The faithful guardians of the American union had “Uncle Tom’s Cabin” written of purpose to prevent the execution of the fugitive slave law. They hypnotized the root-and-branch abolitionists and Mrs. Stowe into believing that to abet in any way the restoration of a flying slave was an unpardonable crime; and thatthe obligation of conscience to refrain from committing such a crime imperatively commanded disregard of all counter provisions of the constitution and the law of the land. One cannot at all understand the mighty abolition movement if he stop with the professed motives of Phillips, Whittier, Garrison, Mrs. Stowe, and the rest. They believed in their hearts, and declared, its purpose was to wipe out the great national disgrace of slavery, to lift the slave out of an abyss of unspeakable outrage and injustice, and to better his condition. As we have shown you, they were, in their very extreme of conscientiousness, as wide from the facts and right as wide can be. They were not doing their own wills, as they thought they were. They but did the will of the fates. The latter ruthlessly—so it seems to us now—sacrificed both the prosperity and comfort of the southern people for several generations, and the very existence, it may be, of nearly all the negroes in America, besides also making a laughing-stock of the abolitionists—all to the end to kill that nationalization which threatened the integrity of the American union.
I believe that I can now take my reader on with me in what I have to say of Mrs. Stowe’s book. Let him bear in mind that the object of the fates was to have in it not a representation true to fact, but such an untrue and probable one as would unite the people of the north in moral and conscientious resolve against any and every attempt to restore a fugitive slave. What the fates wanted was an author who appeared to have extensive and accurate acquaintance with slavery, and who, while believing it most conscientiously to be the extreme of evil to the black, was endowed with the power to make the north see withhereyes. They found their author in Mrs. Stowe, whom they had educated and trained from infancy.
In view of the mighty influence which “Uncle Tom’s Cabin” exercised upon public opinion, it is important to examine what were Mrs. Stowe’s qualifications to speak as an authority on southern slavery. And in this investigation the same qualifications of all others who arraigned the system for what they alleged were its heinous moral wrongs to the slave are likewise involved. The statement of Professor Wendell, quoted above, that she was the only one of the abolitionists who had observed slavery “on the spot,” can be corroborated by overwhelming proofs. If it be made to appear, as I think will be the case, that she was from first to last under a delusion which metamorphosed the negro into a Caucasian, and further that she had no real opportunities of learning the facts of slavery, then the case of the root-and-branch abolitionists must fall with the testimony of the only eye-witness whom they have called.
Whether she was biased or not we will let her own words decide. Here they are:
“I was a child in 1820 [she was then nine years old] when the Missouri question was agitated; and one of the strongest and deepest impressions on my mind was that made by my father’s sermons and prayers, and the anguish of his soul for the poor slave at that time. I remember his preaching drawing tears down the hardest faces of the old farmers in his congregation. I well remember his prayers morning and evening in the family for ‘poor, oppressed, bleeding Africa,’ that the time of her deliverance might come; prayers offered with strong crying and tears, and which indelibly impressed my heart, and made me what I am from my very soul, the enemy of all slavery. Every brother that I have has been in his sphere a leading anti-slavery man. As for myself and husband, we have for the last seventeen years lived on the border of a slave State, and we have never shrunk from the fugitives, and we have helped them with all we had to give. I have received the children of liberatedslaves into a family school, and taught them with my own children, and it has been the influence that we found in the church and by the altar that has made us do all this.”[90]
No comment is needed. The passage shows that her strongly excited feelings unavoidably shaped all her perceptions and formed all her judgments as to everything in slavery.
