The Orator of Secession: A Study of an Agitator

IN the study of American history we seem to have attained a sufficient remoteness from the great anti-slavery agitators to justify confidence in the estimates of them and their work which historians like Mr. Rhodes and Mr. Schouler have been making for us. In these fresh and careful studies of the great sectional controversy, Garrison and Phillips take their place close alongside the men of action who carried on the fight in Congress, in the White House, and on the battlefield. It is, therefore, somewhat surprising that the pro-slavery agitators are generally neglected by the historians of their times. The congressional side of the pro-slavery fight, indeed, has not lacked adequate portrayal, and some attention has been given to the activity of governors and other officials in the South who appeared as champions of the doomed institution. But of the foremost pro-slavery agitator, properly so called, even Mr. Rhodes, whose account of Southern society exhibits so conscientious a desire to understand the springs of the secession movement, has told us almost nothing.

The fact is not explained by any lack of striking and picturesque features in the man’s career, for it was in many ways extraordinary ; nor can it be attributed to the failure of his endeavor, for he attained his immediate purpose. He and his associates may at least share equally with Garrison and Phillips and their associates in the responsibility for precipitating the conflict at one time instead of another, and for the lines on which the issue was finally joined. Yet for chapters on the work of the anti-slavery agitators — work that began and ended with agitation — one finds scarcely a line devoted to the work of William Lowndes Yancey. An industrious biographer¹ has indeed succeeded in getting printed a bulky volume about his life and times, but the book has made little headway in reëstablishing his fame. His name, which in the later fifties was a rallying cry to the defenders of slavery, and to its assailants an execration, is known to few who cannot go back in memory to those terrible years. Thousands of youth, fresh from the study of their country’s history even in our best colleges, would be astounded, no doubt, to hear a claim advanced for him to a place among the half dozen men who have had most to do with shaping American history in this century. A pause over his grave should not prove valueless to those who are attempting a philosophic treatment of the period to which he belongs.

He was of good Virginian ancestry, but his father, Benjamin Cud worth Yancey, lived in South Carolina, and was numbered with Lowndes, Cheves, Calhoun, and Wilds in the so-called “ legal galaxy ” of the Palmetto State. The father died in 1817, when the son was three years old, and left but a small fortune. The son’s education was limited to a single year at Williams College. He studied law at Greenville, South Carolina, and at twenty was a practitioner at the bar, the editor of a Unionist paper, and an anti-nullification orator. At twenty - one he married a wealthy lady, and became a planter. A year later he went with his slaves to Alabama and established himself at Oakland, a plantation in the heart of the black belt, near Cahawba, the first capital of the young commonwealth, — a city of sudden birth and swift decay, now quite vanished from the earth.

Here he lived the quiet life of a cotton planter, until an irretrievable disaster, the accidental poisoning of his slaves, drove him back into law and journalism. Journalism and the law led him back into politics. Meantime, the headship of a slave establishment had so strengthened the bonds which bound him to his class and his section that no trace of Unionism was left in his mind when he entered the campaign of 1840 as a Van Buren man. Alabama was Democratic, but the Whigs were making a wonderful canvass. The demand for staterights oratory was great, and it was as a state-rights orator of the strictest sect that Yancey appeared, in the hard-cider year, before Alabama audiences. His success was such that for twenty years thereafter his sway over the people of Alabama was comparable to nothing that we of a cooler-headed generation have ever seen. Chief Justice Stone, a jurist not unknown to lawyers of the present day, once said : “ I first heard Mr. Yancey in 1840. I thought then, and I yet think, he was the greatest orator I ever heard.”

He rose rapidly to power. At twentyseven he was in the lower house of the legislature. At twenty-nine he was a state Senator. At thirty a by-election sent him to Congress. His reputation as an orator had preceded him, and his first speech at Washington extended it widely, while the immediate consequences of the speech made him for a time a national celebrity. Clingman, of North Carolina, had become a target for Southern invective when he opposed the annexation of Texas, the principal measure under debate during the winter of 184445. Yancey, though a new member, had the distinguished privilege of speaking for his Southern colleagues ; and if he excelled in one sort of oratory more than another, it was in impassioned invective. His speech made a pronounced impression on the House and the country, and Clingman, stung to the quick, demanded an explanation of certain personal allusions. Yancey haughtily declined to explain. Clingman then demanded “ the satisfaction usual among gentlemen; ” and with this demand his opponent, who had killed his man in an earlier affair, instantly complied.

