William Lowndes Yancey and the Coming of the Civil War

By Josiah Ober

IWilliam Lowndes Yancey (1814-63) was one of the leading secessionists of the Old South. In this first comprehensive biography, Eric H. Walther examines the personality and political life of the uncompromising fire-eater.

Born in Georgia but raised in the North by a fiercely abolitionist stepfather and an emotionally unstable mother, Yancey grew up believing that abolitionists were cruel, meddling, and hypocritical. His personal journey led him through a series of mentors who transformed his political views, and upon moving to frontier Alabama in his twenties, Yancey's penchant for rhetorical and physical violence was soon channeled into a crusade to protect slaveholders' rights.

Yancey defied Northern Democrats at their national nominating convention in 1860, rending the party and setting the stage for secession after the election of Abraham Lincoln. Selected to introduce Jefferson Davis in Montgomery as the president-elect of the Confederacy, Yancey also served the Confederacy as a diplomat and a senator before his death in 1863, just short of his forty-ninth birthday.

More than a portrait of an influential political figure before and during the Civil War, this study also presents a nuanced look at the roots of Southern honor, violence, and understandings of manhood as they developed in the nineteenth century.

• Language: English
• Publisher: The University of North Carolina Press
• Release date: Dec 8, 2006
• ISBN: 9780807877340

Josiah Ober

Eric H. Walther is associate professor of history at the University of Houston. He is author of The Fire-Eaters and The Shattering of the Union: America in the 1850s.

Book preview

WILLIAM LOWNDES YANCEY AND THE COMING OF THE CIVIL WAR

CIVIL WAR AMERICA Gary W. Gallagher, editor

WILLIAM LOWNDES YANCEY AND THE COMING OF THE CIVIL WAR

Eric H. Walther

The University of North Carolina Press

Chapel Hill

© 2006 The University of North Carolina Press

All rights reserved

Designed by Jacquline Johnson

Set in Bembo

by Tseng Information Systems, Inc.

Manufactured in the United States of America

The paper in this book meets the guidelines for permanence and durability of the Committee on Production Guidelines for Book Longevity of the Council on Library Resources.

Library of Congress Cataloging-in-Publication Data

Walther, Eric H., 1960–

William Lowndes Yancey and the coming of the

Civil War / Eric H. Walther.

p. cm. — (Civil War America)

Includes bibliographical references and index.

ISBN-13: 978-0-8078-3027-7 (cloth : alk. paper)

ISBN-10: 0-8078-3027-5 (cloth : alk. paper)

1. Yancey, William Lowndes, 1814–1863.

2. Legislators—Alabama—Biography.

3. Alabama—Politics and government—To 1865.

4. Secession—Alabama. 5. Statesmen—

Confederate States of America—Biography.

6. Confederate States of America—Politics and

government. 7. Legislators—United States—

Biography. 8. United States. Congress. House—

Biography. 9. United States—History—Civil

War, 1861–1865—Causes. I. Title. II. Series.

E415.9.Y2W35 2006

973.7’13092—dc22 2005037964

10 09 08 07 06 5 4 3 2 1

To my mother,

Harriett Walther

the memory of my father,

Ralph Walther (1927–2001)

and my brother,

Dr. Joseph;

my sister-in-law, Sandra;

and my nephew,

Benjamin Joseph Walther

CONTENTS

Acknowledgments

Introduction

ONE Jordan's Stormy Banks

TWO Rebellion and Union

THREE Flush Times and Bad Times in Alabama and South Carolina

FOUR Politician

FIVE Party and Honor

SIX The Alabama Platform

SEVEN Secessionist

EIGHT Creating the Leaven of Disunion

NINE Public Man, Private Life

TEN Yancey and the House Divided

ELEVEN Walker and Walker, the League and the Letter

TWELVE The Conventions of 1860

THIRTEEN The Voice of the South

FOURTEEN The Men and the Hours

FIFTEEN In King Arthur's Court

SIXTEEN Journeys Home

SEVENTEEN The Main Pillar of the Confederacy

Legacy

Notes

Bibliography

Index

A section of illustrations follows page 167.

ACKNOWLEDGMENTS

I could not have successfully undertaken this study without aid from scores of people. Among those to whom I am most indebted are Dr. Edwin Bridges and Dr. Norwood Kerr at the Alabama Department of Archives and History, as well as Ricki Bruner, Ken Tilley, Mark Palmer, and Debbie Pendleton; Richard Schrader at the Southern Historical Collection at the University of North Carolina at Chapel Hill; Janie Morris, Pat Webb, and Bill Erwin at the William R. Perkins Library, Duke University; William E. Lind and William H. Davis at the National Archives; Nelson Lankford, Frances Pollard, and Sarah Bearss at the Virginia Historical Society; Guy R. Swanson and Corrine P. Hudgins at the Museum of the Confederacy; Bev Powers at Auburn University; Mack Woodward and Eddie Parker at the Sam Houston Memorial Library, Huntsville, Texas; and skilled archivists and librarians at these and several other depositories. Edward Patillo, formerly curator of the Alabama Supreme Court Library, supplied me with vital information about William L. Yancey's law practice, and Dudley Perry Jr. allowed me to visit his law office in Montgomery, Alabama—the same office used by Yancey for most of the 1850s. The University of Houston supported me generously with a Research Initiation Grant, two semesters of Faculty Development leave to complete my writing, and a small grant award. A Mellon Fellowship from the Virginia Historical Society supported my research through their immense and invaluable collections.

Several of my friends and colleagues deserve particular thanks. Greg Cantrell spotted the Dixon Hall Lewis Papers at the Sam Houston Memorial Library, a critical primary source. At the University of Houston, James K. Martin read the earliest drafts of my manuscript, and Joseph Glatthaar and James H. Jones helped me restructure and substantially revise the first half of the study, particularly by emphasizing the psychological background of Yancey, an essential element of this biography. J. Mills Thornton III has given encouragement, advice, and the best possible sounding board for me from nearly the start of my research to its completion. Conversations on matters of honor with Bertram Wyatt-Brown were essential and enjoyable. John Boles and members of Rice University's Houston Area Southern Historians provided both forums for me to test preliminary findings and very considered and constructive criticisms. Lynda Crist, Mary Seaton Dix, Kenneth Williams, and others at the Papers of Jefferson Davis at Rice University offered their expert and invaluable assistance in almost every phase of my research.

