CHAPTER XI

TOOMBS

Calhoun solidified the south in resolve to leave the union if the abolition party got control of the federal government. Just before his death there commenced such serious contemplation of an aggressive defence of slavery that we may call it an actual aggressive. Although by reason of his unquestioned primacy he could have assumed the conduct of this aggressive, he did not. Toombs was its real, though not always apparent, leader, from its actual commencement until it resulted in secession. Thus he played an independent part of his own, and deserves a chapter to himself. While Calhoun was the forerunner, Toombs was both apostle and the Moses of secession. As nearly all of my readers have never thought of any one else than Calhoun in this capacity, the statement of Toombs's prominence just made will probably startle them. But I know if they will follow me through the record they will all at last agree with me. In view of Calhoun's conspicuousness in the southern agitation from 1835 until his death in 1850, this misapprehension of my readers is very natural. Contemporaries following Sulla, named Pompey, not Julius Cæsar, The Great. Similarly Toombs, as an actor in the intersectional arena, is as yet dwarfed from comparison with the really great but not greater Calhoun.

It is much more necessary than I saw such a method was with Calhoun to deal first with what we may call the non-sectional parts of Toombs's career. And I wish to assure my readers at the outset that these parts are exceptionally important and valuable not only to every American, but to all those anywhere who prize shining examples of private virtue and exalted teachers of good and honest government.

I was nearly ten years old when Toombs's congressional career commenced in December, 1845. Living only eighteen miles from him I heard him often mentioned. It was the delight of many people to report his phrases and repartees. By reason of their wisdom or wit and fineness of expression, the whole of each one lodged in the dullest memory. I never knew another whose sayings circulated so widely and far without alteration. As they serve to introduce you to his rare originality, I will tell here a few of them that I heard admired and laughed at in my boyhood.

He had not then left off tobacco, but he chewed it incessantly, and a spray of the juice fell around him when he was speaking. Once while he was haranguing at the hustings, a drunken man beneath the edge of the platform on which he was standing, rudely told him in a loud voice not to let his pot boil over. Toombs, looking down, saw that his interrupter had flaming red hair: "Take your fire from under it, then," he answered.

In another stump speech he was earnestly denying that he had ever used certain words now charged against him. A stalwart, rough fellow--one of Choate's bulldogs with confused ideas--rose, and asserted he had heard him say them. When and where was asked. The man gave time and place, and added tauntingly, "What do you say to that?" Toombs rejoined, "Well, I must have told a d--d lie."

A rival candidate, really conspicuous and celebrated for his little ability, in a stump debate pledged the people that if they would send him to congress he would never leave his post during a session to attend the courts, as he unjustifiably charged Toombs with habitually doing. The latter disposed of this by merely saying, "You should consider which will hurt the district the more, his constant presence in, or my occasional absence from, the house."

In another discussion this same opponent charged him with having voted so and so. Replying, Toombs denied it. The other interrupted him, and sustained his charge by producing the _Globe_; and he expressively exclaimed, "What do you think of that vote?" Toombs answered without any hesitation--nothing ever confused him--"I think it a d--d bad vote. There are more than a hundred votes of mine reported in that big book. He has evidently studied them all, and this is the only bad one he can find. Send _him_ to congress in my place, the record will be exactly inverted; it will be as hard to find a good one in his votes as it is now to find a bad one in mine."

In the congressional session of 1849-50 Toombs had made his Hamilcar speech, to be told of fully after a while. In this he avowed his preference of disunion to exclusion of the south from the Territories so positively and strongly that the ultra southern rights men hailed him as their champion. But soon afterwards, with the great majority of the people of the State, he took his stand upon the compromise of 1850 and the Georgia Platform quoted above. This was really on his part a recession from the extreme ground he had taken in the speech. In 1851, a coalition of the whigs and democrats of Georgia nominated Howell Cobb, a democrat, for governor, and Toombs, then a whig, canvassed for him with great zeal. He had an appointment to speak, in Oglethorpe county, at Lexington, the county seat. There were quite a number of ardent southern rights men in the county, who held that the admission of California, really in southern latitude, with its anti-slavery constitution, called for far more decided action on the part of the south than was counselled in the Compromise and Georgia Platform. Hating Toombs, whom they regarded as a renegade, they plotted to humiliate him when he came to Lexington. As he never shrank from discussion they easily got his consent to divide time with--as the phrase goes--a canvasser for McDonald, their candidate for governor. Toombs was to consume a stated time in opening the stump debate; then the other was to be allowed a stated time; after which Toombs had a reply of twenty minutes--these were the terms. In opening, Toombs, as was natural, stressed the compromise measures and set forth the advantages of preserving the union; and he fiercely inveighed against the men who could not be satisfied with the Georgia Platform, embraced as it had been by a great majority of all parties, denouncing them as disunionists. The other disputant took the Hamilcar speech of Toombs, made just the year before, as his text. Deliberately, accurately, systematically he unfolded the doctrine of that speech, and he did the same for the speech just made, and contrasting the two, he put them into glaring inconsistency. Southern rights stock rose and union stock sunk rapidly as the comparison went on. In his peroration the speaker commented upon Toombs's tergiversation with such effective severity it elicited wild applause from the men of his side. They had pushed themselves to the front. Toombs rose to reply. In their riotous rejoicing over the great hit of their speaker, they forgot the proprieties of the occasion; forgot that it was Toombs's meeting, as was said in common parlance; and they rapped on the floor with canes, and even clubs provided for the nonce, howled, and made all kinds of noises to drown his voice. Unabashed he looked upon them, smiling that grandest and blandest of smiles. As the foremost of these roysterers told me long afterwards, his self-possession excited their curiosity. They wanted to hear if he could say anything to get out of the trap in which they had so cleverly caught him; and they became still. "It seems to me," he commenced, "that men like you meditating a great revolution ought first to learn good manners." At this condign rebuke of behavior which, according to stump usage, was as uncivil and impolite as if it had been shown Toombs in his own house by guests accepting his hospitality, spontaneous cheers from the union men, who were in very large majority, appeared to raise the roof. In his highest and readiest style--for mob opposition always lifted him at once into that--he reminded his hearers that their whole duty was to decide whether they would approve the compromise and the Georgia Platform or not; and that to discuss whether what he had spoken last year before these measures were even thought of, was right or wrong, was to substitute for a transcendently important public question a little personal one of no concern to them whatever. "If there is anything in my Hamilcar speech that cannot be reconciled with the measures which I have supported here to-day with reasons which my opponent confesses by his silence he cannot answer, I repudiate it. If the gentleman takes up my abandoned errors, let him defend them."

How the union men cheered as he broke out of the trap, and caught the setters in it!

I heard much of this day, still famous in all the locality, when six years afterwards I settled in Lexington, to begin law practice. Over and over again the Union men told how their spirits fell, fell, fell as the southern rights speaker kept on, until it looked black and dark around; and then how the sun broke out in full splendor at the first sentence of Toombs's reply, and the brightness mounted steadily to the end. That sentence last quoted is a proverb in that region yet. If in a dispute with anybody there you try to put him down by quoting his former contradictory utterances, he tells you that if you take up his abandoned errors you must defend them.

The interest excited in me by what is told in the foregoing was the beginning of my study of Toombs, which never at any time entirely ceased, and which will doubtless continue as long as I live. He has impressed me far more than any other man whom I ever knew. Soon after his return, in 1867, from his exile I resolved I would try to write his Life under the title, "Robert Toombs, as a Lawyer, Statesman, and Talker;" and for ten or fifteen years I had been systematically collecting the data. These had accumulated under each head--especially reports of his epigrams and winged phrases--far more considerably than was my expectation at first. I added to them very largely by copious notes of the record of his congressional life which I read attentively in course, commencing immediately after his death. In a few years I had finished my task. As yet I have not found the times favorable for publication, and the MS. may perplex my literary executor. Of course my object in the too egotistic narrative just made is to inform you that I have bestowed very great labor and study upon the subject, hoping thus to draw your attention.

Robert Toombs was born July 2, 1810, on his father's plantation in Wilkes county, Georgia. He went to school at Washington, the county seat; then to the State university; which having left, he finished his collegiate course at Union. Next he spent a year at the law school of Virginia university. He never was a bookworm. His habitual quotations during the last fifteen years of his life--when I was much with him--betrayed a smattering of the Roman authors commonly read at school, a much greater knowledge of the Latin quoted by Blackstone and that of the current law maxims, and considerable familiarity with "Paradise Lost," "Macbeth," and the Falstaff parts of "King Henry IV.," and "Merry Wives," Don Quixote, Burns, and the bible. But this man, whose diction and phrases were the worship of the street and the despair of the cultured, had no deep acquaintance with any literature. Erskine got the staple of his English from a long and fond study of Shakspeare and Milton; but Toombs must have drawn his only from the fountains whence Tom, Dick, Harry, and Mariah get theirs, and then purified and refined it by a secret process that nobody else knew of,--not even himself, as I believe. If he had only corrected after utterance as assiduously as Erskine did, of the two his diction would be much the finer.

The year before he came of age he was admitted to the bar by legislative act. In the same year he married his true mate and settled at Washington. For four years the famous William H. Crawford was the judge of the circuit. Toombs was born into the Crawford faction, and the judge who, as there was no supreme court then, was law autocrat of his circuit, gave him favor from the first. The courts were full of lucrative business. The old dockets show that in five years Toombs was getting his full share in his own county and the adjoining ones. The diligent attention that he gave every detail of preparation of his cases, had, in a year or two after his call, made him first choice of every eminent lawyer for junior. One of these was Cone, a native of Connecticut, who had received a good education both literary and professional, before he came south. Toombs, who had known the great American lawyers of his time, always said after his death in 1859 that Cone was the best of all. Lumpkin used to tell that during a visit to England he haunted the courts, but he never found a single counsel who spoke to a law point as luminously and convincingly as Cone. Another one of these was Lumpkin. He is, I believe, the most eloquent man that Georgia ever produced. He had some tincture of letters; but he was without Choate's pre-eminent self-culture and daily drafts of inspiration from the immortal fountains. A. H. Stephens admired Choate greatly. He heard the latter's reply to Buchanan. Often, at Liberty Hall--as Stephens called his residence--he would repeat with gusto the passage in which Choate roasts Buchanan for his inculcation of hate to England. Stephens contended that if all that education and art had done for each--Choate and Lumpkin--could have been removed, a comparison would, as he believed, show Lumpkin to be the stronger advocate by nature.

These three--Cone, Lumpkin, and Toombs--were often on the same side. But whether Toombs had them as associates or as adversaries, they were always in these early years of his at the bar, in his eye. With the unremitted attentiveness of what we may call his subconscious observation, and a receptivity always active and greedy, he seems to have soon appropriated all of Cone's law and all of Lumpkin's advocacy--that is, he had, as he did with the speech and language heard by him every day, transmuted them into the rare and precious staple peculiar to his own _sui generis_ self.

In his first forensic arguments his rapid utterance was as indistinct as if he had mush in his mouth, old men have told me. But after a year or two of practice he developed both power and attractiveness. In due time when Cone or Lumpkin were with him, he would be pushed forward, young as he was, into some important place in court conduct. I myself heard Lumpkin tell that the greatest forensic eloquence he had ever heard was a rebuke by Toombs--then some twenty-seven years old--of the zeal with which the public urged on the prosecution of one of their clients on trial for murder. The junior--the evidence closed--was making the first speech for the defence. As he went on in a strong argument, the positiveness with which he denied all merit to the case for the State, angered the spectators outside of the bar, and a palpable demonstration of dissent came from some of them, which the presiding judge did not check as he ought to have done. Toombs strode at once to the edge of the bar, only a railing some four feet high separating him from these angry men, and chastised them as they merited. His invective culminated in denouncing them as bloodhounds eager to slake their accursed thirst in innocent blood. These misguided ones were brought back to proper behavior, and with them admiration of the fearless and eloquent advocate displaced their hostility, and carried upon an invisible wave an influence in favor of the accused over the entire community, and even into the jury box. And the narrator, who was one of Toombs's greatest admirers, told with fond recollection how the popular billows were laid by the speech of his junior, and how he himself took heart and found the way to an acquittal which he feared he had lost.