The meeting was bloodless, and the opponents of dueling failed entirely in their efforts to make an example of the principals. Preston King’s resolution for an investigation was beaten in the House; and the legislature of Alabama passed over the governor’s veto an act relieving Yancey of the political disabilities which, under the laws of the state, he had incurred. To the Alabama Baptist, a religious paper which severely censured his course, Yancey wrote : “ The laws of God, the laws of my own state, the solemn obligations due ‘ that young wife, the mother of my children,’ to whom you so feelingly and chastely allude, were all considered ; but all yielded, as they have ever done from the earliest times to the present, to those laws which public opinion has framed, and which no one, however exalted his station, violates with impunity.”

Unopposed by the Whigs, Yancey was returned for the term beginning in 1845, and his reputation was much strengthened by his speeches in the first session. Apparently, he had every reason to look forward to a brilliant career in public life. But at the end of the session he resigned his seat, formed a partnership with a distinguished lawyer of Montgomery, and explained with the utmost clearness the reasons for his retirement. He never again held office under the government of the United States. I have set down the facts of his career up to this point as briefly as I could, for the reason that his true life work began with his retirement from Congress.

The address to his constituents in which he announced his retirement was in the main a bitter arraignment of the Northern Democrats. He charged them with subserviency to sectional interests antagonistic to the welfare of the South, and with infidelity to the party’s historical principles. “ If principle,” he declared, “ is dearer than mere party association, we will never again meet in common Democratic convention a large body of men who have vigorously opposed us on principle.” The scorn of compromise was the keynote of his address ; resistance to compromise was the sum total of the endeavor to which he thus committed himself. The recreant party must be brought back to the principles of strict construction or abandoned as the bulwark of Southern rights. The South must cease to rely on party, and insist, regardless of party platforms and party interests, on all it had a right to claim under the “ compact of union.” The ultimate remedy for Northern aggression he did not yet name ; but when occasion arose, in the controversy over the territory acquired from Mexico, he named it promptly and clearly. It was not nullification, or interposition, or any other form of resistance inside the Union ; it was secession from the Union. To the fight against compromise Yancey gave the remainder of his life. To understand how he fought and why he won, it is necessary to consider the people among whom he lived and the means of agitation that were available.

Politically, the people of the cotton states were divided into three parties. There were, indeed, few who did not call themselves either Whigs or Democrats ; but the extreme state-rights men, though they usually coöperated with the Democrats, repeatedly asserted themselves in such a way as to present the aspect of a third party. Probably a majority of the great planters were Whigs in name, but they invariably stood for the interests of their class, and in consequence they frequently found themselves in closer accord with the staterights or “ Southern Rights ” Democrats of their own section than with the Whigs of the North. On the other hand, the bulk of the Democrats, small farmers, tradesmen, and the like, were nowhere committed, except in South Carolina, to the extreme doctrines of Calhoun and other leaders in the resistance to centralization. There is no good reason to believe that either nullification or secession, considered as a policy, had a majority of the party in any state except South Carolina ; and in South Carolina the Calhoun men controlled so completely that the ordinary party divisions can hardly be said to have prevailed there at all. It was to the state-rights men, mingled as they were with the supporters of both the great national parties, that Yancey turned for help in the task he had undertaken.

In general, it may be said that the public mind was in a state altogether favorable to revolutionary designs. A growing unrest was in many ways apparent. Industrial unrest, due to economic causes, was exhibited in a revival of the migratory impulse. Early in the fifties, we find Senator C. C. Clay complaining bitterly of the abandonment of lands near his home in the fertile valley of the Tennessee. Olmsted’s books are full of allusions to the westward movement of cotton growers, even from regions so recently settled as the valleys of the Alabama and Tombigbee rivers. It was about this time that the failure of the state bank systems throughout the South was finally accepted by the legislatures. The political signs of unrest were unmistakable. In Yancey’s own state, perhaps the best of all the Gulf states for purposes of illustration, by reason of its geographical position and the representative character of the population, party lines were drawn in so many ways during the decade from 1845 to 1855 that the party names are bewildering. Whigs and Democrats, Bank men and AntiBank men, Unionists and Southern Rights men, Know-Nothings and AntiKnow-Nothings, sought the favor of the people. At such a time tenacity of purpose counted. In the midst of hesitation and indecision, Yancey had the immense advantage of knowing his own mind.

