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The Fire-Eaters
In the early 1850s, northerners and southerners alike used the term fire-eater to describe anyone whose views were clearly outside the political mainstream. Eventually, though, the word came to be most closely identified with those southerners who were staunch and unyielding advocates of secession. In this broadly researched and illuminating study, Eric H. Walther examines the lives of nine of the most prominent Nathaniel Beverly Tucker, William Lowndes Yancey, John Anthony Quitman, Robert Barnwell Rhett, Laurence M. Keitt, Louis T. Wigfall, James D.B. De Bow, Edmund Ruffin, and William Porcher Miles.
Walther paints skillful portraits of his subjects, analyzing their backgrounds, personalities, and contributions to the movement for disunion. Although they shared the common goal of southern independence, Walther shows that in many respects the fire-eaters differed markedly from one another. It was their very diversity, he maintains, that enabled them to appeal to such a wide spectrum of southern opinion and thereby rally support for secession.
In his exploration of the role of the fire-eaters in the secession movement, Walther touches upon a number of perennial themes in southern history, including the appeal of proslavery thought and southern expansionism, the place of education and industrialization in antebellum southern society, the significance of oratory in southern culture, and the nature of southern nationalism. He also describes the fire-eaters' activities on behalf of the Confederacy and traces the course of their lives after the war.
The Fire-Eaters makes a valuable contribution to our understanding of the secession movement and the context in which it developed. There is no other study available that treats these men as a group and that delineates their manifold differences as well as their similarities. Walther shows that secessionism was not a monolithic ideology but rather a movement that emerged from many sources, spoke in many voices, and responded to a number of regional problems, needs, and aspirations.
Walther paints skillful portraits of his subjects, analyzing their backgrounds, personalities, and contributions to the movement for disunion. Although they shared the common goal of southern independence, Walther shows that in many respects the fire-eaters differed markedly from one another. It was their very diversity, he maintains, that enabled them to appeal to such a wide spectrum of southern opinion and thereby rally support for secession.
In his exploration of the role of the fire-eaters in the secession movement, Walther touches upon a number of perennial themes in southern history, including the appeal of proslavery thought and southern expansionism, the place of education and industrialization in antebellum southern society, the significance of oratory in southern culture, and the nature of southern nationalism. He also describes the fire-eaters' activities on behalf of the Confederacy and traces the course of their lives after the war.
The Fire-Eaters makes a valuable contribution to our understanding of the secession movement and the context in which it developed. There is no other study available that treats these men as a group and that delineates their manifold differences as well as their similarities. Walther shows that secessionism was not a monolithic ideology but rather a movement that emerged from many sources, spoke in many voices, and responded to a number of regional problems, needs, and aspirations.
352 pages, Paperback
First published July 1, 1992
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October 5, 2023
A highly enjoyable and informative read, even if it is biased in favor of the slave-masters. Each chapter is so embedded with the notion that, on the issue of white supremacy, there are "good people on both sides", that it often becomes a game of spotting the author's irrepressible romanticism about the Old South. The author completed his education at Southern institutions, teaches at one, and publishes with another AND IT SHOWS. One particularly example comes in the chapter on Edmund Ruffin. It was so laden with fact-dismissals and double-speak that I burst out laughing a number of times. Edmund Ruffin, a fervent racist who enjoyed violence to such an extent he attempted to find all his ‘kills’ after battles, committed suicide at the conclusion of the Civil War, declaring in his final words his ‘unmitigated hatred’ for the other ‘race’. You can’t make this stuff up. This man whole heartedly embraced his hatred, saying, “Would that I could impress these sentiments, in their full force, on every living southerner, and bequeath them to every one yet to be born! May such sentiments be held universally in the outraged and down-trodden South until the now far-distant day shall arrive for just retribution… for deliverance and vengeance!”