This affair is illustrative of Toombs in two respects. In the first place it shows his extempore faculty and presence of mind. I have seen him so often in sudden emergencies do exactly the thing that subsequent reflection pronounced the best, that I believe had he been in Napoleon's place when the Red Sea tide suddenly spread around, he would have escaped in the same way, or in a better one. I do not believe that this can be said of any one else of the past or present. In the second place it is one of the many proofs extant that he could always vanquish the mob.

He divined what offered cases are unmaintainable more quickly, and declined them more resolutely than any one I ever knew. So free was he from illusion that he could not contend against plain infeasibility. It was impossible for clients, witnesses, or juniors to blind him to the actual chances. For ten years or more, commencing with 1867, I observed him in many _nisi prius_ trials, and I noted how unfrequently, as compared with others, he had either got wrong as to his own side or misanticipated the other. But now and then it would develop that the merits were decidedly against him. He would at once, according to circumstances, propose a compromise, frankly surrender, or, if it appeared very weak, toss the case away as if it was something unclean. When he had thus failed, his air of unconcern and majesty reminded of how the lion is said to stalk back to his place of hiding when the prey has eluded his spring.

Stephens came to the bar some four years after Toombs did, and settled in an adjoining county. I need merely allude to their long and beautiful friendship, full details of which are to be found in the biographies of the former. I merely emphasize the importance of Stephens's help to Toombs's development in his early politics. The former got to congress two years before he did. Toombs evidently relied greatly upon the sagacity with which the other divined how a new question would take with the masses. On his return from a brief and bloodless service in the Creek war as captain of a company of volunteers, Toombs commenced a State legislative career, which Mr. Stovall has creditably told.[97] I can stop only to say it was honorable, and contributed greatly to his political education.

When Toombs was at the Virginia law school, he heard some of Randolph's stump speeches; and for a few years afterwards he often vouched passages from them as authority. Stephens would tell this; and then with affectionate mischief tell further that his friend, before he had finished in the Georgia legislature, had ceased entirely to support his contentions with anything else than his own reasons.

Before he got to Congress, he had made reputation at the hustings. In 1840 he crossed the Savannah, and meeting the veteran McDuffie in stump debate is reported to have come off with the high opinion of all hearers, including his adversary.

Let us now take an inventory of him as he is about to enter congress. He is the best lawyer in the State, except Cone, and fully his equal; while as a speaker he did not have Lumpkin's marvellous suasion of common men, yet with them he was almost the next, and he was far greater than Lumpkin in quelling the mob, convincing the honest judge that his law was right, and convincing also the better men of the jury and citizens present that the principles of justice involved in the issue of facts were to be applied as he claimed; he had acquired enough of property to be considered rich in that day, although he had always lived liberally; his legislative and political career had convinced the people that he was incomparably the best and ablest man of the district for their representative. It is to be especially emphasized that he had practical talent of the highest order. His plantation was a model of good management. His investments were always prudent and lucrative. Practical men of extraordinary ability were bred by the conditions about him. In the Raytown district of Taliaferro county--about ten miles distant--my maternal grandfather, Joshua Morgan, lived on his plantation of more than a thousand acres, which he managed without an overseer. His father had been killed by the tories. His education had been so scant that he found reading the simplest English difficult, and to sign his name was the only writing I ever knew him to do. But his plantation management was the admiration of all his neighbors. His land was sandy and thin, but he made it yield more than ample support for his numerous family, his rapidly increasing force of negroes, his blooded horses, his unusually large number of hogs, cows, sheep, and goats; and a fair quantity of cotton besides. The slaves loved sweet potatoes more than any other food, and they were a favorite food in the Big House. His supplies never failed, there being some unopened "banks or hills" when the new potatoes came. His hogs were his special attention. His fine horses required so much corn, and so much more of it was needed for bread, that he could not feed it lavishly to his hogs. So he developed a succession of peach orchards, with which he commenced their fattening in the summer. These were four in all; the first ripened in July and the last the fourth week in October. The fruit in any particular one ripened at the same time, and he cared not how many different varieties there were. Whenever he tasted peaches away from home that he liked, if they were not from grafted trees, he would carry away the seed, and there was a particular drawer labelled with the date, into which they were put. Whenever he had need to plant a tree whose fruit was desired at that particular time of the year, the seed was planted where he wanted the tree. Many of his neighbors planted the seeds in a nursery, whence after a year or two they transplanted the young trees; but my grandfather, as he told me, saved a year by his method. He was always replanting in place of injured trees and those he had found to be inferior. The "fattening" hogs--that is, those to be next killed for meat--were turned into the July orchard just as soon as the peaches commenced to fall; and they went on through the rest of the series. There was running water in each orchard. After peach-time, these hogs ran upon the peas which were now ripe in the corn fields, the corn having been gathered. And for some two weeks before they were to be killed they were penned and given all the corn they would eat. What pride the good planter of that time took in keeping independent of the Tennessee hog drover, who was the main resource of his rural neighbors who did not save their own meat, as the phrase then was! Observing that his hogs were not safe against roving negroes when away from the house on Sunday, on that day they were kept up. One of my earliest recollections is that of Old Lige driving them to the spring branch twice every Sunday. For a long while he tried in various ways to protect his sheep against worrying dogs. At last he had them "got up" every night in some enclosure he wished to enrich near enough to the Big House for his own dogs to be aware of any invasion by strangers, and he never had a sheep worried afterwards. The foregoing is enough to suggest the whole of the system. The management of its different trains and many separate departments upon an up-to-date railroad was not superior in punctuality and due discharge of every duty. He lived well, entertained hospitably, and kept out of debt. Mr. Thomas E. Watson has lately given a graphic description of good plantation conduct,[98] which ought to be considered by all those who now believe that every planter was necessarily slipshod and slovenly in his vocation. It was a good training school for the born business man. Let me give an example to show how extensive planting bred experts in affairs. The Southern Mutual fire insurance company--its principal office being at Athens, some forty miles distant from Toombs's home--at the beginning of the brothers' war had for some years almost driven all other insurers out of its territory. It is still such a favorite therein that it is hardly exaggeration to state that its competitors must content themselves with its leavings. The plan of this great company is a novel form of co-operative insurance--indeed, I may say, it is unique. It was invented, developed, and most skilfully worked forward into a success which is one of the wonders of the insurance world. The men who did this were never any of them reputed to be of exceptional talents. They had merely grown up in the best rural business circles of the old south. A similar fact explains the mastery of money, banking, and related matters which Calhoun acquired in a locality of South Carolina, not forty miles distant from Washington, Georgia. It also explains why Toombs, bred in the interior and far away from large cities, had perfectly acquired the commercial law; had complete knowledge of the principles and practice of banking, and those of all corporate business, and also a familiarity with the fluctuating values of current securities equalling that of experts.

He was also, as I know, almost a lightning calculator, and fully indoctrinated in the science of accounts.

Surely this man, now thirty-five, is ripe for congress.

January 12, 1846, the United States house of representatives having under consideration a resolution of notice to Great Britain to abrogate the convention between her and the United States, of August 6, 1827, relative to the region commonly called Oregon, Toombs made his congressional debut.

It is an able speech for a new member--especially for one grappling with a question peculiar to a part of the country so far away from his own. Convinced that the adoption of the resolution could give no just cause of offence, he will not yield anything to those who merely cry up the blessings of peace. The warlike note is deep and earnest. Then comes the most original part of the speech. Showing great familiarity with the facts and the applicable international law, he does his utmost to prove that the title of each country is bad; and it seems to me that he succeeds. He urges that the time has arrived when American settlers are ready to pour into Oregon. "Terminate this convention and our settlements will give us good title."

Of course I believe that Calhoun's policy, as I have explained it above, was the true one, and that we should have continued the convention as to joint occupancy as long as possible. Toombs was bred among the followers of Crawford, who regarded Calhoun as his rival for the presidency, and I doubt if he ever did neutralize this early influence enough to enable himself to do full justice to Calhoun. And as a further palliation, his combative temperament must be remembered, and also that he had inherited from a gallant Revolutionary father an extreme readiness to fight England.

July 1, 1846, he discusses a proposal to reduce import duties in a long speech, carefully premeditated as is evident. He shows great familiarity with Adam Smith, economical principles, fluctuations in prices of leading commodities, and the consequences of affecting legislation. Its main interest here is the detailed argument in its concluding passages against the expediency of free trade, of which he afterwards became an advocate.

January 8, 1847, a speech on the proposed increase of the army is his next considerable effort. He denounces the Mexican war as unjust in its origin, but he reprehends its feeble conduct. He is very strong, from the southern standpoint, in what he says of the Wilmot proviso. Here is a passage characteristic of Toombs later on:

"The gentleman from New York [Grover] asked how the south could complain of the proposed proviso accompanying the admission of new territory, when the arrangement was so very fair and put the north and south on a footing of perfect equality. The north could go there without slaves, and so could the south. Well, I will try it the other way. Suppose the territory to be open to all; then southerners could go and carry slaves with them, and so could northerners. Would not this be just as equal? [Much laughter.] I will not answer for the strength of the argument, but it is as good as what we of the south get. [Laughter.]"

Winthrop, who followed, commences by deprecating the necessity that exposed him to the disadvantage of contrast with a speech which had attracted so much attention and admiration. And Stephens praised the effort greatly.[99]

December 21, 1847, Toombs offered a resolution in the house, that neither the honor nor interest of the republic demand the dismemberment of Mexico, nor the annexation of any of her territory as an indispensable condition to the restoration of peace.

His Taylor speech of July 1, 1848, evinces warm whig partisanship.

In his first years at the bar he loitered a while as a speaker. And one who studies his record in congress discerns that it is some two years before he commences to feel easy as a member of the house. The speeches which I have mentioned above, with the solitary exception of that of January 8, 1847, are labored communication of cram rather than the peculiar language of the speaker who, when I commenced to observe him a few years later on the stump, had become a marvel both of strong thinking and fit expression extempore.

I detect a gleam of the coming man, when August 4, 1848, and February 20, 1849, he exhibits his inveterate hostility to maintaining and increasing an army in time of peace. Next he begins his lifelong war upon high salaries, and the extravagance and waste of congressional printing. Note what he says February 29, 1848, advocating reduction of salaries of patent examiners; and his denouncing the evil of congress's publishing agricultural works, in two speeches, the one made March 20, 1848, the other January 18, 1849. These are short, but strong, and their forcible style gives sure promise that the true Toombs is at hand. He suddenly found his real self in December, 1849, when his lead towards secession commenced, as I shall detail later. After that date he soon becomes one of the strongest and most influential members; and especially one whose speech greatly attracts audience. I must support this assertion by the record. With my limited space I must be very brief. My trouble is that the many examples which I could use are all so good it is hard to decide what must be left out. While I shall always give dates, so that my statements can be checked by reference to the _Globe_, I need not confine myself strictly to the order of time.

His mastery of parliamentary law is a good subject to begin with.

January 18, 1850, it was moved that the sergeant-at-arms act as doorkeeper until one be elected. The chair decided that the question affected the organization of the house and was therefore one of privilege. On an appeal there was much discussion. Here is the part played by Toombs:

"_Mr. Toombs._ I apprehend that the speaker has committed error. This is not an office known to the law; it was created only by the rules of the house. The office of speaker and clerk alone are known to the law.... It is not every officer whom by their rules they may choose to appoint, that is necessary to the organization of the house. Suppose that by a rule they provided for the appointment of a bootblack; could a resolution for his appointment be made a question of privilege to arrest and override all other business?

Mr. Bayley inquired of the gentleman from Georgia if a rule was not as clearly obligatory upon the house as a law.

