Meet the Fire Eaters!

The Fire Eaters were a group of Southern men who long before 1861 argued for the separation of the South from the North. Their passion for their cause, and the cause of Dixie, earned them the name Fire Eaters. Requiescant in pace Domini.

Roger Atkinson Pryor

Brigadier-General Roger Atkinson Pryor was born near Petersburg, Va., July, 1828, and was graduated at Hampden-Sidney college in 1845, and at the university of Virginia in 1848. Subsequently he prepared for the legal profession, and was admitted to the bar, but relinquished the practice on account of delicate health, and entered journalism. After an association with the Washington Union he became editor of the Richmond Enquirer in 1853, and rapidly attained prominence. In 1855, at the age of twenty-seven years, he was sent to Greece by President Pierce, as special commissioner for the adjustment of certain difficulties with that government.

On his return he established a political journal at Richmond, called The South, in which he presented with great vigor the most radical opposition to encroachments upon the local rights and industrial methods of the South. He was elected to Congress in 1859, to fill a vacancy, and was reelected in 1860. While in Congress his aggressiveness and passionate oratory gave him national prominence, and led to several duels. He took a prominent part in the proceedings of the Charleston Democratic convention in 1860, and after the presidential election ardently advocated the formation of the Southern Confederacy and the union with it of Virginia. Repairing to Charleston, S. C., he became a member of the volunteer staff of General Beauregard, and with his comrade, A. R. Chisholm, accompanied Aide-de-camps James Chestnut and Stephen D. Lee in the visit to Fort Sumter April 12th, notifying Major Anderson that fire would be opened on the fort. Thence they went by boat to Fort Johnson, where Capt. George S. James was ordered to open the fire. James, who was a great admirer of Pryor, offered the honor to him, as General Lee relates, but he replied, with much the same emotion as had characterized Anderson's receipt of the notice of bombardment, "I could not fire the first gun of the war."

From their boat midway between Johnson and Sumter, he witnessed the opening of the bombardment. After the flag on Sumter was shot down he was sent with Lee to offer assistance in subduing the fire in the fort, and discovered that Colonel Wigfall had made arrangements for surrender. Soon afterward he was assigned as colonel to the command of the Third Virginia regiment, stationed at Portsmouth and vicinity, and later in the year was elected a member of the First Confederate congress, in which he served with prominence as a member of the military committee.

Continuing in military command, he moved his regiment to Yorktown in March, 1862, and engaged in battle at Yorktown and Williamsburg, after which he was promoted brigadier-general. In this rank he participated in the battle of Seven Pines, and was particularly distinguished, his men fighting bravely and with heavy loss, in the victories won at Gaines' Mill and Frayser's Farm. With Longstreet's corps he took part in the second battle of Manassas, and shared the distinction won by Anderson's corps at Harper's Ferry and Sharpsburg. In November General Lee requested Pryor to return to Richmond and organize a brigade to operate south of the James river.

He rendered valuable services in that field until his resignation, August 26, 1863.

In 1864 he was captured by the United States troops and for a time confined at Fort Lafayette. Upon the close of hostilities he urged a policy of quiet acquiescence.

The degree of LL. D. was conferred upon him by Hampden-Sidney college.

[Confederate Military History, Vol. III, pp. 654-655.] (http://members.aol.com/jweaver300/grayson/pryor.htm)

The Pryor Line of MacDonald King Aston

s/o Mel Aston b. 11/23/1925
s/o Eva King b. 7/25/1901
d/o Sarah Jane Pryor b. 5/03/1871
d/o Joseph Allen Pryor b. 5/03/1850
(Joseph is the father of my Great-Grandma, Sarah Jane Pryor.
Sarah Jane, or Janey as she was known, was the fourth cousin of Roger Atkinson Pryor.)

s/o William Harrison "Buck" Pryor b. 6/18/1812
s/o William Pryor b. 2/08/1788
s/o Mathew J. Pryor, Sr. b. 3/15/1758 (Revolutionary War)
s/o Green Pryor b. 1735
s/o John Henry Pryor b. 1694
s/o Robert Pryor b. 1663, England
s/o Robert Pryor b. 1635
s/o William Pryor b. 1610

Edmund Ruffin

Edmund Ruffin was born in 1794 and educated in Virginia, including a brief period at the College of William and Mary. For most of his life, Ruffin was a farmer and a renowned agricultural reformer. Experiments on his farm convinced him that fertilizers, crop rotation, drainage, and good plowing could revitalize the declining soil of his native state.