Now as to the means she had of acquiring the facts. Although she had seen a little of Kentucky, a border slave State, she had never lived in it, nor anywhere else in the south. Especially is it to be emphasized that she had had no experience of the cotton region, the real seat of slavery, and the only place where it could be fully studied and learned. She passed some eighteen years in lower Ohio, just across the river from Kentucky, where she saw much of escaping slaves. Of course, being aflame with zeal as she was for her subject, she had observed closely the native negroes of the north. Such of these as she met were widely different from the mass in slavery; for, born and bred in the north, they had had the beneficent training of the free-labor system, and also opportunity to absorb considerable of a higher culture. These negroes were exceptional, even of the northern natives. And the fugitives were also exceptional; for they far excelled the companions left behind them in intelligence, spirit, and every essential of good character. An ordinary Cuffee had liberty the least of all things in his thoughts. A negro like Hector or Garrison, the former escaping from Calhoun and the other from Toombs, was as much above the average as the shepherd dog is above common sheep-worriers and egg-suckers. Mrs. Stowe, as her book shows, had no conception whatever of the ordinary plantation negro. And while she had seen much of some Kentuckians, thesewere not representative southerners. They lived upon the border, where slave labor found but little lucrative opportunity, and they were also affected more or less with the sentiments of their nearby northern neighbors. Naturally only those Kentuckians of the border who really were of her opinion would consort with this decided anti-slavery partisan; the others would stand aloof. Mrs. Stowe never knew either real negroes or real slaveholders. And she also knew nothing whatever of cotton plantation management. Some authors show an amazingly full and accurate knowledge of countries and communities which they never saw. Burke’s knowledge of every detail touching India occurs to me. Lieber had visited Greece while Niebuhr had not. When the former had minutely described to the other some famous landscape,—say the battlefield of Marathon,—Niebuhr would make copious inquiries about remains of old roads and belongings which the other had forgotten, although he had seen them. Tom Moore had never been in Persia, but there is so much of that country drawn to the life in Lalla Rookh that somebody applied to him the saying that reading D’Herbelot was as good as riding on the back of a camel. Mrs. Stowe could not collect, sift, and read facts, and see through the most cunningly devised masks, as Henry D. Lloyd showed his marvellous power to do in “Wealth against Commonwealth.” That was not her gift. Her gift was to tell the best of stories—to vary it prodigally and artistically throughout with wonders, with things to make you shudder and also thrill with pleasure, with things to make you cry and laugh. Her emotional invention was the great factor. Here is her own account:
“The first part of the book ever committed to writing was the death of Uncle Tom. This scene presented itself almostas a tangible vision to her mind while sitting at the communion-table in the little church in Brunswick. She was perfectly overcome by it, and could scarcely restrain the convulsion of tears and sobbings that shook her frame. She hastened home and wrote it, and her husband being away she read it to her two sons of ten and twelve years of age. The little fellows broke out into convulsions of weeping, one of them saying through his sobs, ‘Oh, mamma, slavery is the most cursed thing in the world!’”
The description of Uncle Tom’s death is the goal and climax of the novel. Its scene is laid far down in the south, hundreds of miles below any place which she or the children had ever seen or studied. It would have been more in order for her to submit the draft to observant residents of that locality; but the fates did not intend that her convictions should be weakened by real information. Evidently she considered that her truth to fact was fully vindicated by the effect of the narrative upon her children, who, like herself, were entirely without knowledge of the subject. They wept and exclaimed over it. Why, of course, like all children they loved horrible tales, which their weeping and lamentation proved that they thought were true. Doubtless these same children had made respectable demonstrations over Bluebeard or Little Red Ridinghood. And now over Uncle Tom’s death, which is more dreadful than anything in Dante’s Inferno, and as pure figment, their feelings were shaken with storm and tempest as never before.
The statement just quoted proceeds thus:
“From that time the story can less be said to have been composed by her than imposed upon her. Scenes, incidents, conversations rushed upon her with a vividness and importunity that would not be denied. The book insisted upon getting itself into being, and would take no denial.”
I often fancy, as I think over it, that the last quotation describes suggestions from the fates.
But we must let Mrs. Stowe finish what we have had her tell in part. Informing us that, after writing “two or three first chapters,” she made an arrangement for weekly serial publication in theNational Era, she says:
“She was then in the midst of heavy domestic cares, with a young infant, with a party of pupils in her family to whom she was imparting daily lessons with her own children, and with untrained servants requiring constant supervision, but the story was so much more intense a reality to her than any other earthly thing that the weekly instalment never failed. It was there in her mind day and night waiting to be written, and requiring but a few moments to bring it into veritable characters.The weekly number was always read to the family circle before it was sent away, and all the household kept up an intense interest in the progress of the story.”[91]
This household had been indoctrinated by the zeal of Dr. Lyman Beecher into believing unreservedly all the inventions of ignorant assailants of slavery instead of the widely different facts.
Before I begin a detailed statement of the material errors and perversions of fact in “Uncle Tom’s Cabin” I want to emphasize it that every one of them appeared to northern readers, unfamiliar with the negro and the south, to be true, and most efficiently helped to form and strengthen sentiment against enforcement of the fugitive slave law.
Many things that she writes show that Mrs. Stowe was completely ignorant of the ways of the cotton plantation. I have space to mention but one. Tom was bred in Kentucky, where no cotton was grown. AndCassy, by reason of her indulgent rearing, had had as little experience as Tom in cotton-picking. Yet these two show such expertness that Tom can add to the sack of a slower picker, and Cassy give Tom some of her cotton, and each have enough to satisfy the weigher at night. The good cotton-picker is surely a most skilled laborer. He must be trained from childhood to use both hands so well that he becomes almost ambidexterous. The training that the typewriter is now urged to take is a parallel.
