Oct. 26, 2025

America's Story- The Rise and Fall of the Fire-eaters

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Gaslight flickers over polished wood, a packed hall hums with dread and ambition, and a single voice promises safety through rupture. We take you inside Charleston’s Hibernian Hall in 1859, where Robert Barnwell Rhett—“the father of secession”—braids grievance, fear, and political theater into a call that helps set the country on a path to civil war. Guided by newspaper power, party fractures, and the myth of Southern chivalry, Rhett and his band, the fire eaters, turn a militant minority into a force that reshapes the map.

This is the story of the rise and fall of the fire-eaters!

00:00 - Charleston Sets The Stage

02:24 - Rhett’s Agenda And Mercury’s Influence

05:00 - From Sumner’s Caning To Southern Fury

08:00 - Platform Battles And Expansion Of Slavery

11:00 - A Call To Secession

14:00 - Lower South Votes To Leave

17:00 - Fort Sumter And Upper South Breaks

20:00 - Fire Eaters Sidelined By War

23:00 - Defeat, Despair, And Legacies

26:00 - Reconstruction’s Promise And Betrayal

28:00 - Modern Echoes And Reading List

30:24 - Closing Reflections And Next Tease

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The year was 1859.

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Tensions throughout the country were hot, blazing hot.

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A single spark could burn the nation to the ground and into ash.

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On August of that hot summer in Charleston's Hibernian Hall, Robert Barnwell Rhett, the unrelenting father of secession, prepared to light that flame.

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Beneath the hall's gas-lit chandeliers, South Carolina's elite gathered.

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Planters, merchant yeomen awaited his words, their hearts pounding with the fear of northern abolitionists and their dreams of a slave-holding empire.

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As Lincoln's house-divided speech loomed in the back of their minds and Kansas bled, Rhett's Charleston Mercury fueled the rebellion, as unlike any other newspaper could in the South.

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Tonight, Rhett's fiery oration would rally the South to break the Union, a defiant cry that would ignite the Civil War and reshape history.

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In the two long years from 1859 to 1861, the country would grow more divided with more radical talk.

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This is the short story of the rise and the fall of the fire eaters.

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This series, America's Story, takes you on a journey through the pivotal moments of liberty, remarkable events of hope, and incredible cast of characters, good and bad, who have shaped our nation.

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Together, we'll explore the stories that built the country we know today and uncover what they still mean for us now and can teach us for our future.

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So with that, here's America's story.

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On that sultry evening of August of 1859, Charleston's Hibernian Hall stood as a beacon of Southern defiance, its Greek revival columns glowing under gaslit chandeliers at 105 Meeting Street.

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Built in 1840 for the Hibernian Society of Benevolence Group, founded by Irish immigrants in 1801, the hall's oak paneled ballroom was packed with South Carolina's elite planters and tailored broadcloth, merchants flashing gold watch chains, and yeomen in coarse homespun.

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At the lectern stood Robert Barnwell Rhett, the father of secession, his gaunt frame and piercing eyes radiating the zeal that had made his Charleston Mercury, the clarion of Southern Nationalism newspapers.

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At fifty eight, Rhett was no longer the young lawyer who had championed nullification back in eighteen thirty two.

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He was a prophet of disunion, determined to forge South Carolina into the vanguard of a slave holding Confederacy.

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One year ago, the year eighteen fifty eight was the crucible for the South.

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Abraham Lincoln's house divided speech in june sixteenth of that year, delivered in Springfield, Illinois, had sent shockwaves through the slave holding states, warning that the nation could not endure half slave and half free.

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The Lecompton Constitution, a pro slavery bid to admit the state of Kansas, had fractured the Democratic Party, pitting Southern radicals against Stephen Douglas's popular sovereignty doctrine.

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Barnwell Rhett, who had resigned his U.S.

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Senate seat in 1852 over the compromise of 1850, saw his opportunity in the chaos.

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His Charleston Mercury, now co edited by his son Robert Barwell Rhett Jr., had been stoking secession fever since the nullification crisis of 1832 and 1833 when Rhett defied federal tariffs as a state legislator.

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Down through the years he has written many a fiery editorial.

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Earlier in June, he warned of Northern fanaticism and urged a Southern convention to resist abolitionist threats.

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Hibernian Hall, the hub of Charleston's planner aristocracy in the site of the eighteen sixty Democrat National Convention, was the perfect stage for Rhett's call to arms.

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Fellow Carolinians, Rhett's voice boomed and cut through the tobacco laden air, sharp as a buoy knife.

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The North seeks our ruin, he said.

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Lincoln's words are a decoration of war and of our institutions, our homes, our fields, our very blood.