He had another advantage in that he lived among a people peculiarly incapable of resisting any appeal that might be made to them as his was, —a people over whom the power of a real orator was incalculable. An editor like Garrison, a poet like Whittier or Lowell, a novelist like Mrs. Stowe, could hardly have swayed the planters of Alabama as they swayed the people of New England ; for it must be said of the lower South that its culture was not of books. Mr. Rhodes, guided by the testimony of European travelers, has reached the conclusion that the best society in the South was finer than in the North. “ The palm,” he declares, “ must be awarded to the slaveholding section.” But the qualities that made the Southern host so attractive to the traveled Englishman or Frenchman were not developed in an atmosphere of free libraries or free public schools. There were really no public libraries in the cotton states, and the public school system did not flourish in a region so sparsely settled and so devoted to agriculture ; in Alabama, for example, there was no organized school system until the middle of the fifties. In many of the plantation homes there were, indeed, good private libraries, and men and women who loved books; but there were few books that belonged to America or to the passing age. The literary activity which gave to the world such names as Hawthorne and Emerson had in no wise stirred the lower South. Certain newspapers, like those of Charleston and New Orleans and the Montgomery Advertiser, were edited with ability, and were by no means unimportant forces in politics. Indeed, if one gives due weight to the fewness of cities, the influence of the newspaper press seems to have been fully as great as one could expect. But it was the spoken word, not the printed page, that guided thought, aroused enthusiasm, made history. It is doubtful if there has been any society in which the orator counted for more than he did in the cotton kingdom.

Yet at first blush it would seem that, as compared with the lyceum orator of New England, the oratorical agitator in the lower South had serious obstacles to contend with. He had, indeed, no such machinery as the lyceum to bring him before his audiences. Moreover, the railroads were few and short; there were no great cities, and few important towns. But he did not need the device of the lyceum to get an audience. Its place was amply filled by the law courts, the political meetings and conventions, the camp meetings, and the barbecues. For, from the nature of their chief industry, the people were unemployed during certain seasons ; and they were all familiar with the uses of horseflesh. Time was often heavy on their hands, and everybody rode and drove. The crossroads church stood often quite out of sight of human habitations, but its pews were apt to be well filled on Sunday, and the branches of the trees in front of it were worn with bridles. The court house, marking the county seat, might have no other neighbors than a “ general ” store and a wretched inn, but when some famous lawyer rose to defend a notorious criminal, hundreds, even thousands, followed with flashing or tearful eyes the dramatic action which surely accompanied his appeal. An important convention was not without a “ gallery ” because it was held in a town of few inhabitants and the meanest hotel accommodations. As to the barbecues and camp meetings, they were nothing less than outpourings of the people. At Indian Springs, in Georgia, during the hard-cider campaign, there was given a barbecue to which “the whole people of all Georgia” were invited. It was attended by thousands; the orators, of whom Yancey was one, spoke by day and by night; and it lasted a week.

These, in fact, were the true universities of the lower South, — the law courts and the great religious and political gatherings ; as truly as a grove was the university of Athens, or a church, with its sculpture and paintings, the Bible of a mediæval town. The man who wished to lead or to teach must be able to speak. He could not touch the artistic sense of the people with pictures or statues or verses or plays ; he must charm them with voice and gesture. There could be no hiding of the personality, no burying of the man in his art or his mission. The powerful man was above all a person ; his power was himself. How such a great man mounted the rostrum, with what demeanor he bore an interruption, by what gesture he silenced a murmur, — such things were remembered and talked about when his reasoning was perhaps forgotten.