Mrs. Stowe shows that she had no accurate knowledge of the sentiments of the whites of the south as to slavery. As we have already suggested, there may have been among the Kentuckians of the border some outspoken opponents of slavery; but it is very probable that in her womanly ardor for her great cause she lavishly magnified their numbers. In her novel she has nearly all of her white southerners—I may add all of the attractive ones—to declare themselves as abolitionists at heart. Misrepresentation of fact could not be grosser than this. I was twenty-five years old when the brothers’ war commenced. I had mingled intimately with the people, high and low, of my part of the south. During all of this time I never found out there was a single one of my acquaintances, man, woman, boy, or girl, who did not believe slavery right. The charge implied by Mrs. Stowe that we southerners were doing violence to our consciences in holding on to our slaves is utterly without evidence; nay, it is unanimously contradicted by all the evidence. As we and our parents read the bible, it told us to hold on to them, but to treat them always with considerate kindness.
Mrs. Stowe emphasizes the frequent cruelty of the master to the slave; and she emphasizes more strongly still that under the law he was helpless. The slave wasnot helpless. He was protected by law. Note this example, given by Toombs:
“The most authentic statistics of England show that the wages of agricultural and unskilled labor in that kingdom not only fail to furnish the laborer with the comforts of our slave, but even with the necessaries of life, and no slaveholder could escapea conviction for cruelty to his slaveswho gave his slave no more of the necessaries of life for his labor than the wages paid to their agricultural laborers by the noblemen and gentlemen of England would buy.”[92]
The witness just called has full knowledge, and is the extreme of frank honesty and truthfulness.
The statute-book demonstrates that the law was steadily bettering the condition of the slave. I have not space to state the progression which can be found in the different Georgia enactments. But I must mention two instances. In 1850 the procedure of trying a white person charged with a capital offence was extended to the slave. The code which came of force January 1, 1863, and which had been adopted some while before, prevented any confession made by a slave to his master—it mattered not how voluntary or free from suspicion it might be—from ever being received in evidence against him.
I commenced law practice in 1857. From that time until I went to the front I observed that public opinion was becoming more decided against mistreatment of the blacks. The masters ofashcats,—as ill-fed negroes were called in derision of their lean and dingy faces by the great multitude of sleek and shining ones,—those who punished with unreasonable severity, those who exacted overwork,—they were few and far between,—they wereall more and more detested; and grand juries became more and more prone to deal properly with them. I would support this by cases, if their citation would not be unpleasant to descendants of parties.
Mrs. Stowe has his master to brand George Harris in the hand with the initial letter of the former’s surname. She has Legree’s slaves to pick cotton on Sunday. I never heard of any cases of branding human beings except as a punishment for crime in execution of a judgment of conviction, and very few of them. Tidying up the house, cooking, serving meals, caring for the animals on the place, and such other things as are done everywhere on Sunday, were of course required of the domestic slaves. Leaving these out, no slave was ever put to work on Sunday except to “fight fire,” or at something commanded by a real emergency. Their employers now exact from thousands of white persons of both sexes all over the country a great amount of such hard and grinding Sunday work as was never exacted of the slaves in the south. Peep into stores, offices of large corporations, and elsewhere, while others are at Sunday-school or church, and count those weary ones you find finishing up the work of the last week.
But all of the mistakes of Mrs. Stowe noticed in the foregoing are mere matters of bagatelle as compared with the character and nature which she gives the average negro of the south.
She represents the women as chaste as white women, and the husbands faithful to their wives even when separated from them. I shall now tell the truth as I know it to be—the truth that all observant people who have had experience with negroes know.
The moment almost that a married pair of slaves were separated for any cause, each one secretly, or more often openly, took another partner. Even when not separated,infidelity of both was the rule. Mrs. Stowe has the girls and their parents to shrink with horror from the desires of the master. To the simple-hearted African the master was always great, and there was among them not a woman to be found who would not dedicate herself or her daughter to greatness, finding it so inclined,—husband, father, brothers, and sisters all in their desire for a friend at court heartily approving. The white whose concubine gave favors behind his back to her slave friends was the stalest joke of every neighborhood.
The mass of the negroes are more unchaste now than they were in slavery, a subject of which I shall say something further in another chapter. But even where the master’s steady requirement from one generation to another of a stricter observance of family ties, and the natural imitation of the ways of the dominant race, had lifted the slaves, in appearance at least, far above their West African ancestors, not even mothers had become chaste. Boys, girls, men, and women, both married and unmarried, were as promiscuous by night as houseflies are by day. The horror of horrors in this abyss of moral impurity to one of a superior race was their utter unconsciousness of incest.[93]
Mrs. Stowe has their philoprogenitiveness—as phrenologists call it—as fully developed as the whites. One bred in the cotton districts well remembers that it required all the vigilance of master and mistress, overseer, and the deputies selected from the older slave women, to secure from the mothers proper attention to their children, and especially to keep them from punishing too cruelly. But I do not mean to say that this parental misbehavior was as general as the unchastity mentioned. When the mothers aged beyond forty-five or fifty, they would begin to think somewhat less of beaux and somewhat more of their children.