But Walther treats him as a romantic hero. Ruffin was a man cocooned in extreme wealth since birth, descendent of one of the oldest slavers of Virginia, engaged for his lifetime in the fight to maintain and expand slavery, giddily attended the execution of John Brown, literally fired the first shots on Fort Sumter, and was so consumed by hatred that he would rather DIE than live in a prospective world of black equality. Yet, Walther frames Ruffin’s life as a romantic quest, finishing the chapter with quotes of him being deeply ‘honored’ and ‘fired with the zeal for freedom and love.’ (WTF!) It wasn’t unhinged racism that caused Ruffin to kill himself, Walther assures us through family recollections. No, “the Yankees have killed [him]’.
Its laughable but, perhaps more telling, it fits securely in line with the Lost Cause fantasy that still animates the South. Another handy example comes at the books concluding chapter which opens with the abolitionist, William Lloyd Garrison, burning a copy of the Constitution to protest the false promise of equality contained therein. “So perish all compromises with tyranny!” Garrison proclaims as the paper burns. This, Walther writes, is somehow equal to the unholy brutality perpetuated by white slave-masters. “The fire-eaters had no more toleration for compromise than did Garrison,” Walther says. He goes on to write how these fire-eaters men embraced secession as a response to what they honorably believed was the “hostile, irresponsible, and insurmountable political power of the North,” which, ironically, has been thoroughly disproved by his own work uncovering the centrality of racism and slavery in the minds of these nine enraged men.
How anyone could equate burning a copy of the Constitution to the horrors of slavery would be extraordinary if one didn’t have a whole book full of the same false equivalencies and swift-moving obfuscations. Luckily, I grew up and was educated in the South myself; I could spot the double-speak a mile away. This obviousness of bias might be an unexpected boon to the reader: the pro-Lost-Cause sentimentality is so glaring that anyone will catch it. Only someone thoroughly embraced of the master race fantasy could claim this work to be objective. Only loyal adherents to the legacy of white supremacy will see doomed honor, idealism, and personal integrity, where the rest of us see SLAVERY-RAPE-TORTURE-BLOODLUST.
And yet, the book is not merely the double-speak of white supremacy. It does aim and achieve a genuine work of knowledge and scholarship, despite its reverence to the slave master. As someone long engaged in Civil War research, I was thrilled to find gobs of priceless, well-contextualized information of the pre-war era that most other history books neglect. Walther romanticizes, but his first loyalty is to reporting on the era and its leading men, including their ample and remarkably similar personality failings (vindictiveness, conspiratorial thinking, insecurity, impulsivity, narcissism, extreme rage, bloodlust, ignorance of military matters, etc.). In this respect, the reader is provided ample quotes and snippets from speeches, periodicals, personal letters, and outside observations from colleagues, diarists, and family members. These primary sources aren’t the center of the narrative; Walther still reserves most of his text to his own narrative, but it provides rich lodes for further research. I came away with so much to do! I’ve now got a priceless starting point for further primary source research – De Bows periodical seems a particular juggernaut of racist hatred. (De Bow is definitely one of my favorites for the simple streamlined nature of his extremism. He honestly believed that white men are accountable to no one for ANYTHING they do to society, women, and people of color. “As Southerners, as Americans, as MEN, we deny the right to be called to account for our institutions, our policy, our laws, or our government.” [emphasis on “MEN” is De Bow’s].)
These are primary-source gems for anyone who seeks to understand American authoritarianism. Here, in refreshingly direct rationalizations, one finds the bedrock of extremism today, from the Lost Cause to MAGA terrorism, from Great Replacement Theory to Tucker Carlson, from Proud Boys and Incels and QAnon to the outer reaches of capitalist theory, these nine men are extraordinarily clear about their philosophy and the importance of passing it on to the next generation. They will tell you, as Walther fills in context with the history of Westward expansion in the 1830’s+, that being a master over black people and women is what makes them MEN. Indeed, complete destructive power is the only way to BE a man, to ensure one’s ‘honor’, and to consolidate their wealth for the next generation of white male racists. They will tell you that racism creates necessary class solidarity among all white people; that enslaving blacks, Mexicans, and Native Americans imbues the white lower classes with a cherished respectability that they will die to protect; that, in unlikely event a poor White man can buy a slave, one needs only buy a woman and rape her, and “her children become heirlooms and make the nucleus of an estate.” (De Bow again). Wonder why the white working classes support Trump even as he funnels more money and power to the wealthy? Well. Here ya go. This is the clear-eyed logic of a men who constructed and idealized racial hatred, all here, straight from the mouth of the white supremacists themselves.