Nor can it be said that the impressions thus produced were less deep and lasting than if they had resulted, as in other communities, from appeals addressed more especially to the intellect. The peculiarly impressionable character of Southern audiences of that day, their quick responsiveness to any plea that graced itself with the devices of the one art they loved, might very well have led a cool-headed observer to measure the outcome by the criterion of Latin-American civilization. Instability, lightness, might properly have been attributed to them. But whatever changes had come over the temper of the English stock in the cotton states, it had never lost its habit of fidelity to the cause once espoused, its sternly practical way of turning words into deeds. What many a Northern optimist considered mere bluster in the fifties took on the horrid front of war in the sixties; what seemed credulity in the farmer audiences who merely listened and shouted rose into the dignity of faith from the Petersburg trenches. He who cannot reconcile excitability with strength of purpose can never understand the people to whom Yancey spoke.²

Nowhere were these characteristics of the men of the lower South more strongly marked than in Yancey’s own home and the region of which it was the centre. The country wagons that always filled the central square of the Alabama capital brought every day the two most forcible illustrations of his contention. The cotton bale was his object lesson when he sought to touch his people’s sense of the interests that were endangered when the manufacturing states controlled at Washington. The negro on top of it was a constant reminder of mastery, a constant incitement to a heightened appreciation of the liberty that was still, as in Burke’s day, “ not only an enjoyment, but a kind of rank and privilege.” To the Southerner liberty meant nothing less than the right of himself and his community to be free from all interference from the peculiar outside world which had neither cotton nor slaves, — the meddlesome outside world which kept prating of a higher law, above the Constitution, above the Scriptures, rolling its r’s the while in such a disagreeable way.

It was not, however, after the fashion of the common demagogue that Yancey sought to lead his people. His claim to our respect as a political thinker is far stronger than that. He did not show them the merely obvious aspects of the sectional controversy. On the contrary, it is doubtful if any mind in the country dwelt more fixedly than his on the relations of the South to the rest of the Union, and of slavery to American civilization ; or if any more remorselessly pursued the facts, from one point of view, to their remoter consequences and significance. In this regard Yancey was no unworthy successor to Calhoun. He was never clamorous or shrill, however vehement he grew, because no particular exigency ever drew his attention from the main question. Perceiving from the outset that the crucial test of strength between slavery and its assailants must come in dealing with the territories, he took his stand on that, and never changed it.

His first effort was to bring his party to his position ; and his position was first clearly stated in a political document, once famous as the “ Alabama platform ” of 1848. To the Alabama Democratic convention of that year, called to choose delegates to the national convention, Yancey went as a delegate, carrying this document in his pocket. The committee on resolutions brought in a much milder declaration ; but by a notable oratorical triumph he got his own views adopted instead. Following the line of Calhoun’s resolutions of 1847, the platform declared that it was the duty of Congress not merely to permit slavery in the territories acquired from Mexico, but to protect it there. Its most important clause was a denunciation of the new theory of squatter sovereignty, — a theory which Yancey always regarded as the most insidious of all attacks on the equality of the Southern states in the Union. The resolution on this doctrine became the true gospel of the fire eaters. It read as follows : —

“ Resolved, That the opinion advanced or maintained by some that the people of a territory acquired by the common toil, suffering, blood, and treasure of the people of all the states can, in other event than the forming of a state constitution, preparatory to admittance as a state in the Union, lawfully or constitutionally prevent any citizen of any such state from removing to or settling in such territory with his property, he it slave property or other, is a restriction as indefensible in principle as if such restriction were imposed by Congress.”

The delegates pledged themselves to support no candidate for the presidency who would not openly oppose both methods of excluding slavery from the territories, — by the action of Congress and by the action of territorial legislatures. The delegates to the national convention at Baltimore, with Yancey at their head, were instructed to act in accordance with the resolutions. With Democrats elsewhere who would not accept the resolutions as good party doctrine the Alabama democracy would have no fellowship. Yancey immediately wrote to the various aspirants for the presidential nomination for an expression of their views, in order that he and his associates might be governed by their replies.

This was the furthest ground that any body of Southerners had yet taken in the controversy; but for a moment it looked as if the whole of the Southern democracy were going to take it at once. The Alabama platform had done for the pro-slavery agitation what the Virginia and Kentucky resolutions, at the close of the last century, did for the Anti-Federalist impulse. Democratic conventions in Florida and Virginia hastened to adopt it; the legislatures of Georgia and Alabama indorsed it. Then suddenly it fell into disfavor. The moderate men, who loved the Union, saw in it danger to the country’s peace ; the politicians, looking forward to the campaign, scented danger to the party. Yancey returned from traveling on a circuit of the courts to find the newspapers turning against him, the presidential aspirants replying evasively to his letters, and even his fellow delegates wavering. He himself did not waver for an instant. At Baltimore he spoke firmly ; first objecting to the nomination of a candidate until a platform had been agreed on, and then urging his views in a minority report from the committee on resolutions. His amendment being rejected, and Cass, the reputed author of the squatter sovereignty doctrine, being named as the candidate, he arose, and with a single follower left the hall.