_Mr. Toombs._ It is; but its execution is not a question of organization."

A reversal was the result.

The following took place February 20, 1851, and is a good illustration of his forcible way of putting things:

"_Mr. Toombs._ (Interrupting Mr. Stanton) called the gentleman to order. The committee ought not to tolerate this custom of speaking to matters not immediately before it.

_The Chairman._ Does the gentleman from Georgia raise the point of order that the remarks of the gentleman from Tennessee are not in order because they have no reference to the bill before the committee.

_Mr. Toombs._ My point is that debate upon steamboats is not in order upon a pension bill.

_The Chairman._ I decide the gentleman is in order. It has been invariable practice to permit such debate in committee of the whole on the state of the union.

_Mr. Toombs._ The practice may have been permitted; but it was wrong."

On appeal by Toombs the chairman was reversed.

Though Toombs--a whig--had stubbornly opposed the candidacy of Howell Cobb--a democrat--he soon became to the latter, after his election as speaker, the leading parliamentary authority. Often there would be confused clamor and wild disorder, nearly every member proposing something. At a loss himself, Cobb would look at Toombs and see him intently conning his Jefferson. Soon he would rise, and being recognized by the speaker at once, would forthwith suggest the right thing.

The foregoing was often told by Cobb, as his friends have informed me.

February 24, 1853, he shows up the bad consequences of overpaid offices, the duties of which the holders can hire others to do for half of its compensation; and March 2, the same year, he thus speaks of a cognate evil:

"The gentleman seems to go upon the principle that as many clerks with high salaries should be attached to one office as to any other--the principle of equalizing the patronage of these different offices without regard to the species of labor required by each."

I append here a collection of short extracts from Toombs's speeches in the lower house, which illustrate his power to tickle the ear by striking presentation, epigram, and novel expression:

_Debate always Harmless._ "A little more experience will show the gentleman that he is mistaken, and that the absence of discussion here does not accelerate adjournment. The most harmless time which is spent by the house, he will find, is that spent in discussion." February 17, 1852.

_Nominees of National Conventions._ "What are the fruits of your national conventions?... They have brought you a Van Buren, a Harrison, a Polk, and a General Taylor.... I mean no disparagement to any one of these. All of them but one [Van Buren] have paid the last debt of nature, and the one who survives, unfortunately for himself, has survived his reputation." July 3, 1852.

_Two Classes of Economists._ "There is a class of economists who will favor any measure by which they can cut off wrong or extravagant expenditures. But there is another class who are always preaching economy--who are always ready to apply the rule of economy and get economical in every case except that before the house." February 17, 1852.

_Principles of Banking._ "If we intend to regulate the business of banking in this District, the bill does too little; if we do not, it does too much, As it does not seek to control generally the business of banking, but permits the issue of notes greater than five dollars, it violates the principles of unrestrained banking, but does not go to the extent of regulation by law. I think the public are more likely to suffer, and to a greater extent, from bank issues above five dollars than those under that amount." January 11, 1853.

_The Dahlonega Mint, in his own State._ "I believe the mints at Dahlonega, Charlotte, and New York are each unnecessary.... I do not desire to continue abuses in Georgia any more than in New York. I am willing to pull up all abuses by the root.... I think the existing mint is adequate to the wants of the country." February 17, 1853.

_Personal Explanations in Debate of Appropriations._ "I believe that with all the abuses we have had in the discussion of appropriation bills, we have never had personal explanations." February 21, 1850.

Toombs is now about to leave the lower for the upper house. He has grown in all directions in the qualifications and powers marking the good representative. There is no other man in the house, from either section, whose ability is superior or whose promise greater. Three days before his career in the United States senate begins, he made the following appeal, protesting against hasty and reckless expenditure, which seems to me a model of matter and extemporaneous expression:

"In this bill the fortification bill is introduced; and provision made for private wagon ways for Oregon and California. There is in it an appropriation of $100,000 to pay somebody for the discovery of ether. You have a provision for a Pacific railroad; and you have job upon job to plunder the government in the military bill;--and the representatives of the people are called upon to vote on all these grave questions under five minutes' speeches. You do gross injustice to yourselves; you betray great interests of the people when you act upon such important measures in this manner. Let the house reject the amendments; let the senate devote its time to maturing bills, and send them to us to be acted upon deliberately; and then whichever way congress determines for itself, it will have a right so to do. But to act upon them in this way, is not only to abdicate our powers, but to abdicate our duties. Put your hands upon these amendments and strike them out." March 1, 1853.

Manifestly all that he had learned of the pending bill was from having heard it read. The instant apprehension and accurate statement, and the exhaustion of the subject in far shorter time than his small allowance--these recall what I often heard Stephens say, "No one else has ever made such perfect and telling impromptus as Toombs."

His famous Hamilcar outburst did not consume all of his five minutes.

Toombs was United States senator from March 4, 1853, until the spring of 1861. His peculiarities must be suggested. Although he was perhaps the ablest lawyer in the senate, loved the profession with all the ardor of first love, and had great cases with large fees offered him every day, he resolutely subordinated law practice to his congressional duties. He did much practice, but it was all in the vacations of congress. He did not seek office. There is not to be found, so far as I know, a trace of any aspiration of his during his congressional career for other than the place of senator. If on a special committee, he worked energetically; but he avoided the standing committees. He says:

"It is only occasionally that I go to the committee meetings to make a quorum to act on important business. I do not attend them one day more than I am obliged to, for I am quite sure it is not my duty unless charged with a certain subject. This whole machinery is a means of transferring the legislation of the country from those to whose hands the constitution commits it to irresponsible juntas.... I say general standing committees, without any exception, are great nuisances, and they ought to be abolished.... They are not proper bodies to exercise legislative powers. They are not known in the country from which we derive our institutions. The English have no standing committees. They raise special committees on special objects."[100] February 18, 1859.

"The general business of the country," as he expressed it, January 10, 1859, that was his concern. Each subject requiring the action of the senate, whether important or trivial, received his industrious attention, as his course and language on the floor always show; and he evidently feels it his duty to furnish the body on all questions the utmost instruction and aid that he can possibly give. He had no ambition to be the author of novel measures--he was strenuous only to bestow upon every subject of current legislation the proper consideration. His premeditated efforts are but few. He never shows any distrust of his offhand faculty. He takes part in nearly all the discussions, often being up several times the same day on the same subject. He is seldom lengthy, hardly ever away from the point needing explanation, and never, never dull. Generally he comes with correcting fact or enlightening principle, and it is seldom that his matter and words are not both impressive. I found it well in writing the Life mentioned above to present the most of his senatorial course by assorting his utterances under their proper heads, with the briefest possible comment, rather than to narrate chronologically in the common way of biographers. In his speeches it is only now and then that he is steadily progressive as he was in the Iowa contested election case. His advocacy or opposition is generally founded upon a principle, and from this principle--usually central and self-evident--the different passages radiate in aphorisms, self-supporting paragraphs, and detached arguments,--this common radiation being their only connection. Accordingly if you know what is the particular subject that is under discussion, a part taken at random anywhere from any of his extempore speeches is nearly always complete in itself and fully intelligible. Therefore we can have him to give in his own words, in a comparatively small space, an approximately full collection of the rich and varied teachings of his senatorial career, although our chrestomathy would appear to one putting it beside the unmutilated report of the _Globe_ as a beggarly and jejune abstract. I know of no other public man with whom this can be as satisfactorily done. Of course the compilation made by me, as just told, cannot be given here. He challenged every bad and defended every good measure. He is on record both by speech, nearly always hitting the nail on the head, and by vote, nearly always right, upon every one. What he did in the house deserves close attention; but his actings and doings in the senate, to which he belonged from March 4, 1853, until shortly after his famous speech of January 7, 1861, when he left to go with his seceding State, are such that I challenge all students of history to produce a single example of such earnest grappling with and able handling of so many matters of importance in so short a time--not eight full years--by any member of ancient or modern parliaments.

Having now, I hope, aroused my readers to some faint conception of Toombs's greatness as a senator in non-sectional matters, I must bring that greatness into fuller view, if I can. I therefore add to the foregoing catalogue the rough character sketch next following.

We begin with his devotion to his duties. One examining the _Globe_ will hardly find any other member who calls as often for the reading of the reports accompanying bills to pay private claims, and such other small matters; and he will always observe that his immediate comment shows that he has fully taken in what has been read. He said once, "I have been reproached half a dozen times within the last two days as being rather fractious because I desired to understand the business on which I was called to vote." August 3, 1854.

The alert and intelligent vigilance which he gives every measure proposed seems superior to that of all his colleagues. They acknowledge this by the many inquiries they make of him for information as to pending bills. Thus June 20, 1860, Green asks him where is the amendment? when was it adopted? has the house disagreed to it? has it been before a committee? etc., and every query is answered without hesitation. This but examples how the other senators very often made a convenience of Toombs's accurate note of what was passing.

He shows a like readiness upon facts of history--especially English and American--on clauses of the constitution, or statutes, or treaties, provisions of the law of nations, principles of political economy, institutions, commercial systems, customs of particular nations, and all such topics as may illustrate the pending question, however suddenly it may have risen. And so he discusses every matter, grave or trivial, with perfect grasp of the proposition submitted, and with fullness of knowledge and understanding. He avoids strained and over-ingenious reasoning. Plain and safe men never disparaged his arguments by calling them hair-splitting or metaphysical. But though he took his stand upon the palpable meaning of undisputed facts and the most plainly applicable doctrines of reason and justice, he displayed an unparalleled power of formulating in intelligible and striking words the key principles of common affairs. This gift always found instant appreciation with practical men, and they admired it as genius. Though he has his eye ever open to principle, he is the very opposite of the mere doctrinaire. He is practical, and always pushing business on, except when the bills depleting the treasury--to use his favorite name for them--are up and likely to pass because of the coalition between the opposition and the fishy democrats which he is always exposing with exhaustless variety of language. Only then he prefers to do nothing.

As to his own measures, he changes words, accepts amendments--in short makes every concession which will gain him the substance of his desire.

We will here say a little of him as a speaker. He thus describes himself:

"I speak rapidly; but the idea which I intend to utter generally comes out, sometimes perhaps with too much plainness of speech. What I say, I mean; and the whole of what I mean generally gets out." July 30, 1856.

He shows in the following a contemptuous opinion of written speeches:

"As a general rule a speech that is fit to be spoken is not fit to be printed, and one fit to be printed is not fit to be spoken.... The senator from New York [Seward] comes in with his already in type; other gentlemen around me, on both sides of the house, from all sections of the union, who think proper to write essays, bring them here and read them to the senate.... I am not objecting to their character, but I would rather read them in my room. Of course nobody pays any attention to them here." April 22, 1858.

He did not habitually correct the report of his speeches, as he says May 13, 1858; at the same time entering a general disclaimer as to all that he does not report himself. This disclaimer must not be pressed too far. If you are familiar with the man you need not fear being led astray by the inaccuracies, the number of which he greatly exaggerates. His stamp is so unmistakable that you always know what is his. Extempore discussion was his forte. Therefore nearly all the quotations I use in the Life which I have written I intentionally take from his shorter, impromptu, and evidently unrevised speeches. These unlabored effusions, it matters not how dry or small the particular theme may be, have generally the double merit of showing the true solution and refreshing with figure, apt illustration, or wit.[101]

In important debate he is conspicuously the strongest man in the senate. We will run over the leading ones:

July 28, 1854, a bill containing appropriations for places in nearly every one of the States came up. Through the long debate he evinces uncommon power and readiness. He is too tart in rejoinder, and too much gives the rein to invective.

In the two days' debate of the mail steamer appropriation--February 27, 28, 1855,--he distinguishes himself.

