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fire-eaters

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fire-eaters, in U.S. history, term applied by Northerners to proslavery extremists in the South in the two decades before the Civil War. Edmund Ruffin Ruffin, Edmund (rŭf`ĭn), 1794–1865, American agriculturist, one of the Southern fire-eaters , b. Prince George co., Va.
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, Robert B. Rhett Rhett, Robert Barnwell, 1800–1876, American politician, b. Beaufort, S.C. His family changed its name from Smith to Rhett (after a colonial ancestor) in 1837. A lawyer, he was a state legislator, state attorney general (1832), U.S.
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, and William L. Yancey Yancey, William Lowndes, 1814–63, American leader of secession , b. Warren co., Ga. Admitted (1834) to the bar in Greenville, S.C., he soon moved to Alabama.
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 were the most notable of the group. As early as 1850, at a convention held in Nashville, Tenn., the "fire-eaters" urged secession upon the South, but the Compromise of 1850 and more moderate counsel combined to postpone that event for another 10 years. Although the "fire-eaters" were in large measure responsible for the movement to organize a separate Southern government, they filled minor offices under the Confederacy.


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Kory-Kory was in ecstasies, and commenced a vehement harangue, which, so far as I understood it, implied that the result exactly agreed with his expectations, and which, moreover, was intended to convince me that it would be a perfectly useless undertaking, even for an army of fire-eaters, to offer battle to the irresistible heroes of our valley.
He calls all his fire-eaters about him, all those into whom he had more particularly put the devil, and talks to them in this way:
 
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