George Harris and Eliza are next of the slave characters in prominence and importance to Uncle Tom. With their large admixture of white blood, their comparatively good education and superb moral training, a southerner would think that you were merely mocking him if you named these as fairly representative negroes. As they are drawn, they are really whites—whites of high refinement—with only a physical negro exterior, and that softened down to the minimum.
But Uncle Tom—I pray my northern readers to take counsel of their common sense and consider what I shall now say of him. Rightly to estimate him, I mustbegin with some contrasts. The first that occurs to me is Tyndarus, the slave hero of the Captivi of Plautus, pronounced by the great critic Lessing to be the most beautiful play ever brought upon the stage. Tyndarus and Philocrates, his young master, taken prisoners, are sold to Hegio. The two captives personate each other, and induce Hegio to send home Philocrates, who was a wealthy noble, and keep only the born slave. Hegio was scheming to recover his own son, now a slave in the land of the captives, by a bargain for Philocrates, this bargain to be negotiated by the counterfeit Tyndarus. Discovering how he had been duped, the anguished father tells the real Tyndarus that he shall die a cruel death. This is the reply of the slave:
“As I shall not die because of evil deeds, that is a small matter. My death will keep it ever in remembrance that I delivered my master from slavery and the enemy, restored him to his country and father, and chose that I myself should perish rather than he.”
That is exalted. But Tyndarus has not the complete goodness of Uncle Tom. As soon as he is at last rescued from the horrible mines, to find Philocrates true and himself a free man, he threatens woe to a slave who had injured him, and looks approvingly upon the execution of his threat.
Compare Uncle Tom with the good men of the bible, such as Moses, Peter, and Paul, to mention no more. Not one of these was able always to keep his feelings and tongue in that complete subjection that never fail Uncle Tom.
Uncle Tom, in whom love alone prompts all thoughts and deeds, surpasses every saint in Dante’s Paradise—he surpasses even the incomparably sweet Beatrice, who now and then chides unpleasantly.
The climax of my comparison is reached when I suggest that Uncle Tom is made from first to last a more perfect Christ than the Jesus of the gospels. The latter, as Matthew Arnold and other reverent christians remark, was sometimes unamiable. Remember his expulsion of the money changers and traders from the temple, and the many opprobrious words he used of and to the Pharisees. Growing recognition of the all-human Jesus is benignly replacing a religion of superstition, intolerance, and dogma with one of universal love and brotherhood. I cannot fully express my appreciation of the liberal divines, from Charming to Savage, who are preparing us so well for the millennium. But I am sure a new study of Uncle Tom would give each one of them firmer grasp of christlikeness and far more power to present it. Think over such instances in that holiest and most altruistic of lives as these: He has just learned that he has been sold; that he is to be carried down the river. His wife suggests that as he has a pass from his master permitting him to go and return as he pleases, he take advantage of it and run away to the free States. As firmly as Socrates, unjustly condemned to death, refused to escape from prison when his friends had provided full opportunity, Tom declared he would stay, that he would keep faith with his master. He said that, according to Eliza’s report of the conversation she had overheard, his master was forced to sell him, or sell all the other slaves, and it was better for himself to suffer in their place. And as he goes away he has nothing but prayers and blessings for the man who sends him into dread exile from his wife and children. He falls to a new master, whom, and his family, he watches over with the fidelity and love of a most kind father, doing every duty, but above all things trying to save that master’s soul. Then his cruelfortune delivers him to the monster Legree. For the first time in his life he is treated with disrespect, distrust, and harshness. Yet he forgets his own misery, and finds pleasure in helping and comforting his fellow sufferers, striving his utmost to bring them into eternal life. He will not do wrong even at the command of his cruel master, who has him in a dungeon, as it were, into which no ray of justice can ever shine. And here he dies from the cruel lash—almost under it. He falters some, it is true; but there was no sweat of blood as in Gethsemane, nor exclamation upon the cross, “My God, my God, why hast thou forsaken me!” He went more triumphantly through his more fell crucifixion.
I believe that the character of Uncle Tom is the only part of the book which future generations will cherish; not for the lesson against slavery it was intended to teach, but because it excels in ideal and realization all imitation of Christ in actual life or the loftiest religious fiction. Consider its marvellous effect upon Heine, as told by a quotation from the latter in The Author’s Introduction to the book.[94]
The detailed comparison which I have just made puts Uncle Tom upon a pinnacle, where he is above all the saints in lofty, self-abnegating, and lovingly religious manhood; and the reader notes how fruitlessly I have tried to find another like him. But Mrs. Stowe was confident that she had not exaggerated or overdrawn him, and further that such were common among the southern slaves. Here is what she deliberately says in her Key:
“The character of Uncle Tom has been objected to as improbable; and yet the writer has received more confirmations of that character, and from a greater variety of sources, than of any other in the book.Many people have said to her, ‘I knew an Uncle Tom in such and such a southern State.’ All the histories of this kind which have thus been related to her would of themselves, if collected, make a small volume.”[95]
“The character of Uncle Tom has been objected to as improbable; and yet the writer has received more confirmations of that character, and from a greater variety of sources, than of any other in the book.
