Oct. 19, 2025

MM#441--A House Dividing Again, pt 2---The Road to Disunion of 1860: The Fire Eaters and The Rhetoric of Ruin

FAN MAIL--We would love YOUR feedback--Send us a Text Message Words can move nations—and sometimes they move them off a cliff. We dive into the antebellum South to examine the Fire Eaters, the radical pro‑slavery leaders whose speeches, platforms, and media campaigns turned sectional tension into a secession movement. With William W. Freehling’s and Eric H. Walther’s research as our guide, we unpack how mainstream Democratic moderates once contained extremism, why that buffer failed, and how ...

FAN MAIL--We would love YOUR feedback--Send us a Text Message

Words can move nations—and sometimes they move them off a cliff. We dive into the antebellum South to examine the Fire Eaters, the radical pro‑slavery leaders whose speeches, platforms, and media campaigns turned sectional tension into a secession movement. With William W. Freehling’s and Eric H. Walther’s research as our guide, we unpack how mainstream Democratic moderates once contained extremism, why that buffer failed, and how a small but relentless network reframed compromise as dishonor and delay as defeat.

We explore the core playbook: amplify grievance, define identity against an enemy, and repeat a simple choice—submit or secede. William Lowndes Yancey emerges as the silver‑tongued strategist who pushed the Alabama Platform and helped fracture the Democratic Party at Charleston in 1860, while Robert Barnwell Rhett’s Charleston Mercury kept the pressure on with relentless editorials and organizing. Their coordination—one commanding the stage, the other the press—created a feedback loop that made moderation sound timid and militancy sound inevitable. Along the way, we revisit key flashpoints like Bleeding Kansas and the caning of Charles Sumner, not as isolated events but as fuel for a narrative that sold rupture as rescue.

This conversation isn’t just about the past; it’s a lens for the present. We track how over‑the‑top rhetoric accelerates polarization, how media ecosystems can reward the loudest voices, and what happens when political identity hardens into a zero‑sum creed. The takeaway is both sobering and practical: language shapes choices, and choices shape history. If you care about how societies keep disagreement from becoming disaster, this story matters.

Key Points from the Episode:

• Fire Eaters defined as radical pro‑slavery secessionists
• Moderates within the Democratic Party as temporary brake on extremism
• Propaganda through speeches and newspapers to harden opinion
• Yancey’s Alabama Platform and Charleston 1860 walkout
• Rhett’s Charleston Mercury as engine of agitation
• Walther’s argument on movement diversity and acceleration of secession
• Biographical arcs of Yancey and Rhett as case studies in radicalization
• Caution on the social cost of over‑the‑top rhetoric
• Preview of a debate comparing 1860 rhetoric to today

Other resources:

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00:00 - Welcome And Setup

00:44 - Defining The Fire Eaters

01:20 - Freeling’s Lens On Southern Moderates

03:31 - Who The Fire Eaters Were

06:52 - Propaganda, Crisis, And Secession

08:41 - Walther’s Thesis On Diversity And Impact

10:27 - Modern Parallels Teased For Debate

11:11 - Yancey’s Rise And Radical Platform

14:46 - Charleston 1860: Speech And Walkout

17:08 - Rhett’s Machinery Of Agitation

18:15 - Biographies: Yancey In Full

22:16 - Biographies: Rhett In Full

26:12 - The Cost Of Overheated Rhetoric

28:06 - Closing And Next Debate Preview

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Welcome to the Theory to Action Podcast, where we examine the timeless treasures of wisdom from the great books in less time to help you take action immediately and ultimately to create and lead a flourishing life.

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Now, here's your host, David Kaiser.

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Hello, I am David, and welcome back to another Mojo Minute.

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Last time, we said the over-the-top rhetoric is where breakdown begins to happen, and where it began to happen back before the U.S.

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Civil War during the 1850s.

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We said in this episode, we're going to talk all about the fire eaters of the South.

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Who were they?

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How radical were they?

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And how do they compare to our current radicals in speech and violence?

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We will do this with a debate, most likely in our next episode, because we're gonna we're gonna run out of time in this episode.

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And most especially because the last time we offered a debate, it went over very, very well with you guys.

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So be on the lookout for that.