From the 1820s onward, Ruffin published his findings, edited an agricultural journal, lectured, and organized agricultural societies. In the 1850s, he became president and commissioner of the Virginia State Agricultural Society.

Increasingly, however, Ruffin turned his attention in the 1850s to politics, especially the defense of slavery and secession. Although he had earlier expressed some doubts about slavery and opened the pages of his agricultural journal to arguments about colonization, by the 1850s Ruffin had become a staunch proponent of slavery and of the racial inferiority of blacks. He joined the ranks of fire-eating southern radicals advocating a separate southern nation to protect slavery and the southern way of life. Secession became as great a reform cause as agricultural improvement. Both would rejuvenate the South.

Ruffin's desire to push the secessionist movement towards a confrontation with the North brought him to Charleston during the Sumter crisis. He intended to take his stand with the Confederacy, and he hoped events would drive his native state, Virginia, out of the Union. His ardent southern nationalism made him a hero of southern radicals. He was invited to attend three secession conventions, and given the honor of firing one of the first batteries against Fort Sumter.

As the Confederacy's fortunes ebbed during the war, however, Ruffin grew distraught. Plagued by ill health, family misfortunes, and the rapid collapse of Confederate forces in 1865, Ruffin proclaimed "unmitigated hatred to Yankee rule," and on June 17, 1865, committed suicide. His act, sometimes considered the "last shot" of the Civil War, became identified with the Confederacy's defeat and a symbol of the lost cause. His suicide was interpreted as an expression of the Southern code of honor, the refusal to accept a life in defeat.

(Source: http://home.sandiego.edu/~clawson/edmund.html)

Edmund Ruffin’s Famous Last Words

On June 18, 1865 Edmund Ruffin, Fire Eater, chose to commit suicide rather than submit to the subjugation of Yankee bayonet rule. Defiant to the bitter end, this fiery Southern patriot penned these famous last words in his diary just minutes before taking leave of the Yankee tyranny that had descended upon Dixie:

Louis Trezevant Wigfall

Louis Trezevant Wigfall, a Senator from Texas; was born near Edgefield, Edgefield District, S.C., April 21, 1816.

He pursued classical studies; attended the University of Virginia and graduated from South Carolina College (now the University of South Carolina) at Columbia in 1837; served as a lieutenant of Volunteers in the Seminole War in Florida in 1835; attended the law department of the University of Virginia at Charlottesville; admitted to the bar in 1839 and commenced practice in Edgefield, S.C.; moved to Marshall, Tex., in 1848; member, State house of representatives 1849-1850; member, State senate 1857-1860; elected as a Democrat to the United States Senate to fill the vacancy caused by the death of J. Pinckney Henderson and served from December 5, 1859, until March 23, 1861, when he withdrew; expelled from the Senate in 1861 for support of the rebellion; served in the Confederate Army during the Civil War; represented the State of Texas in the Confederate Congress; after the war moved to London, England; returned to the United States in 1873 and settled in Baltimore, Md.; died in Galveston, Tex., February 18, 1874; interment in the Episcopal Cemetery.

Bibliography: American National Biography; Dictionary of American Biography; King, Alvy. Louis T. Wigfall: Southern Fire-Eater. Baton Rouge: Louisiana State University Press, 1970; Ledbetter, Billy. “The Election of Louis T. Wigfall to the United States Senate, 1859: A Reevaluation.” Southwestern Historical Quarterly 77 (October 1973): 241-54.

(Biographical Dictionary of the United States Congress, Website: bioguide.congress.gov, 5 April 2005)

From the Handbook of Texas Online

WIGFALL, LOUIS TREZEVANT (1816-1874). Louis T. Wigfall, secessionist, was born in Edgefield, South Carolina, on April 21, 1816, to Levi Durand and Eliza (Thomson) Wigfall and educated at South Carolina College and the University of Virginia. Wigfall believed in a society led by the planter class and based on slavery and the chivalric code. As a young man he neglected his law practice for contentious politics that led him to wound a man in a duel (and be wounded himself) and to kill another during a quarrel. In 1846 Wigfall arrived in Galveston, then moved with his wife, Charlotte, and three children to Nacogdoches, where he was a law partner of Thomas J. Jennings and William B. Ochiltree.qv Soon Wigfall opened his own law office in Marshall. He was active in Texas politics from the month he arrived, "alerting" Texans to the dangers of abolition and growing influence of non-slave states in the United States Congress. At the Galveston County Democratic convention in 1848 he condemned congressional efforts to prohibit the expansion of slavery into the territories and expressed sorrow that Texas would not take the lead in opposing such unconstitutional actions.

