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Fire-Eaters
In American history, the Fire-Eaters were a loosely aligned group of radical pro-secession Democrats in the antebellum South who urged the separation of the slave states into a new nation, in which chattel slavery and a distinctive "Southern civilization" would be preserved. Some sought to revive American participation in the Atlantic slave trade, which had been illegal since 1808. After eleven southern states declared independence from the United States in 1861, several Fire-Eaters were outspoken critics of the new Confederate government during the American Civil War. Impact Dubbed “Fire-Eaters” by critics, the group was not a cohesive political faction but a collection of radical Democrats well known for their extreme rhetoric and nationalist demands for an independent southern nation. Among the best known Fire-Eaters were Edmund Ruffin, Robert Rhett, Louis T. Wigfall, and William Lowndes Yancey. By urging secession in the South, the Fire-Eaters aggravated the growth ... [...More Info...] [...Related Items...] OR: [Wikipedia] [Google] [Baidu] |
Act Prohibiting Importation Of Slaves
The Act Prohibiting Importation of Slaves of 1807 (, enacted March 2, 1807) is a United States federal law that prohibited the importation of slaves into the United States. It took effect on January 1, 1808, the earliest date permitted by the United States Constitution. This legislation was promoted by President Thomas Jefferson, who called for its enactment in his 1806 State of the Union Address. He and others had promoted the idea since the 1770s. It reflected the force of the general trend toward abolishing the international slave trade, which Virginia, followed by all the other states, had prohibited or restricted since then. South Carolina, however, had reopened its trade. Congress first regulated against the trade in the Slave Trade Act of 1794. The 1794 Act ended the legality of American ships participating in the trade. The 1807 law did not change that—it made all importation from abroad, even on foreign ships, a federal crime. The domestic slave trade within th ... [...More Info...] [...Related Items...] OR: [Wikipedia] [Google] [Baidu] |
William Lowndes Yancey
William Lowndes Yancey (August 10, 1814July 27, 1863) was an American politician in the Antebellum South. As an influential "Fire-Eater", he defended slavery and urged Southerners to secede from the Union in response to Northern antislavery agitation. Though a critic of John C. Calhoun at the time of the Nullification Crisis of 1832–33, in the late 1830s, Yancey began to identify with Calhoun, and, by 1849, Yancey was a firm supporter of Calhoun's "Southern Address" and an adamant opponent of the Compromise of 1850. Throughout the 1850s, Yancey demonstrated an ability to hold large audiences under his spell for hours at a time and was sometimes referred to as the "Orator of Secession". At the 1860 Democratic National Convention, he was instrumental in splitting the party into Northern and Southern factions as a leading opponent of Stephen A. Douglas and the concept of popular sovereignty. He used the phrase "squatter sovereignty" in a speech he gave at the convention to ... [...More Info...] [...Related Items...] OR: [Wikipedia] [Google] [Baidu] |
Edmund Ruffin
Edmund Ruffin III (January 5, 1794 – June 17, 1865) was an American planter, politician, scientist, and activist best known as an early advocate for secession of the Southern slave states from the United States. He served in the Virginia Senate from 1823 to 1827. In the three decades before the American Civil War he published polemics in support of states' rights and the protection of chattel slavery, earning notoriety as one of the so-called Fire-Eaters. Ruffin was present at the Battle of Fort Sumter in April 1861 and fired one cannon shot at the fort. This gave rise to the legend that Ruffin fired the first shot of the Civil War. Ruffin did enlist as a Confederate soldier despite his advanced age. When the war ended in defeat in 1865, he died of suicide rather than accept what he called "Yankee rule." Ruffin is also known for his pioneering work in methods to preserve and improve soil productivity. He recommended crop rotation and amendments to restore soils exhausted from to ... [...More Info...] [...Related Items...] OR: [Wikipedia] [Google] [Baidu] |
Louis Wigfall