Many people have said to her, ‘I knew an Uncle Tom in such and such a southern State.’ All the histories of this kind which have thus been related to her would of themselves, if collected, make a small volume.”[95]
Toombs once said to me, “It would have been a matchless eulogy of slavery if it had produced an Uncle Tom.” But, as we see from the last quotation, she claims far more. She really claims that it was fruitful of Uncle Toms in every southern State.
Shall we attribute this firm belief, that there were among the southern slaves many who were better christians than Christ himself is represented to have been, to a mere hallucination? That word is not strong enough. To explain the belief, we must think of visions suggested by the hypnotizing powers, or something like the spell on Titania, when Bottom with his ass’s head inspired her with the fondest admiration and love.
Although the foregoing is far from being exhaustive, it is enough; it shows incontrovertibly that Mrs. Stowe builded throughout upon the exceptional and imaginary. My father, a Presbyterian clergyman, with the strictest notions as to the Sabbath, as he generally called Sunday, made me read, when a boy, a book called, if I recollect aright, “Edwards’s Sabbath Manual.” Be the title whatever it may, the entire book was but a collection of instances of secular work done on Sunday, and always followed closely by disaster, which appeared to be divine punishment of sabbath-breaking. The author was confident he had proved his case. He believed with his whole soul that if one should do on Sunday any week-day work not permitted in the catechism, it was more than probable that God would at once deal severely with him for not keeping his day holy.
This is a somewhat overstrained example of Mrs. Stowe’s method. I will therefore give one which is as close as close can be. Suppose a diligent worker to cull from newspaper files, law reports, and what he hears in talk, the cases in which one party to a marriage has cruelly mistreated the other. If he digested his collection with a view to effect, it would prove a far more formidable attack upon the most civilizing and improving of all human institutions than Mrs. Stowe’s Key is upon slavery; and if he had her rare artistic gift he could found upon it a wonderful anti-marriage romance. The author of such a Key and romance would be confuted at once by the exclamation, “If these horrors are general, people would flee marriage as they do the plague.” Let it be inquired, “If ‘Uncle Tom’s Cabin’ and Mrs. Stowe’s Key truly represent, why did not more of the blacks escape into the free States? and why did they not revolt in large bodies during the war in the many communities whence all the able-bodied whites had gone to the front far away?” and there can be but one answer, which is, there was no general or common oppression of the African in slavery—there were no horrors to him in the condition—but on the contrary he was contented and happy, merry as the day is long.
How was it that a book so full of untrue statement and gross exaggeration as to an American theme found such wide acceptance at the north and elsewhere out of the south? For years I could not explain. When I read it at Princeton, I talked it over with the southern students. We pooh-poohed the negroes, but we admired the principal white characters except Mrs. St. Claire, whom we all regarded as a libellous caricature. The representation of slavery was incorrect, and the portrayal of the negro as only a black and kinky-haired white was so absurd that one of us dreamed that eitherwould be taken seriously by the north. It was some ten years after the brothers’ war that the true explanation commenced to dawn upon me, and it has at last become clear.
It is an important fact that the great body of the people of the north knew almost next to nothing of the south, and especially of the average negro. As one calmly looks back now he sees that in the agitation over the admission of California, the cleavage between the two nationalizations treated in foregoing chapters was becoming decided, and that the people belonging to each were losing their tempers and getting ready to fight. When even a political campaign in which the only question is, who shall be ins and who outs, is on, each party is prone to believe the hardest things of the other. But when such a fell resort to force as that of 1850 and the years immediately following is impending, all history shows that those on one side will believe any charge reflecting upon the good character of those on the other side which is not grossly improbable. Such quarrels are so fierce that we never weigh accusations against our adversaries—we just embrace and circulate. Thus had the northern public become ripe for an arraignment of the morality of slavery, which—as was with purblind instinct felt, not discerned—was the sole active principle of the southern nationalization. Even without the provocation just mentioned, a northern man would liken the African in everything but his skin and hair to a white. We always classify a new under some old and well-known object. When the Romans first saw the elephant they thought of him as the Lucanian ox. The automobile which propels itself around our streets is made as much like the corresponding horse-drawn vehicle familiar to the public for ages as can be. The northerner knew no man well but the Caucasian,and he had long been led by a common psychological process to give his characteristic essentials to the negro. And now when anti-slavery partisans positively maintained that the latter was a white in all but his outside, adducing seeming proofs, and the free-labor nationalization was with its leading strings pulling all the northern people into line, even the calmest and most dispassionate among them were influenced to believe that the negroes were so much like our Anglo-Saxon selves it was an unspeakable crime to keep them in slavery. And all tales of cruelty and horror found easy credence.
