biography
| name: |
Rhett, Robert Barnwell
|
| |
originally Robert Barnwell Smith
|
| sex:
| male
|
| lived:
| (1800–76)
|
| biography:
| US representative, senator, and political idealogue, born in Beaufort, South Carolina, USA. A South Carolina planter, he served in the state legislature (1827–32) and was the state's attorney general (1832–7). (It was in 1837 that he adopted the surname of an ancestor.) Inspired by the political rhetoric of the American Revolution, he became a ‘fire-eater’ secessionist and was briefly John C Calhoun's protégé. He served South Carolina in the US House of Representatives (Democrat, South Carolina, 1837–49) and in the US Senate (1850–2) and opposed all attempts at compromise over the issues of slaves (of which he owned many) and states' rights. He also carried on his campaign through the columns of the Charleston Mercury, which he owned. He was a central delegate at the South Carolina secession convention (1860) and wrote an ‘Address to the Slaveholding States’ to encourage secession. After he failed to become president of the Confederate States of America, he vocally opposed President Jefferson Davis and his conduct of the war. He moved to Louisiana (1867), and, although he was a delegate to the Democratic national convention in 1868, he never abandoned his belief in a ‘separate and free’ South. |
|
|