I have profited immensely by friendship and no-holds-barred feedback from several people who read all or part of the evolving manuscript. Richard J. M. Blackett, Howard Jones, and William C. Davis (we're done with fire-eaters now, right?) helped me sharpen my focus, watch my facts, and improve my writing, and they supplied both general and precise advice about cutting (and cutting, and cutting) the tome. George C. Rable spent tremendous time, energy, and thought in his painstakingly thorough reading of the manuscript. I am very grateful to Charles B. Dew for his reading of a later version of the work that further helped condense, sharpen, and refine it; his constructive comments gave me a big boost when I really needed one. Needless to say, despite the assistance of these and others, any errors of fact or interpretation are mine, and mine alone.

I have thoroughly enjoyed my experiences with the professional and friendly people at the University of North Carolina Press. I have finally had a chance to work with my friend Gary Gallagher, whose faith in me and guiding hand have buoyed my spirits over many years and helped make this a better book. I have profited immensely from David Perry's steady hand keeping me on course, from his bluntness when necessary, and from his reassuring grin and sense of humor at all times. David Hines, Kathleen Ketterman, Ron Maner, Eric Schramm, and many others at UNC Press have helped me mop up loose ends and made the final stage of this work flow smoothly. Thank you all.

Several friends and acquaintances have provided useful information as well as interest and support that are greatly appreciated. I particularly wish to thank several Yancey descendants, particularly Dennis Yancey, Jim Rice, Sky Yancey, and her husband, Thomas J. Stipanowich. Michael Reynolds, Tim Kubaski, and Valerie J. Smith have frequently lent their ears and opinions and have also found some obscure but important primary sources. Scout Blum provided me with an invaluable opportunity to pull together and test my major theses at the first annual Chancellor's Symposium on Southern History at Troy State University. Two of the most important people in my life have stood by my side through various phases of this work, and have given me their support in all things. I do not know the words to express my thanks and my gratitude for Helen Warwick, who has helped me from the start of my graduate career. Her hand still graces many of my ancient note cards, and I am forever grateful for her steadfast faith in me. Travis Dennington was by my side as I groaned through the final leg of this work, and now joins me in celebrating a happy ending.

Without the love and support of my family, all my accomplishments and joy would ring hollow. My Houston-Scottsdale cousins, Ruth and Richard, Alejandro and Leslie, Andres Daniel, and Michael Benjamin Hirschfeld have truly made Houston home and are my biggest local fans. My love and thanks go out to my aunt Jackie Wissen; Paul, Eva, Shayna, and Rachel Dickstein; Louise, Barry, and Marissa Kohan; Erica, Phil, Alicia, and Erin Stillwell; Mindy Alper; and cousins too numerous to name, from Budapest to Buenos Aires and scattered throughout the United States of America. Frosty, Liz, and now Jack have literally been by my side throughout my writing, telling me to stop it and play ball with them instead. Good dogs. Of course, no one has been more important, loving, and supportive than my immediate family, to whom this book is dedicated.

WILLIAM LOWNDES YANCEY AND THE COMING OF THE CIVIL WAR

INTRODUCTION

William Lowndes Yancey ranks among the leading secessionists of the old South. Contemporaries knew him as one of the greatest public speakers in the country. One historian compared Yancey to Adolf Hitler for his ability to sway crowds through oratory.¹ In his times and since, Yancey has been considered the arch-secessionist of the South—a fire-eater, in the language of his day. Through most of his life, Yancey was unalterably opposed to political compromise in any form or fashion. Often rash and reckless in both speech and actions, Yancey killed a relative in a street fight before entering Congress, where his first major speech resulted in a duel. He spent over a decade striving toward disunion and the creation of a slaveholding republic. He led the secession movement in his adopted state of Alabama, and nationally through his association with other fire-eaters. By the late 1850s and especially in 1860, Yancey riveted the attention of the national media. His bold insistence in 1860 that the Democratic Party support the expansion of slavery into the national territories resulted in the rendering of that party into northern and southern sections, each with their own candidates. This helped ensure the election of Abraham Lincoln, which in turn served as the catalyst for secession. During that election season, Yancey launched an unprecedented speaking tour of much of the country, defending the expansion of slavery and promising northerners that all slaves were happy and content—unless northerners interfered with them. By helping other slave states to break the compact of the Union, William L. Yancey helped to propel the country into civil war. Early in 1861, Yancey had the honor of welcoming President-elect Jefferson Davis to the new Confederate capital. Yancey then served his president as the leading Confederate diplomat to Great Britain and France, where he surprised critics through his tact and effectiveness. By the time of his election to the Confederate Senate in 1862, Yancey balanced his concerns for the liberties of white Confederates with the obvious need to stand by his president and create a strong wartime government.

His life was both tumultuous and brief. He was born in Georgia in 1814 and raised in New England by an emotionally unstable mother and fiery abolitionist stepfather. As a teenager Yancey defended the Union against the mighty John C. Calhoun of South Carolina. By age twenty-four he gained election to the Alabama assembly. Four years later he served in Congress and began to question his commitment to the Union. He emerged as a primary promoter of disunion in the 1850s and served his new country as a diplomat and a senator, all before his death just weeks before turning forty-nine in 1863.

In 1892 John W. DuBose wrote the first and heretofore only book-length biography of Yancey, The Life and Times of William Lowndes Yancey: A History of Political Parties in the United States, from 1834 to 1864; Especially as to the Origin of the Confederate States. A major slaveholder, a Confederate veteran, and an oath-bound member of the original Ku Klux Klan, DuBose consciously used Yancey as a vehicle to vindicate slaveholding and the Confederate experience. DuBose hoped the 752-page biography is now condensed enough to read easily, especially because there was so much more of Yancey he had wanted to say.² Since then only a few authors have focused on Yancey.³

The key to understanding Yancey, as for most people, was his childhood. Much has been written about the perils of psychohistory, the dangers of imposing modern concepts of psychoanalysis on people and cultures long dead, of formulating hypotheses based on fragmentary documentary records and recollections and memories that are, at best, imperfect. And yet, as historian C. Vann Woodward noted, every biographer must and does make psychological judgments, even if they lack the formal training to do so or use the proper language or cite authoritative sources.⁴ I will not hesitate to make these evaluations. Fortunately for this study, a fairly abundant record of Yancey's formative years survives, and modern psychological insights make clear to me how Yancey fit into his own culture and era.