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The crowd of three hundred roared, fists pounding on the table, their fears of slave insurrections and economic collapse were stoked by wretz over the top oratory.

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His son Robert Jr.

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scribbled notes near the front of the hall, ready to publish the speech the next day in the Mercury.

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Lawrence Kite, the volatile congressman who had abetted Preston Brooks' eighteen fifty six caning of Charles Sumner in the US Senate, leaned forward, his grin fierce.

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The caning sparked by Sumner's crime against Kansas speech insulting South Carolina Senator Andrew Butler, Brooks' cousin, had made Brooks a Southern hero, the Mercury in May of eighteen fifty six, editorialized wonderfully that Brooks' chivalrous act and Charlestonians sent him dozens of congratulations by the way of canes, some inscribed with hit him again.

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Robert Barnwell Rhett now wielded that honor driven fury of southern chivalry to unite the hall.

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He pointed to a map of the Western territories of the United States, pinned behind him, its edges curling in the humid air.

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The black Republicans and that traitor Douglas would bar our rights in Kansas, he thundered, condemning Douglass' doctrine, which allowed territories decide on themselves on slavery.

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Popular sovereignty was its policy.

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The fire eater William Laudis Yancey's Alabama platform rejected at the eighteen fifty six Democratic Convention had demanded federal protection for slavery, a cause Rhett gladly championed.

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The Wilmot Provisal of eighteen forty six, bleeding Kansas and now Lincoln's fanaticism proves the North's aim to crush our peculiar institution.

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Rhett bellowed, the crowds cheered, shook the halls wrought iron gates, crafted by Charleston's Christopher Warner.

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The crowd was worked into a fiery, emotional lather.

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Rhett ended his rhetorical summation and echoed a speech he gave just a decade ago in June of eighteen fifty at this same Hibernian Hall, where he urged secession if the North blocks slavery's expansion at the Nashville Convention.

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We are no beggars at the Union's table, he declared.

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South Carolina must lead a Southern Confederacy or we wish to perish under the abolitionist heel.

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In the crowd, Edward Edmund Ruffin, Virginia's white bearded fire eater, nodded grimly.

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Ruffin, whose eighteen fifty seven pamphlet Glimpses of the Future Predicted Racial Chaos Undern Roll, had visited South Carolina's agricultural societies one year earlier to spread his secessionist zeal.

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He dreamed of firing the first shot for Sumter, a prophecy that would be fulfilled in eighteen sixty one.

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William Porcher Miles, a pragmatic Charleston lawyer and future Confederate congressman, whispered to the planter, urging economic independence to bolster Retz's vision.

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Kite, the former congressman, leapt up, shouting to hell with the Union, his bravado recalling his role in the caning of Charles Sumner, where he blocked aid to the bloodied senator.

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His blood up, his voice piercing, Retz speech built into a crescendo.

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We are a nation apart, he cried, invoking the late great senator of the South, John C.

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Calhoun's states rights doctrine, the cornerstone of South Carolina's defiance since the eighteen thirties, some three decades before.

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Let us forge a southern empire with Charleston at its heart.

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The crowd surged, the boots stomped the oak floor, voices crescendoing, chanting secession, secession.

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Rhett's words mirrored his eighteen fifty one address to the people of South Carolina, which was reprinted in his Charleston Mercury, urging disunion if slavery was threatened.

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The fire eaters of the South, though as a group, were a minority of a minority.

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There were cooler heads that were prevailing in eighteen fifty eight and eighteen fifty nine across the South, but after Lincoln's election in November of eighteen sixty, the South was again divided.

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The radical fire eaters would fan across the South to s to secession conventions to make their case.

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Disunion was the only way forward.

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In South Carolina, the hotbed of the Southern Revolution, they would be listened to, as South Carolina's initial strike would provoke only the southernmost slave holding states into rebellion.

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Elsewhere the fire eaters were not the master of that revolution.

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The lower south states of South Carolina, Florida, Georgia, Alabama, Mississippi, Louisiana, and Texas would vote over the next three months for rebellion.

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And only in these seven secessionist states did Cotton reign king, and slaves comprised almost half of the population, and enslaved blacks outnumbered free blacks more than fifty to one.

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However, twice as many white southerners resided in the less torrid, less enslaved, and less secessionist Upper South, those border states of Delaware, Maryland, Kentucky, and Missouri, and then the Middle States, the Middle South states of Virginia, North Carolina, Tennessee, and Arkansas, things were different.

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The South was divided against itself.

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The border states shunned this new revolution and rebellion advocated for.

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The Middle South states had a collision of cultures above and below them literally.