February 6, 1856, Toombs, with Hunter and Toucey, supports a resolution proposing the origination of appropriation bills in the Senate. Sumner and Seward take the other side. The argument of Seward is very elaborate, notwithstanding his declaration at the outset that he is wholly unprepared. It is demolished by Toombs in his most crushing style. Note, too, how accurate the latter is as to the proceedings of the constitutional convention, how familiar he is with the abuses of wild appropriations which he is trying to correct, and how graphically he depicts them.

July 28, 1856, the Black Lake harbor appropriation is the subject. All that he says is noticeable for power; especially his replies to interruptions by Pugh, Wade, and Cass. Though the bill was passed over his head, as you read the report you feel that his was the actual triumph.

July 30, 1856, another debate of river and harbor improvements. It is begun by Hunter. Benjamin takes the lead in support of the bill; Toombs joins discussion with the latter, who by his coolness and adroitness for a while foils his adversary; but soon Toombs gets his feet firmly on the constitution, and still more firmly upon the injustice of extorting the support of commerce from other interests, and he is resistless. The disputants often put questions to one another. Toombs's promptness to answer every adverse position is a taking exhibition. It is to be noted that many sparkling sentences are struck out of him by the incessant hammering of the others. At the close, he seems either to have wearied or silenced his opponents. One cannot but feel that this is no arena for a man who can make only written speeches.

August 4, 1856, the subject being the improvement of the Mississippi, Toombs urges that the valley is prosperous, and it should improve its river. The examination he gives the question is profoundly searching. Towards the conclusion of the debate, Cass reads the counter doctrine of Calhoun, in the report of latter to the Memphis convention, his reason being, as he says: "I will confess frankly my object in reading it. The senator from Georgia has treated the question with great ability; and I want the same vehicle that carries his remarks to the public to carry also the opinions and views of Mr. Calhoun, whose authority is vastly better than mine."

Through the whole of this debate the faculty and force exhibited by Toombs are wonderful even for him.

Consider all that he says of the proper management of the post-office, February 28, 1859.

January 30, 1860, there was an animated debate, which occupied the morning and was renewed in the evening. The vigorous blows which he deals the coalition passing the appropriations--ever the theme of his severest reprehension--and the review he makes of each item in the appropriation bill, taken all in all, are high feats.

His conduct, January 6, 1857, in the Iowa contested election manifests such rare courage against party and section for the right that it must be told at some length. We think it belongs with the more important matters just noticed rather than to its chronological place.

Harlan, a republican, had been sitting for some time as a senator from Iowa. There was no contestant. The adverse report was grounded upon a protest of the Iowa senate, stating that that body did not participate in the so-called joint convention which had affected to elect Harlan. It appeared that both houses of the Iowa legislature had met in joint convention, had balloted without result, and the convention had adjourned to meet at 10 A. M. the next day. On this day the senate--the majority of its members manifestly being democrats and opposed to the sense of the joint majority--met in their own chamber and adjourned before the hour appointed for the assembling of the convention. But a majority of the senate were present in the convention when it made the election--several of them having been brought in by the sergeant-at-arms, and who protested that they did not act in the proceedings. In the United States senate the democrats were in a majority, but Toombs, who was always above mere party considerations, supported the cause of Harlan, saying afterwards, "I maintained his title, black Republican though he was, because I believed it stood on right." February 15, 1858. The decision was against Harlan; but I do not think that an unbiased man who regards mere technical rules as no more than the instruments of justice, will fail to concur with Toombs. His treatment of the subject is extremely good and entertaining. Every material fact is given prominence; every important distinction taken, as, for instance, that the convention, as it could do no legislative act and did not require the concurrence of the executive, was not really the legislature, but only the persons constituting the legislature acting in a body of their own as electors; and further, his position that after the convention had organized it could proceed with the election as long as it had a quorum. Having completed a most lawyer-like and concatenated argument, which is a wonderful exhibition of concise and exhaustive extemporaneous reasoning, he rises to the higher plane of statesmanship and justice, in which he shows in a vivid light what a monstrous evil it would be to approve the factious withdrawal of the majority of the Iowa senate from the convention. Note especially the many questions asked him by different members, and the readiness and satisfactoriness of his answers.[102] It is all in all one of the best samples of Toombs's dispassionate debate to which I can refer. Very probably the democrats would have done right by Harlan had it not been for Bayard's argument, the special effectiveness of which was the use he made of the case of his own election, in 1839, to the United States senate by the Delaware legislature. As he stated it, it was this: There being a majority of one in the Delaware house of representatives in favor of the opposite party, a majority of that house refused to go into the joint balloting. Bayard was elected, and it was maintained by his party, the democrats, that a majority of the members of the two houses had authority to proceed; but he hesitated, and at last consulted Silas Wright, of New York. The latter gave a decided opinion that such an election was invalid. Whereupon Bayard succumbed, and his State was without a senator for two years. I cannot help feeling that if Wright had considered the subject and bottomed it on true principle, as Toombs afterwards did, Bayard would have settled down in the opposite conclusion, and he and Toombs in concert would have forced their fellow-democrats of the United States senate into doing justice to an opponent.

Many have been superior to Toombs in making perfect orations, but it is hard to find in any deliberative body a match for him as a debater. Charles Fox was a giant; but he did not have the strength, the grip, the never remitted activity, the infinite thrust, the parry, illustration, wit, epigram, and invincible appeal to conscience, feeling, and reason--in short, the complete supply and command of all resources that marked Toombs as foremost in the pancratium of parliamentary discussion. It ought to add inexpressible brightness to his fame that he sought for no triumphs except those of justice and good policy. He was far more than a mere logician in debate. His brilliant snatches, his sudden uprisings, his thawing humor, and flashing wit--all these did their part as effectively in winning favor and working suasion as his array of facts and his ratiocination did theirs in convincing. He was too prone to use harsh language towards the other side. There are many places in his speeches where I wish he had used soft instead of bitter words. That he could observe perfect parliamentary propriety there are proofs in the _Globe_. Especially would I refer to his behavior in the Harlan debate, spoken of a moment ago, and his discussion of the Indiana senatorial election, June 11, 1858. Note the last especially (belonging volume, 2943-2947) for his moderation, courtesy, and invitation of question while he is most ably supporting the central proposition he had before urged in the Iowa case.

Yet, in spite of his occasional vehemence and acrimonious language, he seems to have the respect and regard of even his most decided political opponents. Wade and he recognize each the great merit of the other. Once after applauding his honesty and frankness, Toombs says of him: "He and I can agree about everything on earth until we get to our sable population, I do believe." March 22, 1858.

Wade had already said this of Toombs: "I commend the bold and direct manner in which the senator from Georgia always attacks his opponents." February 28, 1857.

February 8, 1858, Fessenden said, "I am very happy to get that admission from the senator from Georgia. It is made with his customary frankness and clearness."

Hale also respects him. January 23, 1857, he says that Toombs ought to have been on the bench, complimenting his desire for justice and fairness as well as his legal ability.

The northern democrat Simmons loves to praise him, as is evidenced by what he says June 2, 1858, February 9, 1859, and June 23, 1860.

Such unsought and spontaneous commendations of the great southern partisan by northern men during the heat of sectional agitation are extraordinarily strong proofs of his high character as well as great genius.

Of course the southern members showed their appreciation. Especially note what Bayard says March 21, 1860, and what Butler says January 6, 1857. I could give many more such; but I shall only add here how, February 14, 1860, by reason of the importunate urgency of some of these, evidently regarding him as the special southern champion, he is pushed into making an able rejoinder to Hale, who had just concluded a reply to Toombs's speech on the Invasion of States.

Toombs's inflexible keeping to what he deemed the right course parallels the absolute fearlessness with which Julius Cæsar, when a young man, clung to the wife whom the all-powerful and bloody-minded Sulla commanded him to put away. The Sulla of America are the people in their unconscientious moments, and unpopularity the proscription threatened which disquiets almost all public men with torturing apprehension. And so there is in nearly every one some admixture of the trimmer. But Toombs never showed fear either of the people at large or of those of his own State and locality. He thus scourges juries assessing the value of land condemned for the government:

"It has come to such a pass that in getting places for the army, it seems to be considered better to be cheated by the owners of a site out of a few hundred thousand for $10,000 worth of property rather than trust a jury." June 12, 1860.

When he uttered the following he knew it was extremely unpalatable to his section:

"The southern States from their sparseness of population do not pay all their postal expenses. The whole mail service of the south ought to pay its whole expenses, and I am ready to put it on that ground.... I say the point to retrench is in the south." February 28, 1859.

The following distasteful lesson he read his own State:

"I know that some of the mail routes in my own neighborhood were taken away, and I never was consulted about them, and I never thought it was the duty or business of the postmaster-general to consult me. I have not been to his office during this winter in regard to a single one; and I have been very much complained of, even in my own county and town, on account of it.... I have a word to say about the _Isabel_. She touches at Savannah; and I have received memorials from people, letters from interested people, from the Savannah chamber of commerce, and others, saying, 'By all means keep up the _Isabel_; we want it.' It is a very popular thing; it is a good ship, and has done its duty well. What have I to do but follow my uniform line of policy, and give them the same rules as everybody else? Sixteen years' experience here--and I was here in 1847, when this steamship system commenced--have satisfied me that congressional contracts are always unwise, and are the fruitful sources of boundless legislative corruption. Therefore, I will never sustain one under any necessity whatever." May 28, 1860.

February 22, 1859, though Iverson, his companion from Georgia, was the other way, he advocated abolishing the mint at Dahlonega in that State, and the mint also in North Carolina.

The last instance we cite is his declaration, April 25, 1856, that he had always voted against a claim of the daughter of Governor Irvin of Georgia.

And to this proud independence he was without spot of corruption. This was never questioned but once. May 13, 1858, he was taunted for having supported the Galphin claim. When at last he sees that the charge is seriously urged, in a becoming glow he demands an explanation. A disclaimer of reflection upon his character being made, he gives a detailed account of the claim, his steady support of it, and a complete justification of George W. Crawford in the affair. At its close, Hammond of South Carolina, who was familiar with all the details, bestowed upon it his unqualified voucher. The lofty spirit and just indignation informing this statement of Toombs from beginning to end distinguish it as that of one who has kept out of dark places and walked so purely in the light that accusation is far more of a surprise than insult.[103]

He never showed any symptom of the presidential fever, which, to say nothing of its many other victims, enfeebled each one of the great trio,--Clay, Calhoun, and Webster. Fully content with his place in the senate, he did not look elsewhere. Taking popularity at its exact worth; candid and frank to the extreme; contented in the course dictated by his judgment and conscience though opposed by his people or party and his own private interest; in no bargains with men nor smirching connections with women, doing nothing in secret which, if published, would bring a blush; elevated above the amiable weaknesses of unwise benevolence, ever championing with all his powers the righteous cause of the weak and unpopular,--as exampled in his maintaining the claims of certain persons in Louisiana to the Houmas land against the formidable opposition of the two senators from that State, in his extraordinarily eloquent appeal for the naval officers retired without a hearing, in his heroic endeavor to have his party seat the republican Harlan; incorruptible and really consistent forever and always,--when he is scrutinized as a public man his character rises into a grandeur of unselfishness, firmness of high purpose, honesty, and power to show and do the right almost superhuman. It stands by itself awe-striking and imposing.