Yancey was raised in a dysfunctional family. Antebellum Americans would have called it turbulent. It was not common in the early 1800s for parents and stepparents to repeatedly threaten and beat their children, for husbands to nail wives in closets, for wives to try to destroy their husband's public reputations, or for stepchildren to assist in that effort, yet this was the environment Yancey confronted as a child and adolescent. Whether or not it was usual at this time for adult children to act as protector and provider for mothers who had failed to provide emotional or physical protection to those children, it was bound to make an impact on the child, especially if that mother later responded to her child with neglect, criticism, and contempt, as Yancey's mother did. Children who faced physical and emotional abuse often develop a low sense of self-esteem. And people who as children suffered from low self-esteem often have a very fragile sense of self-worth as adults; they commonly seek approval of others because they did not receive it from parents and do not have it within themselves.⁵

One of the few constants in Yancey's life was his quest for public adulation, or at least attention. He devoted much of his life to rebelling against his hated stepfather and that man's antislavery and unionist values. This very rebellion, which included affirmation of vague memories of Yancey's deceased father and Yancey's idealized vision of the South, drove him relentlessly to seek approval from his society. Those closest to him noted an odd combination of sincerity and shallowness in Yancey. He argued vociferously for the Union when he lived with unionists; he did the same for secession after his association with disunionists. He defended himself and his father's name through dueling, as the culture of his region demanded. He only threatened other southerners with violence, as though he could personally purge his section of those who dishonored it. As for the North in general, he considered it a section whose population lacked honor. Yancey's desire to be considered a good Christian and family provider ultimately created unresolvable conflicts with his sense of honor. He excelled in oratory, one of his culture's most highly prized avocations, although in the heat of a diatribe he often blundered and had to issue public explanations or retractions. He sought the prestige of a public man, both as a politician and a lawyer; but he mastered neither art, only the outer trappings of each job.⁶ Yancey finally found his personal identity in the collective character of his native South, especially his adopted state, Alabama, and its people's emphasis on freedom from government interference and the critical importance of white liberty and black slavery.⁷ And as the North more and more embodied the antagonistic values of Yancey's stepfather-father, Yancey felt compelled to fight for the preservation of that peculiar southern society that had at last given him a sense of worth. That psychological struggle had fateful consequences for Yancey, the South, and for the history of the United States.

CHAPTER ONE Jordan's Stormy Banks

Nothing remains of the Bird family plantation on the shoals of the Ogeechee, a river that defines part of the western border of Warren County, Georgia. After two hundred years of settlement the site remains tranquil and secluded. Water babbling over rocks in the riverbed usually drowns out the noise of the occasional automobile that passes by on a bridge far overhead, a crossing almost obscured from the stream by dense foliage. On Sunday mornings the sound of music and song rises from African American parishioners of a small church set back from the only major intersection in the vicinity. A highway marker at that small crossroads community, now called Shoals, notes the site of the birthplace of William Lowndes Yancey on August 10, 1814, at a nearby plantation owned by William Bird. Bird, a Revolutionary War veteran, had moved to Georgia in 1796 with his wife, Catherine. His plantation gained the name the Aviary in part because a local army commander who visited often remarked on the beauty of the Birds’ six daughters.¹

On December 8, 1808, Caroline Bird married twenty-five-year-old Benjamin Cudworth Yancey, a navy veteran and promising young lawyer from Abbeville, South Carolina. Benjamin Yancey had studied law in Baltimore under former Federalist congressman Robert Goodloe Harper and had begun his law practice sharing a tiny brick office with two other aspiring Carolina attorneys, Patrick Noble and his cousin John C. Calhoun, a man who would dominate southern politics for more than a generation. Benjamin Yancey served with some distinction in the state legislature, representing Abbeville from 1810 to 1813 and Charleston from 1816 to 1817. He chaired the House Judiciary Committee and acted as military aide to Governor Joseph Alston during the War of 1812. In 1814, he ran for reelection but was defeated by none other than Patrick Noble. This contributed to a growing schism between Yancey's family and the Calhouns and Nobles.

Benjamin Yancey's legal talents, his notable service for South Carolina, and his pronounced nationalism brought him to the attention of Daniel E. Huger, a leading lawyer in the state. The two formed a partnership in Charleston after Yancey lost to Noble. In August 1817, his wife, Caroline, three-year-old son William, and four-month-old Benjamin Cudworth Yancey Jr. joined him on a trip to the interior of the state to escape an outbreak of yellow fever around Charleston harbor. As the Yancey family trekked inland, high water detained them at the Edisto River swamp. There the young father contracted malaria, and after a few agonizing days of high fever and chills, Benjamin C. Yancey died on October 26, 1817, in his thirty-fifth year.²

Mrs. Yancey, who returned to the Aviary with her children after her husband's death, raised her boys on tales of their late father's exploits not only in law and politics, but also his service on the USSConstellation during the Quasi-War with France. This conflict stemmed from the Napoleonic wars in Europe; both France and Britain harassed and attacked American merchant vessels that dared trade with the other power, often kidnapping American sailors and forcing them into their respective navies. After failing to resolve this problem through diplomacy, President John Adams and his Federalist Party authorized the construction of several warships, less to attack the French than to protect American ships and crews on the high seas. Among these was the Constellation.

Commodore Thomas Truxtun, a veteran of the American Revolution, commanded the Constellation, a frigate with thirty-eight guns and a crew of 320. Truxtun and his ship would score two remarkable victories in engagements with the French. The first came on February 9, 1799, off the Caribbean island of Nevis, where Truxtun and the Constellation encountered the L'Insurgente, one of the fastest and most powerful warships in the French navy. The French captain tried to outrun the Americans, but the Constellation overtook her, pulling abreast only a hundred yards away and unleashing a deadly volley with fourteen of her guns, pouring twenty-four-pound balls into the L'Insurgente. After suffering twenty-nine deaths and injuries to forty-one more of her crew, the captain of the L'Insurgente surrendered to Truxtun, whose crew suffered only six losses. Midshipman Benjamin Yancey joined the now-celebrated Constellation a few weeks later, and would gain his own share of glory.³

Just days after reporting for duty, Benjamin Yancey participated in the capture of the French schooner Union, a Letter of Marque vessel—a pirate ship—with thirty-two men, near St. Christopher's. A month later Yancey and his shipmates captured another Letter of Marque schooner, the Diligente, and its crew of thirty-four near Guadeloupe. Near that island, on February 1, 1800, the Constellation encountered the La Vengeance. No small pirate ship, the La Vengeance was far larger and more powerful than the American vessel: though its crew was of equal size, it carried eighty additional military passengers and had fifty-four guns. This time, even with new, lighter guns that enabled him to move with greater speed, Truxtun could not outmaneuver the French, but his men fired with more deadly accuracy. After about five hours’ continuous combat La Vengeance limped away into the evening. The Constellation suffered losses of eighteen dead and twenty-one wounded; the French captain reported twenty-eight killed and forty wounded, but other reports listed nearly a hundred more casualties—half the crew.⁴

