Rhett: The Turbulent Life and Times of a Fire-Eater

Extract

In this book, William C. Davis has provided us with a long overdue biography of Robert Barnwell Rhett, the South Carolinian secessionist par excellence. At over six hundred pages it will, no doubt, replace Laura White's now dated work, Robert Barnwell Rhett (1931), as the definitive biography of Rhett. Davis traces the life of Rhett chronologically starting with the English origins of his family and ending with his death in 1876, a year before the fall of Reconstruction. The bulk of the book is devoted to his antebellum fire-eating career and his role in the formation of the Confederacy.

Davis is at his best when he highlights the contradictions in Rhett's separatist speeches, from his early adherence to disunion during the nullification crisis to the secession of South Carolina in 1860. He discusses the partnership between John C. Calhoun and Rhett, but he underestimates Calhoun's ideological influence on Rhett and overestimates the political distance between them, despite their temporary differences during the Bluff-ton movement of 1844. Rhett's antidemocratic ideas and his notion that as co-sovereigns, the states owned the territories owed much to Calhoun's theories. Moreover, it was Calhoun who justified the right of secession as a constitutional right of the states.