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For now, though, let's begin as we always do with the opening quote.

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By the middle of the 1850s, William Lawtus Yancey and fellow secessionist had suffered through two decades as a cornered minority.

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During this exasperating time, Yancey perhaps dreamed that he would someday help prod half the South out of the Union.

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But the stymied Alabama extremist probably never imagined he would surrender to a reluctant secessionist, when secession remained only half accomplished.

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Yancy's abdication occurred in Montgomery, Alabama, provisional capital of the Southern Confederacy.

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That capitulation transpired on february seventeenth, eighteen sixty one, the eve of Jefferson Davis' inauguration as president of the half formed nation.

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Yancey introduced Davis, who had opposed secession as late as december eighteen sixty by declaring that the quote, man and the hour have met.

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The extremist thereby bet his revolution on a national Democratic Party moderate.

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Such opponents of extremism had long kept revolutionaries at bay in the South.

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Mainstream politicians leveraged inside the South began with their leverage inside the nation's majority party.

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For a quarter century, the Democratic Party's Southern establishment in Washington had secured many pro slavery protections.

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With a union featuring minority bulwarks, why gamble on disunion?

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And why doubly gamble on reckless leaders?

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Revolutionary hotheads had long been called fire eaters.

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With their fiery rhetoric, they sought to incinerate the Union whatever the risks.

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The less agitated Southern majority craved cooler rulers, especially during nervous revolutionary times.

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Even in South Carolina, the most disunionist state, cautious revolutionaries had to drive an outraged Robert Barnwell rat into the shadows before uneasy squires would dare disunion.

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And that, my friend, is a quote that comes to us from one of the great books of U.S.

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history, William Double W.

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Freeling's The Road to Disunion, Volume Two, The Secessionist Triumph, 1854 to 1861.

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We can learn about our U.S.

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history by reading such great books, and we can learn all about our human nature and how going to work, how that's going to work in the future by reading the past.

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The two men that we just talked about in this opening quote, William Laudis Yancey and Robert Barnwell Rhett, were part of what was called the fire eaters of their time.

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So called because the fire eaters were an extreme group, radical, pro-slavery political leaders in the antebellum South, known for their fiery retic, relentless push to break away from the United States and create a separate slaveholding nation.

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Let's gather some key facts about this radical group.

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Now, originally they were most active from the late 1840s through 1861.

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The fire eaters were not a formal political party, but a loosely organized network of radical Democrats who considered compromise with the North impossible and even dishonorable.

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Their main goals were preserving and expanding slavery.

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Some even called for the reopening of the Atlantic slave trade, which had been banned in 1808.

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All demanded Southern states secede from the Union to secure what they saw as a quote distinctive Southern civilization.

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Its major leaders were one Edmund Ruffin from Virginia.

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He's celebrated for firing the first shot at Fort Sumter, sparking the Civil War, even though other folks contest that he was the one that actually pulled the trigger at Fort Sumter.

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Another one of its major leaders, Robert Barnwell Rhett from South Carolina, nicknamed the Father of Secession.

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He was the editor of the Charleston Mercury newspaper, a leading voice for disunion.

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And again, another leader, the aforementioned William Laudus Yancey from Alabama, a powerful orator.

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He traveled widely to rather rally Southern support for secession.

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And the final one is Lewis T.

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Wigfall from Texas, advocated for an aggressive action to push Southern states into secession.

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Now their influence was wide and far.

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This group used speeches, newspapers, and events like Bleeding Kansas and the caning of Senator Charles Sumner as propaganda, claiming Northern abolitionists wanted immediate, total abolition of slavery.

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Their uncompromising stance made political negotiation impossible and directly fueled sectional division.

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Their impact, well, they were instrumental in pushing the first wave of secession following Abraham Lincoln's eighteen sixty election.

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The fire eaters helped ignite the chain reaction that led directly to the Civil War, though much of their influence rapidly waned once the firing started.

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In summary, the fire eaters can be best described as political arsonist, extremist of their era, whose radicalism and propaganda made war and separation the only acceptable options in their eyes.

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Let's hear from this definitive book written all about them.

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Go on to the book.

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I began my research on the fire eaters by seeking to discover the forces that brought them together and shaped the secession movement.