My favorite, by far, is Nathaniel Beverly Tucker, a law professor who wrote college textbooks on American law and, I think one can make the argument, a founding ‘intellectual’ father of modern white supremacy. If the Confederates and their descendants argue that the Civil War was fought over state ‘sovereignty’, then Tucker defines the word for us. Sovereignty, he taught, was “the RIGHT TO COMMAND, TO BE OBEYED, to hold individuals responsible to the community [other white men], and to impose the collective responsibility of the community between them and anyone external.” The execution of sovereignty included “the enforcement of RETRIBUTION, INFLICTION OF PUNISHMENT…” It is “the power of the pit and gallows” of which “there was no limit” other than those white men chose for themselves. Indeed, according to Tucker, a man should have the power to “‘rob and burn and murder’ and the federal government had no more authority over him ‘than the Emperor of China.’” He called democracy and universal voting an American “epidemic” to which “slavery is a perfect antidote.” More from the book:
“Tucker sought a ‘controlling power over the brute force of the multitude’ so that ‘they who want will not take from they who have.’ He taught his students that the most basic step in this direction was to prevent universal suffrage and even to disfranchise many voters… He remarked that what was best for ‘a horde of poor and ignorant barbarians’ would not suit ‘an enlightened, refined, rich and luxurious community.’”
Slavery and widespread disenfranchisement was the perfect answer. “By enslaving the poor, especially when that class was clearly separated by race, Tucker and other fire-eaters merely embraced a logical conclusion that Jefferson avoided: African slavery was necessary for American republicanism.” It “created a unity among whites and political and social stability for the entire slaveholding society. White southerners’ observations of living examples of [] slavery fostered a ‘jealous passion for liberty in even the lowest class of those who are not slaves.’ In a slaveholding society, the color of a white person ‘is his certificate of freedom.’… By maintaining a ‘class lower than all, and more numerous than all, of a different race,’ white people unite to control and manage them ‘in a common spirit and in perfect harmony.’”
Tucker, along with the rest of the fire-eaters, darkly threatened race war in the event white men's grip on Black, Mexican and women were loosened, warning prophetically of the uprising of white men of both the lower and upper crust who would fight and die for RIGHT TO COMMAND AND BE OBEYED in whatever they chose. Sound accurate? These captains of white power knew what they were doing when they laid the groundwork for war, either their own or ours to come.
This study, along with the study of all our white supremacists, is of vital importance to understanding American authoritarianism and the modern world as fashioned by their hate. As tainted as the book is by the Lost Cause myth, it has proved crucial to my research and a powerful view into a time period that continues to affect us all. I will definitely read it again.
But Walther treats him as a romantic hero. Ruffin was a man cocooned in extreme wealth since birth, descendent of one of the oldest slavers of Virginia, engaged for his lifetime in the fight to maintain and expand slavery, giddily attended the execution of John Brown, literally fired the first shots on Fort Sumter, and was so consumed by hatred that he would rather DIE than live in a prospective world of black equality. Yet, Walther frames Ruffin’s life as a romantic quest, finishing the chapter with quotes of him being deeply ‘honored’ and ‘fired with the zeal for freedom and love.’ (WTF!) It wasn’t unhinged racism that caused Ruffin to kill himself, Walther assures us through family recollections. No, “the Yankees have killed [him]’.
Its laughable but, perhaps more telling, it fits securely in line with the Lost Cause fantasy that still animates the South. Another handy example comes at the books concluding chapter which opens with the abolitionist, William Lloyd Garrison, burning a copy of the Constitution to protest the false promise of equality contained therein. “So perish all compromises with tyranny!” Garrison proclaims as the paper burns. This, Walther writes, is somehow equal to the unholy brutality perpetuated by white slave-masters. “The fire-eaters had no more toleration for compromise than did Garrison,” Walther says. He goes on to write how these fire-eaters men embraced secession as a response to what they honorably believed was the “hostile, irresponsible, and insurmountable political power of the North,” which, ironically, has been thoroughly disproved by his own work uncovering the centrality of racism and slavery in the minds of these nine enraged men.
