“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 impedimentsto 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.’”
“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 impedimentsto 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. TheGlobementions 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 surelyforerunning 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 yeasand 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 pronounceex cathedraupon 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 thefinest 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 intoconsciousness 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 openingof 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 of1849-50 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, aseverybody 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 keepsfrom 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.”
“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 hornWere 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 lastanalysis 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 isfacile primusof 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 afterwardsStephens 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 roundThe 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 againstus; 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.”
“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 againstus; 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 protectStates 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 civilizedworld 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.”
“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 protectStates 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 civilizedworld 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 greatmiscarriage 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 survivedhiscountry. 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, whosedearest 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 beenproclaimed. 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 theutmost 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 longingand 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 longenough 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 ofa 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 Œdipus.
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 thebar 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 havingmore 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!
HELP TO THE UNION CAUSE BY POWERS IN THE UNSEEN
Ifyou are not balked by adherence, either to the rapidly waning overpositiveness of materialism, or to the ferocious orthodoxy which denies that there has been any providential interference in human affairs since that told of in the bible; and if you are exempt from the fear of being regarded as superstitious which keeps a great number of even the most cultivated people forever in a fever of incredulity as to every example of what they call the supernatural, you have long since become convinced that evolution is intelligently guided by some power or powers in the unseen. I seem to myself to discern plainly in many important crises of history the palpable influence of what are to me the directors of evolution. Washington, to found our great federation, and Lincoln to perpetuate it—these come at once as examples. Now follow me while I try to show you what the directors did in preparation for and in conduct of the brothers’ war, of purpose that the north should triumph and save the union. Of course I am precluded from all attempt to be exhaustive. I shall only glance at a few of the facts that appear to me cardinal and most important.
In the first place, they deferred the war until under the effect of foreign immigration the population of the north greatly outnumbered that of the south and had become almost unanimous against slavery; and until the south was almost entirely dependent upon her railroadsand her river and ocean commerce. Had secession occurred because of the excitement over the application of Missouri for admission into the union with a slave constitution, there might have been a war, but it would have been short, the end being that every foot of the public domain admitting of profitable slave culture would have fallen to the south. Suppose a serious effort had been made in 1833 to collect the revenue in South Carolina, how long would the south have endured invasion of the little State and slaughter of its citizens? Even President Jackson would have soon forgotten his enmity to Calhoun and recognized that blood is thicker than water. The time was not then ripe, as the directors saw; and so they effected an adjustment of the controversy. It did not suit the directors to have the war commence in 1850, for there was at the time no general use of ironclads, and the railroad system was far from completion. Consider for a moment the advantage to the north of having gunboats and the disadvantage to the south of not having them. Fort Donelson really fell because of gunboats. Grant got re-enforcements in time to save him from disastrous defeat at Shiloh because of the command of the river by gunboats. The gunboats caused the fall of Vicksburg. And it was the holding of the James from its mouth to Fort Darling by gunboats which gave Grant such secure grip at Petersburg that Richmond had to fall at last, and with it the confederacy.
Now a word as to the southern railroads. Next to the navigable rivers they were the lines of easiest penetration to invaders. Remember how the British in 1898 advanced in Africa only as they completed their railroad behind them. Of course had the railroad been already made their advance would have been along it. How could Sherman have ever crossed the devastated tractfrom Dalton to Atlanta had he been without the railroad behind him? During his retreat Johnston kept the invading army between himself and the railroad without which it could not have been subsisted, and staid so close that Sherman had him constantly in view; conduct which is still lauded by some people in the south as masterly beyond compare.
To conceive more vividly the river and railroad situation which I am striving to explain, suppose that during the Revolutionary war the States had been as dependent as the south afterwards became upon rivers and railroads, and the British had and the Americans did not have iron-clad gunboats; as matters now look, our forefathers would have been beaten back to the foot of the throne. I believe that the railroads alone would have rendered their subjugation certain.
So much for the matchless judgment shown by the directors in deciding as to the time of the war. I shall now tell what I have long thought is most unmistakably their work in conducting that war.
As soon as secession was an accomplished fact, they deprived the better southern statesmanship of all guidance of the brothers’ war now inevitable and about to begin. In such a war a proper executive is of far more importance than good legislators and even good generals. Toombs was the man who stood forth head and shoulders above all others as the logical president of the southern confederacy. But the wily directors hypnotized the electors into believing that Davis, because of his military education, service in Mexico, and four years’ secretaryship of war, was the right man. It is generally believed in the south that the considerations just mentioned turned the scale in favor of Davis. But sometimes I think that the true explanation is different. Stephens has told how Toombs was got out of the way.When this narrative[111]was published, both Toombs and Davis, with many of the partisans of each were alive, and regard for them may have kept him silent as to a reported mischance to Toombs, which provoking opposition—as was whispered—from some of those who had been among his most earnest supporters, decided him to retire. A biographer writes: “There was a story, credited in some quarters, that Mr. Toombs’s convivial conduct at a dinner party in Montgomery estranged from him some of the more conservative delegates, who did not realize that a man like Toombs had versatile and reserved powers, and that Toombs at the banquet board was another sort of a man from Toombs in a deliberative body.”[112]
Something like that stated in the quotation just made did happen, as Stephens was wont to relate at Liberty Hall—the name which he gave his hospitable home at Crawfordville, Georgia. I was present more than once at such times.
