Fire-Eaters
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In American history, the Fire-Eaters were a loosely aligned group of radical pro-secession Democrats in the antebellum South who urged the separation of the slave states into a new nation, in which ch
William Lowndes Yancey.
William L. Yancey
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William Lowndes Yancey was an American politician in the Antebellum South. As an influential "Fire-Eater", he defended slavery and urged Southerners to secede from the Union in response to Northern an
Fire-Eaters
…nationalist demands for an independent southern nation. Among the best known Fire-Eaters were Edmund Ruffin, Robert Barnwell Rhett, Louis T. Wigfall, and William Lowndes Yancey. By urging secession in the South, the Fire-Eaters aggravated the growth of divisive sectionalism in the U.S., and they materially contributed to the…
Portrait of John C. Calhoun. Yancey was critical of Calhoun in the 1830s, but he was fully supportive of Calhoun's defense of Southern institutions by the late 1840s.
After serving in the Alabama Legislature in the 1840s and the United States House of Representatives from 1844 to 1846, Yancey held no public office until the Civil War.
A portrait of Lewis Cass. The nomination of Cass for the 1848 Democratic Presidential nomination on a platform of popular sovereignty led Yancey to walk out of the convention.