How anyone could equate burning a copy of the Constitution to the horrors of slavery would be extraordinary if one didn’t have a whole book full of the same false equivalencies and swift-moving obfuscations. Luckily, I grew up and was educated in the South myself; I could spot the double-speak a mile away. This obviousness of bias might be an unexpected boon to the reader: the pro-Lost-Cause sentimentality is so glaring that anyone will catch it. Only someone thoroughly embraced of the master race fantasy could claim this work to be objective. Only loyal adherents to the legacy of white supremacy will see doomed honor, idealism, and personal integrity, where the rest of us see SLAVERY-RAPE-TORTURE-BLOODLUST.
And yet, the book is not merely the double-speak of white supremacy. It does aim and achieve a genuine work of knowledge and scholarship, despite its reverence to the slave master. As someone long engaged in Civil War research, I was thrilled to find gobs of priceless, well-contextualized information of the pre-war era that most other history books neglect. Walther romanticizes, but his first loyalty is to reporting on the era and its leading men, including their ample and remarkably similar personality failings (vindictiveness, conspiratorial thinking, insecurity, impulsivity, narcissism, extreme rage, bloodlust, ignorance of military matters, etc.). In this respect, the reader is provided ample quotes and snippets from speeches, periodicals, personal letters, and outside observations from colleagues, diarists, and family members. These primary sources aren’t the center of the narrative; Walther still reserves most of his text to his own narrative, but it provides rich lodes for further research. I came away with so much to do! I’ve now got a priceless starting point for further primary source research – De Bows periodical seems a particular juggernaut of racist hatred. (De Bow is definitely one of my favorites for the simple streamlined nature of his extremism. He honestly believed that white men are accountable to no one for ANYTHING they do to society, women, and people of color. “As Southerners, as Americans, as MEN, we deny the right to be called to account for our institutions, our policy, our laws, or our government.” [emphasis on “MEN” is De Bow’s].)
These are primary-source gems for anyone who seeks to understand American authoritarianism. Here, in refreshingly direct rationalizations, one finds the bedrock of extremism today, from the Lost Cause to MAGA terrorism, from Great Replacement Theory to Tucker Carlson, from Proud Boys and Incels and QAnon to the outer reaches of capitalist theory, these nine men are extraordinarily clear about their philosophy and the importance of passing it on to the next generation. They will tell you, as Walther fills in context with the history of Westward expansion in the 1830’s+, that being a master over black people and women is what makes them MEN. Indeed, complete destructive power is the only way to BE a man, to ensure one’s ‘honor’, and to consolidate their wealth for the next generation of white male racists. They will tell you that racism creates necessary class solidarity among all white people; that enslaving blacks, Mexicans, and Native Americans imbues the white lower classes with a cherished respectability that they will die to protect; that, in unlikely event a poor White man can buy a slave, one needs only buy a woman and rape her, and “her children become heirlooms and make the nucleus of an estate.” (De Bow again). Wonder why the white working classes support Trump even as he funnels more money and power to the wealthy? Well. Here ya go. This is the clear-eyed logic of a men who constructed and idealized racial hatred, all here, straight from the mouth of the white supremacists themselves.
