William Lowndes Yancey was a leading Fire-Eater, gifted speaker, cunning strategist and early Southern nationalist. Having failed to get his own Democratic Party to take a strong pro-South position in the 1848 election, Yancey led a grass-roots campaign in Alabama to build support for independence. Professor and author Eric H Walther describes Yancey’s efforts to rally secessionists in the Heart of Dixie on pages 61-63 of his book The Fire-Eaters:
During the summer of 1850, Yancey encouraged the creation of southern rights associations throughout Alabama to promote secession. He inaugurated one himself in Montgomery and through it called for a statewide convention of such groups to assemble in the capital in February. Eighty-four delegates gathered, representing seventeen associations and eleven south Alabama counties. Yancey turned this small meeting into a personal forum. With the Compromise of 1850 a reality, he argued that there was no longer any “middle ground between submission and secession.” He did not yet agree with Senator Lewis that creating a third party was futile; he called on his fellow delegates “to know no party but the great Southern Party.” The resolutions adopted confirmed Yancey’s position “that the question of secession of Alabama from this government is reduced to that of time and policy only.” Anticipating the actions of a similar convention ten years later, the Southern Rights Convention issued a call to other slaves states to secede, send representatives to Montgomery, “and use all proper efforts to the formation of a Southern Confederacy.”
…After the convention adjourned, Yancey continued to promote secession by drawing ever sharper distinctions between supporters of resistance and Unionists. He declined a request from Dallas County Southern Rights Association to run for governor; he refused to divert his attention from the “only issue” of importance in 1851: whether the South should quietly submit “to the unconstitutional actions of Congress” or should resist “by separate State secession.” He told his Dallas County supporters that the people of Alabama must align themselves with one of two groups: “In the ranks of the Advocates of submission will eventually be gathered whatever there is of federal abolition tendencies in our midst, while… beneath banners of secession will as inevitably be rallied all that are true, to the institution of African slavery as a part of the fundamental basis of the social and political polity of the South, and all that shall prefer citizenship under separate State sovereignty, to a servile acquiescence in the consolidation of the federal government upon the basis of free-soilism. Yancey predicted that the practice of “pandering to party prejudices” must soon end. He promised advocates of secession that perfecting their organization and continuing to explain the necessity of secession to the public would rapidly win enough converts to accomplish their goal. In a prophetic afterthought, Yancey said that even if southerners rejected secession, his tactics would ensure success the next time they felt “outraged and disregarded.” Then, he stated, “we shall… not have again to await the slow process of disintegration of those old parties which have heretofore preyed upon the vitals of the South.”
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