The Brothers' War Part 11

"Ring! O bells!

Every stroke exulting tells Of the burial hour of crime."

What does he mean is the crime? Why, the delivering of certain Africans and their descendants from lowest human degradation and misery, and blessing them with opportunity and help to rise far upward? Had he seen, as we do now, forty years later, instead of pouring out this wild and mad delight, he would have dropped scalding tears over the "burial hour" of all that promised anything of welfare to those for whom he had labored so long and faithfully. And in the last stanza his command that

"With a sound of broken chains"

the nations be told

"that He reigns, Who alone is Lord and G.o.d!"

The poet misunderstood the "broken chains" as greatly as he did the "burial hour." Chains were broken, but their breaking was no blessing to the negro. Golden chains of domestic ties, drawing him gently, kindly, surely up to higher morality and complete manhood--these were broken; and far other were forged for him, with which fear he has been made fast to destruction. His only friends able to help alienated; what a clog! Given back to African improgressiveness; what a fetter! How he is held to the body of death by unbreakable chains of want, misery, vice, disease, and utter helplessness! and how his shackles gall him and his convict chains clank in every corner of the land which was once an earthly paradise to him!

Let us not sully with Whittier the glory of the federal arms by ascribing to them as their chief triumph the gift of illusory freedom to a few negroes. Rather let us inform ourselves with the spirit of Webster, and give praise and thanks without end for the actual blessings and the richer promise of the restored union to myriads of that race whose mission it is to spread an inexpressibly fair socialism over all the earth.

And let me say at the last, the people of the north should learn that all the tragic evils which Professor Wendell and others outside of the south have in mind belong only to the slave-s.h.i.+ps, and by a strange psychological metastasis--no stranger, however, than that by which the fourth commandment, in popular conception, has been abrogated as to the seventh day, and applied to the first day of the week--they have firmly attached themselves to the reputation of southern slavery. For long years we of the south, our mothers and our mothers' mothers, our fathers and our fathers' fathers, have been charged with cruelties and outrages purely fancied. These fabrications are the stock comparisons with which almost every invective against the wrongs of any lower cla.s.s is sharpened. The writer or speaker whenever he is taken short says something of the dreadful condition of the southern slave under the sway of an entirely absolute master. Variety of the misdeeds invoked as ill.u.s.tration is limited only by the promptness with which the utterer can think of what he has read in abolition literature or its sequel. It is all mere parrot gabble. To hear so much of it as we do is "a little wearing," as Reginald Wilfer said. Surely if our brothers and sisters of the north but think, they will acknowledge that these so-called horrors of slavery were all nothing but the inventions of the angry pa.s.sions provoked by the powers in the unseen after they had decided that slavery must be sacrificed in the interests of the union. And these dear brothers and sisters will no longer persist in a.s.serting that southern slavery was but robbery and oppression of and cruelty to the slave; that the system was evil to him of itself.

They will talk no more of the pro-slavery infamy, of the unscrupulousness and perfidy of the slave power, and all such false twaddle, that can now serve no purpose whatever except to offend good men and women and their children without cause.

CHAPTER X

SLAVERY AT LAST IMPELLED INTO A DEFENSIVE AGGRESSIVE

Until the crisis of 1850, slavery had never changed from purely defensive tactics. This year made it seem that the north had fully resolved that slavery should never be allowed another inch of new territory; and also was very near, and was rapidly coming nearer to, the point of practically preventing the enforcement of the fugitive slave law. We have explained how slave property could not live unless it found new virgin soil in the Territories; and we have also explained what a deadly blow it would receive, in the refusal to restore fugitives. This refusal would be really indirect abolition. Read the masterly sketch by Calhoun, in his speech March 4, 1850, of the conquering advance of the anti-slavery party, until now--to use his language--"the equilibrium between the two sections ...

had been destroyed;" and he demonstrates that the actual exercise of the entire national political power must soon be in the hands of the free-labor section. The south instinctively felt that the time for her old tactics was over, and that she must do more than merely fend off the blows of abolition. And, as we will tell in the next chapter, she found her new leader in Toombs. Nullification as advocated by Calhoun was the extreme energy of the pure defensive of the south. His proposed dual executive amendment was merely that nullification be made a right granted to the federal government instead of remaining one reserved to the States.

Toombs had grown up in the school of William H. Crawford. George R.

Gilmer, a follower of Crawford, tells of the latter: "He was violently opposed to the nullification movement, considering it but an ebullition excited by Mr. Calhoun's overleaping, ambition."[96]

Toombs scouted nullification. Under his lead his State, in 1850, adopted the Georgia Platform quoted above. This platform was considerate and resolute preparation for the southern offensive.