But let us particularize the special lesson of his senatorial career. We must begin by suggesting his peculiar bent. It is clear that he chose as his province commerce and industry, with the related themes of political economy, finance, the currency, taxation, the tariff, the principles of exchange and distribution, and so on.[104] He probably had the best business insight of all our prominent statesmen, Calhoun even not excepted. Though Hamilton and Webster--the former especially--evince titanic comprehension of financial theory, yet we see from their lives and poor money-saving success that commercial and business affairs were not to them both practice and theory as they were to Toombs. Of all his peers he was most at home in the ways and principles which dictate proper legislation as to trade and business. To judge by his words, uttered year in and year out, nobody else ever saw more clearly that there ought to be no tariff, improvement, job, or any other pets of government. The latter should not foster such a class, yearly increasing in number, as it always will, living idly and luxuriously upon the public income, that is, upon the labor and property of others. This class supplants the vigorous products of natural selection by pampered fatlings of bounty, always raising their demands for support, and ever more and more clamorously calling for the suppression of all self-supporting competition at home and abroad. With the moral hardihood of Shakspeare, who shrinks not from rudely shocking our feelings by making Henry V discard his old boon companion Falstaff, Toombs never wearied of proclaiming the unpopular truth that the government ought not to be the helper, guardian, patron, protector, guarantor, surety, almoner, of any of its citizens. Ponder these stout-hearted and golden words of his, although the evil represented therein is now established and magnified into dimensions far beyond what he could conceive when they were said--an evil, to suppress which let us hope all patriots will soon unite:

"Whenever the system shall be firmly established that the States are to enter into a miserable scramble for the most money for their local appropriations, and that senator is to be regarded the ablest representative of his State who can get for it the largest slice of the treasury, from that day public honor and property are gone, and all the States are disgraced and degraded." February 27, 1857.

He is always preaching against the heinous abuse of diverting government from impartially guarding the whole community and making it profit only a few. His text is never far-fetched. He finds it in the proposed legislation of the day, which it is his duty to consider in his place. He cares not that he makes no present effect. Just before Bell's bill for improving the Cumberland river was passed, he said of it and its companions: "These bills are passing _sub silentio_, and I suppose attempt to resist is wholly useless. I wish it understood that I do not assent to their passage. I am opposed to all of them." February 24, 1855.

He sees that the appropriations for harbors and rivers, lighthouses, private claims, pensions, etc., are almost as baneful as was the distribution of corn to the Roman populace, and yet the people everywhere are eager for the corrupting gifts. Against his party, against many of his section, he fights alone and single-handed, reminding of Horatius keeping the bridge against the Etruscan host. Though always outvoted, he behaves with spirit and dignity. Either he, or some one of the faithful few who act with him in the slim minority, always have the yeas and nays recorded. His grand purpose was to appeal to the American people upon an issue involving the article of his creed which he had held up with so much puissance and fidelity in days of evil report. These words contain the motto of the long contest which occupied all of his non-sectional career in the senate:

"I think every one of these bills should be considered. I do not wish to have them considered in such a manner as improperly to occupy the time of the senate. I desire to spread before the country reasonable information. That is the only purpose we can have now; because the combination is sufficient to carry everything that the committee report. But there is a day of reckoning to come; and I trust that those who support this system will be called to judgment."

"I desire the truth to go to the honest people all over the country. Let the taxpayers look at this matter; let the jobbers beware. 'To your tents, O Israel!'" July 29, 1856.

The sectional agitation, mounting higher and higher, as Toombs said often, blinded the people to this great subject. Secession came, and his State--to him the only sovereign--called the solitary combatant away from the ground that ought to be kept forever in loving memory for his long, desperate, thrice-valiant stand. And the world should also remember that the clauses of the constitution of the Confederate States, "prohibiting bounties, extra allowances, and internal improvements," came from him.[105]

The struggle that wins our deliverance from the monopolists now causing us to go hungry, cold, and unshod is yet to be. I cannot say when; but I know it will come soon, and that the people will conquer. As in that day Calhoun's monetary doctrine will be brought out of its obscurity to add new lustre to his fame, as I believe, so I believe also that the name of Robert Toombs will become an object of affectionate reverence to all his countrymen, and the weighty and eloquent sentences in which he sought to shield general industry from drones and rivals favored by government, and in which he advocated that the public burdens be reduced to the minimum, and then apportioned justly,--these stirring words will be quoted everywhere to receive at last their due audience and favor. And when no branch of our government either robs or gives to its citizens, Toombs's never-remitted, brave, unselfish, and gigantic endeavor to bring on this millennium ought to be put by Americans in their Sunday-school books. When we who fought the brothers' war completely forget and forgive, as we soon will, it will then be understood how much the sectional agitation impeded him, and that when he was caught away from the senate by the whirlwind of secession he was only fifty years old, and of such constitutional vigor that he had the guaranty of at least a quarter of a century more of undiminished activity. A fond imagination will inquire: Suppose the energy spent upon the Kansas discussion; the protection of slavery in the Territories; in the great speech of January 24, 1860, on the Invasion of States, and in that of January 7, 1861, justifying secession, his supreme effort, as most of his admirers claim, could have been saved for themes of Pan-American concern; and suppose him remaining in the senate, eschewing all other place, with increasing years loved the more by his people for his courageous fidelity to the right, age assuaging his vehemence and softening his invective, ripening his judgment and bringing him charity and wisdom to the full,--to what a height and glory he would have grown!

If there had been no slavery, I verily believe that the south would have been the leading and most prosperous part of the union, and that Toombs would have been the greatest American. Stephens knew Webster, Calhoun, and Clay. The longer he lived the more positive he became in believing that Toombs was superior in ability to each one of the three. I have heard him say often that he had never found anything to which he could compare the power of Toombs, discussing a great theme extempore, except Niagara.

Turning back from these unavailing conjectures, I must say a last word as to that part of Toombs's career in the senate which I have been discussing. Its exemplariness is not so much in single great achievements. It is his uniform attention to the current duties of his place. Whether the particular duty impending was important or trivial, whether it was popular or not, it received from him at the proper time whatever effort was needed for doing it rightly. His performance averages so high in merit that I cannot find a like. No plodder ever kept more closely to the safe and beaten path. But he did far more than plod. Almost every day for eight years he showed how genius can manifest itself fully and fitly and find its true activity in the common round of affairs; how it can better, exalt, ennoble, and beautify daily routine. I believe that if you will reflect over this, you will at last see that such are the greatest of men, and those that the world most needs.

* * * * *

I now take up Toombs's sectional career. The aggressive defence of slavery, looming in sight as Calhoun is within a few months of death, called for a leader who did not hug the union, and whose eyes were shut to everything but the justice and sanctity of the southern cause. Calhoun's last speech, that of March 4, 1850, was throughout an appeal to the north. In that same session, and some while before that speech was delivered, the true apostle of secession begins the proclamation of his mission, and some time after Calhoun's death and before the end of the session that portentous proclamation was complete. Robert Toombs--then in his fortieth year, and having as yet attained but little conspicuousness in congress--is the man I mean. His appeal was really to the south.

Just after the new congress assembled in December, 1849, a caucus of the whigs, to which party Toombs then belonged, having met to nominate a candidate for speaker of the house, he introduced a resolution to the effect that congress ought not to put any restriction upon any State institution in the Territories, nor abolish slavery in the District of Columbia, and, the resolution being rejected, Toombs, Stephens, and a small number of others retired from the caucus, and they did not act any further with their party in the organization of the house. Toombs and his following declared their purpose to disregard former connections and side with whatever party accorded the south the guaranty demanded by the resolution above mentioned. As these southern whigs, and also fourteen northern democrats and whigs, would not support for speaker either Cobb, the democratic nominee, or Winthrop, the whig, neither one of the two nominees could muster the majority necessary under the rules for election. Toombs's tactics were like those of the commons who would not vote the supplies until the king granted their wishes in other matters. At this time all the southern democrats and a majority of the southern whigs were opposed to his action. He was leading what appeared to be a hopeless advance. This is the beginning.

The next stage is when, after nine days of balloting for speaker without result, a resolution was introduced declaring Cobb, who had received a plurality, speaker, when Duer of New York opposing, said he was willing for the sake of organizing to elect a whig, democrat, or free-soiler--only that he could not support a disunionist. This manifest reflection upon the whigs who had held themselves aloof made Toombs break the silence he had theretofore kept.

He surprised everybody--perhaps himself--with an impromptu of powerful argument and burning eloquence. Note, in order to compare it with whatever utterance of Calhoun you please, these passages:

"Sir, I have as much attachment to the union of these States, under the constitution of our fathers, as any freeman ought to have. I am ready to concede and sacrifice for it whatever a just and honorable man ought to sacrifice. I will do no more. I have not heeded the aspersions of those who did not understand or desired to misrepresent my conduct or opinions. The time has come when I shall not only utter them, but make them the basis of my political action here. I do not, then, hesitate to avow before this house and the country, and in the presence of the living God, that if by your legislation you seek to drive us from the Territories of California and New Mexico, purchased by the blood and treasure of the whole people, and to abolish slavery in the District, thereby attempting to fix a national degradation upon half of the States of this confederacy, _I am for disunion_; and if my physical courage be equal to the maintenance of my convictions of right and duty, I will devote all I am and all I have on earth to its consummation."

"The Territories are the common property of the United States.... You are their common agents; it is your duty while they are in the territorial state to remove all impediments to their free enjoyment by both sections ... the slaveholder and the non-slaveholder. You have made the strongest declarations that you will not perform this trust; that you will appropriate to yourselves all the Territories.... Yet with these declarations on your lips, when southern men refuse to act with you in party caucuses in which you have a controlling majority--when we ask the simplest guaranty for the future--we are denounced out of doors as recusants and factionists, and indoors we are met with the cry of 'Union, union!'"

"Give me securities that the power of the organization which you seek will not be used to the injury of my constituents, then you have my co-operation; but not till then.... Refuse them, and, as far as I am concerned, 'let discord reign forever.'"

I must emphasize the effect of this speech made December 13, 1849,--nearly three months before that of Calhoun last mentioned,--and which goes great lengths beyond anything ever said by Calhoun. The _Globe_ mentions that the speaker was loudly applauded several times. Stephens, who was present, says "it received rounds of applause from the floors and the galleries," and we can well believe his assertion that it "produced a profound sensation in the house and in the country."[106] Another eye-witness, Hilliard of Alabama, a southern whig who was not in sympathy with his refusal to act with his party, relates with rapturous reminiscence the full-orbed splendor with which Toombs unexpectedly rose upon the house at this time. He tells: "A storm of applause greeted this speech. Mr. Toombs had left his desk and taken his stand in the main aisle and the southern members crowded about him."[107]

For completeness and height, and for sudden surprise, this speech exceeds all impromptus on record. To appreciate it you must recognize it as surely forerunning the future uprising of southerners as one man in what they deemed the holiest of causes. When you do this you can adapt to it Webster's words:

"True eloquence ... does not consist in speech.... It must exist in the man, in the subject, and in the occasion.... It comes ... like ... the bursting forth of volcanic fires, with spontaneous original, native force.... Then patriotism is eloquent, then self-devotion is eloquent.... This, this is eloquence; or rather it is something greater and higher than all eloquence--it is action, noble, sublime, godlike action."

The remaining facts of this remarkable session, which show that Toombs and not Calhoun was the apostle of secession, can now be told very briefly.

December 14, 1849, debate in the house was prohibited by resolution. On the 22d the whigs and democrats, in order to organize without agreeing to the demands of Toombs, joined in a resolution that the person receiving the largest vote on a certain ballot, if it should be a majority of a quorum, should be speaker. This was a palpable violation of the rules, but perhaps authorized by the great emergency. When the resolution was presented, Toombs, having resolved to prevent any organization until he had secured the guaranty he was standing for, in defiance of the prohibition of debate, made a demonstration of his surpassing endowment, as compared with all other orators, to outmob a hostile mob and scourge them into respectful audience. He adroitly led Staunton, introducing the resolution, to yield the floor. Why should he want the floor? The house had forbidden any discussion, and especially were nine-tenths of them deaf to him, deeming him the cause of their failure to organize. Announcing his purpose of discussion, he was called to order. Then a point of order was raised, which the clerk tried to put. The yeas and nays being demanded, the clerk began to call the roll. There was turmoil and din, but Toombs held on, denying the right of anybody to interrupt him, supporting his attack on the resolution by the constitution, the act of 1789, and the high authority of John Q. Adams, challenging the right of the clerk calling the names, and indignantly inquiring of the house how they could so permit an intruder and an interloper in nowise connected with them to interrupt their proceedings. At the last he forced the house into quiet, and completed the argument he had risen to make. You will not understand this marvellous achievement if you deem it, as many do, to have been prompted by the pride of ostentation and the rage of turbulence. Toombs was thinking only of securing the rights of his people. He was as earnest in this cause as ever Webster was for the union. And destiny, providence,--not himself nor other men,--was in this juncture revealing him to the south as her leader.

