“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 against us; 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 protect States 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 civilized world 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 great miscarriage 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 survived his country. 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.