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

"In the first comprehensive biography of William Lowndes Yancey (1814-63), one of the leading secessionists of the Old South, Eric H. Walther examines the personality and political life of the uncompromising fire-eater." "Born in Georgia but raised in the North by a fiercely abolitionist stepfather and an emotionally unstable mother, Yancey grew up believing that abolitionists were cruel, meddling, and hypocritical. His personal journey led him through a series of mentors who transformed his political views, and he began his public life under the tutelage of South Carolina Unionist Benjamin F. Perry. After acquiring slaves of his own and moving to frontier Alabama in his twenties, however, Yancey experienced an about-face, and his penchant for inflammatory oratory and physical violence was soon channeled into a crusade to protect slaveholders' fights." "By the 1850s Yancey was a key leader in the movement for disunion, proclaiming himself the defender and embodiment of the South. He defied Northern Democrats at their national nominating convention in 1860, rending the party and setting the stage for secession after the election of Abraham Lincoln. Selected to introduce Jefferson Davis in Montgomery as the president-elect of the Confederacy, Yancey went on to serve as the Confederacy's first diplomatic commissioner to England and France and then as a senator from Alabama before his death in 1863, just short of his forty-ninth birthday." "More than a portrait of an influential political figure before and during the Civil War, this study also presents a nuanced look at the roots of Southern honor, violence, and understandings of manhood as they developed in the nineteenth century."--Jacket.