My favorite, by far, is Nathaniel Beverly Tucker, a law professor who wrote college textbooks on American law and, I think one can make the argument, a founding ‘intellectual’ father of modern white supremacy. If the Confederates and their descendants argue that the Civil War was fought over state ‘sovereignty’, then Tucker defines the word for us. Sovereignty, he taught, was “the RIGHT TO COMMAND, TO BE OBEYED, to hold individuals responsible to the community [other white men], and to impose the collective responsibility of the community between them and anyone external.” The execution of sovereignty included “the enforcement of RETRIBUTION, INFLICTION OF PUNISHMENT…” It is “the power of the pit and gallows” of which “there was no limit” other than those white men chose for themselves. Indeed, according to Tucker, a man should have the power to “‘rob and burn and murder’ and the federal government had no more authority over him ‘than the Emperor of China.’” He called democracy and universal voting an American “epidemic” to which “slavery is a perfect antidote.” More from the book:
“Tucker sought a ‘controlling power over the brute force of the multitude’ so that ‘they who want will not take from they who have.’ He taught his students that the most basic step in this direction was to prevent universal suffrage and even to disfranchise many voters… He remarked that what was best for ‘a horde of poor and ignorant barbarians’ would not suit ‘an enlightened, refined, rich and luxurious community.’”
Slavery and widespread disenfranchisement was the perfect answer. “By enslaving the poor, especially when that class was clearly separated by race, Tucker and other fire-eaters merely embraced a logical conclusion that Jefferson avoided: African slavery was necessary for American republicanism.” It “created a unity among whites and political and social stability for the entire slaveholding society. White southerners’ observations of living examples of [] slavery fostered a ‘jealous passion for liberty in even the lowest class of those who are not slaves.’ In a slaveholding society, the color of a white person ‘is his certificate of freedom.’… By maintaining a ‘class lower than all, and more numerous than all, of a different race,’ white people unite to control and manage them ‘in a common spirit and in perfect harmony.’”
Tucker, along with the rest of the fire-eaters, darkly threatened race war in the event white men's grip on Black, Mexican and women were loosened, warning prophetically of the uprising of white men of both the lower and upper crust who would fight and die for RIGHT TO COMMAND AND BE OBEYED in whatever they chose. Sound accurate? These captains of white power knew what they were doing when they laid the groundwork for war, either their own or ours to come.
This study, along with the study of all our white supremacists, is of vital importance to understanding American authoritarianism and the modern world as fashioned by their hate. As tainted as the book is by the Lost Cause myth, it has proved crucial to my research and a powerful view into a time period that continues to affect us all. I will definitely read it again.
March 21, 2025
Interesting read about a handful of notorious, white men. It gives a lot of insight into the South's beliefs, values & politics leading up to the Civil War. My only complaint is that I wanted more background information on these individuals to gain a better understanding of who these men were nurtured to be & what role nature had in creating these ugly ideologies.
October 25, 2019
A fine series of miniature biographies chronicling men of varied means, united by ideology and a fiery temperament. None of these fellows, save maybe De Bow, came to a good end. I was surprised by Yancey's moments of moderation and Rhett's shifts from political skill to outright bungling.
My favorites would be Ruffin, who was a brilliant farmer and stout family man although terribly violent and De Bow, who was perhaps the smartest and most flexible of them all. Miles is also fascinating for his mix of conservative and reformist politics. He was also rather mild-mannered compared to the rest in the book.
I would rate this a 5 but the prose is a trifle stilted and the side characters such as Hammond and Pryor, lack clearly defined portraits. We need a book on the fire-eaters as a whole, with their ideology laid bare along with their limitations and victories. One thing is clear; the fire-eaters got their way by exploiting a political crisis, placing this book firmly in the Michael F. Holt camp (of which I am a member) of Civil causation.
My favorites would be Ruffin, who was a brilliant farmer and stout family man although terribly violent and De Bow, who was perhaps the smartest and most flexible of them all. Miles is also fascinating for his mix of conservative and reformist politics. He was also rather mild-mannered compared to the rest in the book.
I would rate this a 5 but the prose is a trifle stilted and the side characters such as Hammond and Pryor, lack clearly defined portraits. We need a book on the fire-eaters as a whole, with their ideology laid bare along with their limitations and victories. One thing is clear; the fire-eaters got their way by exploiting a political crisis, placing this book firmly in the Michael F. Holt camp (of which I am a member) of Civil causation.
October 13, 2011
One of my favorite history books. Walther does a great job of breaking down each charater and the how's and why's they became or are defined as "fire-eaters". Anyone interested in antibellum history, this is a must read.
Displaying 1 - 4 of 4 reviews