Miles & Rhett: Strategy for Southern secession

By the League of The South

William Porcher Miles

Along with Robert Barnwell Rhett and William Gilmore Simms, one of the strongest voices for Southern independence in the months and years leading up to secession was William Porcher Miles. As we have seen inan earlier article, Miles was one of the South’s most able leaders and as Mayor of Charleston and later as a US Congressman he championed an uncompromisingly Southern nationalist platform.

The debate over the admission of Kansas into the Union as either a Northern or Southern State was one of the key section issues in the years before secession. Another issue was an effort by Alabamian William Lowndes Yancey, South Carolinian Robert Barnwell Rhett and others to re-open the international slave trade. His strong pro-Southern stance on these and other issues won Miles the respect of his fellow Fire-Eaters and made him one of the leading Southern nationalists of the era. Professor Eric H Walther quotes Miles on page 283 of his book The Fire-Eaters as saying that Southerners were compelled to ‘choose subjugation or resistance, colonial vassalage or separate independence.’ The Charleston Mercury, edited by Rhett’s son, Robert Barnwell Rhett, Jr, praised Miles and a close alliance developed between the Rhetts and Miles.

One of the most interesting and important actions that Southern nationalists took during this period was in the critical year of 1860 before and during the Democratic convention in Charleston. Walther describes the plan on pages 288-289 of his book:

[W]hen Robert Barnwell Rhett, Jr. suggested to Miles that splintering the Democratic party at the next national convention would help the states of the deep South control the fate of “inferior contemporaries,” he won Miles’ wholehearted agreement.”

Southern Democrats, led by the Fire-Eaters, nominated John Breckinridge of Kentucky to run for the US presidency, while Northern Democrats went on to nominate Stephen Douglas of Illinois. Miles then joined Rhett in campaigning for Breckinridge and urging Southerners to reject compromise. This split up the only party which had support in both the North and South, paving the way for Republican Abraham Lincoln to pull out a victory in a purely sectional vote. Though the Fire-Eaters hated Lincoln, they knew that nothing short of such a man taking the White House would push most Southern conservatives to support secession. The plan worked and South Carolina led the Lower South States in secession that winter. Miles was one of the delegates to the secession convention which voted to dissolve the union between the Palmetto State and the United States (with Rhett being the star of the convention). The Upper South States later followed their lead, resulting in an independent confederation of States stretching from Virginia to Texas. History might have been very different if Miles, Yancey and the Rhetts had not worked to split the Democratic Party.