Benson J. Lossing, Pictorial Field Book of the Civil War. Volume 1.

[96]

Already Robert Barnwell Rhett, appropriately called the “Father of South Carolina secession,” had sounded the tocsin. He was an arrogant demagogue, whose family name was Smith, and whose lineal root was to be found in obscurity, among the sand-hills near the mouth of the Cape Fear River, in North Carolina. He made his residence at Beaufort, South Carolina, when he dropped the name of Smith and took that of Rhett — a name honorable in the early history of that State.¹ He succeeded in taking position among respectable men in South Carolina. With vulgar instinct

Robert Barnwell Rhett.

he spurned the “common people,” boasted of “superior blood,” and by the force of social influence, and much natural talent for oratory and intrigue, with the aid of the Charleston Mercury, edited by his equally disloyal son, he did more than any other man since the days of Hamilton, and Hayne, and Calhoun, to bring the miseries of civil war upon the State that gave him shelter and honor. From the moment of the disruption of the Charleston Convention of Democrats, in April, 1860,² he had been an active traitor in deeds and words and so early as the 12th of November, the day before the South Carolina Legislature adjourned, he declared in Institute Hall,³ in Charleston, that the Union was dissolved, and that henceforth there would be deliverance, and peace, and liberty for South Carolina. “The long weary night of our humiliation, oppression, and danger,” he said, “is passing away, and the glorious dawn of a Southern Confederacy breaks on our view.” Alluding to the people of the North, he said, “Swollen with insolence and steeped in ignorance, selfishness, and fanaticism, they will never understand their dependence on the South until the Union is dissolved, and they are left naked to their own resources.” Then the poor madman, with ludicrous gravity, began to prophesy. “Then, and not till then,” he said, “will they realize what a blessing the Almighty conferred upon them when he placed them in union with the South; and they will curse, in the bitterness of penitence and suffering, the dark day on which they compelled us to dissolve it with them. Upon a dissolution of the Union, their whole system of commerce and manufactures will be paralyzed or overthrown — their banks will suspend specie payments — their stocks and real estate will fall in price, and confusion and distress will pervade the North. Broad processions will walk the streets of their great cities; mobs will break into their palaces, and society there will be resolved into its original chaos.” He then went on to say, that there would be great difficulty in limiting the Southern Confederacy. “Many of the Free States,” he said, “will desire to join us.” lie proposed to let them in, on condition that “the Southern Confederacy should be a Slaveholding Confederacy ;” ⁴ that taxation should be light, and that the forts in Charleston