Benjamin Yancey thrived on excitement and chafed at tedium, qualities that his firstborn child would share. After the Quasi-War wound down, the Constellation ignobly ran aground and partially sunk in the Delaware River near the Philadelphia Naval Yard. Benjamin Yancey could scarcely tolerate the calm on the Delaware's peaceful banks. He and two crew mates took to "living here in a discepated [sic] manner, and have never been near the Ship since," their new captain reported ruefully to the Navy Department. After his exhilarating experiences in the tempest of war, peacetime life in the navy bored Yancey to excess. He would leave the navy in May 1801 as part of a general and vast reduction of America's military at the end of the Quasi-War, returning to civilian life, law, and politics.⁵

Growing up in the peaceful, landlocked farmland of northern Georgia, William and Ben Yancey Jr. must have thrilled to tales of their father's exotic voyages and exciting experiences in the Caribbean. The father's spirit and service to his country left a powerful imprint in the mind of William L. Yancey. His very name stood as a reminder of his father's politics. William Lowndes (1782–1822) was a leading nationalist and Federal Republican politician in South Carolina. William Yancey himself, as a young adult, would briefly entertain the notion of joining the navy, and a generation later he proudly supported his own son and namesake, William E. Yancey, as he reported to the U.S. Naval Academy at Annapolis in 1860 and trained aboard the USSConstitution, sister ship to the Constellation.

William Yancey also received quite a legacy of character and personality from his father. Eulogists extolled the senior Yancey's oratorical skills, a prowess that stemmed largely from his ability to use the weapons of invective and sarcasm, and noted his ardent, inflexible, decisive manner. Decades later William Yancey would exemplify those same qualities.⁶

Virtually every member of the Bird family had a notorious temper. One of Caroline's brothers, Fitzgerald Bird, launched a verbal assault on their brother Wilson after he insinuated publicly that Fitzgerald had moved to Sparta, Georgia, to escape creditors. In a card printed in a local newspaper, Fitzgerald Bird announced, None other than a malevolent mind could have conceived such a machination, and none but a base, malicious heart would have connived at its currency. . . . I feel bound to refute, publicly, the foul slanders of his tongue; as a man, I put them at defiance; and as a brother, I spurn his relationship. Louisa Bird, who married Robert Cunningham of Greenville, South Carolina, unleashed her venom often, but especially after learning that her son, John, had become engaged to the daughter of Patrick Noble. He was fully aware it was planting poisoned daggers in my heart, she complained to her nephew, Benjamin Cudworth Yancey Jr. This family [the Nobles and Calhouns] has been the enemy of my race—they were the deadly foes of your father. Family lore held that William Bird once remarked that if he were to make a raid on Hell he would select his daughter, Caroline, as first lieutenant. Caroline's later confrontations and conflicts both in private and public confirmed her father's assessment.⁷

Within the tumultuous Aviary, Caroline Bird Yancey served as her eldest son's first teacher. His early instruction emphasized oratory, the art that would earn him both fame and infamy throughout the United States and in Europe. She made sure that he learned to enunciate clearly. Supposedly his favorite recitation was Samuel Stennett's hymn, On Jordan's Stormy Banks I Stand. After a while Caroline sent her son to the nearby Mt. Zion Academy in Hancock County, considered by many among the best schools of its kind in the nation. There mother and son came to know the founder and headmaster, Rev. Nathan Sydney Smith Beman, the man Caroline would soon marry.⁸

Nathan Beman was born November 26, 1785, in New Lebanon, New York (now Vermont), son of Samuel and Silence Douglas Beman. Samuel Beman was obstinate and old fashioned. He persisted in wearing his hair and clothing in the colonial style (complete with knee breeches and knee buckles) until his death in 1845. As orthodox Congregationalists the Bemans insisted on daily prayer, temperance, and cessation of every activity on the Sabbath that would divert one's attention from God—no singing, no whistling, no games. On other days of the week the elder Beman expected his young son to perform all manner of tasks in and around the house before he could play. Later, although still a youth, Nathan joined his father in the fields for more strenuous work. Like most New England fathers of his day, Samuel Beman ran his home with authoritarian control. Conventional wisdom held that discipline was critical in child rearing. In fact, many parents likened raising boys to breaking horses, and cautioned that willful disobedience would come from children unless their parents remained ever vigilant against indulgence. In his adulthood Nathan Beman would demonstrate these same attitudes and adopt identical rules for his own children.⁹

One of Beman's closest boyhood friends was Chittenden Lyon, son of U.S. senator Matthew Lyon. Senator Lyon was one of the few men actually imprisoned under the Sedition Act of 1798 for criticizing President John Adams. The heady atmosphere of confrontational politics clearly excited young Beman. The Lyon boy, like his father and like Beman, easily angered and quarreled, so the two boys fought nearly as frequently as they played.¹⁰

No less than Yancey, Beman could boast of a patriotic family. His father had participated in the American Revolution. More notably, his uncle and namesake served as guide to Ethan Allen and his Green Mountain Boys in the renowned capture of Fort Ticonderoga. Although his family had a rich heritage, they did not have much money, and that hampered young Beman's efforts to attain an advanced education. He attended Williams College in western Massachusetts in 1803, but after less than one year his family's financial troubles forced him to withdraw. By working odd jobs he financed the rest of his studies at Middlebury College in Vermont. In 1807 Beman obtained his first job as a teacher at the Lincoln Academy in Maine. And doubtless influenced by his parents’ deep religious convictions, Beman went on to receive a license to preach in June 1809.¹¹

Beman left his parents’ Congregational Church for Presbyterianism and quickly became one of the leading clergymen of his day, despite a personality described by his biographer as hasty, reckless, arbitrary, rude, and overbearingly intolerant. Nearly from the start of his career Beman worked politics into his sermons, preaching against President Thomas Jefferson's Embargo of France and Britain from 1807 to 1809 during the Napoleonic Wars, and against American participation in the War of 1812. Although Beman would live until 1871, during the early 1810s he suffered from poor health. His doctor advised him to make a trip south to escape the cold of New England. He went to Georgia in 1811 and returned there the next year to recover from tuberculosis. This visit lasted ten years. It was in 1812 that Beman began Mt. Zion Academy, where he would meet the Yanceys.¹²

