William Lowndes Yancey and the Coming of the Civil War (review)

"The man and the hour have met" (295). The silver-tongued William Lowndes Yancey thus greeted Jefferson Davis in Montgomery, Alabama. It was February 1861, and Davis had just arrived to lead the Confederate States of America. Yancey bore considerable responsibility for this denouement. Until now, however, "the prince of the Fire-eaters" has lacked a modern biography (239).

Yancey was both gifted and troubled. A culture that assigned high value to oratory prized his speaking ability. Yancey discovered when still young that he possessed a "magnetic power" to sway audiences (150). Unfortunately, the speaker suffered from "low self-esteem" and became addicted to the plaudits of the crowd (25). Yancey lacked key attributes of leadership. Always inclined to tear down rather than build, he had only a desultory commitment to public life. He quickly tired of seats in the Alabama legislature and Congress. Yancey all too often used words to wound, and a prickly sense of honor frequently embroiled him in dangerous scrapes. He once served a three-month prison term after murdering a relative by marriage.

Eric Walther attributes Yancey's behavior to a difficult childhood. His widowed mother Caroline was "emotionally unstable" (2). She remarried Rev. Nathan Beman, a demanding Yankee disciplinarian, who moved the family from Georgia to Troy, New York, and soon became a "fiery abolitionist" (2). Beman placed his hot-blooded Southern stepson under explosively contradictory pressures. Yancey hated his stepfather, who routinely abused both him and his mother. At the same time, however, Yancey modeled Beman's speaking style. Having spent his adolescent years in upstate New York and New England—Yancey studied at Williams College from 1830 to 1833—the future Fire-eater knew well the social order that most other Southerners disliked only from a distance. Some reform ideas remained part of Yancey's outlook when he returned south, notably an enthusiasm for women's rights, but in most other ways he rejected the North. He also spent the rest of his life rebelling against paternal authority. He embraced and then rejected or outgrew other father figures and did what he could to undermine the political status quo.

Walther's portrayal of Yancey thus depicts in psychological terms the growing estrangement between the late antebellum South and the free states. The book dovetails with Christopher Olsen's stimulating assessment of ordinary white Mississippians, who tended to take at face value the demons that Yancey and lesser orators called to their attention (Political Culture and Secession in Mississippi: Masculinity, Honor, and the Antiparty Tradition, 1830-1860 [Oxford University Press, 2000]). A pathological touchiness to perceived insult is one of the keys to understanding the deep South's compulsion to commit collective suicide, but it is not the whole story.

Yancey willfully destroyed the Democratic party, through which the Old South long exercised outsized influence in the Union. Walther shows the extent of his boneheaded treachery. For at least a decade before the final crisis, Yancey imagined that the Old South stood at the same crossroads as had the American colonies in 1774–76 and that it should act accordingly. In 1860 he pretended to favor a "Constitutional Union," yet he insisted that it could be preserved only by electing the Southern Rights candidate, John C. Breckinridge (270). During the campaign "Yancey overshadowed Breckinridge" (255). The most sought-after speaker for the candidate supported by the incumbent president was someone who had been plotting for years to subvert the Union.

In the winter of 1860–61, following Abraham Lincoln's victory, mass hysteria gripped the deep South. "After years of running ahead of events, almost overnight Yancey had to scramble just to keep pace" (276). Walther does not, however, endorse Mills Thornton's view that nonslaveholding Jacksonian yeomen led the drive for secession because they were unhinged by the growth of the market economy (Politics and Power in a Slave Society: Alabama, 1800-1860 [Louisiana State University Press...