Rhett: The Troubled Life and Times of a Fire-Eater (review)

William C. Davis's Rhett: The Troubled Life and Times of a Fire-Eater is an exhaustive account of one of the Old South's most notorious malcontents, Robert Barnwell Rhett of South Carolina. As Davis points out in his bibliography, the scholarship on Rhett is surprisingly thin considering his role as one of the driving forces for secession, a position he advocated as early as the 1820s. This biography fills that gap ably and fully.

Davis's nearly 600-page narrative offers a seemingly daily record of Rhett's life. Born Robert Barnwell Smith, Robert Barnwell Rhett changed his name in the 1830s to accentuate his kinship to South Carolina's traditional elite. The name change reflected Rhett's outlook as a member of South Carolina's conservative leadership. At an early age, Rhett accepted the tenets of antebellum Southern conservatism. He believed that slavery was a divinely sanctioned institution that formed the basis for natural hierarchies of white over black and the elite over the poor. Rhett, like his fellow southern conservatives, defended slavery while he held at arm's length the democratic aspirations of poorer whites. Through his multifaceted career as slaveowner, politician, and propagandist (his family purchased the Charleston Mercury in 1857), Rhett hammered loudly on behalf of these conservative southern values. As Davis observes in his summing up, Rhett "had only . . . a few basic political tenets, and he stated and restated them over and over again for a half century" (567).

What Davis draws out impressively is Rhett's real historical significance: far earlier than most, Rhett anticipated the eventual clash between the proslavery South and the free labor North. Rhett was one of the first southern conservatives to advise his fellow slaveowners to dissolve the union and preserve the institution of slavery. He envisioned an endless future of slavery not just in the South, but across the lower United States and on into Central America. When the rest of the slaveowning South finally caught up to his thinking, Rhett enjoyed his finest hour by signing South Carolina's secession ordinance in December 1860. As a biography of a proslavery ideologue, add Davis's examination of Rhett to Manisha Sinha's The Counterrevolution of Slavery: Politics and Ideology in Antebellum South Carolina (2000) and Charles B. Dew's Apostles of Disunion: Southern Secession Commissioners and the Causes of the Civil War (2001) as recent books reasserting the southern conservatives' insistence on a society rooted in the institution of slavery.

Along the way Davis provides a fascinating look into psychology of a neurotic slaveowner. Despite being thin skinned, Rhett navigated his way through the complex world of antebellum South Carolina (with John C. Calhoun as its epicenter) to become a U.S. congressman and senator. Yet, throughout most of his adult life, Rhett felt slighted and exasperated whenever others failed to agree with his every idea and plan. Rhett also seemed unable to function without an enemy on which to focus his considerable wrath. During the 1840s, for instance, his enemy was a likely choice—abolitionists (especially his distant cousin, John Quincy Adams). The need for an enemy, however, eventually brought isolation and humiliation when, almost instantaneous with the birth of the Confederacy, Rhett made Jefferson Davis the personification of all evil and ineptitude.

Give Davis credit also for showing through Rhett how the mind of the Old South did not necessarily expire with the Old South. Despite living in dire straits after the war, Rhett continued to push for a Southern society that reflected what he believed were nature's hierarchies. Like other postwar Southern conservatives, Rhett began to rewrite antebellum Southern history to downplay the role of slavery (although as Davis points out, Rhett did this less than others) while maintaining his conservatism. Politically he despised the dominant Republican party for its views on...