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I quickly discovered, however, that there were surprising and important variations.

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Certainly the fire eaters were concerned with the growing power of the federal government and the coincident dilution of states' rights.

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All truly believed African slavery was essential to the maintenance of the Republic of a Republican society.

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All came to believe that their ideal government could exist only in a Southern republic.

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Here they differed from most other Southerners only in degree, for a working majority of Southerners became secessionists by 1861.

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These fire eaters had other concerns that reflected those of their fellow Southerners, but they were only but they were convinced that only disunion promised a solution.

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Over the years, an increasing number of Southerners became frustrated and angry with the status quo and worried about apparently menacing political developments.

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The fire eaters bolstered the spirit of resistance and offered a solution.

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It was their diversity that made the fire eaters important and the secession movement successful.

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Because each emphasized different issues, ideas, and goals, they drew other southerners to the secession movement as the mushrooming sectional crisis made the fire eaters seem prophetic instead of extreme.

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Fire eaters then did not cause secession, but they hastened it by capitalizing on a multitude of events and ideas.

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And that was from the definitive book by Eric H.

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Walther W A L T H E R titled The book is titled The Fire Eaters.

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Fantastic book.

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And so all this begs the question are the most radical Democrats of 2025 the fire eaters of 1860?

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That is a haunting question.

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But I think it's a valid one.

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Like I said, in our next episode, we're going to compare the radical Democrats of 2025, those I'm beginning to call the Neo-Confederates, to the Radicals of the Day, the fire eaters of 1860.

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We will have a good old-fashioned debate because that is what you guys found most enjoyable, and some of our episodes prior.

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But back to these fire eaters of 1850 and 1860, all the way to the lead up of the Civil War.

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Let's grab two quotes about these two leading men in the eighteen fifties that were given the nicknames the Prince of the Fire Eaters and his companion, the father of secession.

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Going back to the book.

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Though the Democratic Party was the only major one with a truly national following, it was rocked by internal divisions.

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Douglass's supporters matched Yancey in their determination to prevail at the meeting with both their candidate and their platform, yet most Southern Democrats agreed that Douglas was unacceptable.

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For the party's future, Charleston, selected at the 1856 party convention as a concession to Southerners, was a most unfortunate sight for the Assembly.

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Recent events intensified the political, the politically charged atmosphere in the city.

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John Brown's raid on Harper's Ferry the previous fall spurred secessionist to renewed calls for disunion.

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Robert Barnwell Retz Jr.

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turned out endless streams of propaganda in his newspaper, The Charleston Mercury, which condemned all Southerners who favored compromise with the Douglas forces.

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Southern rights meetings, caucuses, and speech speeches were held for days before the convention.

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In this heated atmosphere, William L.

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Yancey addressed the Charleston Convention on April 28th, 1860.

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And he argued for the adoption of his Southern platform, which had been accepted by the majority of the Platform Committee in a manner described by Harper's Weekly as statesmanlike and restrained.

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Yancey began by stating that his delegation had come to the convention to save the Union, not to disrupt it.

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The South, he explained, was a fixed minority.

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It could not protect itself within the Union without Northern support.

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Yancey told the Assembly that, quote, the great and solemn fact faces you, quote, that Northerners must protect Southern rights or force the South to secede.

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The North, not the South, would be responsible for secession.

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The South could not grant any concessions on the slave question.

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Quote, ours is the property invaded, ours are the institutions which are at stake, ours is the peace which is to be destroyed, ours is the honor at stake.

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Neither Republicans nor Democrats should limit slavery's expansion because to do so would deny the equality of the Southerners in the territories and stigmatize slaveholders as inferior.

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Northerners had no right to interfere with slavery in any form.

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Quote It does not belong to you to put your hands on it.

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You are aggressors when you injure it.

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You are not our brothers when you injure us.

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Yancy joked that Northern delegates enjoyed the welcome they received in slave holding Charleston.

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Even such hospital hospitalities as you pay for so magnificently.

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He therefore asked them to allow southerners the full enjoyment of their property as they saw fit without outside interference or restrictions by non slave holders.

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Yancey's speech drew thunderous applause from spectators in the galleries, but it did not sway Douglas supporters.

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The majority platformed was defeated.