Thus had the northern public been made ready for “Uncle Tom’s Cabin.” And although the book wholly ignored and obscured the really live and burning issue, and it was packed from beginning to end with the most gigantic errors of fact, it took the section by storm.
It is a great book. When something has been as persistently demanded as long as “Uncle Tom’s Cabin” has been by the northern public and the “Conquered Banner” by the southern public; when thousands upon thousands of plain people weep over them and lay them away to weep over them again, you may know—it matters not what the unruffled and sarcastic critic may say—that each is a work of the very highest and the very rarest genius. Tears of sympathy for tales of distress and misery, whoever can set their fountain flowing is always a nature’s king or queen.
I have read “Uncle Tom’s Cabin” four times: first at Princeton in 1852; the second time amid the gloom of reconstruction, more accurately to ascertain northern opinion of the negro and forecast therefrom, if I could, what was in store for the south; the third time as I was meditating the Old and New South; and just the other day the last time. The more familiar I become with it the greater seems to me the power with which theattention is taken and held captive. The very titles to the first twelve chapters are, in their contents and sequence, gems of genius, and draw resistlessly. I become more and more impatient with Ruskin’s reprehending the escape of Eliza, when, with her child hugged to her bosom, she leaps from block to block of floating ice in the Ohio until she is safe on the other side—a marvel like the ghost’s appearance in the first scene of Hamlet, exciting a high and breathless interest at the outset, which is never allowed to flag afterwards. Whenever I begin to read the book, I fall at once into that illusion which Coleridge has so well explained. I accept all her blunders and mistakes as real facts, and although it is hard to tolerate her negro travesties and the anti-slavery sentiments of her southern whites, somehow they do not then offend me, and there is chapter after chapter in which I follow the action with breathless interest. “Gulliver’s Travels” and “Pilgrim’s Progress” are examples to show how little of reality either entertaining or moving fiction needs. From a mass of false assumptions, seasoned with the merest sprinkling of fact; and especially from her taking for granted that the negro is really on a par of development with the white, she has constructed the Iliad of our time. The nursery tale out of which Shakspeare fashioned the drama of Lear did not furnish him with smaller resources. What a wonderful action he puts in the place of the nursery tale! how natural and probable it all appears to us as it unfolds! how we hate, or pity, or admire, or love as we cannot keep from following it! Likewise every reader in the north accepted Mrs. Stowe’s novel as the very height of verity, and afterwards saw in every fugitive slave a George Harris, or Eliza, or an Uncle Tom. And the book evoked the same effect out of America. The most curious proof of this that I can think of is the statue of The Freed Slave,which I saw on exhibition at the Centennial. It has nearly all the peculiar physical characteristics of the Caucasian; and it represents not a typical man of African descent, but a negro albino, that is, a white negro, not a black one. There are albino negroes, but there are also albino whites. That statue shows what was European conception of the negroes whose chains were broken by the emancipation proclamation. Its reception in America shows also that the same conception prevailed here. Day after day I saw crowds of northern people contemplating that counterfeit with deep emotion, many of the women unable to restrain their tears.
Surely “Uncle Tom’s Cabin” in its propagandic potency is unrivalled. It did more than the anti-slavery statesmen, politicians, preachers, talkers, and orators combined. To it more than to all other agencies is due that the people of the north took such a stubborn stand in opposition that the south at last saw that the fugitive slave law had been practically nullified. Thus the fates worked to bring about secession. For secession was to bring the brothers’ war; and this war was to do what could not be done by law or consent,—that is, to get rid of slavery as the informing principle of southern nationalization.
The post-bellum propagandic effect of “Uncle Tom’s Cabin” has been very malign. With the companion literature and theories, it formed the opinion that devised and executed the reconstruction of the southern States. The cardinal principle of that reconstruction was to treat the blacks just emancipated as political equals of the whites.
Those who did this are to be forgiven. They had been made to believe that the negroes of the south were as well qualified for full citizenship as the whites, and itwas but meet retributive punishment of the great crime of slavery and waging war to hold on to it, that the masters be put under their former slaves. “Uncle Tom’s Cabin” had made them believe it.