He now begins to be conscious of his coming leadership, and to feel that he is an authority and entitled to pronounce _ex cathedra_ upon the question of southern equality in the disposition of the Territories. Consequently, February 27, 1850, he made a long speech on the subject of the admission of California--one far more elaborate and finished than his average efforts. Especially to be noted is its ending with the famous words of Troup, "When the argument is exhausted, we will stand by our arms."

One other exploit of Toombs during this session must be told. It crowned him as the leader of the south.

Excitement had become intense. The extreme northern partisans for bringing in California were challenged to answer if they ever would vote to admit a slave State, and they declined to say that they would. Thereupon came from Toombs an outburst which is perhaps the finest example of his miraculous extempore declamation which has survived. He did not consume the five minutes to which he was limited. We append the conclusion, which is a little more than a third of the whole:

"We do not oppose California on account of the anti-slavery clause in her constitution. It was her right to exclude slavery, and I am not even prepared to say she acted unwisely in its exercise--that is her business; but I stand upon the principle that the south has the right to an equal participation in the Territories of the United States. I claim for her the right to enter them all with her property and securely to enjoy it. She will divide with you, if you wish it; but the right to enter all, or divide, I shall never surrender. In my judgment, this right, involving as it does political equality, is worth a thousand such unions as we have, even if they each were a thousand times more valuable than this. I speak not for others, but for myself. Deprive us of this right and appropriate this common property to yourselves, it is then your government, not mine. Then I am its enemy, and I will, if I can, bring my children and my constituents to the altar of liberty, and, like Hamilcar, swear them to eternal hostility to your foul domination. Give us our just rights, and we are ready, as ever heretofore, to stand by the union, every part of it, and its every interest. Refuse it, and for one I shall strike for independence."

Stephens, ever a most accurate and trustworthy witness, says that of all speeches which he heard during his congressional course, which covered the years 1843-1859, this produced the greatest sensation in the house.[108] Its effect outside--that is, in the southern public--was widespread, deep, and permanent. The comparison with which it closed had been, I believe, used before; but what of that? It exactly voiced the revolutionary sentiment which, as his deliverances on the 13th of December before showed, was beginning to come into consciousness in his section. It gave new impetus to the circulation of the other speeches. The young men of Georgia, as I know, and perhaps those of other southern States, read them over and over, reciting with passionate emphasis the most stirring passages. Especially did they delight to declaim the peroration of the Hamilcar speech, as that of June 15, 1850, has always been called in Georgia. To the stump orators, the last mentioned and that of December 13 became examples which they emulated only to find in their despairing admiration that parallel was impossible. And even the retiring, quiet, and elderly people who care for nothing but their daily business caught the fire. Not long ago, one who is now old, who was entering middle age in 1850, and who has been a stanch union man all his life, told me that he could not keep from reading these speeches over and over, and whenever he read one of them, it made him for the time a disunionist.

The part played by Toombs in the congressional session of 1849-50 seems to me one of the most wonderful exploits in all parliamentary annals. Since slavery is gone, and I can at last understand that it was all blessing to the African and all curse to us, my joy is inexpressible. But I must ever hold that its defence was one of the noblest efforts of the best of people. It will soon be understood by the whole world, and especially by our brothers of the north. They will acknowledge that neither Greek nor Scot nor Swiss were more manly or heroic than southerners, and the supporters of the Lost Cause will be crowned with such lustre and glory as magnify Hannibal succumbing to Rome, or Demosthenes unvailingly stirring up his country against Macedon. It will forever bring me ecstatic emotion to recall the many, many places where my fellows suffered or fell at my side without a murmur. Our victories at the opening of the brothers' war; then the drawn battles; then the defeats; and the round of sickening disasters at the end,--all these come thronging back, and I can never be other than proud of the prowess and endurance of our out-numbered armies, the energy and untamable spirit of our people, and the devotion of our blessed women to the weal of our soldiers. I often look back over the track of what I have called the aggressive defence of slavery. Though it was disguised under various names, such as the threat of disunion in certain contingencies by the Georgia Platform, just division of the public domain between the sections called for by all parties in the south, and finally the demand for full protection of slavery in the Territories; and though it was now and then seemingly at rest, that movement from the day it set in was in reality one directly towards secession, and it kept on as steadily as the Propontic. And as I look back at the further edge of this retrospect, marking the beginning, towering above all who took high place later,--even above Lee and Jackson,--ever comes more plainly into view the majestic figure of Robert Toombs, revealing his unsuspected power like a thunderclap from the sunny sky, December 13, 1849, when he extorts wild acclamations of applause from the majority of southern whigs and all of the southern democrats, both unanimous against his stand for a guaranty of congressional non-restriction; a few days later coercing an infuriated house trying to cry him down into wondering silence; and through the whole session upholding his cause with such might that the single champion proves an overmatch for the two parties striking hands against him, and he finally conquers preaudience and dictation upon the main southern theme.

I become more and more confident that future history will find the achievement of Toombs in the session of 1849-50 to be the exact point where the drift towards secession, which had before that been only latent and potential, becomes actual, and that here is the dawn of the Confederate States. The more I gaze at it the plainer and redder that dawn becomes.

We need not tell the rest of Toombs's sectional career with much detail. The all-important part of it historically is its beginning, and how he vaulted into the lead of the aggressive defence of the south, which I hope I have adequately told. From this time he showed in all that he did the quality which Mommsen glorifies in Julius Cæsar,--ready insight into the possible and impossible. Much discontent manifested itself in Georgia, and also in Mississippi, Alabama, and South Carolina, against the compromise measures, and especially against the admission of California with its constitution prohibiting slavery. A convention being called in Georgia to consider what should be done, there was thorough discussion. An overwhelming majority of delegates opposing any resistance was elected. To this result Toombs contributed more than any one else, and he really shaped the platform finally promulgated by the convention. This--the Georgia Platform of 1850, as we always called it--is a most important document to the historian; for it was the weighed and solemn declaration of some nine-tenths of the people of a pivotal southern State.

The southern-rights men, as a small but noisy part of the southern people then called themselves, had mistaken Toombs's last-mentioned speeches in congress as declarations for immediate disunion in case California was admitted under her free constitution; and when he supported the compromise measures, and also the Georgia Platform, they hotly denounced him as a turncoat. In their blind fury they could not see, as everybody else did, that vehement and fervent language, proper to awaken one's people from perilous apathy, may really be at the time understatement, and that, after the people have awakened, to seek in that same language the counsel of right action would be the extreme of immoderate folly. The more you meditate it the more plainly you discern that his leadership was masterly. From the first to the last his appeal was to the middle class of property owners--then so numerous that it was practically the whole of southern society. His object at the first, as he declared, was to make with this class the protection of their fundamental property interest the prominent question of national politics. And the end showed that he not only took, but that he kept, the right road. The Georgia Platform became the bible of every political following in the State. The next year, 1851, Toombs, still a whig, supported Howell Cobb, a democrat, for governor against McDonald, one of the most popular men of the State, the southern-rights candidate. Toombs's side, which won by a large majority, was called the union party. You will not be deceived by this if you keep in mind that Cobb was elected on the Georgia Platform, which had pledged the people of the State to resist, even to disunion, certain named encroachments upon slavery which providence had already ordered to be made.

In 1848 Yancey had aroused the people of Alabama into demanding that the United States protect slavery in the Territories, and he advocated secession in 1850. But in both these things he was premature. As compared with Toombs he uncompromisingly stood for every tittle of what he believed were the rights of the south. Toombs was a far more practical and able opportunist. His falling back upon the Georgia Platform from a much more advanced position, as I have just told, is an instance. I want to give others. He always declared in private conversation after the war that the democratic party was ripened and committed by Douglas and his co-workers to the repeal of the Missouri compromise while he was kept away from Washington by necessary attention to the interests of a widowed sister, otherwise, with his commanding position at the time, he would have crushed the scheme at its first proposal. When he returned to his public duties, to his amazement he found that every prominent member of the party was irrevocably for the repeal, and he could do nothing but embrace the inevitable. Then he would say substantially, "Had it not been for that administratorship which I could not avoid taking, we would all still be working our slaves in peace and comfort. That Missouri settlement was not right, but we had agreed to it; and with me a wrong settlement, when I agree to it, is just as binding as a righteous one."

When others are urging that the United States ought to protect slavery in the Territories, the record does not show that he is interested at first; although when at last the question is forced into debate he makes by far the strongest speech of all in championship of the Davis resolutions. I believe the current sucked him in.

Just after Lincoln's election--an event which influenced nearly all of even the most moderate elderly people of my acquaintance to declare at once for a southern confederacy--he proposed that Stephens join with him in an address to the people of Georgia, counselling that no immediate secessionist nor non-resistance man be elected to the convention;[109] and later he professed willingness to accept the Crittenden compromise.

The truth is that the ablest leaders, as we call them, do not lead--they are led. If they should become non-representative, their followers would go elsewhere. And those of these leaders whose influence is the most potent and permanent are the conservative and moderate. Toombs was never really ahead in the southern movement except when for a brief while in the session of 1849-50 he planted the standard far to the front and called his people forward. Afterwards there were always others who appeared to be fighting much in advance of him.

He companioned his people as they steadily developed their readiness for the dread action commanded by the Georgia Platform if the north should say not another inch of extension for slavery, and no extradition of fugitive slaves. Of course he matured in feeling for secession far beyond what appeared to be his ripeness in 1850. With all his conservatism, he was of that stuff out of which the most earnest and biased partisans are made. There are many who can admit nothing against those they love, and a still larger number who hug their country with a religious acceptance of everything in it as the best in the world. To him and his people, the south, under the mighty influence of the nationalization we have explained, had long been unconsciously displacing the union in their hearts. As one may learn from his Tremont Temple lecture, he saw and magnified all of the good in the society to which he belonged, and was as blind to the bad as a mother is to the faults of her children. He was often heard to run through an enumeration of southern superiorities. The courage and valor of the men, the virtue and loveliness of the women, the purity of the administration of justice and of the performance of all public duties; especially did he love to say that the honesty of his section was so well established that its few venal congressmen were like a woman of easy virtue in a good family, whom the reputation of the latter keeps from solicitation; and he would fall to praising the kingliness of cotton, the beneficence of slavery both to master and slave, the delicacy of our yam, the excelling flavor given by crab grass to beef and butter, the juice of the peach of Middle Georgia, sweeter than nectar, the incomparable melon, and cap the climax by asserting persimmon beer to be more acceptable to the palate of a connoisseur than any champagne. And in the days just preceding the great outbreak he had become more intense in his deep love for his State and section. The raid of John Brown into Virginia was, I think, the event which turned the scale with him, and made him feel that secession was near. Taking the occasion offered by Douglas's resolution, directing the judiciary committee to report a bill for the protection of each State against invasion by the authorities and inhabitants of other States, January 24, 1860, he delivered in the senate a speech which we must notice. It is common in Georgia to adopt the eulogy of Stephens and pronounce the speech of January 7, 1861, justifying secession, as Toombs's greatest effort. But I hesitate, unable to decide which is superior. He states his propositions thus:

"I charge, first, that this organization of the abolitionists has annulled and made of no effect a fundamental principle of the federal constitution in many States, and has endeavored and is endeavoring to accomplish the same result in all non-slaveholding States.

Secondly, I charge them with openly attempting to deprive the people of the slaveholding States of their equal enjoyment of, and equal rights in, the common Territories of the United States, as expounded by the supreme court, and of seeking to get the control of the federal government, with the intent to enable themselves to accomplish this result by the overthrow of the federal judiciary.

