A fire-eater remembers

by Robert Barnwell Rhett

"A Fire-Eater Remembers affords a look at the secession crisis and the formation of the Confederacy as seen through the eyes of the man some called the Father of Secession. Never before published, Robert Barnwell Rhett's personal account of the years 1859 through 1865 is the fullest memoir to have survived from any member of South Carolina's Secession Convention and the Confederate Provisional Congress. Like Rhett himself, the writings are opinionated, contentious, arrogant, and unforgiving. They reveal much of Rhett's inside view of the effort to separate from the Union, and they depict his participation in the founding of the Confederacy.". "Presented as Rhett composed it, the volume includes the southerner's thoughts on the nature of free government, his advocacy of free trade, and his gloomy forecast for the future of the Union after war and Reconstruction. Although no portion of this memoir has been published before, it served as a model for such famous Confederates as P. G. T. Be