With his younger brother, Carlisle Beman, offering courses in classical studies at Mt. Zion, Rev. Beman exerted a profound influence on his adopted community beyond the confines of the academy. In the decade that he led Mt. Zion, Beman's school produced more graduates than any other preparatory school in Georgia. In 1819, with two business partners, Beman established a local newspaper, the Mt. Zion Missionary. Beman offered editorial comment on all sorts of issues. He complained that the proliferation of thespian societies and little theaters would continue until every pin-feathered actor may flap his wings and crow majestically upon the pinnacle of his own dunghill. He attacked the practice of "pitching dollars, shooting rifles, gouging, breaking sculls [sic], and biting off ears and noses" associated with taverns and gambling halls. He railed against dueling, drinking, and Sabbath breaking. And while targeting these issues with vitriolic language did not brand him as unique, it did gain him plenty of attention.¹³

The reverend's outspokenness and his standing in Hancock County eventually brought him to the attention of Yancey's widowed mother. Beman himself was a widower with two children, Henry and Eliza. After a brief courtship, Beman and Caroline Bird Yancey married on April 3, 1821, at the Aviary.¹⁴ Six-year-old William Yancey's schoolmaster was now also his stepfather. Beman's biographer claimed that the subsequent tumultuous marriage diminished the reverend's influence on his stepson, but nothing was further from the truth. Although fathers dominated most American families of the period, Beman's authoritarianism and brutality surpassed acceptable contemporary standards of patriarchy, and his evangelism rooted itself not in forgiveness and love, but in absolute submission of all to the will of God and of Beman's family to his own tyrannical authority.¹⁵ Shortly after their marriage, Beman locked his wife in a closet following an argument. Several hours later, a house slave let Caroline out and she collapsed on her bed. Beman then supposedly thundered that if locks would not hold her perhaps nails would, and as he nailed shut her bedroom door Caroline cried for help through the window. According to another report Beman contended that Caroline had an impossible temper, one that somehow hastened the death of her first husband. She wore his life out, and her father said that no man could live with her, Beman alleged.¹⁶ William Yancey grew to despise his stepfather, to hate passionately both the man and his values. William, his younger brother, and even Samuel S. Beman, the first child of Caroline and Nathan Beman, banded together as best they could to protect themselves and their mother from the pastor, and eventually to strike back at a man they held in contempt.

A key source of the turmoil in this stormy union involved Caroline's slaves. When she and Beman married he became lawful owner and master of her three slaves, a mother and two small children. Most white southerners never possessed even one slave, and throughout the nineteenth century median slave-holding hovered between four and six slaves. As the new owner of three bond servants, therefore, Beman represented a fairly typical slaveowner even while he stood an important notch up on the southern social ladder. But this new status came at a cost. Slavery as an abstract question had been among the most important issues faced by the New England preacher since he moved to Georgia. The Presbyterian General Assembly in 1818 passed a unanimous resolution condemning slavery as utterly inconsistent with the law of God, but rather than antagonize southern slaveholders, after several years the Assembly acknowledged that slavery was so fixed in state laws that no church could interfere with it.¹⁷

While he lived in the South, Beman never advocated abolition—that would come later. As a minister Beman believed that his primary concern lay in bringing Christianity to African Americans. There are now, he wrote in 1821, "between one and two millions of SLAVES, who, in point of religion, may be ranked with the pagan world; and yet little, or nothing, comparatively, is done for their salvation. Like other ministers, Beman suggested that masters would receive a reward of more dutiful slaves if they brought the gospel to their human chattel. Let the servant feel that he enjoys the distinction of the son of God, he explained, that he is the heir of the same glory to which patriarchs and apostles aspired, and he will cheerfully submit to the lot, though an humble and painful one, which has been appointed him here below." Like other local Presbyterians, Beman hoped to use Christianity to ameliorate the harshest aspects of slavery without challenging the institution itself. In November 1821, Beman served as temporary clerk at a synod of South Carolina and Georgia Presbyterians that met in Washington, Georgia. The assembly agreed that slaves who remarried after their masters forcibly separated them from their spouses may not be excluded from privileges of the church.¹⁸

Beman's position on slave trading also placed him within the mainstream of his profession and time, but it would have enormous consequences for his career, his marriage, and his relationship with his Yancey stepsons. Frequently Rev. Beman castigated those who engaged in the crime of man-stealing, men who have made a traffick of human blood, bones and sinews, especially those who had participated in the transatlantic slave trade. He called for a cessation of all traffick in human flesh. Although not yet calling for abolition, Beman encouraged masters to consider manumission and the return of former slaves to Africa under the auspices of the American Colonization Society, an organization founded in 1816 under the leadership of such prominent slaveholders as the Speaker of the House of Representatives, Henry Clay, and former president James Madison.¹⁹ But the same pastor who denounced slave trading also accepted advertisements in his Missionary for slave sales. And on April 11, 1822, Beman sold the slaves that he had acquired through marriage, a thirty-two-year-old slave woman, her four-year-old son, George, and infant daughter, Caroline, to a man in Savannah for $700.²⁰ His stepsons would not let him forget his hypocrisy.

In the fall of 1822, the First Presbyterian Church of Troy, New York, invited Beman to fill a ministerial vacancy there. He accepted, and moved his family north in the spring of 1823. During his interview for this position, church officials asked Beman about the veracity of rumors concerning trouble in his marriage. He denied that any trouble existed.

The acrimony between Rev. and Mrs. Beman only increased, however, as they left Georgia, and worsened dramatically in New York. On the voyage from Savannah to New York the ship's captain complained about Beman's treatment of his wife, especially considering that she had to care for her young children while she was ill. After their arrival in Troy the Bemans abused each other with greater frequency and violence, often lashing out against everyone in the household. Cut off from family and friends in far-off Georgia and insulated in their household, both Caroline and the children faced physical and emotional attacks. Although most households—even sternly patriarchal ones—could count on the love and nurture of the mother to balance the power and authority of the father, such was not the case for the Bemans. Caroline used a walking stick to strike the head of her stepdaughter, Eliza, and often slapped her children or hit them with the heel of her shoe. Not even house servants were safe. In fact, by gaining the affection of the children and inadvertently undermining the authority of both parents, the servants’ mere presence might have further antagonized both Rev. and Mrs. Beman. Caroline raged at servant girls, called them strumpet and bitch, and threatened to beat them with fire wood and fire tongs. Rev. Beman, determined to save his children an eternity of damnation, seldom spared inflicting pain to force obedience to him and God. According to his wife, on one occasion Beman beat William and Ben until stripes showed on their backs. Contemporary commentators on child governance condemned such cruelty. Parents, who govern well, never suffer children to arrive at such a pass, that nothing short of torture will coerce them, wrote one evangelical author in 1814. In fact, critics of the day condemned harsh words as much as physical attacks. For William Yancey, the specter and anticipation of violence and abuse must have been almost as bad as the abuse itself; watching helplessly as his parents struck his siblings added to his own trauma.²¹

