The topics uppermost in the public mind of that day were the Oregon question, Texas, and the ubiquitous tariff. It looked at one time as if war with Great Britain were unavoidable. President Polk occupied an extreme position, and declared in his message to Congress that our title to the whole of Oregon was clear. The boundary of the ceded territory was unsettled. The Democrats demanded the occupation of Oregon, with the campaign cry of "fifty-four forty or fight."
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 title was exceptional up to 54°40'. Our claim to the territory north of the Columbia River was the Spanish title 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 ship, 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 assessment 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.