Background

William Lowndes was born on August 10, 1814, in Ogeechee, Warren County, Georgia, United States. He was the son of Benjamin Cudworth and Caroline Bird Yancey. His father was a lawyer and a midshipman in the United States Navy. The elder Yancey died when his son was young; the mother remarried.

Education

Yancey attended Mount Zion Academy in Hancock County, Georgia, academies in New York State, and Williams College from 1830 to 1833.

Career

William Lowndes Yancey studied law and, in 1834, was admitted to the bar in Greenville, South Carolina, where he also planted and edited the Greenville Mountaineer from 1834 until 1836.

As a result of a duel over politics, in 1836 Yancey moved to Cahaba, Alabama, where he planted and edited the Cahaba Democrat and the Cahaba Gazette before being admitted to the bar in Wetumpka, Alabama. He was elected to the Alabama state House in 1841 and to the state Senate two years later.

In 1844-1845, he served in the United States House of Representatives. Yancey, who moved to Montgomery in 1846, led the Alabama delegation at the Charleston Democratic convention in 1860. At the Alabama constitutional convention of 1861, he introduced the ordinance to dissolve the Union.

In March 1861 he went to England and France as a commissioner from the Confederate States of America. His mission was ineffective, perhaps because of his passionate defense of slavery, which both countries hated. Upon his return in 1862, he was elected to the Confederate Senate. In 1863, in a noisy debate, Benjamin H. Hill, a senator from Georgia, threw an inkstand at Yancey, hitting him in the face and splattering blood and ink.

Achievements

• William Lowndes Yancey was a preeminent figure in the secession movement that brought on the Civil War. A vehement advocate for southern rights, popularly known as a "Fire-Eater," he accomplished his ultimate objective in 1860 when he precipitated the dissolution, not of the Union, but of the last truly national political organization: the Democratic Party. The dissolution of the Union soon followed.

Works

More photos

• book

  • Speech of the Hon. William L. Yancey, of Alabama: Delivered in the National Democratic Convention, Charleston, April 28th, 1860; With the Protest of the Alabama Delegation 1860
  • The Issues Involved in the Presidential Contest
  • Speeches of Willam L. Yancey, Senator from the State of Alabama 1862
  • The Issues Involved in the Presidential Contest: Speech of Hon. William L. Yancy of Alabama, Delivered at Memphis, Tenn., August 14, 1860 1860

Politics

Yancey was a rallying point for those radical secessionists who believed that the Davis administration was a hindrance to an effective war effort.

Views

Quotations: "The anti-slavery sentiment is universal. Uncle Tom's Cabin has been read and believed... I ought never to have come here. This kind of thing does not suit me. I do not understand these people or their ways well enough."

Personality

Willia Yancey believed that Southern unity could come only with the disintegration of existing parties and the submergence of partisan hatreds in the face of a common threat. Yancey encouraged the formation of local Southern rights associations and agitated to reopen the African slave trade to spread slavery's blessings to poor white Southerners. Preaching the notion of secession more convincingly than any contemporary, he was later called the "orator of secession."

Connections

William married Sarah Caroline Earle on August 13, 1835, they had seven children.

Father:

Benjamin Cudworth Yancey

1783-1817

Mother:

Caroline Bird Beman

1781-1859

Wife:

Sarah Caroline Earle Yancey

1816-1883

Sister:

Mary Eliza Yancey

1809-1817

Brother:

Benjamin Cudworth Yancey

1817-1891

Half Brother:

Samuel Smith Beman

1822-1882

Half sister:

Louisa Caroline Beman

1824-1887

Son:

Benjamin Cunningham Yancey

1836-1909

Son:

George Earle Yancey

1838-1838

Daughter:

Mary Elizabeth Yancey Harrell

1839-1902

Daughter:

Ella Bird Yancey

1842-1846

Son:

William Earle Yancey

1843-1932

Son:

Dalton Huger Yancey

1845-1925

Son:

Goodloe Harper Yancey

1848-1924

References

• The Coming of the Civil War
  1966
• A Government of Our Own: The Making of the Confederacy
  1944
• The Burden of Confederate Diplomacy
  1998
• The Confederacy As a Revolutionary Experience
  1992
• The Confederate Republic: A Revolution against Politics
  2000
• William Lowndes Yancey and the Coming of the Civil War
  2006