Caroline herself likely received beatings from her husband. As an adult, Ben Yancey recorded a cryptic and ominous memory, either his own or his mother's, that implied that Beman battered Caroline while William attended school, and warned her that no one would accept her word over his. By 1826 the marriage had become so intolerable that Rev. Beman decided to seek a legal separation. At this time divorce required an act of state legislatures, and adultery constituted the sole ground for divorce in New York. Divorces were publicly humiliating and considered disgraceful, rare in all states (especially in the South) and legally impossible in South Carolina. Because of the public embarrassment from such proceedings, members of Beman's congregation intervened before the matter reached court. They convinced the couple to reconcile, but the whole affair created a schism within Beman's church, leaving a vocal minority determined to drive out their minister who literally appeared unable to practice what he preached.²²

The tumult of the Beman household in odd ways paralleled the atmosphere of contemporary Troy and upstate New York. When the eight-year-old William Yancey arrived there, Troy had just begun an amazing transformation later characterized as part of America's market revolution. The city in no way resembled pastoral Hancock County, Georgia. The completion of the Erie Canal in 1823, almost simultaneous with the arrival of the Beman-Yancey family, brought with it amazing changes. Troy became a center of transportation, commerce, and industry because of its location as the eastern terminus of the great canal, where it connected with the Hudson River. Population exploded. From 1820 to 1830, it grew from 5,262 to 11,556.

Even things that might have seemed familiar to Yancey were strangely transformed in Troy, especially slavery. That institution, common once to each of the original thirteen states, had not yet disappeared from the Empire State. The ideals of liberty embodied in the American Revolution, however, influenced New Yorkers and most other northerners to repudiate slavery. The people of New York, in common with most other northern states, chose to slowly phase out the institution rather than abolish it instantly. Rensselaer County still counted 433 slaves in 1820, as well as 632 free colored. The same year Hancock County, Georgia, had 6,863 slaves (compared to 5,847 whites) and only 24 free blacks. By 1830 no slaves remained in Rensselaer County, but the freedmen generally stayed and increased the free black population to 1,036. These independent-minded freemen and women soon built several colored churches of their own in Troy, a development that Yancey could not have witnessed during his youth in Georgia, where few free blacks lived. But to Yancey yet another unfamiliar phenomenon appeared. Both replacing some slaves and joining freemen in industry and commerce were a wave of immigrants, swelling in number from 165 in Rennselaer County in 1820 to 1,418 ten years later. When Yancey left Hancock County, only four residents there were of foreign birth.²³

As a boy Yancey watched as blacks and whites, native born and foreign, poured into and through Troy and Watervliet (across the Hudson), bringing both welcome and unwelcome changes to that river's agitated banks. Troy received about one-third of the traffic carried by the Erie Canal. Yancey could not have avoided contact with the rough and raucous men who labored along the shore of the canal. These longshoremen worked hard and played harder. Only a few years after the canal opened, approximately 1,500 grog shops lined its banks, about one for every quarter mile. Watervliet, the end of the line, had several drinking establishments. That area, plainly visible from Beman's church, eventually became known as the Barbary Coast of the East. Saloons with such names as Black Rag and Tub of Blood became known for a hundred fights a day, [and] a body a week found in the canal. Coarseness and vice pervaded the place. Local folklore contends that once Watervliet authorities brought a drunken prostitute before a judge, who asked where she came from. She replied, I slid down from Buffalo on a plank. The judge sentenced her to six months in jail, supposedly admonishing her, so you can pick the slivers out of your [ass]!²⁴

Although Watervliet almost monopolized vice in the area, residents of Troy noted changes there, too. Profound transformations occurred in the character, tempo, and demographic profile of the burgeoning city. It had previously bustled with wagons and sleighs in winter, but quickly the city's traffic almost vanished as business moved to the river and the wharves and warehouses on its front. Visitors commented on the odd quiet in the city, silence interrupted only by the construction of residential and commercial buildings that appeared with the new wealth enjoyed by city residents. The Beman home was no palace, but a handsome and comfortable three-story brick townhouse on 135 Third Street, just a few blocks from Beman's church and six short city blocks east of the busy Hudson River. By 1833 Beman's First Presbyterian Church would be housed in a new, fashionable, and grand Greek-Revival building.²⁵

With sudden, constant, dizzying changes all around and the specter of Sodom and Gomorrah upon them, no wonder zealots like Beman were determined to stamp out sin and convert sinners. And among the most important and profound ingredients of social change during this time were dramatic new developments in American Protestantism. Few places in the country had a greater impact on religious excitement and debate than the upstate New York of Yancey's childhood and adolescence. The ongoing second Great Awakening—evangelical religious revivals—affected Beman's church, congregants, and the minister's own shifting views on slavery. Beman would emerge as a leader of the New School movement of the Presbyterian Church, and worked with Rev. Charles G. Finney and others to encourage greater emotionalism and increased participation by women in church activities. The New School style suited Beman's rhetorical technique; he employed sarcasm, was occasionally rude and arbitrary, had a knack for quick retorts, but was also witty, relaxed, and informal, traits that his stepson later adopted in his own speech-making. Before his arrival in Troy, Beman's congregants had already engaged in fierce and divisive debates over whether or not to install heating, a carpet, and an organ. From the pulpit Beman not only continued to blend politics with theology, but also attacked his own congregants, accusing them of losing faith and secretly hoping that their children would not become converted. He often singled out people by name to denounce them as wicked and evil, or to shout, You lie, and you know it; you don't want religion; and if you think you do, it is only a delusion of the devil.²⁶

As Beman became involved with abolitionism during the 1830s and worked closely with Theodore Dwight Weld and Lyman Beecher, his concern over slavery created yet another source of conflict with his wife. Just before you left home, you had settled your mind from the Bible, as I heard you say, that slavery was morally wrong, he reminded Caroline. Now it seems to be a most holy thing, a gift from heaven.²⁷

A schism had already begun to settle into the mind of the impressionable young William Yancey. The North, as personified by Beman, seemed cold, austere, forbidding, cruel, and hypocritical. Beman's children had to have adopted some perception of northern society as wicked, sinful, vice-ridden, and tumultuous. In stark contrast, the South, less personified by Yancey's mother than his vague notions of his late father, seemed warm, ordered, and safe, with a clearly defined place and role for all, black and white, slave and free, male and female, parent and child. As an adult in the 1850s, Yancey would argue these very points.