The situation when he returned to his home was an admirable one to try the temper of an agitator. The people crowded to hear him defend his course ; at one meeting after another the Democrats urged him in affectionate terms to reconsider his determination and yield to the will of the majority. But he had the born agitator’s inability to accept defeat. He declined to support Cass, or in any way to recede from his position. On the contrary, he denounced with the utmost bitterness the course of his fellow delegates at Baltimore; he would come back into the party when it abandoned squatter sovereignty, and not before. Alabama went for Cass and Butler, and Yancey’s labors seemed to have gone for nothing. He had failed in his attempt at party leadership. One thing only was left to him : his prestige as an orator always sufficed to get him a hearing. On one occasion, a public meeting first voted that he should not be heard; and then, when it was announced that he would speak on the other side of the street, adjourned thither en masse without the formality of a vote.

He kept on speaking, and before long the crisis of 1849-50 gave him another opening. As the time for the decision of the territorial question approached, party lines in the cotton states grew weaker and weaker. Democrats who feared for the Union favored a compromise ; many Whigs, moved by their attachment to slavery and the plantation system, favored a firm stand for the Southern contention. Yancey found himself in the forefront of the opposition to Clay’s plan for saving the Union. He believed that the rights of the Southern states had been sacrificed in the compromise of 1820; to accept another arrangement that would hamper the extension of slavery was to his mind like submitting to a second branding. The honor of the South was at stake, not its material interests alone. With this appeal he won many to his side ; it played upon the instinct that had kept the duello alive. He even found his way back into the councils of the Democratic party. That party, in fact, seemed on the eve of disruption throughout the South ; Union men and Southern Rights men were struggling for the mastery in the organization. The people were really dividing, with little regard to parties, on the issue of compromise or resistance, and the Whigs, for the most part, were joining the Union Democrats. For the first time there was a clear division in Yancey’s own state between those who thought the plantation system safe inside the Union and those who were ready to weigh the peculiar interests and the honor of the South against the value of the Union.

In consequence, Yancey came face to face with men who opposed his leadership, not because it endangered the welfare of a party, but because his ideas were a menace to the Union, and they loved it. The defense of compromise, which in that exigency was the defense of the Union, was undertaken by men of no ordinary ability. In Alabama, Henry W. Hilliard, a Whig of national reputation in those days, and an orator hardly second to Yancey himself in effectiveness with popular audiences, was the Union leader. Senator William R. King, who was soon to die while the Vice-President’s seat awaited him, counseled moderation and loyalty. Collier, the governor ; Watts, who was to be governor and a member of the Confederate Cabinet; Houston, who after many years was to lead his people out of the horrors of reconstruction, were all firm Unionists. It was such men as these, in Alabama and the neighboring states, who kept the Nashville convention from doing any mischief. It was they who gave Yancey, now at the head of the Southern Rights party, his second defeat. Their fight drew eloquent praise from Rufus Choate at the time, but nowadays it is hardly remembered that there ever was any fight for the Union in the lower South. They were successful in most of the congressional districts, and the party of resistance practically disappeared. But Yancey, with a corporal’s guard of followers, refused to leave the field. In 1852, a national ticket, Troup and Quitman, was actually nominated and supported by a few thousands who stood in the South, as a like handful of steadfast abolitionists did in the North, for the view that the inevitable conflict was at hand. Yancey, in fact, never considered any other provocation comparable to the measures of 1850. In 1860 he declared that if he went out of the Union because of “ a Black Republican victory,” he would go “ in the wake of an inferior issue ; ” the true justification for such action, in his mind, was that the Union had been destroyed ten years before, when the Southern states were denied equality with the free states of the North in the common territorial possessions.