Louis Trezevant Wigfall (April 21, 1816 – February 18, 1874) was an American politician who served as a Confederate States Senator from Texas from 1862 to 1865. He was among a group of leading secessionists known as Fire-Eaters, advocating the preservation and expansion of an aristocratic agricultural society based on slave labor. He briefly served as a Confederate Brigadier General of the Texas Brigade at the outset of the American Civil War before taking his seat in the Confederate Senate. Wigfall's reputation for oratory and hard-drinking, along with a combative nature and high-minded sense of personal honor, made him one of the more imposing political figures of his time. He was also an enslaver. Early life and career Youth Wigfall was born on a plantation near Edgefield, South Carolina, to Levi Durant and Eliza Thomson Wigfall. His father, who died in 1818, was a successful Charleston merchant before moving to Edgefield. His mother was of the French Huguenot Tre ... [...More Info...] [...Related Items...] OR: [Wikipedia] [Google] [Baidu] |
Robert Rhett
Robert Barnwell Rhett (born Robert Barnwell Smith; December 21, 1800September 14, 1876) was an American politician who served as a deputy from South Carolina to the Provisional Confederate States Congress from 1861 to 1862, a member of the US House of Representatives from South Carolina from 1837 to 1849, and US Senator from South Carolina from 1850 to 1852. As a staunch supporter of slavery and an early advocate of secession, he was a " Fire-Eater", nicknamed the "father of secession". Rhett published his views through his newspaper, the '' Charleston Mercury''. His son Alfred M. Rhett commanded a battery at Fort Moultrie at the time of the bombardment of Fort Sumter. Early life Rhett was born Robert Barnwell Smith in Beaufort, South Carolina, United States. He later studied law. Rhett was of English ancestry. On his mother's side, he was related to U.S. Representative Robert Barnwell (his great-uncle) and Senator Robert Woodward Barnwell (son of Robert). A cousin of the ... [...More Info...] [...Related Items...] OR: [Wikipedia] [Google] [Baidu] |
1860 United States Presidential Election
Presidential elections were held in the United States on November 6, 1860. The Republican Party ticket of Abraham Lincoln and Hannibal Hamlin emerged victorious in a four-way race. With an electoral majority composed only of Northern states that had already abolished slavery, and minimal support in the Democratic-dominated Southern slave states, Lincoln's election as the first Republican president thus served as the main catalyst for Southern secession and consequently the American Civil War. The United States had become sectionally divided during the 1850s, primarily over extending slavery into the western territories. Furthermore, uncompromising pro-slavery elements clashed with those in favor of compromise; this created four main parties in the 1860 election, each with their own presidential candidate. The incumbent president, James Buchanan, like his predecessor, Franklin Pierce, was a Northern Democrat with Southern sympathies. Buchanan also adamantly promised not ... [...More Info...] [...Related Items...] OR: [Wikipedia] [Google] [Baidu] |
Slave States
In the United States before 1865, a slave state was a state in which slavery and the internal or domestic slave trade were legal, while a free state was one in which they were prohibited. Between 1812 and 1850, it was considered by the slave states to be politically imperative that the number of free states not exceed the number of slave states, so new states were admitted in slave–free pairs. There were, nonetheless, some slaves in most free states up to the 1840 census, and the Fugitive Slave Clause of the U.S. Constitution, as implemented by the Fugitive Slave Act of 1793 and the Fugitive Slave Act of 1850, provided that a slave did not become free by entering a free state and must be returned to his or her owner. Enforcement of these laws became one of the controversies that arose between slave and free states. By the 18th century, slavery was legal throughout the Thirteen Colonies, but at the time of the American Revolution, rebel colonies started to abolish the practi ... [...More Info...] [...Related Items...] OR: [Wikipedia] [Google] [Baidu] |
1856 United States Presidential Election
Presidential elections were held in the United States on November 4, 1856. Democratic nominee James Buchanan defeated Republican nominee John C. Frémont and Know Nothing/ Whig nominee Millard Fillmore. The main issue was the expansion of slavery as facilitated by the Kansas–Nebraska Act of 1854. Buchanan defeated President Franklin Pierce at the 1856 Democratic National Convention for the nomination. Pierce had become widely unpopular in the North because of his support for the pro-slavery faction in the ongoing civil war in territorial Kansas, and Buchanan, a former Secretary of State, had avoided the divisive debates over the Kansas–Nebraska Act by being in Europe as the Ambassador to the United Kingdom. Slavery was the main issue, and with it the question of the survival of the United States as it then existed. The Democrats were seen as the pro-slavery party; the new Republican party, though hostile to slavery, limited its efforts to the politically more managea ... [...More Info...] [...Related Items...] OR: [Wikipedia] [Google] [Baidu] |