Such could have been the work of the directors.
Georgia, being the pivotal State of the new federation, was by many conceded the presidency. Besides Toombs she had two other men, far abler statesmen than Davis and then as conspicuous in the public eye—A. H. Stephens and Howell Cobb. The election of either one of these would really have been the same almost as the election of Toombs, for the three were in complete accord, and Toombs was the natural and actual leader. So great was their fealty to him that neither one could have been induced to stand for the place after he had missed it. The directors saw to it that neither one of the three should be president of the Confederate States.
Suppose that Toombs—or that either Stephens orCobb—had been made president, what a different conduct there would have been of the war. Besides being the foremost statesman of the south, Toombs was its very ablest man of affairs, and as far superior to Davis in practical and business talent as a trained and experienced man is to an untrained and inexperienced woman. Not intending to disparage the other great qualifications of Toombs, I must emphasize it that of all his contemporaries he alone evinced a clear understanding of the principles according to which the confederate currency could have been better managed than were the greenbacks by the other side. A letter of his during the war to Mr. James Gardner, of Augusta, Georgia, published at the time in the paper of which the latter was then editor, shows insight and grasp of the subject equal to Ricardo’s. Toombs as president of the confederacy would have had congress enact proper currency measures. When he was in place to advise and lead, his influence exceeded by far that of any other man that I ever knew.
But this, important as it is, is far from being the most important. He and Stephens were fully convinced at the very first of the overruling importance to the confederacy of these two things: (1) to make full use of cotton as a resource; (2) to prevent a blockade of the southern ports. I make these extracts following from a speech of Stephens’s at Crawfordville, Georgia, November 1, 1862:
“What I said at Sparta, Georgia, upon the subject of cotton, many of you have often heard me say in private conversation, and most of you in the public speech last year to which I have alluded. Cotton, I have maintained, and do maintain, is one of the greatest elements of power, if not the greatest at our command, if it were but properly and efficiently used, as it might have been, and still might be. Samson’s strength was inhis locks. Our strength is in our locks of cotton. I believed from the beginning that the enemy would inflict upon us more serious injury by the blockade than by all other means combined. It was ... a matter of the utmost ... importance to have it raised. How was it to be done?... I thought it ... could be done through the agency of cotton.... I was in favor, as you know, of the government’s taking all the cotton that would be subscribed for eight per cent bonds at a rate or price as high as ten cents a pound. Two millions of the last year’s crop might have been counted upon as certain on this plan. This, at ten cents, with bags of the average commercial weight, would have cost the government one hundred millions of bonds. With this amount of cotton in hand and pledged, any number, short of fifty, of the best ironclad steamers could have been contracted for and built in Europe—steamers at the cost of two millions each, could have been procured, equal in every way to the ‘Monitor.’ Thirty millions would have got fifteen of these, which might have been enough for our purpose. Five might have been ready by the first of January last to open some one of the ports blockaded on our coast. Three of these could have been left to keep the port open, and two could have conveyed the cotton across the water if necessary. Thus, the debt could have been promptly paid with cotton at a much higher price than it cost, and a channel of trade kept open till other ironclads, and as many as were necessary, might have been built and paid for in the same way. At a cost of less than one month’s present expenditure on our army, our coast might have been cleared. Besides this, at least two more millions of bales of the old crop on hand might have been counted upon—this with the other making a debt in round numbers to the planters of $200,000,000. But this cotton, held in Europe until its price became fifty cents a pound, would constitute a fund of at least $1,000,000,000 which would not only have kept our finances in sound condition, but the clear profit of $800,000,000 would have met the entire expenses of the war for years to come.”[113]
The reader who carefully reflects over the passage just quoted may well think that the extravagant profit pictured savors more of Mulberry Sellers than of a cool-headed statesman; but if the war price of cotton be recalled he readily agrees that under the plan proposed the south could easily have got a fleet of the best ironclads. Such a fleet would have kept the southern ports open. The advantage of which would have been very great. It would have held the Mississippi from the first, or have recovered it after the capture of New Orleans. It would have cleared the gunboats out of all the navigable rivers in the south. And we must not forget how it might have ravaged the northern coast, perhaps capturing New York, and forcing an early peace.