Named in 1850 to the Texas House of Representatives, Wigfall attacked United States Senator Sam Houston as a coward and a traitor to Texas and the South. Wigfall played a major role in organizing Texas Democrats and fighting the American (Know-Nothing) party and Sam Houston in 1855-56. Wigfall was one of the few men in Houston's opposition who rivaled him as a stump speaker, and he was widely credited with Houston's defeat for the governorship in 1857. That year Wigfall was elected to the Texas Senate, and in 1858 he had a strong voice in the state Democratic convention that adopted a states' rights platform. With the breakup of the Know-Nothings, many moderates moved back into the Democratic party, and it appeared that Wigfall`s radicalism was repudiated and that Houston and moderates were ascendant. But Wigfall capitalized on the fear that John Brown's raid on Harper's Ferry caused in the slave states and was elected to the United States Senate in 1859. In the Senate Wigfall earned a reputation for eloquence, acerbic debate, and readiness for encounter. In the forefront of southern "fire-eaters," Wigfall continued his fight for slavery and states' rights and against expanding the power of national government. Nevertheless he tried, unsuccessfully, to get federal funds to defend the Texas frontier against Indian attacks and to build the Southern Pacific Railroad into Texas.

After Abraham Lincoln was elected president, Wigfall coauthored the "Southern Manifesto," declaring that any hope for relief in the Union was gone and that the honor and independence of the South required the organization of a Southern Confederacy. Wigfall helped foil efforts for compromise to save the Union and urged all slave states to secede. He stayed in the Senate after Texas seceded, spying on the Union, chiding northern senators, and raising and training troops in Maryland to send to South Carolina. With the assistance of Benjamin McCulloch, he bought revolvers and rifles for Texas Confederates. Wigfall made his presence felt when the Civil War began at Fort Sumter, rowing under fire to the fort and dictating unauthorized surrender terms to the federal commander. Between April and July 1861, when he was finally expelled from the Senate, Wigfall was a member of the Provisional Congress of the Confederacy, an aide to President Jefferson Davis, and a United States Senator. He was commissioned colonel of the First Texas Infantry on August 28, 1861, and on November 21 Davis nominated him brigadier general in the Provisional Army, a move later confirmed by the Confederate Congress. Wigfall commanded the Texas Brigade of the Army of Northern Virginia (Hood's Texas Brigade) until February 1862, when he resigned to take a seat in the Confederate Congress.

At the beginning of the war Wigfall was a friend and supporter of President Davis. But soon after Wigfall's election to the Confederate Senate they quarreled over military and other matters. During the last two years of the Confederacy Wigfall carried on public and conspiratorial campaigns to strip Davis of all influence. Despite his public advocacy of states' rights, Wigfall did little for Texas. In the Confederacy he worked for military strength at the expense of state and individual rights. But he opposed the arming of slaves and was willing to lose the war rather than admit that blacks were worthy of being soldiers. After the fall of the Confederacy, Wigfall fled to Texas for almost a year and then, in the spring of 1866, to England, where he tried to foment war between Britain and the United States, hoping to give the South an opportunity to rise again. He returned to the United States in 1872, lived in Baltimore, moved back to Texas in 1874, and died in Galveston on February 18, 1874. He was buried there in the Episcopal Cemetery.

BIBLIOGRAPHY: Alvy L. King, Louis T. Wigfall: Southern Fire-Eater (Louisiana State University Press, 1970). Billy D. Ledbetter, "The Election of Louis T. Wigfall," Southwestern Historical Quarterly 77 (October 1973). Clyde W. Lord, Ante-Bellum Career of Louis Trezevant Wigfall (M.A. thesis, University of Texas, 1925). Wigfall Family Papers, Library of Congress, Washington.

Alvy L. King

[Handbook of Texas Online, s.v. "WIGFALL, LOUIS TREZEVANT," http://www.tsha.utexas.edu/handbook/online/articles/view/WW/fwi4.html (accessed April 6, 2005).]

William Lowndes Yancey, Fire Eater!

1814-1863
Lawyer, Planter, Editor, Statesman

The nicknames appended to William L. Yancey—"the Silver-tongued Orator of Secession" and "the Prince of Fire-eaters"—attest to his best known accomplishments.

One of the foremost Southern nationalists, he was lauded as a great speaker among great speakers in an era when oratorical skill was essential to success in politics.