Ongoing strife doomed the Bemans’ marriage. In 1832 Beman threatened again to obtain a legal separation, but the couple reconciled once more. The next year they came close to parting, and by 1835 they informally agreed to separate. After staying with friends in Troy, Caroline left to spend a year and a half with her family in the South, with Beman agreeing to pay her expenses. When Beman learned that his wife had become quite friendly with two wives of his parishioners who had led the effort to oust him from his pulpit, he thundered: You have scattered your stuff through the community—gone to members of other churches who hate me and joined with them to destroy my ministerial influence, endeavored to alienate the members of my own church so as to drive them into other congregations, become intimate with two of the slanderous women of this city . . . and they are spitting their venom all over the country.²⁸

As tension mounted, Beman became both perplexed and infuriated at Caroline's periodic expressions of good will. You talk of burying the hatchet, he wrote, "and of being willing to bear and forbear and of dividing the blame equally between us. . . . [Yet] you have for years pursued a course . . . which has destroyed my peace. It was not originally at me, but at domestics and children. When I have endeavored to pacify and quiet you you have made it a quarrell [sic] with me. . . . I have come to the conclusion that you are either deranged or you have lost your moral sense. Later he added, You know I wanted to have taken a legal remedy in 1826. . . . But the matter has now come out, that you were only waiting for an opportunity to exculpate yourself, & ‘crush’ me! This is what you confided to me in 1834 you had always a desire to do. Caroline's expression of continued affection for her estranged husband, despite their sad history, evoked another outburst. If her demeanor as a wife was affectionate, the minister rejoined, I say ‘from affection, good Lord, deliver me!’ A very little more affection would actually kill me!"²⁹ The words Beman set to paper were severe enough; one can only imagine what young Yancey heard during the heat of an argument.

Early in 1837, while Caroline was in Alabama, Beman raised the stakes even higher. You can't return to the North, he warned. "Should you be rash enough to do it, you will not find me; & the children will be beyond your reach." Friends of Caroline's confirmed the impossibility of her return and the seriousness of Beman's threat involving her children. Nevertheless she tried, but for years got no closer than Rochester and could only contact her children through the mail. By 1840 she managed a brief return to Troy, finding a boardinghouse on the same block where her estranged husband lived, across the street from his church.³⁰

The stormy atmosphere of the Beman household had a long-lasting effect on the children. It forged quite a bond between William, Ben, and Samuel Beman, their half-brother. The three remained devoted to each other throughout their lives, despite later divisions caused by family, politics, secession, and war. Whenever Rev. Beman was late with financial support or negligent in any way, it evoked a powerful reaction from the Birds and Yanceys. In 1837, Ben began to gather correspondence between his mother and stepfather and begged her to take him to court. Ben and William even sent to Georgia to obtain a certified copy of Beman's slave sale from 1822 in the hope of publishing a pamphlet for circulation in Troy to embarrass and perhaps destroy the now famous abolitionist. Although Caroline never ceased complaining about lack of financial support, she adamantly refused either to sue or to let her sons publish the damning documents.³¹

Among the charges the Bird family—especially Caroline's brother William and her brother-in-law, Robert Cunningham—levied against Beman was that he squandered money set aside by their father for the schooling of young William and Ben.³² That accusation carried no merit. William undeniably enjoyed a superior education. He attended academies in Chittenango (Yates Polytechnic Institute) and Troy in New York, Bennington's Brick Academy in Vermont, and the Lenox Academy in Lenox, Massachusetts. At both Bennington and Lenox, oratory and declamation constituted key portions in the curriculum, as well as standard topics such as classical languages, philosophy, and mathematics. In Yancey's last year at Lenox, 1830, he was one of 127 students (which included 28 girls). He was among the 21 pupils to concentrate studies in Greek and Latin.

The most unusual feature of Yancey's early education was his mobility; he attended four academies in seven years. This likely had nothing to do with Beman or money. Lenox Academy cost only $7 for a term of fourteen weeks, and from $1.25 to $2.00 a week for boarding, quite inexpensive for the day. Even Yancey's family admitted that the frequent movement stemmed from William's already troublesome personality. His aunt Louisa Cunningham once warned his brother, Ben, Don't you be led away by Williams wild notions, who could never rest satisfied in one place 2 months at a time. Furthermore, the primitive condition of many of these academies did little to win a student's loyalty. The head of the girls’ school at Lenox described it as a bare and ugly little village, dismally bleak and uncouth, reached only after six miles of steep and rough driving over the Berkshire Mountains.³³

Beman's dedication to education also raises doubts about claims of negligence. In 1845 he would accept the presidency of Troy's Rensselaer Polytechnic Institute and retain that post for twenty years. Under Beman's leadership the institute grew from a faculty of three and a student body of twenty in 1845 to eleven teachers and over a hundred pupils by 1855. Beman governed the institute with the same discipline, expectations, and rigor that characterized his church and his home. No wonder that, although an effective administrator, when Beman taught classes in Philosophy of the Mind, he did not win the hearts of his students.³⁴

By the end of summer 1830, Yancey had turned sixteen and looked forward to attending college, if only to remain away from his troubled household. Nine years of fighting, arguing, and beatings had taken quite a toll. For most of his life Yancey would exhibit signs of low self-esteem and depression, unleash his own pent-up anger and rage, fiercely attack authority figures, and desperately try to defend his family and its good name—all classic consequences of childhood abuse. He would also seek to replace Beman with a mentor, a father figure, someone who matched young Yancey's gauzy image of his late, heroic father. Another legacy of his childhood trauma revealed itself in Yancey's overwhelming drive to fit into new social groups and gain their attention and approval, whether they were other family members, neighbors, or peers.³⁵

Yancey's college experience afforded him several opportunities. It offered him the prospect of yet another move to satisfy his restless spirit. It also gave him the chance to stay away from the shrill, chaotic, and turbulent household of his mother and stepfather that had inflicted so much emotional and physical damage and pain. And, in an era when even the shortest attendance in a college was exceptional, it promised to expand and to challenge his mind, to allow him to mix with other young men with great ambition and a sense of self-importance. In short, going to college promised a new beginning for a young man very ready to leave one life and move on to another, where he could emerge from his stepfather's powerful, threatening shadow.

