Robert Toombs was born July 2, 1810, on his father’s plantation in Wilkes county, Georgia. He went to school at Washington, the county seat; then to the State university; which having left, he finished his collegiate course at Union. Next he spent a year at the law school of Virginia university. He never was a bookworm. His habitual quotations during the last fifteen years of his life—when I was much with him—betrayed a smattering of the Roman authors commonly read at school, a much greater knowledge of the Latin quoted by Blackstone and that of the current law maxims, and considerable familiarity with “Paradise Lost,” “Macbeth,” and the Falstaff parts of “King Henry IV.,” and “Merry Wives,” Don Quixote, Burns, and the bible. But this man, whose diction and phrases were the worship of the street and the despair of the cultured, had no deep acquaintance with any literature. Erskine got the staple of his English from a long and fond study of Shakspeare and Milton; but Toombs must have drawn his only from the fountains whence Tom, Dick, Harry, and Mariah get theirs, and then purified and refined it by a secret process that nobody else knew of,—not even himself, as I believe. If he had only corrected after utterance as assiduously as Erskine did, of the two his diction would be much the finer.
The year before he came of age he was admitted to the bar by legislative act. In the same year he married his true mate and settled at Washington. For four years the famous William H. Crawford was the judge of the circuit. Toombs was born into the Crawford faction, and the judge who, as there was no supreme court then, was law autocrat of his circuit, gave him favor from the first. The courts were full of lucrative business. The old dockets show that in five years Toombs was getting his full share in his own county and the adjoining ones. The diligent attention that he gave every detail of preparation of his cases, had, in a year or two after his call, made him first choice of every eminent lawyer for junior. One of these was Cone, a native of Connecticut, who had received a good education both literary and professional, before he came south. Toombs, who had known the great American lawyers of his time, always said after his death in 1859 that Cone was the best of all. Lumpkin used to tell that during a visit to England he haunted the courts, but he never found a single counsel who spoke to a law point as luminously and convincingly as Cone. Another one of these was Lumpkin. He is, I believe, the most eloquent man that Georgia ever produced. He had some tincture of letters; but he was without Choate’s pre-eminent self-culture and daily drafts of inspiration from the immortal fountains. A. H. Stephens admired Choate greatly. He heard the latter’s reply to Buchanan. Often, at Liberty Hall—as Stephens called his residence—he would repeat with gusto the passage in which Choate roasts Buchanan for his inculcation of hate to England. Stephens contended that if all that education and art had done for each—Choate and Lumpkin—could have been removed, a comparison would, as he believed, show Lumpkin to be the stronger advocate by nature.
These three—Cone, Lumpkin, and Toombs—were often on the same side. But whether Toombs had them as associates or as adversaries, they were always in these early years of his at the bar, in his eye. With the unremitted attentiveness of what we may call his subconscious observation, and a receptivity always active and greedy, he seems to have soon appropriated all of Cone’s law and all of Lumpkin’s advocacy—that is, he had, as he did with the speech and language heard by him every day, transmuted them into the rare and precious staple peculiar to his own sui generis self.
In his first forensic arguments his rapid utterance was as indistinct as if he had mush in his mouth, old men have told me. But after a year or two of practice he developed both power and attractiveness. In due time when Cone or Lumpkin were with him, he would be pushed forward, young as he was, into some important place in court conduct. I myself heard Lumpkin tell that the greatest forensic eloquence he had ever heard was a rebuke by Toombs—then some twenty-seven years old—of the zeal with which the public urged on the prosecution of one of their clients on trial for murder. The junior—the evidence closed—was making the first speech for the defence. As he went on in a strong argument, the positiveness with which he denied all merit to the case for the State, angered the spectators outside of the bar, and a palpable demonstration of dissent came from some of them, which the presiding judge did not check as he ought to have done. Toombs strode at once to the edge of the bar, only a railing some four feet high separating him from these angry men, and chastised them as they merited. His invective culminated in denouncing them as bloodhounds eager to slake their accursed thirst in innocent blood. These misguided ones were brought back to proper behavior, and with them admiration of the fearless and eloquent advocate displaced their hostility, and carried upon an invisible wave an influence in favor of the accused over the entire community, and even into the jury box. And the narrator, who was one of Toombs’s greatest admirers, told with fond recollection how the popular billows were laid by the speech of his junior, and how he himself took heart and found the way to an acquittal which he feared he had lost.
This affair is illustrative of Toombs in two respects. In the first place it shows his extempore faculty and presence of mind. I have seen him so often in sudden emergencies do exactly the thing that subsequent reflection pronounced the best, that I believe had he been in Napoleon’s place when the Red Sea tide suddenly spread around, he would have escaped in the same way, or in a better one. I do not believe that this can be said of any one else of the past or present. In the second place it is one of the many proofs extant that he could always vanquish the mob.
He divined what offered cases are unmaintainable more quickly, and declined them more resolutely than any one I ever knew. So free was he from illusion that he could not contend against plain infeasibility. It was impossible for clients, witnesses, or juniors to blind him to the actual chances. For ten years or more, commencing with 1867, I observed him in many nisi prius trials, and I noted how unfrequently, as compared with others, he had either got wrong as to his own side or misanticipated the other. But now and then it would develop that the merits were decidedly against him. He would at once, according to circumstances, propose a compromise, frankly surrender, or, if it appeared very weak, toss the case away as if it was something unclean. When he had thus failed, his air of unconcern and majesty reminded of how the lion is said to stalk back to his place of hiding when the prey has eluded his spring.