The only parallel of mass of pernicious error engendered by a book, so far as I know, is “Burke’s Reflections.” Constitutional England ought to have followed Charles Fox as one man, and given countenance to the rise in France for liberty. But Burke’s piece of magnificent rhetoric effectually turned the nation out of her course, and had her in league with absolutists to put back the clock of European democracy a hundred years or more. Even yet intelligent Englishmen magnify that most unEnglish achievement. The bad effects of “Uncle Tom’s Cabin” have not been so lasting in our country. We Americans get out of ruts much more easily than the English. The north is now rapidly learning the real truth as to the utter incapacity of the mass of southern negroes to vote intelligently, and complacently acquiesces in their practical disfranchisement by the only class which can give good government.
We must utterly reject and discard everything that Mrs. Stowe and those whom I distinguish as the root-and-branch abolitionists have taught, in their unutterable ideology, as to the nature and character of the negro, and in its place we must learn to know him as he really is—to tolerate him, nay, to love him as such. This is the only way in which we can prepare ourselves for giving the negroes their due from us.
Further, we owe it to our proud American history, now that the brothers’ war is forty years past, to ascertain the real cause of that mighty struggle, maintained most laudably and gloriously by each side. Those whom I am here criticising made many believe that the real stake was whether the slave should remain the propertyof his master or not. Note the emphasized adjuration in the “Battle Hymn of the Republic:”
“As he [Christ] died to make men holy, let us die to make men free.”
A most beautiful sentiment, fitly expressed; but how it humiliates the grand issue, which was whether federal government should live or perish! And that greatest of American odes, Whittier’s “Laus Deo,” how wide of the true mark is its sublime rejoicing! Celebrating the abolition of slavery by constitutional amendment, the occasion demanded that he extol the really benign achievement. That achievement was that all cause of diverse nationalization in the States had been forever removed, and thus it was assured that brotherhood of the nations was to grow without check. But the rapt bard was blinded, as his utterances show, by what now almost appears to have been a fit of delusional insanity. He says:
“Ring! O bells!Every stroke exulting tellsOf the burial hour of crime.”
What does he mean is the crime? Why, the delivering of certain Africans and their descendants from lowest human degradation and misery, and blessing them with opportunity and help to rise far upward? Had he seen, as we do now, forty years later, instead of pouring out this wild and mad delight, he would have dropped scalding tears over the “burial hour” of all that promised anything of welfare to those for whom he had labored so long and faithfully. And in the last stanza his command that
“With a sound of broken chains”
the nations be told
“that He reigns,Who alone is Lord and God!”
The poet misunderstood the “broken chains” as greatly as he did the “burial hour.” Chains were broken, but their breaking was no blessing to the negro. Golden chains of domestic ties, drawing him gently, kindly, surely up to higher morality and complete manhood—these were broken; and far other were forged for him, with which fear he has been made fast to destruction. His only friends able to help alienated; what a clog! Given back to African improgressiveness; what a fetter! How he is held to the body of death by unbreakable chains of want, misery, vice, disease, and utter helplessness! and how his shackles gall him and his convict chains clank in every corner of the land which was once an earthly paradise to him!
Let us not sully with Whittier the glory of the federal arms by ascribing to them as their chief triumph the gift of illusory freedom to a few negroes. Rather let us inform ourselves with the spirit of Webster, and give praise and thanks without end for the actual blessings and the richer promise of the restored union to myriads of that race whose mission it is to spread an inexpressibly fair socialism over all the earth.
And let me say at the last, the people of the north should learn that all the tragic evils which Professor Wendell and others outside of the south have in mind belong only to the slave-ships, and by a strange psychological metastasis—no stranger, however, than that by which the fourth commandment, in popular conception, has been abrogated as to the seventh day, and applied to the first day of the week—they have firmly attached themselves to the reputation of southern slavery. For long years we of the south, our mothers and our mothers’ mothers, our fathers and our fathers’ fathers, have been charged with cruelties and outrages purely fancied. These fabrications are the stock comparisons with whichalmost every invective against the wrongs of any lower class is sharpened. The writer or speaker whenever he is taken short says something of the dreadful condition of the southern slave under the sway of an entirely absolute master. Variety of the misdeeds invoked as illustration is limited only by the promptness with which the utterer can think of what he has read in abolition literature or its sequel. It is all mere parrot gabble. To hear so much of it as we do is “a little wearing,” as Reginald Wilfer said. Surely if our brothers and sisters of the north but think, they will acknowledge that these so-called horrors of slavery were all nothing but the inventions of the angry passions provoked by the powers in the unseen after they had decided that slavery must be sacrificed in the interests of the union. And these dear brothers and sisters will no longer persist in asserting that southern slavery was but robbery and oppression of and cruelty to the slave; that the system was evil to him of itself. They will talk no more of the pro-slavery infamy, of the unscrupulousness and perfidy of the slave power, and all such false twaddle, that can now serve no purpose whatever except to offend good men and women and their children without cause.
