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six “Lance couched, helmet on, and visor down” Long before Keitt took his seat in the House of Representatives for the first time, southerners had drawn the outlines of the pro-slavery argument and filled in most of the details. Reacting in part to internal pressures, in part to the first feeble attacks of the abolitionists, they had discarded the defense employed by the founding fathers who admitted that the institution was a blot on southern society but insisted it could not be safely expunged. The founding fathers, they concluded, had been badly mistaken. Slavery was not “a necessary evil”; it was a “positive good.”1 Keitt arrived in Washington just as the defense of slavery was taking a new and far more militant turn. No longer satisfied simply to parry abolitionist thrusts, men like George Fitzhugh and William J. Grayson were transforming the southern defense of slavery into an all-out assault on northern society. To this ideological transformation, Keitt contributed nothing at all. But from his seat in the House, he dinned into the ears of a captive audience—congressmen, newspaper reporters, spectators—the ideas of Grayson and Fitzhugh as well as those of more traditional apologists like Thomas R. Dew, William Gilmore Simms, William Harper, Thornton Stringfellow, James H. Thornwell, and many others . Without Keitt and fire-eaters like him, their ideas could not have circulated as widely either inside or outside the South. With his assistance, they achieved widespread notoriety.2 Keitt’s efforts to justify the peculiar institution frequently inspired visitors to the House to record their impressions of his fiery rhetoric and exaggerated behavior. One of the most colorful accounts is a description of a speech entitled “Southern Resources” that he delivered on January 15, 1857: south carolina fire-eater 88 Col. K. appears quite young, not more, we should think, than thirty, and has a strikingly bouyant [sic], frank, and independent expression. His fiery and impetuous temperament is evident in his whole deportment, and even in the aspect of his desk, which generally presents a wilderness of papers, envelopes, pamphlets, etc. dispersed in all directions like people in a panic. Col. K. commenced his speech in a low and rather indistinct tone, and it was not till he had spoken for several minutes that his powerful voice began to expand. . . . But when he came to allude to the constant agitation of the slavery question in which the Republican Party indulged, all the bitterness of his nature poured forth. With a remorseless hand, he stripped off the disguises of that party, and treated them as executioners might treat culprits bound to the wheel. . . . One moment he dived, with an actual bodily diving, down into the abyss of his subject, to fish up an argument, then nailed the argument with such reprehensive thumps upon the innocent mahogany before him, until the articles upon it had a really tremendous motion. The loose papers seemed to have the palsy; the ink kept up a chilly chattering in its stand; one paper (the Mercury) incessantly nodded; another (the Courier) as if in contradiction, incessantly shook its head; dear old John Adam’s [sic] extracts shuddered under the blows as if they were hurt; a little box of Paris pens danced like volatile Frenchmen. Only the slender sticks of English sealing wax stood firm. . . . [Keitt’s] rapid and fervent manner had a riveting interest. His appearance of feeling too, was irresistible. In a knowledge of whatever subject he undertakes, and a facility of developing it in imposing language, this gentleman need not shrink from a comparison with a single contemporary rival in the House.3 Keitt rarely wasted an opportunity to warn an audience against the menace of abolition. Twenty years ago, it had been only a tiny cloud on the horizon no bigger than a man’s hand; now it darkened the entire sky. Twenty years ago, it had been born “amid jeers, contempt and scorn,” but “nursed in the haunts of obscurity . . . fattened upon the offals of the shambles, and the garbage of the gutter,” it had waxed “corpulent and audacious.” Twenty years ago, men had broken up its meetings, dishonored its leaders, and trampled its petitions under foot, but it refused to die. It subverted churches and schools, tore down old political parties, and raised up out of their ruins a new party “atrocious in its purpose, furious in its energy and unsparing in its vengeance.” Now it controlled the governments of ten states, occupied every...

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