Stephens came to the bar some four years after Toombs did, and settled in an adjoining county. I need merely allude to their long and beautiful friendship, full details of which are to be found in the biographies of the former. I merely emphasize the importance of Stephens’s help to Toombs’s development in his early politics. The former got to congress two years before he did. Toombs evidently relied greatly upon the sagacity with which the other divined how a new question would take with the masses. On his return from a brief and bloodless service in the Creek war as captain of a company of volunteers, Toombs commenced a State legislative career, which Mr. Stovall has creditably told.[97] I can stop only to say it was honorable, and contributed greatly to his political education.
When Toombs was at the Virginia law school, he heard some of Randolph’s stump speeches; and for a few years afterwards he often vouched passages from them as authority. Stephens would tell this; and then with affectionate mischief tell further that his friend, before he had finished in the Georgia legislature, had ceased entirely to support his contentions with anything else than his own reasons.
Before he got to Congress, he had made reputation at the hustings. In 1840 he crossed the Savannah, and meeting the veteran McDuffie in stump debate is reported to have come off with the high opinion of all hearers, including his adversary.
Let us now take an inventory of him as he is about to enter congress. He is the best lawyer in the State, except Cone, and fully his equal; while as a speaker he did not have Lumpkin’s marvellous suasion of common men, yet with them he was almost the next, and he was far greater than Lumpkin in quelling the mob, convincing the honest judge that his law was right, and convincing also the better men of the jury and citizens present that the principles of justice involved in the issue of facts were to be applied as he claimed; he had acquired enough of property to be considered rich in that day, although he had always lived liberally; his legislative and political career had convinced the people that he was incomparably the best and ablest man of the district for their representative. It is to be especially emphasized that he had practical talent of the highest order. His plantation was a model of good management. His investments were always prudent and lucrative. Practical men of extraordinary ability were bred by the conditions about him. In the Raytown district of Taliaferro county—about ten miles distant—my maternal grandfather, Joshua Morgan, lived on his plantation of more than a thousand acres, which he managed without an overseer. His father had been killed by the tories. His education had been so scant that he found reading the simplest English difficult, and to sign his name was the only writing I ever knew him to do. But his plantation management was the admiration of all his neighbors. His land was sandy and thin, but he made it yield more than ample support for his numerous family, his rapidly increasing force of negroes, his blooded horses, his unusually large number of hogs, cows, sheep, and goats; and a fair quantity of cotton besides. The slaves loved sweet potatoes more than any other food, and they were a favorite food in the Big House. His supplies never failed, there being some unopened “banks or hills” when the new potatoes came. His hogs were his special attention. His fine horses required so much corn, and so much more of it was needed for bread, that he could not feed it lavishly to his hogs. So he developed a succession of peach orchards, with which he commenced their fattening in the summer. These were four in all; the first ripened in July and the last the fourth week in October. The fruit in any particular one ripened at the same time, and he cared not how many different varieties there were. Whenever he tasted peaches away from home that he liked, if they were not from grafted trees, he would carry away the seed, and there was a particular drawer labelled with the date, into which they were put. Whenever he had need to plant a tree whose fruit was desired at that particular time of the year, the seed was planted where he wanted the tree. Many of his neighbors planted the seeds in a nursery, whence after a year or two they transplanted the young trees; but my grandfather, as he told me, saved a year by his method. He was always replanting in place of injured trees and those he had found to be inferior. The “fattening” hogs—that is, those to be next killed for meat—were turned into the July orchard just as soon as the peaches commenced to fall; and they went on through the rest of the series. There was running water in each orchard. After peach-time, these hogs ran upon the peas which were now ripe in the corn fields, the corn having been gathered. And for some two weeks before they were to be killed they were penned and given all the corn they would eat. What pride the good planter of that time took in keeping independent of the Tennessee hog drover, who was the main resource of his rural neighbors who did not save their own meat, as the phrase then was! Observing that his hogs were not safe against roving negroes when away from the house on Sunday, on that day they were kept up. One of my earliest recollections is that of Old Lige driving them to the spring branch twice every Sunday. For a long while he tried in various ways to protect his sheep against worrying dogs. At last he had them “got up” every night in some enclosure he wished to enrich near enough to the Big House for his own dogs to be aware of any invasion by strangers, and he never had a sheep worried afterwards. The foregoing is enough to suggest the whole of the system. The management of its different trains and many separate departments upon an up-to-date railroad was not superior in punctuality and due discharge of every duty. He lived well, entertained hospitably, and kept out of debt. Mr. Thomas E. Watson has lately given a graphic description of good plantation conduct,[98] which ought to be considered by all those who now believe that every planter was necessarily slipshod and slovenly in his vocation. It was a good training school for the born business man. Let me give an example to show how extensive planting bred experts in affairs. The Southern Mutual fire insurance company—its principal office being at Athens, some forty miles distant from Toombs’s home—at the beginning of the brothers’ war had for some years almost driven all other insurers out of its territory. It is still such a favorite therein that it is hardly exaggeration to state that its competitors must content themselves with its leavings. The plan of this great company is a novel form of co-operative insurance—indeed, I may say, it is unique. It was invented, developed, and most skilfully worked forward into a success which is one of the wonders of the insurance world. The men who did this were never any of them reputed to be of exceptional talents. They had merely grown up in the best rural business circles of the old south. A similar fact explains the mastery of money, banking, and related matters which Calhoun acquired in a locality of South Carolina, not forty miles distant from Washington, Georgia. It also explains why Toombs, bred in the interior and far away from large cities, had perfectly acquired the commercial law; had complete knowledge of the principles and practice of banking, and those of all corporate business, and also a familiarity with the fluctuating values of current securities equalling that of experts.