But it was clear that the secessionists were in a minority. Yancey had failed as the leader of a separate party movement, as he had failed before to win leadership in the old party. His power waned again, but his fame was constantly growing. It did not proceed from above downward, like the oratorical reputations of the officeholders at Washington, but spread in an ever widening circle among the people themselves, until it pervaded states where his voice had not yet been heard. His figure was now distinct and threatening far beyond the limits of his immediate personal influence. He had become the orator of secession, the storm centre of Southern discontents. More than that, he had made himself feared by moderate men everywhere as the arch-enemy of compromise. Now that Clay was dead, Stephen A. Douglas had succeeded to the leadership of those who trusted Clay’s devices. In Douglas, and Northern men like him, Yancey saw the constant obstacle in his path to leadership in the South; for it was they who were forever beguiling the South with bargains and promises. Douglas, on the other hand, during the truce that followed the battle of 1850, might well have studied the man who, far more than any Northern rival, threatened him with defeat alike in his policy and in his ambition.

For the moment Douglas was having his way. His doctrine of squatter sovereignty had triumphed in the compromise, and he proceeded now to extend it into new fields. The passage of the Kansas-Nebraska bill in 1854 marked the lowest ebb in Yancey’s political fortunes. It seemed to prove what his opponents at home had all along contended, that slavery was safe in the Union ; for was not the whole great West thrown open to the master and his slave ? In vain he warned his people against the delusive concession. His was no patient spirit, but he was compelled to wait for events to prove that Douglas was not the savior of the South. Events, however, were moving rapidly. The extremists of the North were the helpers of the extremist leader in the South. The Free-Soilers of Kansas were working for him ; John Brown was his ally. For a moment, indeed, he seems to have been misled by the Cincinnati platform of 1856, and by Buchanan’s adroitly worded letter of acceptance, into the belief that his triumph was coming in the form in which he had sought it at Baltimore, — within the lines of the party ; for, apparently thinking that the party had discarded the Douglas doctrine when it rejected Douglas as a candidate, he supported Buchanan. But the party persisted in the Douglas policy in Kansas, and with the failure of the scheme Yancey saw the approach of his real triumph, — a triumph that should crush Douglas, who for a time had made him powerless, disrupt the time-serving party that had rejected his counsel, and bring to his feet his own people, who had twice refused to follow him.

The vision made him more impatient than ever. He devoted himself to the ways and means of hastening the consummation. In Southern commercial conventions he insisted with arrogance on the separateness of the South’s industrial interests. He even denounced as unconstitutional the laws forbidding the foreign slave trade, supporting his view by the most extraordinary reasoning in the history of constitutional interpretations. Finally, in 1858, he wrote, and afterward defended, a communication which found its way into print and became known far and wide as the “ scarlet letter.” “ No national party can save us,” he declared ; “ no sectional party can save us. But if we could do as our fathers did, — organize committees of safety all over the cotton states (and it is only in them that we can look for any effective movement), — we shall fire the Southern heart, instruct the Southern mind, give confidence to each other, and at the proper moment, by one organized concerted action, we can precipitate the cotton states into revolution.”

The Democrats of Alabama, now united on the platform of 1848, to which even the moderates had been driven by the outcome of the squatter sovereignty experiment, sent Yancey to the national convention at Charleston, with practically the same message he had carried to Baltimore. About the same time, the legislature instructed the governor to call a convention of the people of the state, in the event of the election of a “ Black Republican ” to the presidency. Yancey went to Charleston assured that the whole lower South was behind him. Douglas, still pursuing his great ambition, saw his fate in Yancey’s hands, and went as far as he could go to meet the fire eaters without abandoning all hope of an effective support in the North.

But Yancey, knowing that his hour had come, would accept nothing less than the whole of that for which he had so long contended. When once again, after twelve years of defeat and exile, he rose to speak before a national convention, he had such an opportunity as rarely comes even to an American orator. The imperious tones of his wonderful voice fell with strange power on the convention. The trembling delegates hung upon his words, for they saw in his hands the fate, not of Douglas alone, but of the party, perhaps of the Union. If to grant his demands was party suicide, it was hardly less party suicide to refuse them. By a few votes the Southern platform was rejected. He left the hall, and now, not the single follower of twelve years before, but the delegates of seven states trooped at his heels. In the end yet others followed.

When Douglas, finally receiving the nomination of those who remained, went before the people, he found Yancey awaiting him. Declining the offer of the vicepresidency from the friends of Douglas, Yancey had joined the seceders at Baltimore, where he dictated the nomination of Breckinridge on the extreme Southern platform, and then entered on a canvass of the Northern states ; a tour de force that smacks either of overfed ambition, or else of a real hope that there might be such a union as he had always held the Constitution to define, — a union in which the will of the majority should count for nothing against the letter of the Constitution as he read it. He spoke in the middle states, in New England, and in the West. He even spoke in Faneuil Hall, silencing a threatening uproar where Phillips had conquered his first mob. His attitude to his Northern audiences is perhaps best exhibited in his last speech on Northern soil, made when the result of the election was already clearly foreshadowed.