Next the south a.s.sumes initiative. Extension of slave-territory is so great an economical _sine qua non_ that she attacks its barriers. Using her control of the then dominant democratic party she got the Missouri compromise repealed. Her main purpose in this was to wrench from the anti-slavery men the weapon of congressional restriction, then deemed by them the most powerful of all in their armory. She also contemplated extorting a concession of all lands in the Territories which could be profitably cultivated by slaves from the north, alarmed into apprehending that otherwise slavery might be carried above 36.30'.

This repeal did more than anything else--more even than "Uncle Tom's Cabin"--to arouse the north into mortal combat with slavery. The historian cannot understand why the south procured it, if he ignores that energy of southern nationalization which we have done our utmost to explain. This nationalization had got into what we may call the last rapids, and was bound to go over the precipice into the gulf of secession.

The bootless struggle by the south against overwhelming odds of northern settlers to make Kansas a slave State was the sequel to the repeal of the Missouri compromise. When the South understood that Kansas was really gone, she advanced her forlorn hope in her endeavor to secure slavery in the union. The essence of the compromise measures of 1850 was that the demand of congressional non-interference with slavery in the States and Territories, made by the south, was declared adopted as future policy. As the forlorn hope just mentioned she now made the demand that the owner's property in his slaves, if he should carry them into a Territory, should be protected by congress until its people had made the const.i.tution under which the Territory would be admitted into the union. Her adherence to this demand split the democratic party; and the election of Lincoln ensued. This election meant that slavery--the property supporting more than nine-tenths of the southern people, and which was virtually their entire economic system--was put under a ban. There was nothing for it but depreciation in the near future; soon more and more depreciation; until after prolonged stagnation and paralysis the value of all her property would collapse as did that of the continental currency. That was the way it looked to her. We believe that the facts show that her conviction was right. She felt with her whole soul that the time had come to invoke State sovereignty. So she seceded, with intent to save the property of her people and maintain their domestic peace. Of course she purposed an equitable apportionment of the public domain between herself and the north under which she would get the small part that suited slave agriculture.

The circ.u.mstances constrained the south throughout every part and parcel of her offensive as powerfully as exhaustion of his supplies constrains the commander of a garrison to a sortie upon what he has reason to believe is the weakest point of the circ.u.mvallation. She was hypnotized by the powers. They made her believe that she was always doing the right thing to protect slavery when they were having her to do that only which a.s.sured its destruction. She was all the while as conscientious as the mother who, afraid of drafts, keeps the needed fresh air from her consumptive child and thereby kills him.

We recognize the resistless play of the cosmic forces upon the sun, moon, and stars; upon our earth; in the yearly round of the seasons; in the ocean tides; in storms and heated terms; in vegetation; and in things innumerable taken note of by the senses. But this is not all of their empire. They sway individuals, communities, peoples, nations, making the latter even believe that they are having their own way when in fact they are most servilely doing the will of the powers.

CHAPTER XI

TOOMBS

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

Contemporaries following Sulla, named Pompey, not Julius Caesar, The Great.

Similarly Toombs, as an actor in the intersectional arena, is as yet dwarfed from comparison with the really great but not greater Calhoun.

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

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

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

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

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

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

In the congressional session of 1849-50 Toombs had made his Hamilcar speech, to be told of fully after a while. In this he avowed his preference of disunion to exclusion of the south from the Territories so positively and strongly that the ultra southern rights men hailed him as their champion. But soon afterwards, with the great majority of the people of the State, he took his stand upon the compromise of 1850 and the Georgia Platform quoted above. This was really on his part a recession from the extreme ground he had taken in the speech. In 1851, a coalition of the whigs and democrats of Georgia nominated Howell Cobb, a democrat, for governor, and Toombs, then a whig, canva.s.sed for him with great zeal.

He had an appointment to speak, in Oglethorpe county, at Lexington, the county seat. There were quite a number of ardent southern rights men in the county, who held that the admission of California, really in southern lat.i.tude, with its anti-slavery const.i.tution, called for far more decided action on the part of the south than was counselled in the Compromise and Georgia Platform. Hating Toombs, whom they regarded as a renegade, they plotted to humiliate him when he came to Lexington. As he never shrank from discussion they easily got his consent to divide time with--as the phrase goes--a canva.s.ser for McDonald, their candidate for governor.

Toombs was to consume a stated time in opening the stump debate; then the other was to be allowed a stated time; after which Toombs had a reply of twenty minutes--these were the terms. In opening, Toombs, as was natural, stressed the compromise measures and set forth the advantages of preserving the union; and he fiercely inveighed against the men who could not be satisfied with the Georgia Platform, embraced as it had been by a great majority of all parties, denouncing them as disunionists. The other disputant took the Hamilcar speech of Toombs, made just the year before, as his text. Deliberately, accurately, systematically he unfolded the doctrine of that speech, and he did the same for the speech just made, and contrasting the two, he put them into glaring inconsistency. Southern rights stock rose and union stock sunk rapidly as the comparison went on.

