came on February 9, 1799, 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 captain 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 1, 1800, 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 fifty-four 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 twenty-eight 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 1801 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 (1782–1822) 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 1860 and trained aboard the USSConstitution, 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

Nathan Beman was born November 26, 1785, 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 1845. 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 1798 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 1803, 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 1807 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 1809.¹¹

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 and Britain from 1807 to 1809 during the Napoleonic Wars, and against American participation in the War of 1812. Although Beman would live until 1871, during the early 1810s 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 1811 and returned there the next year to recover from tuberculosis. This “visit” lasted ten years. It was in 1812 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 1819, 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 3, 1821, at the Aviary.¹⁴ Six-year-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 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 slave-holding 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 1818 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 1821, “between one and two millions of SLAVES, 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 1821, 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

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...

Table of contents

• Cover Page
• WILLIAM LOWNDES YANCEY AND THE COMING OF THE CIVIL WAR
• Copyright Page
• Dedication
• CONTENTS
• ACKNOWLEDGMENTS
• INTRODUCTION
• CHAPTER ONE Jordan's Stormy Banks
• CHAPTER TWO Rebellion and Union
• CHAPTER THREE Flush Times and Bad Times in Alabama and South Carolina
• CHAPTER FOUR Politician
• CHAPTER FIVE Party and Honor
• CHAPTER SIX The Alabama Platform
• CHAPTER SEVEN Secessionist
• CHAPTER EIGHT Creating the “Leaven of Disunion”
• CHAPTER NINE Public Man, Private Life
• CHAPTER TEN Yancey and the House Divided
• CHAPTER ELEVEN Walker and Walker, the League and the Letter
• CHAPTER TWELVE The Conventions of 1860
• CHAPTER THIRTEEN The Voice of the South
• CHAPTER FOURTEEN The Men and the Hours
• CHAPTER FIFTEEN In King Arthur's Court
• CHAPTER SIXTEEN Journeys Home
• CHAPTER SEVENTEEN The Main Pillar of the Confederacy
• LEGACY
• NOTES
• BIBLIOGRAPHY
• INDEX