Robert Rhett

Robert Barnwell Rhett, Sr. ( born October 21, 1800, Beaufort, South Carolina, † September 14, 1876 in St. James Parish near New Orleans, Louisiana) was a politician of the United States and the Confederate States of America from South Carolina.

Career

Rhett's original name was Smith, but when he stepped into the public spotlight in 1838, he joined them and took the name of his prominent ancestors of colonial Colonel William Rhett to. He studied law and was elected in 1826 in the House of Representatives of South Carolina.

His great-uncle was a deputy Robert Barnwell and father of MPs Robert Woodward Barnwell. A cousin of the Barnwells was the wife of Alexander Garden, a soldier from the Revolutionary War.

After serving in the House of Representatives of South Carolina Rhett was 1832 Attorney General of his State, 1837-1849 deputy in the Congress of the United States, and from 1850 to 1852 U.S. Senator. He was also highly in his views, a Southerner, he shared in 1844 with John C. Calhoun the lead in Bluffton movement for an independent state action in the Fees Regulations of 1842. Moreover, he was a in of the leaders of the Fire - Easters the Nashville Convention of 1850, which failed in their efforts for the secession of the whole South.

Secessionist

As South Carolina 1852 available (English ordinance ) adopted that only his law declared on the spin-off, Rhett resigned his seat in the U.S. Senate. He continued and expressed his fiery secessionist views in the Charleston Mercury, which was revised by his son, Robert Barnwell Rhett, Jr., a member of the later secession convention of South Carolina in 1860. In the Montgomery Convention, which was originally convened to order to make a provisional government for the split-off states, he was one of the most active delegates, as well as chairman of the committee that the Constitution of the Confederate States of America was reported.

Although he was considered for the office of President of the Confederate States for worthy, but was only a seat in the House of Commons ( lower house engl. ) reach of the Provisional Konföderiertenkongresses. He also did not receive a higher office in the Confederate government, so that he returned to South Carolina, where he criticized the policy of the Confederate President Jefferson Davis of Mississippi sharply.

After the end of the American Civil War, he settled in Louisiana. It was rumored that he was a delegate to the Democratic National Convention of 1868, but in truth it was his son, Robert Rhett, Jr., who took over his father's editorial responsibility.

Honors

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