Robert Toombs Part 3

Mr. Toombs did not accept President Polk's position. His first speech in the House was made January 12, 1846, and at once placed him in the front rank of orators and statesmen. He said that it was not clear to him that our t.i.tle was exceptional up to 5440'. Our claim to the territory north of the Columbia River was the Spanish t.i.tle only, and this had been an inchoate right.

Mr. Toombs wanted the question settled by reason. He impetuously declared that "neither the clamors within nor without this hall, nor the ten thousand British cannon, floating on every s.h.i.+p, or mounted on every island, shall influence my decision in a question like this." He was for peace--for honorable peace. "It is the mother of all the virtues and hopes of mankind." No man would go further than he to obtain honorable peace; but dishonorable peace was worse than war--it was the worst of all evil.

War was the greatest and the most horrible of calamities. Even a war for liberty itself was rarely compensated by the consequences. "Yet the common judgment of mankind consigned to lasting infamy the people who would surrender their rights and freedom for the sake of a dishonest peace."

"Let us," cried the speaker, turning to his Southern colleagues, "let us repress any unworthy sectional feeling which looks only to the attainment of sectional power."

His conclusion was an apotheosis of Georgia as a Union State. He said: "Mr. Speaker, Georgia wants peace, but she would not for the sake of peace yield any of her own or the nation's rights. A new career of prosperity is now before her; new prospects, bright and fair, open to her vision and lie ready for her grasp, and she fully appreciates her position. She has at length begun to avail herself of her advantages by forming a great commercial line between the Atlantic and the West. She is embarking in enterprises of intense importance, and is beginning to provide manufactures for her unpaid laborers. She sees nothing but prosperity ahead, and peace is necessary in order to reveal it; but still, if war must come, if it has been decreed that Oregon must be consecrated to liberty in the blood of the brave and the sufferings of the free, Georgia will be found ready with her share of the offering, and, whatever may be her sacrifice, she will display a magnanimity as great as the occasion and as prolonged as the conflict."

Mr. Toombs indorsed the conservative action of the Senate, which forced President Polk from his extreme position and established the parallel of 49 as the northern boundary.

The tariff bill of 1846 was framed, as President Polk expressed it, in the interest of lower duties, and it changed the basis of a.s.sessment from specific, or minimum duties, to duties _ad valorem_.

Mr. Toombs made a most elaborate speech against this bill in July, 1846.

If his Oregon speech had shown thorough familiarity with the force and effect of treaties and the laws of nations, his tariff speech proved him a student of fiscal matters and a master of finance. His genius, as Jefferson Davis afterward remarked, lay decidedly in this direction. Mr.

Toombs announced in his tariff speech that the best of laws, especially tax laws, were but approximations of human justice. He entered into an elaborate argument to controvert the idea that low tariff meant increased revenue. The history of such legislation, he contended, had been that the highest tariff had raised the most money. Mr. Toombs combated the _ad valorem_ principle of levying duty upon imports.

Mr. Toombs declared to his const.i.tuents in September, 1846, that the President had marched his army into Mexico without authority of law.

"The conquest and dismemberment of Mexico, however brilliant may be the success of our arms," said he, "will not redound to the glory of our republic."

The Whigs approached the Presidential campaign of 1848 with every chance of success. They still hoped that the Sage of Ashland might be the nominee. George W. Crawford, ex-Governor of Georgia, and afterward member of the Taylor Cabinet, perceiving that the drift in the West was against Mr. Clay, offered a resolution in the Whig convention that "whatever may have been our personal preferences, we feel that in yielding them at the present time, we are only pursuing Mr. Clay's own ill.u.s.trious example." Mr. Toombs stated to his const.i.tuents that Clay could not be nominated because Ohio had declared that no man who had opposed the Wilmot Proviso could get the vote of that State. The Whigs, who had opposed the Mexican war, now reaped its benefits by nominating one of its heroes to the Presidency, and Zachary Taylor of Louisiana became at once a popular candidate. Millard Fillmore of New York was named for vice president, and "Rough and Ready" clubs were soon organized in every part of Georgia. The venerable William H. Crawford headed the Whig electoral ticket in Georgia, while Toombs, Stephens, and Thomas W. Thomas led the campaign.

The issue of the campaign in Georgia was the Clayton compromise which the Georgia senators had sustained, but which Stephens and Toombs had defeated in the House. This compromise proposed that all questions concerning slavery in the governments of the ceded territory be referred to the Supreme Court of the United States. Mr. Toombs declared that the Mexican law prohibiting slavery was still valid and would so remain; that Congress and not the courts must change this law.

The Clayton compromise, Mr. Toombs said, was only intended as "the Euthanasia of States' Rights. When our rights are clear, security for them should be free from all ambiguity. We ought never to surrender territory, until it shall be wrested from us as we have wrested it from Mexico. Such a surrender would degrade and demoralize our section and disable us for effective resistance against future aggression. It is far better that this new acquisition should be the grave of the republic than of the rights and honor of the South--and, from present indications, to this complexion it must come at last."