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The Middle South states had fence sitters that might rally behind the lower south moderate of Jefferson Davis, but they shunned the extremist and the radical fire eaters like South Carolina's Robert Barnwell Rhett or Alabama's William Laudis Yancey, and even the less high pitched voice of extremism, Virginia's Edmund Ruffin.

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And so on december twentieth, eighteen sixty, the fire eater whett drafted South Carolina's Ordinance of Secession at Institute Hall and led that state to Confederacy formation in February of eighteen sixty one.

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The vote was held in South Carolina and on december twenty first it was one hundred and sixty nine to zero unanimous for secession.

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Mississippi was next, january ninth, eighteen sixty one.

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The vote there eighty four to fifteen to secede.

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Florida followed the next day, the vote there sixty two to seven, Alabama the next day, the vote there sixty one to thirty nine, Georgia a week later, january nineteenth, eighteen sixty one, the vote there, a surprising two hundred and eight to eighty nine for secession.

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Louisiana a week after that, january twenty sixth, one hundred and thirteen to seventeen for secession.

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And Texas some six days later, february first, eighteen sixty one, voted one hundred and sixty-six to eight to secede, and then followed it with a public referendum because of their governor Sam Houston's opposition to secession and was then deposed.

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So interestingly, the Middle States were torn.

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Remember the collision of cultures we talked about earlier?

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They were caught literally between a rock and a hard place.

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But then the fire eaters rose again.

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On April twelfth, eighteen sixty one, breaking news blazed across that electric lightning, as it was called, the telegraph.

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Fort Sumter had been fired upon.

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It was a federal fort.

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Lincoln then reacted with a call of seventy-five thousand troops.

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The pressure cooker of the South would heat up again.

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What will you do, Virginia?

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Many thought.

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How about Arkansas, Tennessee, North Carolina?

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What would they all do?

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Well, they all broke and buckled.

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Virginia was the first on April seventeenth, eighteen sixty one, some five days after the firing at Fort Sumter.

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The vote was eighty-five to fifty-five.

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The convention in Richmond was swayed by the fire eater Edward Ruffin.

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Arkansas less than a month later, may sixth, eighteen sixty one, that vote sixty five to five.

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Interestingly enough, just two months before they had rejected secession in March of eighteen sixty one.

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The vote then thirty-nine to thirty five against.

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But Fort Sumter and Lincoln's call shifted the sentiment, and the convention in Little Rock faced little opposition by May of 1861.

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North Carolina would be next to secede on May 20th.

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Its vote a fiery, unanimous outcome of 115 to zero.

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Tennessee would become the last state to withdraw from the Union on June eighth, eighteen sixty-one.

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Its vote two to one in favor of secession.

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Strong calls would then come for fraudulent votes across the state went unheard.

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Eastern Tennessee threatened its own violence against other Tennesseans.

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Ironically, just months before Tennessee had initially rejected a statewide election to even send delegates to the Southern Convention to secede.

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The fire eaters had won yet another one.

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And finally, the border states, how did they fare with the fire eaters of the lower south?

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Quickly.

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Delaware, its legislature rejected secession back in January with a near unanimous vote.

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Maryland, certainly the most controversial of the convention votes because Lincoln suspended habeas corpus and pro secession factions in Frederick, Maryland proposed a convention in April.

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But due to Unionist control and martial law, that was prevented it, and no convention ever happened.

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In Kentucky, the birth state of the 16th president, Abraham Lincoln, it declared its neutrality in May of 1861, and it would remain in the Union.

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Missouri held a March 1861 convention vote, and that totaled ninety-eight to one against secession.

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Missouri, despite many factions throughout the state, stayed in Union control.

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As the Civil War began with the first battle at Bull Run on july twenty first, the fire eaters' passion and influence waned, then sputtered, and then spun out.

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At Fort Sumter, Edmund Ruffin is mistakenly credited with firing the cannon on april twelfth, eighteen sixty one, but that credit would go to one Lieutenant Henry Farley.

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Now we are probably sure that Mr.

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Ruffin wasn't too far behind in wanting and desiring to pull that trigger on the ten inch mortar of the Palmetto State Guard.

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Yet quickly Jefferson Davis' pragmatic Confederate government would sideline the fire eaters and for want to try and win the war instead of just winning the argument over the U.S.

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Civil War.

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In two years by eighteen sixty three, Robert Barnwell Rhett's Charleston Mercury had criticized Davis's centralized policies and his brutal editorials accusing him of betraying Southern ideals.

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And by the close of that year in eighteen sixty three, Rhett and the fire eaters were a pariah.

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Their radicalism clashed with the wartime pragmatism of trying to win the war.

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How did they fare?

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Well the war's toll was brutal.

