Robert Rhett

Robert Barnwell Rhett
Deputy to the Provisional Confederate Congress from South Carolina
In office February 4, 1861 – February 17, 1862
Preceded by	Position established
Succeeded by	Position abolished
United States Senator from South Carolina
In office December 18, 1850 – May 7, 1852
Preceded by	Robert W. Barnwell
Succeeded by	William F. De Saussure
Member of the United States House of Representatives from South Carolina's 7th Congressional District
In office March 4, 1843 – March 3, 1849
Preceded by	James Rogers
Succeeded by	William F. Colcock
Member of the United States House of Representatives from South Carolina's 2nd Congressional District
In office March 4, 1837 – March 3, 1843
Preceded by	William J. Grayson
Succeeded by	Richard F. Simpson
Attorney General of South Carolina
In office November 1832 – March 4, 1837
Governor	Robert Young Hayne George McDuffie Pierce Mason Butler
Member of the South Carolina House of Representatives from St. Bartholomew's Parish
In office 1826–1832
Personal details
Born	(1800-12-21)December 21, 1800 Beaufort, South Carolina
Died	September 14, 1876(1876-09-14) (aged 75) St. James Parish, Louisiana
Resting place	Magnolia Cemetery in Charleston, South Carolina
Political party	Democratic
Profession	Politician, lawyer

Robert Barnwell Rhett, Sr. (December 21, 1800 – September 14, 1876) was a United States secessionist politician from South Carolina. He owned the Charleston Mercury.^[1]

Biography

Born Robert Barnwell Smith in Beaufort. He was of English ancestry.^[2] His name was originally Smith, but after entering public life he changed it for that of a prominent colonial ancestor Colonel William Rhett. He studied law and became a member of the South Carolina legislature in 1826.

His great-uncle was Congressman Robert Barnwell the father of Congressman Robert Woodward Barnwell. A cousin of the Barnwells was the wife of Alexander Garden.

After his state legislative service, Rhett was the South Carolina attorney general (1832), U.S. representative (1837–1849), and U.S. senator (1850–1852). Extremely pro-Southern in his views, he split (1844) with John C. Calhoun to lead the Bluffton Movement for separate state action on the Tariff of 1842. Rhett was one of the leading fire-eaters at the Nashville Convention of 1850, which failed to endorse his aim of secession for the whole South.

Secessionist

When South Carolina passed (1852) an ordinance that merely declared a state's right to secede, Rhett resigned his U.S. Senate seat. He continued to express his fiery secessionist sentiments through the Charleston Mercury, edited by his son, Robert Barnwell Rhett, Jr.

During the 1860 presidential campaign, a widely credited report in the Nashville Patriot said that Rhett, along with William Lowndes Yancey and William Porcher Miles, was a leader of a Southern conspiracy to end the Union that began in May 1858 with a plan, hatched at the Southern Convention in Montgomery, Alabama, in May 1858, to split the Democratic Party along Northern and Southern lines.^[3]

Rhett was a member of the South Carolina Secession Convention in 1860. In the Montgomery Convention which met to organize a provisional government for the seceding states, he was one of the most active delegates and was chairman of the committee which reported the Confederate Constitution.

Subsequently he was elected a member of the lower house of the Confederate Congress. He received no higher office in the Confederate government and returned to South Carolina, where he sharply criticized the policies of Confederate President Jefferson Davis of Mississippi.

After the end of the War, he settled in Louisiana. While it was rumored that he was a delegate to the Democratic National Convention in 1868, that was in fact his son, Robert Rhett, Jr., who had shared his father's editorship responsibilities.

Rhett died in St. James Parish near New Orleans. He is interred at Magnolia Cemetery in Charleston, South Carolina.

The Robert Barnwell Rhett House was declared to be a National Historic Landmark in 1973.

References

Further reading

• Davis, William C. Rhett: The Turbulent Life and Times of a Fire-Eater. Columbia: University of South Carolina Press, 2002.
• Scarborough, William K., “Propagandists for Secession: Edmund Ruffin of Virginia and Robert Barnwell Rhett of South Carolina,” South Carolina Historical Magazine 112 (July–Oct. 2011), 126–38.
• White, Laura A. Robert Barnwell Rhett: Father of Secession (1931)

Primary sources

• A Fire-Eater Remembers: The Confederate Memoir of Robert Barnwell Rhett edited by William C. Davis (2002)

External links

• Robert Rhett at the Biographical Directory of the United States Congress Retrieved on 2009-04-19
• "Robert Rhett". Find a Grave. Retrieved 2009-04-19. 

v t e United States Senators from South Carolina Class 2 P. Butler Hunter Pinckney Sumter Taylor W. Smith R. Hayne Calhoun Huger Calhoun Elmore Barnwell Rhett De Saussure Evans A. Hayne Chesnut Robertson M. Butler Tillman Benet Pollock Dial Blease Byrnes Lumpkin Peace Maybank Daniel Thurmond Wofford Thurmond Graham Class 3 Izard Read Colhoun P. Butler Gaillard Harper W. Smith Miller Preston McDuffie A. Butler Hammond Sawyer Patterson Hampton Irby Earle McLaurin Latimer Gary E. Smith Hall Johnston Russell Hollings DeMint Scott