CHAPTER TWO Rebellion and Union

In the fall of 1830 Yancey entered Williams College, as his stepfather had before him. On its surface Williamstown, in northwestern Massachusetts, a village of slightly more than 2,000 people where pigs and cows roamed the streets, offered little to excite new students. When Yancey enrolled, the student population hovered around 100, fewer than at Lenox Academy. Most students lived in spartan quarters within West College, the original building on campus that opened in 1793. A handsome but unadorned brick structure, West College sat on a hill overlooking the town. It crammed students’ quarters, a mess hall, classrooms, and chapel into its four floors. Students were required to fetch their own firewood and to carry their own water from a college well. Once a year students contended with Gravel Day, a suspension of classes so that students could re-gravel the walkways on campus. But the college had a beautiful location, tucked in a valley within the Berkshire Mountains. The college also enjoyed vigor and growth after some lean years in the 1810s, and the students Yancey encountered exhibited seriousness and energy.¹

Yancey's preparatory work enabled him to make a smooth transition to college life. Like all incoming students Yancey faced an entrance examination over Greek and Roman literature, geography, English grammar, and arithmetic. Yancey's performance on the exam brought admission to the sophomore class; this course of study included geometry, logarithmics, plane trigonometry, surveying, logic, rhetoric and elocution, and history. Williams College clearly expected much of its pupils, but it also provided them with outstanding instruction. During Yancey's first year the legendary professor Mark Hopkins began his career there.²

Another renowned member of the faculty was its president, Edward Dorr Griffin. President Griffin had a direct and powerful influence on young Yancey, but never proved a satisfactory mentor or father figure. In fact, Griffin was a close friend of Rev. Beman's and a prominent evangelist in his own right. Religious intensity ran high during Yancey's college years, and included several revivals in Williamstown led by Beman at Griffin's invitation. Williams, like most colleges at the time—even state-sponsored ones—mandated morning and evening prayer services. The campus also had two temperance societies and was home to the Williams Anti-Slavery Society, among the first antislavery organizations in the state. And President Griffin himself—like Beman—combined religion and antislavery. Griffin once offered a sermon entitled A Plea for Africa in which he refuted the notion that African peoples were inferior to Europeans or Americans. Griffin insisted that all white Americans, whether in free or slave states, owe a greater atonement than any other nation to bleeding Africa for the perpetuation of slavery.³

Standing six feet three inches tall and weighing 240 pounds, Griffin's physical presence reinforced his oratorical powers and skills. Despite his enormous size and strength, he demonstrated the effectiveness of softness and modulation (in contrast to Beman), qualities that later emerged as part of Yancey's own style. But his sheer enormity and Beman-like severity gave him the reputation of an administrator whom parents could trust to tame their unruly sons, another factor, certainly, in Beman's decision to send Yancey to Williams.⁴ Although Yancey met the school's requirement for an unblemished moral character during his first six months, President Griffin and his faculty had to draw upon every disciplinary device at their disposal to control the antiauthoritarian Yancey and his new friends.⁵

Colleges in New England at this time had quite similar rules and each had a preponderance of clergymen on their faculties. These men all aspired to corral their charges by invoking rules and procedures better suited for children than for young adults. Invariably their efforts proved counterproductive. Pranks, violence, and periodic student rebellions erupted regularly in New England's colleges, and Williams was no exception.⁶ As strict a Sabbatarian as Beman's father, Griffin mandated that on Sundays students must refrain from unnecessary walking and not shave or cut their hair (the fine stood at fifty cents per incident). During the week students risked twenty-five to fifty cent fines for missing morning or evening chapel. Professors monitored students in their rooms twice a day to enforce the hours set aside for study. Students could not initiate celebrations of any kind, nor form any college society; those fell under faculty purview. The college laws prohibited dueling, forgery, robbery, and blasphemy. No alcohol could enter student quarters without the president's permission. The laws absolutely banned firearms. Students could not sing in their rooms during study hours or after 10:00 P.M., act in or attend plays or shows of any kind, or dance, except at commencement. Students could not engage in sexual intercourse, nor keep indecent pictures or impious or irreligious books. Curiously, college officials also specified that students could not wear indecent apparel, and if he wear women's apparel, he shall be liable to public admonition, suspension, or rustication.⁷

It did not take long for Yancey to test some of these rules. Faculty minutes record that on February 23, 1831, Yancey and his fellow student and friend, Horace Clark, both left town without permission and that Yancey got drunk and used profane language. The faculty fined him a dollar and issued a stern warning. Neither did much good. On March 9 the faculty fined him five dollars for playing cards. A month later, Yancey and Clark again teamed up for some mischief, breaking glass windows on campus (a fifty cent fine). A week later Yancey acted more outrageously. He and his friend, Nathan Rosseter, along with several others, disrupted a Methodist prayer meeting at the home of one Daniel Evins by whispering, talking, laughing, and loudly shuffling their feet. Then, after congregants somehow finished their service and some stayed at Evins's home to socialize, Yancey and his friends turned violent. They threw into Evins's home a large cask of water and a brass kettle, both of which spilled all over the floor. The next day, whether out of smug satisfaction or remorse, Yancey got himself good and drunk. Evins reported the outrage to Williams College officials and demanded justice, and also hoped that civil authorities would act. The incident secured Yancey a suspension from the last few weeks of the spring term, but he incurred no criminal punishment. Evins gained some satisfaction when a newspaper from nearby Pittsfield reported the Daring Outrage.⁸

Yancey's punishment did not change him. On July 4, 1831, Yancey, Clark, and others skipped religious services on campus in favor of celebrating their nation's birth by breaking glass on campus. Yancey's name appeared frequently thereafter in the faculty records, usually for skipping prayers. In the summer of 1832 he, Rosseter, and five others each received a dollar fine for some public disturbance in the nearby town of Adams.⁹

Yancey almost went too far in challenging school authority in the late summer of 1832. Despite explicit instructions to the contrary, he left town in August, with an intention not to return, the faculty believed. They therefore expelled him from the institution. Months later, on October 10, 1832, the faculty received a petition from a contrite Yancey begging for readmission. Whatever he wrote proved persuasive. The faculty decided to readmit Yancey, but put him on probation. This mysterious episode almost changed Yancey, now eighteen years old. He faced but one more fine—again, for missing prayers—for the rest of his time at Williams College.¹⁰

Yancey's rebelliousness neither marked him as unique nor proved a liability later in life. In fact, some of his fellow pranksters and upstarts, Horace Clark and Nathan Rosseter in particular, remained friends for many years. And Clark, along with James Dixon (a frequent prayer-skipper), like Yancey went on to serve in the U.S. Congress. Nathan Rosseter became a district court judge in New York.¹¹

Despite his rowdy behavior, Yancey proved a quite capable student. His interest in public speaking drew him to Williams's Philotechnian Society, a group that met for debate and oratory on philosophical, religious, and political issues of the day. Yancey entered the society on October 6, 1830, and had an immediate impact on his peers; the society's secretary commented on the unusual spirit of that meeting. Yancey, though, did not take an active role until the summer of 1832. Debate topics ranged broadly. Such subjects as capital punishment and tariffs vied with Is the love of Fame the greatest incentive to action? and "Does Religious disputation tend to advance