page_title: William Lowndes Yancey
section_title: Alabama platform and address to the people of Alabama
hierarchical_section_title: William Lowndes Yancey / Alabama platform and address to the people of Alabama
caption_attribution_description: English: Lewis Cass ( October 9, 1782 &#8211; June 17, 1866) was an American military officer and politician. He was the nominee of the Democratic Party for President of the United States in 1848.
context_page_description: William Lowndes Yancey was a journalist, politician, orator, diplomat and an American leader of the Southern secession movement. A member of the group known as the Fire-Eaters, Yancey was one of the most-effective agitators for secession and rhetorical defenders of slavery. An early critic of John C. Calhoun at the time of the Nullification Crisis of 1832-33, Yancey began to identify with Calhoun and the struggle against the forces of the anti-slavery movement by the late 1830s. In 1849, Yancey was a firm supporter of Calhoun's "Southern Address" and an adamant opponent of the Compromise of 1850.
  Throughout the 1850s, Yancey demonstrated an ability to hold large audiences under his spell for hours at a time and was sometimes referred to as the "Orator of Seccession". At the 1860 Democratic National Convention, he was instrumental in splitting the party into Northern and Southern factions as a leading opponent of Stephen A. Douglas and the concept of popular sovereignty. He used the phrase "squatter sovereignty" in a speech he gave at the convention to describe popular sovereignty.
context_section_description: Within a few months of his resignation, Yancey moved to Montgomery, where he purchased a 20-acre (81,000 m²) dairy farm while establishing a law partnership with John A. Elmore. No longer a planter, Yancey still remained a slaveholder, owning 11 slaves in 1850, 14 by 1852, and 24 between 1858 and 1860. While he had suggested with his resignation that his active role in politics might be over, "perhaps forever", Yancey found this to be impossible.
  Yancey recognized the significance of the Wilmot Proviso to the South and in 1847, as the first talk of slaveholder Zachary Taylor as a presidential candidate surfaced, Yancey saw him as a possibility for bringing together a Southern political movement that would cross party lines. Yancey made it clear that his support for Taylor was conditional upon Taylor denouncing the Wilmot Proviso. However, Taylor announced that he would seek the Whig nomination, and in December 1847 Lewis Cass of Michigan, the leading Democratic candidate, endorsed the policy of popular sovereignty.
  With no available candidate sufficiently opposed to the Proviso, Yancey in 1848 secured the adoption by the state Democratic convention of the "Alabama Platform," which was endorsed by the legislatures of Alabama and Georgia and by Democratic state conventions in Florida and Virginia. The platform endorsed these proposals:
  The Federal government could not restrict slavery in the territories.
  Territories could not prohibit slavery until the point where they were meeting in convention to draft a state constitution in order to petition Congress for statehood.
  Alabama delegates to the Democratic convention were to oppose any candidate supporting either the Wilmot Proviso or popular sovereignty (which allowed territories to exclude slavery at any point).
  The federal government would have to overrule Mexican anti-slavery laws specifically in the Mexican Cession and actively protect slavery.
  When the national convention was held in Baltimore, Cass was nominated on the fourth ballot. Yancey's proposal that the convention adopt the main points of the Alabama Platform was rejected by a 216–36 vote. Yancey and one other Alabama delegate left the convention in protest, and Yancey's efforts to stir up a third party movement in the state failed.
  The opening salvo in a new level of sectional conflict occurred on December 13, 1848, when Whig John G. Palfrey of Massachusetts introduced a bill to abolish slavery in the District of Columbia. Throughout the South in 1849, "the rhetoric of resistance to the North escalated and spread". Calhoun delivered his famous "Southern Address", but only 48 out of 121 Congressmen signed off on it. Yancey persuaded a June 1849 state Democratic Party meeting to endorse Calhoun's address and was instrumental in calling for the Nashville Convention scheduled for June 1850.
  Yancey was opposed to both the Compromise of 1850 and the disappointing results of the Nashville Convention. The latter, rather than making a strong stand for secession as Yancey had hoped, simply advocated extending the Missouri Compromise Line to the Pacific Coast. Yancey helped create Southern Rights Associations (a concept that originated in South Carolina) in Alabama to pursue a secessionist agenda. A convention held in February 1851 of these Alabama associations produced Yancey's radical "Address to the People of Alabama". The address began in this way:
  The legacy of the old party organization had been to lead their members to avoid any decisive action on the great slavery question, and to wink and acquiesce in aggressions on the South rather than endanger party success by opposition to them.
  The address hit all of the main points that would ultimately resurface in the secession during the winter of 1860–1861, especially the treatment of Southerners:
  ...as inferiors in the Union—as degraded by your contact with slaves, and as unworthy of an association with the Northern man in the great work of extending the institution of slavery over the vast plains of the West.
  Despite the efforts of Yancey, the popularity of the Compr
caption: A portrait of Lewis Cass. The nomination of Cass for the 1848 Democratic Presidential nomination on a platform of popular sovereignty led Yancey to walk out of the convention.
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