“ My countrymen,” he said at Cincinnati, “ you cannot carry out the policy of the Black Republican party. You cannot carry it out, and expect the South to remain submissively bowing down to your supremacy. We are for the Union. What union ? For the union, gentlemen, contained between these two lids,” holding up the Constitution. . . . “ Can you obtain anything, gentlemen, by destroying, even if you are able, my section, save the memory of a great wrong that would haunt you through eternity ? . . . But do not, do not, my friends of the North, — I say it before you in no spirit, gentlemen, of servile submission to your power, or of servile acknowdedgment of that power, for, as God rules, I have no fear of it, as much as I respect it, — but do not, merely because you have the power, do not wreathe your arms around the pillars of our liberty, and, like a blind Samson, pull down that great temple on your heads as well as ours.”

From the time he crossed the Ohio his journey homeward was like a triumphal progress. At Nashville the horses were taken from his carriage and his admirers drew it through the streets. At New Orleans an informal holiday was proclaimed, that all might hear him. When he reached Montgomery he found Douglas just leaving the city; that night no hall could contain the multitudes thronging to hear their champion, whom they hailed as the foremost orator of the world. At last they were ready to follow where he led. The whole lower South voted for the candidate of his choice, and the day after the election lifelong opponents of his policy joined their voices with his and advocated the final step into disunion.

But his triumph was not to be completed without a struggle. The friends of the Union in his own state were driven to the wall, but they made one more gallant fight before they yielded. In northern Alabama they were still strong, and with them were joined some who, seeing secession inevitable, were yet disposed to wait until coöperation with other states could be assured ; and others, no doubt, who were stirred by no higher motive than a sullen unwillingness to accept a leadership so long rejected. The temper of the convention was in doubt until it assembled, and on the first test vote the majority for immediate secession was but eight. The spirited opposition roused Yancey into an arrogance that met with a sturdy defiance from the Union leaders, who were wanting neither in ability nor in courage. Defeated, however, in their attempt to get the ordinance submitted to the people, they for the most part yielded, in the hope that unanimity might give strength to the movement they deprecated ; but no less than twenty-four refused to sign the instrument. The results of submitting the ordinance to the people in Texas, and later in Virginia, give us no reason to believe that the decision of Alabama could have been changed.

Yancey had had his way. Suddenly, and as if by some enchantment, the cotton kingdom had risen to face the world. Before his eyes, in his own home, he saw a new government established, a new flag unfurled. It was fit, indeed, that his should be the voice to welcome Jefferson Davis when he came to take his place at the head of the new Confederacy ; for no other voice had availed so much to call it into existence. But his work was done. It was his to rouse the storm, not to direct its course. He sailed away to Europe at the head of the commission sent to secure recognition for the Confederacy among the great powers. Returning from this bootless mission, he took his seat in the Confederate Senate, and in the turbulent debates of that gloomy and impotent legislature his last energies were consumed. A painful malady had long sapped his strength, and in the summer of 1863 he went home to die. In the delirium of fever his voice sometimes rose in fierce commands to visionary hosts on unseen battlefields. But his passing was little marked. The orators had given place to the captains. His people were working out in blood and fire the destiny up to which he had led them.

I shall not attempt an estimate of the importance of this career ; but surely it is too important to be neglected by those who write our history. Yet our knowledge of the man is almost entirely matter of tradition. He wrote no books and published no collection of his speeches; the fragments that remain bear the marks of imperfect reporting; the most effective of his addresses were those delivered before popular audiences, usually in the open air, and they were not taken down. What is left could never be treated as literature, and conveys, indeed, but a vague notion of his oratory. Yet there are paragraphs which, read with the single purpose of estimating their immediate effect on those who heard them, and with due regard to time and place, impress one very strongly with his mastery of the instrument he used. The sentences sometimes rush like charging cavalry ; there are phrases that ring out like bugle calls. It is the language of passionate purpose ; of an orator bent on rousing, convincing, overwhelming the men in front of him, not on meeting the requirements of any standard of public speech.