Thirdly, I charge that large numbers of persons belonging to this organization are daily committing offences against the people and property of the southern States which, by the law of nations, are good and sufficient causes of war even among independent States; and governors and legislatures of States, elected by them, have repeatedly committed similar acts."

The facts are reviewed closely and summed up with extraordinary force; the subject is treated as carefully under the law of nations as under the constitution; the quotation from Mill's "Moral Sentiments," and that from Thucydides, narrating the successful effort of Pericles in persuading the Athenians to resort to war rather than concede the right of the Megareans to receive their revolted slaves, are appositely used; the conviction that there is no longer safety for the south in the union speaks out in every line; and, with the exception of a few overheated passages, the entire speech is from the loftiest height of the statesman who bids his people arm for self-preservation. Just preceding the peroration there are paragraphs describing nervously and graphically the great resources of the south and her rapid development from feeble beginnings, one of which especially emphasizes the past and present of Virginia, adding at the last

"One blast upon her bugle horn Were worth a million men."

Next before this are words which invoke the northern democracy, but they seem out of place and foreign. He abruptly ends his appeal to the national classes who have his respect by saying, "The union of all these elements may yet secure to our country peace and safety. But if this cannot be done, peace and safety are incompatible with this union. Yet there is safety and a glorious future for the south. She knows that liberty in its last analysis is but the blood of the brave. She is able to pay the price and win the blessing. Is she ready?"

The last three sentences are the southern correlative of Webster's soaring when he magnified the union in his reply to Hayne. They were repeated over and over by everybody with a wild acceptance utterly without parallel in my knowledge, and after the election of Lincoln became the war cry of Georgia.

The position taken in the very conclusion of this truly Periclean speech is especially to be attended to here. It is that in the event of the success of the republican party in the next presidential election the people of his State must redeem their pledge made nine years before in the Georgia Platform.

From this time on he is _facile primus_ of southern champions. Note his long and elaborate reply to Doolittle, February 27, 1860; the discussion with Wade, March 7, 1860,--both relating to his speech last noticed above; and his very able argument, May 21, 1860, on the duty of protecting slavery in the Territories.

During the presidential campaign of 1860 the Douglas men and the Americans in Georgia charged the supporters of Breckinridge with plotting disunion that would bring on war. The charge was generally denied. The truth is, hardly anybody was aware that the awful crisis was near. Those who really expected secession believed with Howell Cobb and his brother Thomas, and with Thomas W. Thomas, that it would be peaceable, and perhaps they were about a tenth; the rest followed Stephens, believing that the American people on each side of Mason and Dixon's line would, when it was demanded, rise up in resistless co-operation and make safe both southern institutions and the union. Generally Stephens was far superior to Toombs in forecast and discernment of the sentiment of the masses. But while the former was too wise to consider even for one moment the probabilities of peaceable secession, he had a most un-American conviction that nothing good was ever gained by war, and he so loved peace and the union that he could not believe his people would secede. In his great sympathies Toombs was here far more clear-sighted. While he was the only speaker in this presidential campaign that was disrespectful to the union, often calling it in derision "the gullorious," and he gave no promise that withdrawal from the union would be peaceful, and so appeared to be to himself and alone, he was really the only one riding the waves of the undercurrent rising every day nearer the surface, and soon to sweep all of us onward upon its raging waters. The other speakers discussed the rival platforms, but the nearer election day approached the more potently he was preparing the people and himself for secession, though unawares to both. And when Lincoln was elected,--the man who had solemnly published his belief that this government could not endure permanently part slave and part free,--an occurrence which aroused the south throughout as the firing upon Fort Sumter afterwards aroused the north, Toombs drank in every accession to the emotion of his people, and towered more largely before them every day as the soul of the revolution now palpable in its coming to all. When secession was debated before the Georgia legislature, after enumerating what he declared to be the wrongs of the south, he said, "I ask you to give me the sword; for if you do not give it to me, as God lives, I will take it myself." In his immortal eulogy of the union the next night, Stephens quoted these words, and Toombs, who was present, answered in a voice of thunder, "I will." The house rocked to and fro with frenzied applause. Long afterwards Stephens told me that this outburst was the first revealing sign to him that his people were rushing to war. He lost his breath while gasping out the awful word, and there was terror in his looks as if the direful ghost had risen again. Some ardent secessionists professed themselves ready to drink all the blood that would be spilled, but Toombs, in his warlike nature, was already revelling in the joy of fighting for his people in this most sacred of causes. In one of his speeches he eulogized beforehand those who were to fall in defence of the south, giving them the requiem of sleeping forever where

"Honor guards with solemn round The silent bivouac of the dead."

I did not hear this, but a friend told me that the speaker's electric recitative made the hackneyed words forever new and fresh to him.

I must go faster. January 7, 1861, Toombs made in the United States senate his famous defence of secession. He presented in behalf of the south these demands expressed in writing:

1. Any person to be permitted to settle in any Territory, with any of his property, including slaves, and be protected in his property till such Territory is admitted as a State on an equality with the other States, with or without slavery as its people may determine.

2. Property in slaves to receive everywhere from the United States government the same protection which under the constitution it can give any other property, it being reserved to each State to deal with slavery within its limits as it pleases.

3. Extradition of persons committing crimes against slave property, as commanded by the constitution.

4. Extradition of fugitive slaves as commanded by the same constitution.

5. Congress to pass efficient laws punishing all persons aiding or abetting invasion of a State or insurrection therein, or committing any other act against the law of nations that tends to disturb the tranquillity of the people or government of the State.

It is plainly evident to the unprejudiced that he had the warrant of the constitution, the law of nations, of the practice and professions of the great body of even northern citizens ever since the adoption of the constitution, for every one of these demands. It is also as plainly evident that every one was vital to each southern community, founded as it was from basement to roof, upon property in slaves. The justice of his demands could not be denied without repudiating the constitution, the law of nations, and the solemn compacts of the fathers, their children and children's children. And providence had really made each one of these astounding repudiations, in her purpose to extirpate slavery as the only menace to the American union, even if the people so dear to Toombs must be all cast out of their prosperity and comfort into beggary. But when a man is fighting for his loved ones,--especially if he is fighting for his country,--and he has the valor of Toombs, his not-to-be-shaken conviction is that providence is on his side, and the nearer great disaster approaches, the stouter becomes his heart. Toombs's support of his demands, and his defence of what he knew the south would do if they were refused, are the most earnest words he ever spoke. Note these paragraphs:

"You cannot intimidate my constituents by talking to them about treason. They are ready to fight for the right with the rope around their necks."

"You not only want to break down our constitutional rights; you not only want to upturn our social system; your people not only steal our slaves and make them freemen to vote against us; but you seek to bring an inferior race into a condition of equality, socially and politically, with our own people. The question of slavery moves not the people of Georgia one half as much as the fact that you insult their rights as a community. You abolitionists are right when you say that there are thousands and ten thousands of men in Georgia, and all over the south, who do not own slaves. A very large portion of the people of Georgia own none of them. In the mountains there are comparatively few of them; but no part of our people are more loyal to their race and country than our brave mountain population; and every flash of the electric wires brings me cheering news from our mountain tops and our valleys that these sons of Georgia are excelled by none of their countrymen in loyalty to the rights, the honor, and the glory of the commonwealth. They say, and well say, this is our question; we want no negro equality, no negro citizenship; we want no mongrel race to degrade our own; and as one man they would meet you upon the border, with the sword in one hand and the torch in the other. We will tell you when we choose to abolish this thing; it must be done under our direction, and according to our will; our own, our native land shall determine this question, and not the abolitionists of the north. That is the spirit of our freemen."

Here is the grand conclusion:

"This man, Brown, and his accomplices, had sympathizers. Who were they? One who was, according to his public speeches, his defender and laudator, is governor of Massachusetts. Other officials of that State applauded Brown's heroism, magnified his courage, and no doubt lamented his ill success. Throughout the whole north, public meetings, immense gatherings, triumphal processions, the honors of the hero and conqueror, were awarded to this incendiary and assassin. They did not condemn the traitor; think you they abhorred the treason?

Yet ... when a distinguished senator from a non-slaveholding State proposed to punish such attempts at invasion and insurrection, Lincoln and his party say before the world, 'Here is a sedition law.' To carry out the constitution, to protect States from invasion and suppress insurrection therein, to comply with the laws of the United States is a 'sedition law,' and the chief of this party treats it with contempt; yet, under the very same clause of the constitution which warranted this bill, you derive your power to punish offences against the law of nations. Under this warrant you have tried and punished our citizens for meditating the invasion of foreign States; you have stopped illegal expeditions; you have denounced our citizens engaged therein as pirates and commended them to the bloody vengeance of a merciless enemy. Under this principle alone you protect our weaker neighbors of Cuba, Honduras, and Nicaragua. By this alone are we empowered and bound to prevent our people from conspiring together, giving aid, money, or arms to fit out expeditions against a foreign nation. Foreign nations get the benefit of this protection; but we are worse off in the union than if we were out of it. Out of it we should have the protection of the neutrality laws. Now you can come among us; raids may be made; you may put the incendiary torch to our dwellings, as you did last summer for hundreds of miles on the frontier of Texas; you may do what John Brown did, and when the miscreants escape to your States you will not punish them, you will not deliver them up. Therefore, we stand defenceless. We must cut loose from the accursed 'body of this death,' even to get the benefit of the law of nations.

You will not regard confederate obligations; you will not regard constitutional obligations; you will not regard your oaths. What, then, am I to do? Am I a freeman? Is my State a free State? We are freemen. We have rights; I have stated them. We have wrongs; I have recounted them. I have demonstrated that the party now coming into power has declared us outlaws, and is determined to exclude thousands of millions of our property from the common Territories, that it has declared us under the ban of the union, and out of the protection of the law of the United States everywhere. They have refused to protect us by the federal power from invasion and insurrection, and the constitution denies to us in the union the right either to raise fleets or armies for our defence. All these charges I have proved by the record; and I put them before the civilized world and demand the judgment of to-day, of to-morrow, of distant ages and of heaven itself, upon the justice of these causes. I am content, whatever may be the event, to peril all in so noble, so holy a cause. We have appealed time and time again for these constitutional rights. You have refused them. We appeal again. Restore us these rights as we had them, as your court adjudges them to be just as our people have said they are; redress these flagrant wrongs, seen of all men, and it will restore fraternity and peace and unity to all of us. Refuse them, and what, then? We shall ask you, 'Let us depart in peace.' Refuse that, and you present us war. We accept it; and inscribing upon our banners the glorious words 'Liberty and Equality,' we will trust to the blood of the brave and the God of battles for security and tranquillity."

No new nation about to be launched upon a sea of blood was ever heralded with words that were above these in appeal to the conscience and strongest affections of humanity. They are not outvied by those of Patrick Henry reported by Wirt, or those of John Adams reported by Webster, which the world will ever treasure as all gold. O that he had corrected them! He could not use the file, as we have already said.

Soon after making the speech he went away from the senate without taking leave. March 14, 1861, that body passed a resolution reciting that the seats before occupied by Brown, Davis, Mallory, Clay, Toombs, and Benjamin had become vacant, and directing that the secretary omit their names from the roll.

It was clear from his incomparable and faultless leadership of the active defence of the south, and his unique ability in affairs, that he was the choice of the directors of southern nationalization for president of the Confederate States; but these were overcome by stronger spirits, and Davis was made president. I have always believed that Toombs regarded this as the great miscarriage of his life. He could not continue his connection with the unbusinesslike conduct of the administration, and he retired from his secretaryship of state. Read what his superiors say of him at Sharpsburg, and what Dick Taylor with admiration tells of the help he afterwards got from him in a dark hour, as specimens of his gallantry and efficiency in the service. But his was not the nature of Epaminondas, to doff his natural supereminence and sweep the streets. Pegasus did not show more unsuited to the plow than he did to his inferior station in this stage of the great conflict which was his meat and drink.