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As soon as the voting ended, Yansey stormed out of the convention.

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In contrast, what happened at Baltimore twelve years before, delegates from seven southern states followed him.

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And that, my friends, was the turning point when the South was overtaken by the fire eaters and their over-the-top rhetoric moved the southern, the lower southern states to seriously began moving toward secession.

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If the South in the country was a fire, Yancey's fire breathing words in April of 1860 was the very, very dry kindling that would sit waiting for the spark that would ignite our republic into the very worst, the most traumatic and horrific war ever fought on our ground.

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Indeed, the fire eaters drove the propaganda, they drove the speeches, they drove the meetings, and were in the process of driving the country off a cliff.

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Who was William Laudis Yancey's chief propagandist?

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One Robert Barnwell Rhett Jr.

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Let's go back to the book.

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Their message was Act.

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They announced that Carolinians were finally prepared to secede and had warned that they, quote, do not expect their representatives to be behind them.

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They endorsed the actions of private citizens who formed, quote, Minuteman organizations throughout the state.

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They called for the immediate resignation of Southerners from service in the United States military forces and urged the governor to obtain weapons for the state by sending commissioners to Europe, even though the state had yet to secede.

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The Rhett's appealed to passion and emotion by telling Carolinians that Northerners considered them a quote blustering, weak, timid people, demoralized and paralyzed by your institutions, just fit to serve or to be tortured and destroyed.

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When the governor called a special session of the legislature to consider secession, the Rets were ecstatic.

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Quote, the long, weary night of our humiliation, oppression, and danger is passing away.

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Barnwell Rhett told a crowd in Charleston, quote, and the glorious dawn of a Southern Confederacy breaks on our view.

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And again, these are quotes from the definitive work on the fire eaters by Eric Walther.

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And again, you hear in the words, their words, the fire-breathing rhetoric, the over-the-top rhetoric of 1860.

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Now it would help all of us to hear about their lives.

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How did they get to this point?

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How did they get to wanting to drive their states and all the southern states away from the Union in 1860?

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So let's hear about these men in biographical format.

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Starting with William Laudus Yancey, the Prince of the Fire Eaters.

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Again, he was a fiery orator.

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He was a lawyer, a planner, and a journalist from Alabama.

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He was widely regarded as one of the most influential of the fire eaters.

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That's a term for radical Southern secessionists who aggressively defended slavery and pushed for disunion in the face of northern anti-slavery efforts.

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William was born on 1814, I'm sorry, was born August 10th, 1814, on his family's plantation, the Avery, in Warren County, Georgia.

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Yancey was raised partly in the North by an abolitionist stepfather, which ironically fueled his lifelong hatred of Northern, quote, hypocrisy on slavery.

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Williams studied at Williams Colleges and Williams College and read law in South Carolina.

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He moved to Alabama in 1835, where he built a career as a newspaper editor and politician.

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Yancey's early politics-leaned unionist.

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He actually opposed nullification during the 1832 crisis.

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But by the 1840s, he had evolved into a staunch defender of Southern rights.

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Elected to the U.S.

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House of Representatives in 1844, he actually resigned in 1846 to focus on grassroots agitation against compromises like the Wilmot Provozo, which sought to ban slavery in the new territories.

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In 1848, he authored the Alabama platform demanding federal protection for slavery in the territories, a stance so uncompromising that it led Southern Democrats to bolt from the National Party Convention.

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This split foreshadowed the Democratic Party's fracture in 1860, which Yancey orchestrated at the Southern Charleston Convention by rejecting any platform that didn't enshrine slavery's expansion, paving the way for Abraham Lincoln's election in secession.

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We actually heard about that in one of our quotes.

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Nicknamed a silver tongued orator of secession in the Prince of the Fire Eaters, Yancey traveled the South delivering blistering speeches that portrayed northerners as existential threats to southern liberty.

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He supported filibuster expeditions like William Walker's in Nigeria as the cause of the South and raised funds for caucuses and causes like restoring Mount Vernon.

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Despite his extremism, Yancy advocated progressive reforms in the South, including women's rights, banking, prisons, and education.

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In the Confederacy, however, he sought and served as a diplomat to Europe, failing to secure recognition and briefly as a Confederate senator before dying of a stroke in july twenty seventh, eighteen sixty three in Montgomery, Alabama.