Of his look and bearing we have better record ; for it is of these things that Southern tradition is most careful. He had little of the poseur about him ; what most impressed men was his grim fixedness of purpose. He was not given to frantic gesticulation, and it is said that he rarely occupied more than a square yard of space even in his longest addresses. His chief physical endowment was his voice, — “ the most perfect voice,” one tells us, “ that ever aroused a friendly audience to enthusiasm or curbed to silence the tumults of the most inimical.” A youth who heard it years ago, and who since then, in the course of a long career in Congress and in the Cabinet, has doubtless encountered all the notable orators of his time, declares it was “ sweeter, clearer, and of more wonderful compass and flexibility ” than any other he ever heard. His appearance was in no wise extraordinary ; neither stature nor features would have attracted the gaze of a crowd. There was even a lack of animation in his ordinary aspect, and in his later years a look of nervous exhaustion. Away from the platform he made little effort to shine. There is nothing but the mastery and pride of his ill-painted features on the canvas in the State House at Montgomery to draw upon them the eye that wanders among the unremembered governors and judges of his time. But oratory, we know, is action, and the truer picture of the man is the image of tremendous articulate passion which abides in the minds of those who fell under his power nearly half a century ago.

There is so much about Yancey to suggest a comparison with Wendell Phillips that I have been constantly tempted to set the two side by side in my thought. Their names, indeed, were often coupled in the invective of the moderate men of those days: Yancey the “ fire eater,” and Phillips the “ abolitionist fanatic.” Their careers stand out in striking similarity, and in equally striking contrast. The similarity lay chiefly in their mental characteristics and methods of work; the contrast was in the causes for which they stood and the fates they met.

It is easy to think of them as the Luther and the St. Ignatius of the revolt against slavery. But Yancey’s spiritual kinship was not wholly with the Spaniard ; in him, no less than in Phillips, there was something of the German’s temper. The two extremists were alike in their relentless hostility to every form of compromise, to every disguise with which men sought to conceal the sterner aspect of affairs. If both were enthusiasts, neither was a mere dreamer. The fever in their blood brought them, not fanciful visions, but a keener insight into the disorder of the body politic than was given to more sluggish natures. The oratory of both was simple and direct, because both saw and purposed clearly. Both were appealing from the politicians to the people, and they spoke a language which the people understood, however the politicians marveled. Both were wiser than their contemporaries who were judging the situation by the standard of the ordinary, because both were alive to the imminence of an extraordinary crisis.

But here the likeness ends, and the contrast begins. The heroism which one gave to a moral principle the other devoted to a political purpose. One fortified himself with an appeal to a higher law, the other with the compromises of the Constitution. One looked to the future for his justification ; the other demanded of the future that it break not with the past. Standing thus for causes as opposite as the poles, they encountered destinies as diverse : one, a success that proved the beginning of utter failure; the other, defeats that are forgotten in his dateless triumph.

For the surprising and neglected fact of the outcome is that Yancey really led his people in the way he chose, while Phillips never marked out the path along which the republic was finally to march to the heights of his ideal. Not one specific design of the abolitionist extremists was ever accomplished in the way they planned : neither the breaking away of New England, nor the rising of the slaves under John Brown, nor any interference by Congress with slavery in the states. Yet in the end freedom prevailed. Yancey’s definite purpose was to build the Southern Confederacy, and he died under its flag. Yet to-day his Confederacy is a vanished dream, and he himself, within the lives of men who saw his beginning and ending, little more than a tradition.

The traveler in New England, well acquainted with the just fame of the great abolitionist, is surprised to find among his surviving contemporaries an inadequate estimate of his genius. The traveler in the lower South is equally astonished to find that a man whose name he has scarcely heard is honored there as the first orator of the century. On the gravestone of this forgotten orator it is recorded that he was 41 justified in all his deeds; ” yet around his grave are so many graves of simple and honorable gentlemen who gave their lives to the dreadful task he set them, that one can fancy even his proud spirit crying out to be delivered from the body of that death. Nevertheless, the generous people who followed him have not condemned him ; nor may we, since he was an orator, deny him refuge in the defense of Demosthenes : “ Lay not the blame on me, if it was Philip’s fortune to win the battle ; the end depended on the will of God, and not on me.”

William Garrott Brown.