The collapse came, flight from America, return at last to his stricken people, and disability for the rest of his life. Though he had something of even a great career at the bar, and in State politics, his longing for the old south and discontent with the new increased, slowly at first, then faster and faster. As infirmity from age came on apace, and his wife whom he had always made his good angel went to heaven, every day he became more lonely. He had survived _his_ country. Such love as his for that loves but once and always. The sacrifices that he had made for it became his treasures. He hugged his disability as his most precious jewel. Our gallant Gordon was not more proud of the scars on his face. Not long before his mind and memory were failing, speaking of the past, he said with the utmost firmness: "I regret nothing but the dead and the failure.

'Better to have struck and lost, Than never to have struck at all.'"

What a fall! Greater by far than Lucifer's. Lucifer was rightfully cast out because of heinous offence. But Toombs was cashiered because he had been the best, ablest, and most faithful servant of his people, whose dearest rights were in jeopardy. According to our merely human view it is the way of fiends to reward such supremacy in virtue and achievement with hell pains. If we cannot hope confidently, may not we survivors at least send up sincere prayers that the Lord will yet give this Job of the old south twice as much of fair fame as he had before.

If the defeated in the wars between England and Scotland and in the English civil wars; and if Cromwell and the regicides who set up a government that had to fall,--if all these have found respectful and fully appreciative mention at last, why shall not Calhoun and Toombs look to have the same after some years be passed? Trusting that such will come, I close this sketch by suggesting where Toombs will, I think, be niched in American history.

He is often spoken of as the southern correspondence to Wendell Phillips. There was nothing whatever in common between the two except extraordinary fluency of zealous speech. Early in life, Phillips, almost a mere boy, broke with Mrs. Grundy by advocating abolition before his neighbors were ripe for it. While Toombs cared nothing for Mrs. Grundy, he always so comported himself that he was her great authority. He was a very able lawyer, who had made a considerable fortune by practice, and a thorough statesman, when fate confided the southern lead to him; and while Phillips was reckless and rash, Toombs never, never essayed the impossible with his people. The more you balance him and Phillips against each other, the more unlike you will find them. Prof. William Garrott Brown is quite correct in pairing Phillips and Yancey.

There is a northern character to whom Toombs as a southern opposite corresponds in so many important particulars that it surprises me it has not been proclaimed. As Webster was the special apostle of the preservation of the union, Toombs was the same of secession. Their missions were parallel in that each one was the foremost champion of his nationality, Webster of the Pan-American, as we may call it; and Toombs of the southern. All through the brothers' war their phrases were on the lips and fired the hearts of each host, those of Webster impelling to fight for the union, those of Toombs for the southern confederacy. Each was probably the ablest lawyer of his day. Each was surely the ablest debater to be found. Each was of sublime courage in defying what he thought to be unjust commands of his constituents. And the last point which I think of is that each was of most complete and perfect physical development, and was the most majestic presence of his day. The busiest men in the streets of all sorts and ranks always found time to look upon either Webster or Toombs as he passed, and admire. I never saw Webster. But I believe that from his pictures, from long study of his best speeches, and from what I have greedily read and heard of him in a fond lifelong contemplation, I have an almost perfect figure of him before my mind's eye. Toombs from my boyhood I saw often. I will describe him as I observed him at the hustings just before the war. His face, almost as large as a shield, but yet not out of proportion, was in continual play from the sweetest smile of approval to the scowl of condemnation, darkening all around like a rising thundercloud. His flowing locks tossed to and fro over his massive brow like a lion's mane, as was universally said. In every attitude and gesture there was a spontaneous and lofty grace--not the grace of the dancing-master, but the ease and repose of native nobility. His face was not Greek, but in his total he looked the extreme of classic symmetry and the utmost of power of mind, will, and act. Princely, royal, kingly, even godlike, were the words spontaneously uttered with which men tried in vain to tell what they saw in him. He and just one other were the only men of my observation whose greatness, without their saying a word, spoke plainly even to strangers. That other man was Lee. I noted, when we were near Chambersburg in Pennsylvania those three or four days before the great battle, that, while the natives would curiously inquire the names of others of our generals as they rode by, every one instantaneously recognized Lee as soon as he came near. This publication of her chosen in their mere outside which destiny makes is not to be slighted nor underprized. And so remember that Webster looked the greatest of all men of the north, and Toombs the greatest of all men of the south.

To my mind I give each unsurpassable praise and glory when I call Webster the northern Toombs and Toombs the southern Webster.

* * * * *

I add a note by way of epilogue. I observe with pain that the obloquy against Toombs in the north seems to increase, while that against him in the rising generation of the south--who do not know him at all--is surely increasing. It is, however, a growing consolation to me to note that every charge, currently made against him north or south, is founded either upon complete mistake of fact or the grossest misunderstanding of his character and career. It is a duty of mine not only to him as my dead and revered friend, but a high duty to my country, to set him in his right place in the galaxy of America's best and greatest. I never knew a man of kinder or more benevolent heart; nor one who had more horror of fraud, unfairness, and trick; nor one whiter in all money transactions; nor one whose longing and zeal for the welfare of neighbors and country were greater; nor one who showed in his whole life more regard for the rights and also the innocent wishes of everybody. The model men of the church, such as Dr. Mell and Bishop George Pierce, loved him with a fond and cherishing love. The humblest and plainest men were attracted to him, and they gave him sincere adulation. Many of my contemporaries remember rough old Tom Alexander, the railroad contractor. I saw him one day in a lively talk with Toombs. As he passed my seat while leaving the car he whispered to me: "Bob Toombs! his brain is as big as a barrel and his heart is as big as a hogshead." From 1867 until 1881 I was often engaged in the same cases with Toombs, either as associate or opposing counsel, and I saw a great deal of him. It falls far short to say that he was the most entertaining man I ever knew. He was just as wise in judgment as he was original and striking in speech. I am sure that his superiority as a lawyer towered higher in the consultation room just before the trial than even in his able court conduct. And he led just as wisely and preeminently in the politics of that day, when it was vital to the civilization of the south to nullify the fifteenth amendment. Georgia would indeed be an ungrateful republic should she forget his part in the constitution of 1877. That was deliverance from the unspeakable disgrace of nine years--a constitution made by ignorant negroes, also criminals who, to use the words of Ben Hill, sprang at one bound from State prisons into the constitutional convention, and some native deserters of the white race--the constitution so made kept riveted around our necks by the bayonet. The good work would have remained undone for many years had not Toombs advanced $20,000 to keep the convention, which had exhausted its appropriation, in session long enough to finish our own constitution. The railroad commission established by that instrument is really his doing. This post-bellum political career of his, in which he restored his stricken State to her autonomy and self-respect, has not yet won its full appreciation.

If Toombs could but be delineated to the life in his extempore action, advice, and phrase he would soon attain a lofty station in world literature. It mattered not what he was talking about,--an affair of business or of other importance, communicating information, telling an experience, complimenting a girl, disporting himself in the maddest merriment, as he often did after some great accomplishment,--his language flashed all the while with a planet-like brilliancy, and the matter was of a piece. Those of us who hang over Martial, how we learn to admire his perpetual freshness and variety! But when we compare him with Catullus, his master, we note that while his epigram is always splendid, the language is commonplace beside that of the other.[110] Toombs was even more than Martial in exhaustless productivity and unhackneyed point, and his words always reflected, like those of Catullus, the hues of Paradise. Perhaps a reader exclaims, "As I do not know Martial and Catullus your comparison is nothing to me." Well, I tell him that I have read Shakspeare from lid to lid more times than I can say, and that I have long been close friends with every one of his characters, all the way from Lear, Othello, Hamlet, and Macbeth at the top, down to his immortal clowns at the bottom. Surely with this experience it can be said of me, "The man has seen some majesty." I have often tried, and that with the help of a few intimates almost as deeply read in Shakspeare as myself, to find in the dainty plays an equal to Toombs throwing away everywhere around him with infinite prodigality gems of unpremeditated wisdom and phrase. Samuel Barnett, Linton Stephens, Henry Andrews and my cousin, his wife, Samuel Lumpkin, and S. H. Hardeman, all of whom knew him well, were among these. The end of every effort would be our agreement that Shakspeare himself could hardly have made an adequately faithful representation of Toombs.

The mental torture of the last three or four years of his life I must touch upon again. The most active anti-slavery partisan and most scarred soldier of the union will compassionate if he but contemplate. I met him only now and then. As I read his feelings--one eye quenched by cataract and the other failing fast; his contemporaries of the bar and political arena dead; the wife whom he loved better than he did himself sinking under a disease gradually destroying her mind; ever harrowed with the thought that his country was no more, and that he was a foreigner and exile in the spot which he had always called home,--though I was full of increasing joy over the benefit of emancipation to my people and gladness at the promise of reunited America, my tranquillity would take flight whenever he came into my mind. He was that spectacle of a good man in a hopeless struggle against fate that moves enemies to pity. To me his last state was more tragic and pathetic than that of Oedipus.

Of course his powers were declining. I know that he would never have drank too much if there had been no sectional agitation, secession, war, nor reconstruction. His appetite was never that insane thirst, as I have heard him call it, which impels one into delirium tremens. He always disappointed his adversaries at the bar calculating that drink would disable him at an important part of the conduct. Others as well as myself can testify to this. Near the end he deliberately chose to drain full cups of purpose to sweeten bitter memories. With moderation he had more assurance of longevity than any other of his generation; and he would, I verily believe, have been green and flourishing in his hundredth year. He lost his rare faculty of managing money. It was a shock of surprise to me when the fire in August, 1883, disclosed that he had let the insurance of his interest in the Kimball house run out shortly before. It was a pitiable sight to see him in his growing blindness and wasting frame armed by his negro servant along the streets of Atlanta in his last visits to the place. During all this time he was dying by inches.

But the sun going down behind heavy clouds would now and then send forth rays of the old glory. It was in May, 1883, during the session of the superior court of Wilkes, where I had some of my old business to wind up, that I was last in his house. He had made invitations to dinner without keeping account. At the hour his sitting-room was densely packed. A few of us were late. When we arrived many were compounding their drinks. He hospitably suggested to us new-comers that there was still some standing room around the sideboard. In a little while the throng was treading the well-known way to the dining-hall, which we overflowed so suddenly that his niece, whom Mrs. Toombs, then keeping her room, had charged with seeing the table laid, was astounded to find she could not seat all of the bidden guests. Just as her flurry was beginning to make us uncomfortable our host entered. In spite of his infirmity and purblindness he took in the situation with his wonted quickness. He said in a tone of tender remonstrance to his niece, "O, I do not object to having more friends than room; it is usually the other way in this world." And with despatch and order he had the surplus given seats at side tables. My eyes moistened. I had an unhappy presentiment that this was my last observation of the only man I ever knew whose fine acts and words never waited when occasion called. I was aroused by the whisper of a neighbor, "Can any one else in the world do such a beautiful thing on the spur of the moment?" The admiring looks that followed inspired him, and his talk seemed to have more than its old lustre and gleam.

In his final illness, when paralysis was slowly creeping up his frame, and he had lost the sense of place and time, he would now and then start from his stupor and send across the State a bolt from the bow which no other could bend. Somebody spoke of a late meeting of "prohibition fanatics." "Do you know what is a fanatic?" he asked unexpectedly. "No," was replied. "He is one of strong feelings and weak points," Toombs explained. And overhearing another say that an unusually prolonged session of the State legislature had not yet come to an end, he exclaimed with urgency, "Send for Cromwell!"

He died December 15, 1885, in his seventy-sixth year.

If I have told the truth in this chapter,--and God knows I have tried my utmost to tell it,--ought not my brothers and sisters of each section to lay aside their angry prejudices and bestow at last upon the only and peerless Toombs the love and admiration which are the due reward of his virtues, his towering example, his wonder-striking achievements, and his incomparable genius? May that power which incessantly makes for righteousness, and which always in the end has charity to conquer hate, soon bring to us who really knew him our dearest wish!