Born in Warren County, Georgia, on August 14, 1814, to Caroline (Bird) and Benjamin C. Yancey, he was taken from his beloved South as a child. In the wake of his father's death, his mother had married a local schoolteacher, the Reverend Nathan Beman, a native of New England. After selling the Yancey slaves, the Reverend Beman moved his new family to New York and became a fervent abolitionist. As a young adult Yancey chose to return to his native South in 1833 to practice law, first to Georgia and then to South Carolina, where he married Sarah Caroline Earle of Greenville in 1835. After moving his new bride to Cahaba, Alabama in 1836, William abandoned the practice of law to become a planter and a newspaper editor.

A political career was natural for the outspoken young attorney, planter, and editor. His early views were actually those of a strong unionist and he opposed John C. Calhoun during the famous Nullification Crisis in South Carolina. But over time, he became a leading advocate of a separate Southern nation. Like most other prominent fire-eaters, Yancey's political beliefs embraced a sound and strong program of progressive social reforms, including women's rights, banking, the penal code, prisons, and education. His liberalism extended to public denouncements of the religious persecution of Catholics by the Know-Nothing Party, a violation of religious freedom and of the constitution that he so strongly supported.

As a Democrat, Yancey became a significant party leader on both the state and national level, as well as one of the most powerful men of the antebellum South. His political career included service in the Alabama General Assembly, the national House of Representatives, the Confederate diplomatic corps, and the Confederate States Senate.

After a lifetime of service to Alabama and to two nations—the United States of America and the Confederate States of America—William Lowndes Yancey died on July 27, 1863. No man could better symbolize an era. William Lowndes Yancey was inducted into the Alabama Men's Hall of Fame in 1995.

(www.samford.edu/groups/amhf/id39.htm)

From Wikipedia

William Lowndes Yancey (August 10, 1814 - July 27, 1863), American political leader, son of Benjamin Cudworth Yancey, an able lawyer of South Carolina, of Welsh descent, was born near the Falls of the Ogeechee, Warren County, Georgia.

After his father's death in 1817, his mother remarried and removed to Troy, New York. Yancey attended Williams College for one year, studied law at Greenville, South Carolina, and was admitted to the bar. As editor of the Greenville (South Carolina) Mountaineer (1834-35), he ardently opposed nullification.

In 1835 he married a wealthy woman, and in the winter of 1836-1837 removed to her plantation in Alabama, near Cahaba (Dallas county), and edited weekly papers there and in Wetumpka (Elmore county), his summer home. The accidental poisoning of his slaves in 1839 forced him to devote himself entirely to law and journalism; he was now an impassioned advocate of State's Rights and supported Van Buren in the presidential campaign of 1840.

He was elected in 1841 to the state House of Representatives, in which he served for one year; became state senator in 1843, and in 1844 was elected to the national House of Representatives to fill a vacancy, being re-elected in 1845. In Congress his ability and his unusual oratorical gifts at once gained recognition. In 1846, however, he resigned his seat, partly on account of poverty, and partly because of his disgust with the Northern Democrats, whom he accused of sacrificing their principles to their economic interests.

His entire energy was now devoted to the task of exciting resistance to anti-slavery aggression. He is generally included as one of several southerners referred to as "fire-eaters." In 1848 he secured the adoption by the state Democratic convention of the so-called "Alabama Platform," which was endorsed by the legislatures of Alabama and Georgia and by Democratic state conventions in Florida and Virginia, declaring that it was the duty of Congress not only to allow slavery in all the territories but to protect it, that a territorial legislature could not exclude it, and that the Democratic party should not support for president or vice-president a candidate "not ... openly and unequivocally opposed to either of the forms of excluding slavery from the territories of the United States mentioned in these resolutions."

When the conservative majority in the national Democratic convention in Baltimore refused to incorporate his ideas into the platform, Yancey with one colleague left the convention and wrote an Address to the People of Alabama, defending his course and denouncing the cowardice of his associates. Naturally, he opposed the Compromise of 1850, and went so far as openly to advocate secession; but the conservative element was in control of the state.

Disappointment of the South with the results of "Squatter Sovereignty" caused a reaction in his favour, and in 1858 he wrote a letter advocating the appointment of committees of safety, the formation of a League of United Southerners, and the repeal of the laws making the African slave-trade piracy. After twelve years' absence from the national conventions of the Democratic party, he attended the Charleston convention in April 1860, and again demanded the adoption of his ideas. Defeated by a small majority, he again left the hall, followed this time by the delegates of Alabama, Mississippi, Louisiana, South Carolina, Florida, Texas, and two of the three delegates from Delaware. On the next day the Georgia delegation and a majority of the Arkansas delegation withdrew. In the Baltimore convention of the seceders he advocated the nomination of John Cabell Breckinridge, and he made a tour of the country on his behalf.

