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

T H E A L A B A M A R E V I E W 72 be hanged and, as soon as the proceedings are approved on high, are to be executed by their fellow prisoners under Wirz’s supervision. The reign of terror ends and relative peace is established within the stockade. The “men have settled right down to the business of dying, with no interruption ,” Union Sgt. John Ransom entered in his diary (p. 117). It is a frightening chapter about elemental human nature. The arrest, trial, and execution of Wirz provide compelling chapters also, carefully and dispassionately wrought by Ruhlman. These strong sections stand with the chapters on POW policy and the chapter about the Confederates’ feverish attempt to build a major military prison in southwest Georgia in 1864. The author serves up ample helpings of blame in this ultimate story of victimization. Wirz is a victim; justice is a victim; so too the hordes of tormented prisoners are victims. This book will horrify both general readers and knowledgeable historians , but they can trust their calm but probing guide. Excuses and rationalizations abound, Fred Ruhlman emphasizes, but the war had changed by 1864 and with Lincoln’s assassination “the mood of the nation in its demands for punishment intensified” (p. 228). Confederate Assistant Adjutant and Inspector Gen. Robert H. Chilton put it best. “The condition of the prison at Andersonville is a reproach to us as a nation” (p.130). So is the execution of Capt. Henry Wirz. NAT C. HUGHES JR. Chattanooga, Tennessee William Lowndes Yancey and the Coming of the Civil War. By Eric L. Walther. Chapel Hill: University of North Carolina Press, 2006. xi, 496 pp. $39.95. ISBN 0-8078-3027-5. In William Lowndes Yancey and the Coming of the Civil War, Eric Walther has written an admirable biography of a less than admirable man. One of the leading architects of southern secession, Yancey was at various times a lawyer, editor, and, for much of his career, Alabama’s most visible politician. Walther has produced a remarkably balanced portrait of the man—surprisingly, the first scholarly biography of a figure who, as Walther convincingly shows, played a key role in inflaming the sectional conflicts that were to plunge the United States into a bloody civil war. Thoroughly researched and skillfully argued, this book is a major contribution to our understanding of antebellum American politics and the coming of the Civil War. J A N U A R Y 2 0 0 7 73 Yancey has, of course, long been a familiar figure. Bursting on the national scene in the mid-1840s as an ardent champion of the South and slavery, he was immediately distinguished by the fiery oratory and hair-trigger temper that, throughout his life, alternately either served him well or got him into serious trouble. Walther, surveying Yancey’s early life and career, does much to explain the characteristics for which Yancey became famous. Born in Georgia in 1814, Yancey had a troubled youth. His father died early in Yancey’s life, and his stepfather, the rockribbed evangelical (and later noted abolitionist) Nathan S. S. Beman, offered the young Yancey little more than a model of habitual intolerance . Yancey spent most of his youth in the North. He attended Williams College, displaying, even then, the tendencies that were to mark his subsequent career. But it was a career that flowered in the South, nurtured by that culture of honor that did so much to shape the region. Walther shows how Yancey demonstrated his appreciation for that culture from the first. Settling in South Carolina in the early 1830s—and becoming embroiled in the nullification crisis as an ardent Unionist—Yancey quickly showed his gifts for both violent rhetoric and violent action, even to the point of murdering a member of his wife’s family in a politically rooted altercation . Yancey was convicted of manslaughter, and spent some time in prison before receiving a pardon from South Carolina’s governor. He emerged unrepentant. It was only one of the many honor-driven confrontations that filled Yancey’s life until very near its end. Confrontation was to...