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His funeral halted the city for a whole day.

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Historians like Eric H.

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Walthier credit Yancey with keeping secessionist fervor alive the longest and the loudest among the fire eaters.

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Now Robert Barnwell Rett is titled The Father of Secession.

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He was born Robert Barnwell Smith in Beauford, South Carolina.

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He was a lawyer, an editor, and a politician.

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He got that nickname the Father of Secession for his decades-long crusade to dissolve the Union over slavery, changing his surname in 1838 to honor an ancestor Rhett embodied the aristocratic fire eater archetype, arrogant, unyielding, obsessed with Southern honor.

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Educated at Buford College, trained under the law, trained in the law under James Pettigrew.

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He entered politics early serving in the South Carolina House from 1826 to 1832 and as state attorney general before winning election to the U.S.

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House of Representatives in 1837.

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Rhett's radicalism crystallized during the nullification crisis, where he initially supported states' rights, but soon demanded outright separation.

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Again, the nullification crisis is in 1832.

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So this guy is already demanding outright separation.

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In 1844, he sparked the Bluffton movement, a short-lived push for South Carolina to nullify federal tariffs and annex Texas as a slave state, cementing his fire eater status.

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Now just as an aside, nullifying federal tariffs.

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Does that sound any familiarity with what we're dealing with today?

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Anytime you can start nullifying federal law and saying you are a law unto yourself, here's looking at you, Portland, Oregon, and Chicago, Illinois.

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You are going down a very, very bad road.

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Back to Robert Barnwall Rhett.

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As editor of the Charleston Mercury acquired in 1852 and later run by his son, Rhett used its pages to demonize compromise, calling the 1850 Compromise a surrender and urging again immediate secession.

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He attended the Nashville Convention in 1850 where his calls for Southern independence fell flat, but persisted by co-founding the short-lived Southern National Party with the aforementioned William Laudis Yancey.

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As a U.S.

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Senator from 1850 to 1852, he resigned to advocate disunion, and his mercury whipped Charleston into a frenzy during the Democratic Convention, amplifying Yancey's bolt.

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Rhett's influence peaked a decade later in 1860.

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South Carolina's unanimous secession vote on December 20th, 1860, of one hundred and sixty nine for secession and zero against was Rhett's ultimate triumph.

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Though he was ultimately sidelined in the Confederacy, serving only one year in the Provisional Congress and chairing the Committee on its Permanent Constitution.

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Bitter towards Jefferson Davis, who deemed him too moderate, Rhett opposed centralized Confederate power and second guess military decisions like Gettysburg.

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Post-war, he retreated to Louisiana, battling skin cancer.

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Barnwell Rhett died on September fourth, eighteen seventy-six in St.

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James Parish, and he's buried in Charleston's Magnolia Cemetery.

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Biographer William C.

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Davis portrays Rhett as the most extreme fire eater, whose egotism and refusal to compromise made even fetow fellow radicals weary.

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Yet his agitation normalized secession as a quote patriotic duty.

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Together with Yancey and Rhett, exemplified how these fire eaters turned sectional grievances into national catastrophe, portraying coexistence as dishonor and violence as inevitable.

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So in today's mojo minute, I hope you can tell from the chosen quotes, the over the top rhetoric of these fire eaters of the antebellum south were the cause, the beginning of going down that torturous path of secession.

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I hope you can see we're reading history, you can put yourself in the Norse shoes, trying to understand how in the world these radicals of their days were pushing for a revolution.

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A revolution unheard of in their day.

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And again, because the rhetoric question keeps coming up again and again, as we said in the beginning, that over-the-top rhetoric is where the breakdown begins to happen.

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And that is what we have to be on guard for in our day and age.

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So since you now know who the fire eaters were and how radical they were, in our next episode, we will compare their speech to the radicals in our own day and age.

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How do they compare in speech and especially in violence?

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It's a debate you don't want to miss.

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Until next time, keep fighting the good fight.

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Thank you for joining us.

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We hope you enjoyed this theory to action podcast.

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Be sure to check out our show page at teammojocademy.com, where we have everything we discussed in this podcast as well as other great resources.

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Until next time, keep getting your emojo.