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three “He who dallies is a dastard” At least as early as the fall of 1855, South Carolina politicians began to look ahead to the presidential elections of the following year. Speaking for the state’s moderate minority, James L. Orr proposed that it take the novel step of sending delegates to the Democratic nominating convention. During the nullification controversy more than twenty years earlier, South Carolina had cut its ties to both national parties and had never reestablished them. Twice it had intentionally thrown away its electoral votes by casting them for men who had no chance of winning the presidency, John Floyd of Virginia in 1832 and Willie P. Mangum of North Carolina in 1836. Not since the Jacksonians had held the first nominating convention in 1832 had it sent an official delegation to a convention held by any party.1 Orr’s arguments in favor of rejoining the national Democrats should have been persuasive. The state should support northern friends of the South; it should work to unify the South inside the party; it should press the party to adopt policies that would benefit the South. The proposal gained support, particularly in the up country, and by early spring, led by moderates like Orr and Benjamin F. Perry of Greenville, twenty-three of the state’s twenty-nine districts had organized public meetings and elected delegates to a state Democratic convention scheduled for May 5 in Columbia.2 South Carolina radicals failed to agree on how best to react. In Fairfield District politicians tried to organize a new party to nominate a southern man with southern principles to run for the presidency. The idea quickly died. Like many of his radical friends—William W. Boyce, John McQueen, Robert Barnwell Rhett—Keitt was sympathetic, but like his friends, he was deeply suspicious of all political parties; they knew that southerners were as likely as anybody else south carolina fire-eater 40 to abandon principles for patronage. As a result, the movement to form a new southern rights party died before it was fairly launched.3 The radicals had more success attacking the convention movement head-on. Speaking at Barnwell Court House on October 15, Keitt defended the political course the state had pursued for almost a quarter-century and insisted it was the best possible course for the future. What, Keitt asked, could South Carolina gain by attending the Democratic convention or participating in national politics? The state generally acted with the Democrats, but it must remain free to support the party when it was right and oppose it when it was wrong. The state might acquiesce in compromise measures like the 1852 platform that defended squatter sovereignty, but it must never endorse them. If the state participated in selecting Democratic candidates or writing Democratic platforms, it would be morally obliged to support and defend them, even if they compromised southern interests . The northern wing of the party was uncompromisingly hostile to the extension of slavery into the territories. The president was true to the Constitution and the South, but the party could not be trusted to withstand the onslaught of abolitionism or the lure of patronage. The state must not gamble with its future by tying itself to the Democratic Party; it must remain loyal to the legacy of John C. Calhoun. Since the birth of the republic, Keitt said, South Carolina had jealously guarded its independence from national politics. As a result, it had exercised far greater influence than its wealth and population could justify. From the beginning its leaders had resisted the temptations of power and patronage held out by the national parties and had loyally served the interests of the South. But no leader could successfully defend his moral purity if the state insisted on tying him to the Democratic Party’s northern rabble or dragging him into the cesspool of party politics. The state must stand fast in its ancient faith; it must not sacrifice its principles to win a place in the councils of the Democrats.4 The editor of the Orangeburg Southron congratulated Keitt for handling an important subject with great ability. It was gratifying, he wrote, to find its young representative rising above the temptations held out by national politics and exhibiting a conservatism worthy of imitation by his older colleagues. The Charleston Mercury also praised the speech, calling it “condensed, clear, and comprehensive ,” and set off a brief but noisy debate with two up-country journals— the Abbeville Independent...

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