In Alabama he was the guiding spirit in the secession convention and delivered the address of welcome to Jefferson Davis on his arrival at Montgomery. He refused a place in President Davis's cabinet. On March 31, 1861 he sailed for Europe as the head of a commission sent to secure recognition of the Confederate government, but returned in 1862 to take a seat in the Confederate Senate, in which he advocated a more vigorous prosecution of the war.

On account of his failing health, he left Richmond early in 1863, and on the 27th of July died at his home near Montgomery.

Robert Barnwell Rhett

Robert Barnwell Rhett (October 21, 1800–September 14, 1876) was a United States secessionist politician from South Carolina.

"The one great evil from which all other evils have flowed, is the overthrow of the Constitution of the United States. The Government of the United States is no longer the government of a confederate republic, but of a consolidated democracy. It is no longer a free government, but a despotism. It is, in fact, such a government as Great Britain attempted to set over our fathers, and which was resisted and defeated by a seven years struggle for independence."

Rhett was born in Beaufort, South Carolina. His name was originally Smith, but after entering public life he changed it for that of a prominent Colonial ancestor. He studied law and became a member of the State Legislature in 1826.

His posts were lawyer, state legislator, state attorney general (1832), U.S. representative (1837-49), and senator (1850-52). Extremely pro-Southern in his views, he split (1844) with John C. Calhoun to lead the movement for separate state action on the tariff. Rhett was one of the leading Fire Eaters at the Nashville Convention of 1850, which failed to endorse his aim of secession for the whole South.

Secessionist

When South Carolina passed (1852) an ordinance merely declaring the state's right to secede, he resigned (1852) his seat. He continued to express his fiery secessionist sentiments through the Charleston Mercury, edited by his son. Rhett was a member of the South Carolina Secession Convention in 1860, and was the author of its address to the people. In the Montgomery Convention which met to organize a provisional government for the seceding States he was one of the most active delegates, and was chairman of the committee which reported the Confederate Constitution. Subsequently he was elected a member of the Lower House of the Confederate Congress. Receiving no higher office in the Confederate government, he returned to South Carolina, where he sharply criticized the policies of President Jefferson Davis.

After the end of the War of the Rebellion, he settled in Louisiana. He was a delegate to the Democratic National Convention in 1868.

Rhett died on September 14, 1876 in St. James Parish, Louisiana. He is buried in Magnolia Cemetery in Charleston, South Carolina.

[From Wikipedia]

Bibliography

• Dictionary of American Biography; Barnwell, John. “Hamlet to Hotspur: Letters of Robert Woodward Barnwell to Robert Barnwell Rhett.” South Carolina Historical Magazine 77 (October 1976): 236-56; White, Laura. Robert Barnwell Rhett, Father of Secession . 1931. Reprint. Gloucester, Mass.: P. Smith, 1965.
• Barnwell, John, ed. “Hamlet to Hotspur: Letters of Robert Woodward Barnwell to Robert Barnwell Rhett.” South Carolina Historical Magazine 77 (October 1976): 236-56.
• Coussons, John S. “Thirty Years with Calhoun, Rhett, and the Charleston Mercury: A Chapter in South Carolina Politics.” Ph.D. dissertation, Louisiana State University, 1971.
• Davis, William. A Fire-Eater Remembers: The Confederate Memoir of Robert Barnwell Rhett . Columbia: University of South Carolina Press, 2000.Hunt, Gaillard, ed. “Robert Barnwell Rhett on the Biography of Calhoun, 1854.” American Historical Review 13 (January 1908): 310-12.
• Perritt, H. Hardy. “Robert Barnwell Rhett: Prophet of Resistance, 1828-1834.” Southern Speech Journal 21 (Winter 1955): 103-19.
• Walther, Eric H. “ ‘How Best to Controul and Use Man’: Robert Barnwell Rhett.” In The Fire-Eaters , pp. 121-59. Baton Rouge: Louisiana State University Press, 1992.
• White, Laura Amanda. Robert Barnwell Rhett, Father of Secession . 1931. Reprint. Gloucester, MA: Peter Smith, 1965.
  

(Source: Biographical Directory of the United States Congress, 1771-Present; from http://www.infoplease.com/biography/us/congress/rhett-robert-barnwell.html]