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Kite, the fiery southern congressman leading a regiment, fell at Cold Harbor in eighteen sixty four.

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His body was pierced by Union bullets.

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William Laudis Yancey, broken by a failed diplomatic mission to Britain in eighteen sixty two, died of kidney disease in July of eighteen sixty three in Montgomery, just as news reached him of the double failure of Pickett's charge at Gettysburg in Pennsylvania and the western citadel of Vicksburg along the Mississippi, which was a major linchpin in the south, and had surrendered on the same day that Gettysburg fell.

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Charleston would crumble by April of eighteen sixty five.

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The Hibernian Hall's walls would be scarred with Union shells during Sherman's march through South Carolina.

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The next fire eater, one Edmund Ruffin, would be unable to bear defeat, and wrapped himself in a Confederate flag and shot himself on june eighteenth, eighteen sixty five at his son's plantation in Amelia County, Virginia.

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His last diary entry proclaimed his quote unmitigated hatred to Yankee rule.

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And then we come to Barnwell Rhett.

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Unpardoned, ravaged by skin cancer, he fled to St.

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James Parish, Louisiana at the war's end.

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His son-in-law had a plantation there.

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He would die on September fourteenth, eighteen seventy-six.

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His Charleston Mercury, the Southern newspaper, which breathed fire for three decades for rebellion and disunion would fold in eighteen sixty eight.

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Its final issues, decrying Reconstruction's Yankee tyranny, and the fire eaters' dream kindled in those halls like Hibernian burned out in a shattered and devastated South, which laid in ruins by eighteen sixty five.

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And so in this American story, Liberty's moment came for four million slaves with the Union Army of Deliverance.

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Victory and Liberty happened at Appomattox Courthouse with the surrender of the Army of Northern Virginia thus ending the U.S.

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Civil War.

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The Union would and indeed prevailed.

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The war would be over.

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And yet just five days later, a strong Confederate sympathizer, celebrated actor from the border state of Maryland, John Wilkes Booth, would gun down the sixteenth President of the United States on that tragic Good Friday of Holy Week, 1865.

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And just two decades later, it could be said that the Union had won the war but lost the peace as millions of African Americans would be subjected to yet another one hundred years of degradation.

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As Reconstruction would come to a halt and Southern officials sympathetic to the ways of the old South would come back into power, African Americans and those loyal to the Union would struggle to the point of sharecroppers' wages, more degradation in spite, and even to the point of loss of life, as the deep South would struggle under the Jim Crow laws and try to find its way under new leadership.

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But that was brought up under listening to the fire eaters' rhetoric.

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And so as we look apon our country in 2025, do we see the same fire eater rhetoric happening yet again?

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Do those same uncivil and even physical assaults on federal officials and law enforcement echo to that leading and impending crisis of 1860?

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Boy, it is sure getting hard to tell.

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From the summer of love in 2020 and now to our major cities in 2025 is New York City of 2025, the Charleston of 1855 is Portland or Chicago or LA the same.

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Are the same fire eaters then the lunatic radical wing of the Democratic Party today?

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Let us pray not.

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And if you enjoyed this short story, this American story, we suggest further reading with the following books where a good bit of research and inspiration came for this episode.

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First, let us recommend William Freeling's The Road to Disunion Volume two.

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Let us also recommend Eric Walther's The Fire Eaters, which discusses the fire eater influence in the Middle and Deep South, but with the minimal impact of the border south.

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Let us also recommend three other books Joan Freeman's The Field of Blood, David Potter's The Impending Crisis, America before the Civil War from eighteen forty eight to eighteen sixty one, and one more Charles Dews Apostles of Disunion.

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Let me just say if you have any doubt about how bad and hot the fire breathers of the antebellum South could speak, I suggest you read the appendix of this book that will make anyone with a conscience and a character, it will make your blood boil.

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It is not for the faint of heart, and it was the main inspiration for this episode about how far the rhetoric and the radicals had gone in the lead up to the U.S.

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Civil War.

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I thank you for listening, and I hope you enjoyed this American moment in liberty and in hope as we look back at our history in this lead up to our 250th anniversary of our country's birth.

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So please come back and join us in our next America's Story, where we will stay in the American South of the 1870s and watch a man grow deeply in character and conviction.

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It's a story of hope and change, unlike you've ever heard before.

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Please come back and join us.

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Thank you for listening.

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Thank you for joining us for this episode of America's Story, presented by the Theory to Action Podcast.

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We hope you were inspired by this story of hope rooted in liberty, especially as we look ahead to our nation's 250th anniversary.

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For more resources and exclusive content, visit us at our website in the show notes.

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Until next time, keep reading, keep learning, and keep the American story alive.