I grew up hearing stories about Will Yancey, my great-grandfather, a farmer in Tippah County, Mississippi, who died long before I was born. I thought about this man, known to me only through the memories of my relatives and a photograph or two, as I read this weekend a new biography of perhaps the most noteworthy branch of the Yancey family tree.
The University of North Carolina Press has just released historian Eric Walther’s book, William Lowndes Yancey and the Coming of the Civil War about the antebellum U.S. Congressman (D-Ala.), secessionist “fire-eater”, Confederate senator, and CSA ambassador to Great Britain and France.
It doesn’t bode well for my family pride when the opening line of the biography notes the comparisons between Yancey and Adolf Hitler “for his ability to sway crowds through oratory.” I also winced at Yancey’s often demagogic defenses of slavery and, of all things, his feminism, including an egalitarian view of marriage that predated the Seneca Falls women’s movement. The biography pictures Yancey as more than a fiery speaker, but fiery all around, sometimes to the point of physically whipping his opponents, though he was, relatively speaking, somewhat cricket-sized.
The biography presents Yancey as a powerful political force, one of the most powerful in the antebellum South. Yancey was a dogged supporter of Manifest Destiny, even if it meant war for the Oregon territory. He supported the union against the ideas of John C. Calhoun until he shifted to a pro-Southern independence stance. He was pro-immigration and friendly to Catholics against the “Know-Nothing” nativist movement of the time, a movement he rejected as simply a new incarnation of Whiggery. According to Walther, Yancey was strongly influenced rhetorically by revivalist Charles Finney, who worked with Yancey’s stepfather in the New School Presbyterian movement. His leadership and stump-speeches led Alabama out of the Union in 1861.
Even before secession, Yancey led the charge to split the Democratic Party in 1860, leading to the competing nominations of Stephen Douglas of Illinois and (Yancey’s candidate) John C. Breckinridge of Kentucky, both of whom lost the election to Republican Abraham Lincoln. After secession, while other “fire-eaters” distrusted the more moderate Jefferson Davis, Yancey endorsed him and rode with Davis through the streets of Montgomery at the President’s inauguration.
Of most interest, however, is Walther’s almost hesitant use of the contemporary genre of psycho-biography to explain Yancey’s political philosophy and public policy. Yancey’s step-father was a northern Presbyterian abolitionist clergyman, with whom Yancey spent much of his childhood in Massachusetts. According to Walter, Yancey spent the rest of his life rebelling against his stern, hyper-rational Puritan step-father.
As Walther puts it: “Yancey’s search for order included a relentless drive to find someone to replace his late father and to provide an antidote to his step-father, the cold, meddling, tyrannical, and hypocritical man that Yancey grew to see as the personification of all that was wrong with the North and that threatened the South.” Walther sees in Yancey’s denunciations of the cold, acquisitive, industrial, religiously liberal North a strike against a step-father who communicated all of these characteristics. He argues that Yancey, seeking a father, found one in South Carolina political theorist John C. Calhoun.
Such a psychological rendering of history is rightly suspect, to a certain degree, by most traditionalist historians. It is difficult to analyze the subconscious motivations of living people we know intimately, much less long-dead historical figures. The abuses of such crypto-Freudian historiography and even biblical interpretation are so common that we barely notice when a scholar argues that Moses has a Pharaoh complex, or what have you.
Even so, while we can’t peer with the kind of certainty a historian wants into the psychological motives behind the actions of those who went before us, we can understand that actions don’t come about in a vacuum. As Jesus reveals to us, our actions spring from a motive and our motive from a nature, and that nature from a patriarchy. Our actions demonstrate a nature rooted in the divine patriarchy through Christ Jesus or a nature rooted in the satanic patriarchy of our father, the devil (John 8:39-47). Moreover, Scripture reveals that human fatherhood reflects the heavenly patriarchy woven into creation (Eph 3:15; Heb 12:5-11). It ought to remind us of the importance of fathering, not just in a parental sense, but in terms of the spiritual fathering within the life of the church (Phil 2:22; 1 Tim 1:2). That is far more important than the political destinies of nations, Manifest Destiny or not.
I probably will never know much more about William Lowndes Yancey than this biography, and a few emailed genealogy charts, reveal. I don’t know what his dead father and his cruel step-father had to do with making him the man he became, with all its glory and its weakness. I suspect that this historian is reading a bit much into the life story at this point. But I do know that Yancey was looking for a Father, because every human being is. I can only hope he found Him.
