LIKE MOST SOLDIERS, I am drawn to the history of the Civil War—not just the outcomes of the key battles but the war’s political prehistory as well. To learn what led to the first shots at Fort Sumter, one first needs to read about the Missouri Compromise, the Compromise of 1850, the Dred Scott decision, and so many other political events. Far from dry legal footnotes, these historical events were sparks in a parched forest. Each one raised the temperature of sectional tension. But such developments were not by themselves sufficient to plunge the United States into war. The onset of war can be attributed, in part, to a group of political arsonists. These were the Southern “fire-eaters” who made compromise impossible, who portrayed coexistence as dishonor, and who fashioned a worldview in which violence was not a last resort but the only resort. There are lessons for our day in their story.
In the decade before 1861, these men—especially Robert Barnwell Rhett of South Carolina, William Lowndes Yancey of Alabama, Edmund Ruffin of Virginia, and their allies—moved beyond grievance into agitation and violence. They didn’t argue simply that slavery should be protected where it already existed. They demanded its expansion, insisted on the permanence of Southern dominance, and treated any dissent as an existential threat to their way of life. They cultivated a rhetoric that was designed not to persuade opponents but to radicalize their many followers.
Rhett, nicknamed the “Father of Secession,” spent years insisting that South Carolina break from the Union, even as most fellow Southerners urged patience. His family’s newspaper, the Charleston Mercury, became a megaphone for secessionist doctrine, insisting that slavery was not a necessary evil but a positive good and that the Union itself was corrupt beyond repair. An unmatched orator, Yancey carried that message across the South, turning party gatherings into showcases of defiance and bending crowds to his vision of an independent Southern nation. Ruffin, a patrician farmer and polemicist, took the logic further, celebrating violence as a necessary cleansing. When the time came, he traveled to Charleston to fire one of the first shots at Fort Sumter.
It wasn’t their opinions alone that made these figures so dangerous; plenty of politicians held extreme views. The danger lay in their rejection of basic democratic arts: compromise, negotiation, collaboration. They treated those virtues of pre-war society as vices. They argued that to compromise with the North was to betray the South; to negotiate was to surrender. These men rewrote the rules of politics so that democratic processes were illegitimate if they did not yield the desired results.