Mr. Toombs demanded that what was recognized by law as property in the slaveholding States should be recognized in the Mexican territory. "This boon," he pleaded, "may be worthless, but its surrender involves our honor. We can permit no discrimination against our section or our inst.i.tutions in dividing out the common property of the republic. Their rights are not to be abandoned, or bartered away in presidential elections."

So Toombs and Stephens were central figures in this national campaign.

It was during this canva.s.s that Mr. Stephens became embroiled with Judge Francis H. Cone, a prominent lawyer of Georgia and a near neighbor. Mr.

Stephens heard that Judge Cone had denounced him as a traitor for moving to table the Clayton compromise. Stephens had retorted sharply that if Cone had said this he would slap his face. After some correspondence the two men met in Atlanta, September 4, 1848. The trouble was renewed; Judge Cone denounced Mr. Stephens, who rapped him over the shoulders with a whalebone cane. Mr. Stephens was a fragile man, and Judge Cone, with strong physique, closed in and forced him to the floor. During the scuffle Mr. Stephens was cut in six places. His life for a while was despaired of. Upon his recovery he was received with wild enthusiasm by the Whigs, who cheered his pluck and regarded his return to the canva.s.s as an omen of victory.

Shortly afterward he wrote to Mrs. Toombs, thanking her for her interest and solicitude during his illness. He managed to write with his left hand, as he could not use his right. "I hope," he says, "I will be able to take the stump again next week for old Zach. I think Mr. Toombs has had the weight of the canva.s.s long enough, and though he has done gallant service, this but inspires me with the wish to lend all aid in my power. I think we shall yet be able to save the State. My faith is as strong as Mr. Preston's which, you know, was enough to move mountains. I got a letter the other day from Mr. C----, who gives it as his opinion that Ohio would go for General Taylor. If so, he will be elected. And you know how I shall hail such a result."

During Mr. Stephens' illness Mr. Toombs canva.s.sed many of the counties in the Stephens district. Both men were reelected to Congress, and Zachary Taylor received the electoral vote of Georgia over Lewis Ca.s.s of Michigan, and was elected President of the United States.

The Democrats, who put out a candidate this year against Mr. Toombs, issued an address which was evidently not inspired by the able and deserving gentleman who bore their standard, but was intended as a sharp rebuke to Mr. Toombs. It is interesting as showing how he was regarded by his friends, the enemy.

"Of an age when life's illusions have vanished," they said of the Democratic candidate, "he has no selfish aspirations, no vaulting ambition to carry him astray: no vanity to lead where it is glory enough to follow." They accorded to Mr. Toombs "a very showy cast of talent--better suited to the displays of the stump than the grave discussions of the legislative hall. His eloquence has that sort of splendor mixed with the false and true which is calculated to dazzle the mult.i.tude. He would rather win the applause of groundlings by some silly tale than gain the intelligent by the most triumphant course of reasoning." Mr. Toombs carried every county in the district and was returned to Congress by 1681 majority.

When Mr. Toombs returned to Was.h.i.+ngton he had commanded national prominence. He had not only carried his State for Zachary Taylor, but his speech in New York, during a critical period of the canva.s.s, had turned the tide for the Whig candidate in the country. Toombs and Stephens naturally stood very near the administration. They soon had reason to see, however, that the Taylor Cabinet was not attentive to Southern counsels.

During the fight over the compromise measure in Congress the Northern papers printed sensational accounts of a rupture between President Taylor and Messrs. Toombs and Stephens. According to this account the Georgia congressmen called on the President and expressed strong disapprobation of his stand upon the bill to organize the Territory of New Mexico. It was said that they even threatened to side with his opponents to censure him upon his action in the case of Secretary Crawford and the Golphin claim. The President, the article recited, was very much troubled over this interview and remained despondent for several days. He took his bed and never rallied, dying on the 9th of July, 1850. Mr. Stephens published a card, promptly denying this sensation. He said that neither he nor his colleague Mr. Toombs had visited the President at all during or previous to his last illness, and that no such scene had occurred.

Toombs and Stephens, in fact, were warm personal friends of George W.

Crawford, who was Secretary of War in Taylor's Cabinet. He had served with them in the General a.s.sembly of Georgia and had twice been Governor of their State. The Golphin claim, of which Governor Crawford had been agent, had been collected from the Secretary of the Treasury while Governor Crawford was in the Cabinet, but President Taylor had decided that as Governor Crawford was at the head of an entirely different department of the government, he had been guilty of no impropriety.

After the death of President Taylor, Governor Crawford returned to Augusta and was tendered a public dinner by his fellow-citizens, irrespective of party. He delivered an eloquent and feeling address. He made an extensive tour abroad, then lived in retirement in Richmond County, enjoying the respect and confidence of his neighbors.

CHAPTER VI.

THE COMPROMISE OF 1850.

No legislative body ever a.s.sembled with more momentous measures before it than the thirty-first Congress of the United States. An immense area of unsettled public domain had been wrested from Mexico. The Territories of California, Utah, and New Mexico, amounting to several hundred thousand square miles, remained undisposed of. They comprised what Mr.

Calhoun had termed the "Forbidden Fruit," and the trouble which beclouded their annexation threatened to surpa.s.s the storms of conquest.

