Fire-Eaters
In
Impact
By urging
In the latter half of the 1850s, the group reemerged. During the election of 1856, Fire-Eaters used threats of secession to persuade Northerners, who generally valued saving the Union over fighting slavery, to vote for James Buchanan. They used several recent events for propaganda, among them "Bleeding Kansas" and the caning of Charles Sumner, to accuse the North of trying to abolish slavery immediately. Using effective propaganda against 1860 presidential candidate Abraham Lincoln, the nominee of the anti-slavery Republican Party, the Fire-Eaters were able to convince many Southerners of this. However, Lincoln, despite abolitionist sentiment within the party, had promised not to abolish slavery in the Southern states, but only to prevent its expansion into the Western territories.[2] They first targeted South Carolina, which passed an Ordinance of Secession in December 1860. Wigfall, for one, actively encouraged an attack on Fort Sumter to prompt Virginia and other upper Southern States to secede as well. The Fire-Eaters helped to unleash a chain reaction that led directly to the formation of the Confederate States of America and the Civil War. Their influence waned quickly after the start of major fighting.
Notable Fire-Eaters
- William W. Avery
- Albert G. Brown
- Joseph E. Brown
- Thomas R. R. Cobb
- James Dunwoody Brownson De Bow, publisher of De Bow's Review
- James Gadsden
- Maxcy Gregg
- Thomas C. Hindman
- Laurence M. Keitt
- Lucius Quintus Cincinnatus Lamar
- William Porcher Miles
- Edward A. O'Neal
- Edmund Pettus
- John J. Pettus, Governor of Mississippi, who would lead the state in secession[3][4]
- Francis Wilkinson Pickens, Governor of South Carolina; authorized firing on Star of the West
- Roger Atkinson Pryor
- John A. Quitman
- Robert Rhett
- Edmund Ruffin
- Nathaniel Beverley Tucker
- Louis Wigfall
- William Lowndes Yancey
- David Levy Yulee
See also
References
Notes
- ISBN 9780742563995.
- ^ Wilson, Douglas L. Lincoln and Abolitionism The Gilder Lehrman Institute of American History. Retrieved March 30, 2016.
- ^ Sansing, David G. (December 2003). "John Jones Pettus: Twentieth and Twenty-third Governor of Mississippi: January 5, 1854 to January 10, 1854; 1859-1863". Mississippi Historical Society. Archived from the original on December 8, 2015. Retrieved 2014-06-07.
- ISBN 9781617033537.
Bibliography
- Walther, Eric H. (1992) The Fire-Eaters Baton Rouge: Louisiana State University Press. ISBN 0-8071-1775-7
- Walther, Eric H. (2006) William Lowndes Yancey: The Coming of the Civil War