I must make you see the greatness of cotton as a resource. There has been from soon after the invention of the gin a steadily increasing world demand for it, and the south has practically monopolized its production. I can think of no other product of the soil except wine and liquor that is as imperishable. But wine and liquor spill, leak, and evaporate, while cotton does neither. If you but safe it against fire it will not deteriorate by age. In 1884 I was told of a sale just made of some cotton for which the owner had refused the famine price in 1865. It brought the market price of the day, and experts said it sampled as well as new cotton. It was at least 19 years old. Wine and liquor cannot be compressed, but the same weight of raw cotton becomes less and less bulky every year. By reason of the foregoing, cotton is always the equivalent of cash in hand. Now add the effect of the steadily growing war scarcity, and remember how easy it was during the first two years of the war to carry out cotton in spite of the blockade. The European purchasing agent of the Confederate Statesgovernment says “it possessed a latent purchasing power such as probably no other ... in history ever had.”[114]He means cotton. There were several million bales of it in the confederacy, all of which could be had for the taking—much of it for merely the asking. And there were a legion of carriers eager to run the blockade. I cannot understand how Professor Brown could have ever written, “The government had not the means either to buy the cotton or to transport it.”[115]Surely the government could have seized the cotton as easily as it did all the men of military age, and collected the tithes in kind.
If Toombs had been president of the southern confederacy, the very best possible use of its cotton as a resource would have been made. At the time, if but managed with the financial skill which he always showed, that cotton would have been a great war chest in a secure place, always full and appreciating. It is very probable that almost at the beginning of the war the confederacy would have struck terror into its adversaries with some warships far superior to any with which the United States could have then supplied itself. In this case there never would have been any Monitor. And the south would have had all the benefits of wise husbandry and conduct.
During his short premiership of the confederacy Toombs showed marked ability. Note his extraordinary insight when instructing the commissioners, that “So long as the United States neither declares war nor establishes peace, the Confederate States have the advantage of both conditions;” and consider how accurately he foresaw that the north would be rallied as one man to the stars and stripes by attack upon Fort Sumter, and how earnestly he opposed the proposed attack.[116]
Stephens was thoroughly against the policy of many pitched battles. He counselled from the very first that we should draw the invaders within our territory, where, having them far from their base and taking advantage of our shorter interior lines, we could when the right moment came, by attacking with superior numbers, virtually destroy their entire army. The more I think over it, the more clearly I see that this was the true way for us to have fought. Stephens’s influence would have been so great with Toombs or Cobb as president that he would have shaped the conduct of the war.
There would have been no keeping of inefficient men in high command; and no efficient one would have been kept out. Mr. Lincoln would have had an executive rival worthy of his steel. As the former searched diligently and with rare judgment for his commander-in-chief and at last found him in Grant, so Toombs would in all probability have found the proper southern general in the west. It would have been Forrest. The marvellous military genius of this illiterate man, who at the beginning of the war could not have put a recruit through the manual of arms, showed him far superior to his superiors who sacrificed the southern army at FortDonelson. The lieutenant-colonel would not surrender, and his escape with his entire command proved that he could have executed the offer he had made to the commander to pilot the whole army out. From this moment Forrest moves on and upward with the stride of a demigod. The night after Johnston has fallen at Shiloh he alone in the southern army discovers that Grant is receiving by the river thousands as re-enforcement, and he gives Beauregard wise counsel which the latter is not wise enough to heed. Read his letter of August 9, 1863, to Cooper, adjutant-general of the Confederate States,[117]in which he proposes to do what will virtually wrest the Mississippi from the federals, and the sane comment thereon of his biographer.[118]Think of him just after the battle of Chickamauga; how, had Bragg listened to him, he would have reaped the fruits of a great victory which he was too stupid to know he had won. Meditate the capture of Fort Pillow, in spite of its strong defences and the succoring gunboat, by dispositions of his troops and a plan of attack which, though made and executed on the spur of the moment, are the most superb and brilliant tactics of all the engagements of the brothers’ war. And his incomparable conduct by which the army of Sturgis was almost annihilated at Brice’s Cross-Roads. The conception of Forrest is as yet, even in the south, very untrue. He is thought of only as always meeting charge with countercharge, in the very front crying “Mix!” sabring an antagonist, and having his horse killed under him. When he is rightly studied he is found to be a happy compound of the characterizing elements of such fighters as mad Anthony Wayne and Paul Jones, of such swoopers and sure retirers as Marion and Stonewall Jackson, of such asHannibal, whose action both before, during, and after the engagement, is the very best possible. Of all the northern generals Grant showed by far the best grasp of the military problem. I think Forrest’s grasp was equal. Toombs would have divined the genius of Forrest. The confederate army under him would probably have equalled—possibly surpassed—the achievements and glory of that under Lee.
It was one of Toombs’s epigrams that the southern confederacy died of too much West Point. Of course one must not unjustly disparage the military school. Yet there were plainly graduates on both sides who had in them too much of it. This was true of Halleck and McClellan; also of Davis and Bragg. Mr. Davis, by reason of his exaggerated West Point spirit, was not nearly so well qualified as Mr. Lincoln for finding the few real generals in the south. Toombs, with the help of Stephens and all the real statesmen of the section, would have kept the best generals in command.