Congress felt that it was absolutely without light to guide it. It had declined to extend the Missouri Compromise line to the Pacific Ocean.

Henry Clay had p.r.o.nounced such division of public domain between the sections a "Utopian dream," and Zachary Taylor had condemned the principle in the only message he ever delivered to Congress. What Mr.

Lincoln afterward embodied in his famous expression that the Union could never exist "half slave, half free," had been actually antic.i.p.ated. The whole territorial question came up as a new problem. But if the crisis was now momentous the body of statesmen which considered it was a great one. The men and the hour seemed to meet in that supreme moment. The Senate consisted of sixty members, and for the last time that great trio of Clay, Calhoun, and Webster met upon its floor. Commencing their careers a generation before; with eventful lives and ill.u.s.trious performance, they lingered one moment in this arena before pa.s.sing forever from the scenes of their earthly efforts. All three had given up ambition for the Presidency, none of them had commenced to break in mental power, and each one was animated by patriotism to serve and save his country. William H. Seward had entered the Senate from New York; James M. Mason and Robert M. T. Hunter represented Virginia; Wm. C.

Dawson had joined Mr. Berrien from Georgia; Salmon P. Chase appeared from Ohio; Jefferson Davis and Henry S. Foote ill.u.s.trated Mississippi; Stephen A. Douglas had been promoted from the House in Illinois, and Samuel Houston was there from Texas. The House was unusually strong and divided with the Senate the stormy scenes and surpa.s.sing struggles over the compromise measures of 1850. It was the time of breaking up of party lines, and many believed that the hour of disunion had arrived.

The Whig caucus, which a.s.sembled to nominate a candidate for Speaker of the House, sustained a serious split. Robert Toombs offered a resolution that Congress should place no restriction upon slavery in the Territories. The Northern Whigs scouted the idea and Toombs led the Southern members out of the meeting. The organization of the House was delayed three weeks, and finally, under a plurality resolution, the Democrats elected Howell Cobb of Georgia Speaker over Robert C. Winthrop of Ma.s.sachusetts. In the midst of these stormy scenes Mr. Toombs forced the fighting. He declared with impetuous manner that he believed the interests of his people were in danger and he was unwilling to surrender the great power of the Speaker's chair without security for the future.

"It seems," he said, "that we are to be intimidated by eulogies of the Union and denunciations of those who are not ready to sacrifice national honor, essential interests, and const.i.tutional rights upon its altar.

Sir, I have as much attachment to the Union of these States, under the Const.i.tution 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 expression of those who did not understand or desired to misrepresent my conduct or opinions in relation to these questions, which, in my judgment, so vitally affect it. The time has come when I shall not only utter them, but make them the basis of my political actions here. I do not then hesitate to avow before this House and the country, and in the presence of the living G.o.d, that if by your legislation you seek to drive us from the Territories purchased by the common blood and treasure of the people, and to abolish slavery in the District, thereby attempting to fix a national degradation upon half 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.

"Give me securities that the power of organization which you seek will not be used to the injury of my const.i.tuents; then you can have my cooperation, but not till then. Grant them, and you prevent the disgraceful scenes of the last twenty-four hours and restore tranquillity to the country. Refuse them, and, as far as I am concerned, let discord reign forever."

This speech fell like a clap of thunder. The Wilmot Proviso waved like a black flag over the heads of Southern men. No one had spoken outright until Mr. Toombs in his bold, das.h.i.+ng, Mirabeau style accepted the issue in the words just given. The House was filled with storms of applause and jeers, and, as can be imagined, Mr. Toombs' speech did not soothe the bitterness or alter the determination of either side.

On the 22d of December a conference was held by Whigs and Democrats, the Southern Whigs excepted, and a resolution reported that the person receiving the largest number of votes for Speaker, on a certain ballot, should be declared elected, provided this number should be the majority of a quorum, but not a majority of the House. Mr. Stanton of Tennessee offered this "plurality resolution."

Mr. Toombs sprang to his feet and declared that the House, until it organized, could not pa.s.s this or any other rule.

Members stood up and called Mr. Toombs to order, claiming that there was already a question pending. Mr. Stanton contended that he had the floor.

Toombs called out: "You may cry 'order,' gentlemen, until the heavens fall; you cannot take this place from me. I have the right to protest against this transaction. It is not with you to say whether this right shall be yielded or when it shall be yielded."

Mr. Stevens of Pennsylvania: "I call the gentleman to order."

Mr. Toombs: "I say that by the law of 1789 this House, until a Speaker is elected and gentlemen have taken the oath of office, has no right to adopt any rules whatever."

(Loud cries of "order.")

Mr. Toombs: "Gentlemen may amuse themselves crying 'order.'"

(Calls of "order.")

Mr. Toombs: "But I have the right and I intend to maintain the right to----"

Mr. Vand.y.k.e called upon the clerk to put the preceding question. "Let us see," he said, "whether the gentleman will disregard the order of this House."

Mr. Toombs: "I have the floor, and the clerk cannot put the question."

"The House," he said, "has no right. Gentlemen may cry 'order' and interrupt me. It is mere brute force, attempting by the power of lungs to put me down."