| Book Review | The Journal of American History, 94.1

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| Book Review | The Journal of American History, 94.1 | The History Cooperative

Book Review

William Lowndes Yancey: The Coming of the Civil War. By Eric H. Walther. (Chapel Hill: University of North Carolina Press, 2006. xiv, 477 pp. $39.95, ISBN 978-0-8078-3027-7.)

On the nation's disastrous road to secession, radical secessionists waged a shrill campaign that aggravated intersectional tensions and pushed fellow southerners to disunion. Eric H. Walther, the author of an earlier work examining the so-called fire-eaters, now considers the Alabamian William Lowndes Yancey. Yancey was a fanatic, devoted to his cause, hot-tempered and violent, and strident and overblown in his rhetoric. Highly personalized conflict and an absolute devotion to slavery became part of Yancey's persona early in life. How does one explain this unique political personality? Walther finds many of the answers in Yancey's troubled childhood, especially in the premature death of his father and the ill-conceived remarriage of his mother, Caroline Bird Yancey, to Nathan Beman, a New York Congregationalist and local schoolteacher. His childhood and adolescence became defined in opposition to his stepfather (his mother underwent a messy separation) who became a strident abolitionist. What Walther calls Yancey's "inner demons" drove him to perceive the world in Manichean terms and to impose his own version of order on the world (p. 374).

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