SLAVERY AT LAST IMPELLED INTO A DEFENSIVE AGGRESSIVE
Untilthe crisis of 1850, slavery had never changed from purely defensive tactics. This year made it seem that the north had fully resolved that slavery should never be allowed another inch of new territory; and also was very near, and was rapidly coming nearer to, the point of practically preventing the enforcement of the fugitive slave law. We have explained how slave property could not live unless it found new virgin soil in the Territories; and we have also explained what a deadly blow it would receive, in the refusal to restore fugitives. This refusal would be really indirect abolition. Read the masterly sketch by Calhoun, in his speech March 4, 1850, of the conquering advance of the anti-slavery party, until now—to use his language—“the equilibrium between the two sections ... had been destroyed;” and he demonstrates that the actual exercise of the entire national political power must soon be in the hands of the free-labor section. The south instinctively felt that the time for her old tactics was over, and that she must do more than merely fend off the blows of abolition. And, as we will tell in the next chapter, she found her new leader in Toombs. Nullification as advocated by Calhoun was the extreme energy of the pure defensive of the south. His proposed dual executive amendment was merely that nullification be made a right granted to the federalgovernment instead of remaining one reserved to the States. Toombs had grown up in the school of William H. Crawford. George R. Gilmer, a follower of Crawford, tells of the latter: “He was violently opposed to the nullification movement, considering it but an ebullition excited by Mr. Calhoun’s overleaping, ambition.”[96]
Toombs scouted nullification. Under his lead his State, in 1850, adopted the Georgia Platform quoted above. This platform was considerate and resolute preparation for the southern offensive.
Next the south assumes initiative. Extension of slave-territory is so great an economicalsine qua nonthat she attacks its barriers. Using her control of the then dominant democratic party she got the Missouri compromise repealed. Her main purpose in this was to wrench from the anti-slavery men the weapon of congressional restriction, then deemed by them the most powerful of all in their armory. She also contemplated extorting a concession of all lands in the Territories which could be profitably cultivated by slaves from the north, alarmed into apprehending that otherwise slavery might be carried above 36.30′.
This repeal did more than anything else—more even than “Uncle Tom’s Cabin”—to arouse the north into mortal combat with slavery. The historian cannot understand why the south procured it, if he ignores that energy of southern nationalization which we have done our utmost to explain. This nationalization had got into what we may call the last rapids, and was bound to go over the precipice into the gulf of secession.
The bootless struggle by the south against overwhelming odds of northern settlers to make Kansas a slave State was the sequel to the repeal of the Missouri compromise. When the South understood that Kansas wasreally gone, she advanced her forlorn hope in her endeavor to secure slavery in the union. The essence of the compromise measures of 1850 was that the demand of congressional non-interference with slavery in the States and Territories, made by the south, was declared adopted as future policy. As the forlorn hope just mentioned she now made the demand that the owner’s property in his slaves, if he should carry them into a Territory, should be protected by congress until its people had made the constitution under which the Territory would be admitted into the union. Her adherence to this demand split the democratic party; and the election of Lincoln ensued. This election meant that slavery—the property supporting more than nine-tenths of the southern people, and which was virtually their entire economic system—was put under a ban. There was nothing for it but depreciation in the near future; soon more and more depreciation; until after prolonged stagnation and paralysis the value of all her property would collapse as did that of the continental currency. That was the way it looked to her. We believe that the facts show that her conviction was right. She felt with her whole soul that the time had come to invoke State sovereignty. So she seceded, with intent to save the property of her people and maintain their domestic peace. Of course she purposed an equitable apportionment of the public domain between herself and the north under which she would get the small part that suited slave agriculture.
The circumstances constrained the south throughout every part and parcel of her offensive as powerfully as exhaustion of his supplies constrains the commander of a garrison to a sortie upon what he has reason to believe is the weakest point of the circumvallation. She was hypnotized by the powers. They made her believe thatshe was always doing the right thing to protect slavery when they were having her to do that only which assured its destruction. She was all the while as conscientious as the mother who, afraid of drafts, keeps the needed fresh air from her consumptive child and thereby kills him.
We recognize the resistless play of the cosmic forces upon the sun, moon, and stars; upon our earth; in the yearly round of the seasons; in the ocean tides; in storms and heated terms; in vegetation; and in things innumerable taken note of by the senses. But this is not all of their empire. They sway individuals, communities, peoples, nations, making the latter even believe that they are having their own way when in fact they are most servilely doing the will of the powers.
TOOMBS
Calhounsolidified 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 Iwish 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 hewould 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 theGlobe; 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. Sendhimto 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 rightsmen 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 madeall 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 southernrights 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 thelaw 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 ownsui generisself.
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 timewhen 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 spreadaround, 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 manynisi priustrials, 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 Statelegislative 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 andlucrative. 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 anursery, 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 beconsidered 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.