In his peroration the speaker commented upon Toombs's tergiversation with such effective severity it elicited wild applause from the men of his side. They had pushed themselves to the front. Toombs rose to reply. In their riotous rejoicing over the great hit of their speaker, they forgot the proprieties of the occasion; forgot that it was Toombs's meeting, as was said in common parlance; and they rapped on the floor with canes, and even clubs provided for the nonce, howled, and made all kinds of noises to drown his voice. Unabashed he looked upon them, smiling that grandest and blandest of smiles. As the foremost of these roysterers told me long afterwards, his self-possession excited their curiosity. They wanted to hear if he could say anything to get out of the trap in which they had so cleverly caught him; and they became still. "It seems to me," he commenced, "that men like you meditating a great revolution ought first to learn good manners." At this condign rebuke of behavior which, according to stump usage, was as uncivil and impolite as if it had been shown Toombs in his own house by guests accepting his hospitality, spontaneous cheers from the union men, who were in very large majority, appeared to raise the roof. In his highest and readiest style--for mob opposition always lifted him at once into that--he reminded his hearers that their whole duty was to decide whether they would approve the compromise and the Georgia Platform or not; and that to discuss whether what he had spoken last year before these measures were even thought of, was right or wrong, was to subst.i.tute for a transcendently important public question a little personal one of no concern to them whatever. "If there is anything in my Hamilcar speech that cannot be reconciled with the measures which I have supported here to-day with reasons which my opponent confesses by his silence he cannot answer, I repudiate it. If the gentleman takes up my abandoned errors, let him defend them."

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

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

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

Robert Toombs was born July 2, 1810, on his father's plantation in Wilkes county, Georgia. He went to school at Was.h.i.+ngton, the county seat; then to the State university; which having left, he finished his collegiate course at Union. Next he spent a year at the law school of Virginia university.

He never was a bookworm. His habitual quotations during the last fifteen years of his life--when I was much with him--betrayed a smattering of the Roman authors commonly read at school, a much greater knowledge of the Latin quoted by Blackstone and that of the current law maxims, and considerable familiarity with "Paradise Lost," "Macbeth," and the Falstaff parts of "King Henry IV.," and "Merry Wives," Don Quixote, Burns, and the bible. But this man, whose diction and phrases were the wors.h.i.+p of the street and the despair of the cultured, had no deep acquaintance with any literature. Erskine got the staple of his English from a long and fond study of Shakspeare and Milton; but Toombs must have drawn his only from the fountains whence Tom, d.i.c.k, Harry, and Mariah get theirs, and then purified and refined it by a secret process that n.o.body else knew of,--not even himself, as I believe. If he had only corrected after utterance as a.s.siduously as Erskine did, of the two his diction would be much the finer.

The year before he came of age he was admitted to the bar by legislative act. In the same year he married his true mate and settled at Was.h.i.+ngton.

For four years the famous William H. Crawford was the judge of the circuit. Toombs was born into the Crawford faction, and the judge who, as there was no supreme court then, was law autocrat of his circuit, gave him favor from the first. The courts were full of lucrative business. The old dockets show that in five years Toombs was getting his full share in his own county and the adjoining ones. The diligent attention that he gave every detail of preparation of his cases, had, in a year or two after his call, made him first choice of every eminent lawyer for junior. One of these was Cone, a native of Connecticut, who had received a good education both literary and professional, before he came south. Toombs, who had known the great American lawyers of his time, always said after his death in 1859 that Cone was the best of all. Lumpkin used to tell that during a visit to England he haunted the courts, but he never found a single counsel who spoke to a law point as luminously and convincingly as Cone.

Another one of these was Lumpkin. He is, I believe, the most eloquent man that Georgia ever produced. He had some tincture of letters; but he was without Choate's pre-eminent self-culture and daily drafts of inspiration from the immortal fountains. A. H. Stephens admired Choate greatly. He heard the latter's reply to Buchanan. Often, at Liberty Hall--as Stephens called his residence--he would repeat with gusto the pa.s.sage in which Choate roasts Buchanan for his inculcation of hate to England. Stephens contended that if all that education and art had done for each--Choate and Lumpkin--could have been removed, a comparison would, as he believed, show Lumpkin to be the stronger advocate by nature.

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

Let us now take an inventory of him as he is about to enter congress. He is the best lawyer in the State, except Cone, and fully his equal; while as a speaker he did not have Lumpkin's marvellous suasion of common men, yet with them he was almost the next, and he was far greater than Lumpkin in quelling the mob, convincing the honest judge that his law was right, and convincing also the better men of the jury and citizens present that the principles of justice involved in the issue of facts were to be applied as he claimed; he had acquired enough of property to be considered rich in that day, although he had always lived liberally; his legislative and political career had convinced the people that he was incomparably the best and ablest man of the district for their representative. It is to be especially emphasized that he had practical talent of the highest order.