Douglas L
Douglas may refer to: People * Douglas (given name) * Douglas (surname) Animals * Douglas (parrot), macaw that starred as the parrot ''Rosalinda'' in Pippi Longstocking * Douglas the camel, a camel in the Confederate Army in the American Civil War Businesses * Douglas Aircraft Company * Douglas (cosmetics), German cosmetics retail chain in Europe * Douglas Holding, former German company * Douglas (motorcycles), British motorcycle manufacturer Peerage and Baronetage * Duke of Douglas * Earl of Douglas, or any holder of the title * Marquess of Douglas, or any holder of the title * Douglas baronets Peoples * Clan Douglas, a Scottish kindred * Dougla people, West Indians of both African and East Indian heritage Places Australia * Douglas, Queensland, a suburb of Townsville * Douglas, Queensland (Toowoomba Region), a locality * Port Douglas, North Queensland, Australia * Shire of Douglas, in northern Queensland Canada * Douglas, New Brunswick * Douglas Parish, New Brun ... [...More Info...] [...Related Items...] OR: [Wikipedia] [Google] [Baidu] |
Republican Party (United States)
The Republican Party, also known as the Grand Old Party (GOP), is a Right-wing politics, right-wing political parties in the United States, political party in the United States. One of the Two-party system, two major parties, it emerged as the main rival of the then-dominant Democratic Party (United States), Democratic Party in the 1850s, and the two parties have dominated American politics since then. The Republican Party was founded in 1854 by anti-slavery activists opposing the Kansas–Nebraska Act and the expansion of slavery in the United States, slavery into U.S. territories. It rapidly gained support in the Northern United States, North, drawing in former Whig Party (United States), Whigs and Free Soil Party, Free Soilers. Abraham Lincoln's 1860 United States presidential election, election in 1860 led to the secession of Southern states and the outbreak of the American Civil War. Under Lincoln and a Republican-controlled Congress, the party led efforts to preserve th ... [...More Info...] [...Related Items...] OR: [Wikipedia] [Google] [Baidu] |
Abraham Lincoln
Abraham Lincoln (February 12, 1809 – April 15, 1865) was the 16th president of the United States, serving from 1861 until Assassination of Abraham Lincoln, his assassination in 1865. He led the United States through the American Civil War, defeating the Confederate States of America and playing a major role in the End of slavery in the United States, abolition of slavery. Lincoln was born into poverty in Kentucky and raised on the American frontier, frontier. He was self-educated and became a lawyer, Illinois state Illinois House of Representatives, legislator, and U.S. representative. Angered by the Kansas–Nebraska Act of 1854, which opened the territories to slavery, he became a leader of the new History of the Republican Party (United States), Republican Party. He reached a national audience in the Lincoln–Douglas debates, 1858 Senate campaign debates against Stephen A. Douglas. Lincoln won the 1860 United States presidential election, 1860 presidential election, wh ... [...More Info...] [...Related Items...] OR: [Wikipedia] [Google] [Baidu] |
Compromise Of 1850
The Compromise of 1850 was a package of five separate bills passed by the United States Congress in September 1850 that temporarily defused tensions between slave and free states during the years leading up to the American Civil War. Designed by Whig senator Henry Clay and Democratic senator Stephen A. Douglas, with the support of President Millard Fillmore, the compromise centered on how to handle slavery in recently acquired territories from the Mexican–American War (1846–48). The provisions of the compromise were: * approved California's request to enter the Union as a free state * strengthened fugitive slave laws with the Fugitive Slave Act of 1850 * banned the slave trade in Washington, D.C. (while still allowing slavery itself there) * defined northern and western borders for Texas while establishing a territorial government for the Territory of New Mexico, with no restrictions on whether any future state from this territory would be free or slave * establis ... [...More Info...] [...Related Items...] OR: [Wikipedia] [Google] [Baidu] |
