Most Southerners in the antebellum age were, as is still the case today, conservatives. Most were not eager to dissolve the Union and create an independent Southern confederation. The political elites, in particular, tended towards caution andresisted a growing movement of more radical Southern nationalists which grew out of the nullification battles of the late 1820s and early 1830s and continued to gain strength especially across the Lower South for the next three decades. Even after the secessionists prevailed (against the strong resistance of the conservatives) in 1860-61, conservatives (such as Jefferson Davis and Alexander Stephens) were given control of the fledgling Confederate States and it was they, not the radicals, who directed the South in its mortal struggle against the United States.
If there was a godfather of the Southern radicals, it was surely Robert Barnwell Rhett. No one fought as relentlessly and as long as Rhett for the dream of Southern independence. Historian and author William C Davis writes on page xi of his editor’s introduction to A Fire-Eater Remembers: The Confederate Memoir of Robert Barnwell Rhett, about Rhett’s unwavering commitment to Southern nationalism.
[Rhett] took a seat in Congress in 1837, there to serve for the next twelve years, and then in 1851, at the death of [John C] Calhoun, South Carolina elected him to fill the dead sage’s seat in the Senate. Rhett held the seat barely a year, however, before resigning after South Carolina again backed away from secession as a result of protest over the Compromise of 1850. By now Rhett stood irrevocably committed to secession, not just in response to particular actions by the federal government, but as a life’s policy. He had promoted it in the nullification crisis. He promoted it at the Nashville convention in 1850, and from the time of his resignation until the 1860 election of Abraham Lincoln finally impelled the rest of the Deep South to catch up to him, he never stopped arguing for permanent separation in order to protect slavery, the sovereignty of South Carolina, and to combat the insidious incursions of protective tariffs and internal improvements, means by which the more powerful North had all but enslaved the South.
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