Robert Toombs / Statesman, Speaker, Soldier, Sage

by Pleasant A. Stovall

Throwing aside his manual Mr. Toombs walked further out into the aisle and assumed a yet more defiant position.

"You refuse," he said, "to hear either the Constitution or the law. Perhaps you do well to listen to neither; they all speak a voice of condemnation to your reckless proceedings. But if you will not hear them the country will. Every freeman from the Atlantic to the Pacific shore shall hear them, and every honest man shall consider them. You cannot stifle the voice that shall reach their ears. The electric spark shall proclaim to the freemen of this republic that an American Congress, having conceived the purpose to violate the Constitution and the laws to conceal their enormities, have disgraced the record of their proceedings by placing upon it a resolution that their representatives shall not be heard in their defense, and finding this illegal resolution inadequate to secure so vile an end, have resorted to brutish yells and cries to stifle the words of those they cannot intimidate."

The clerk continued to call the roll, and Mr. Toombs with splendid audacity turned upon him. Pointing his finger at the locum tenens, he cried with scorn: "I ask by what authority that man stands there and calls these names. By what authority does HE interfere with the rights of a member of this House. [The clerk continued to call.] He is an intruder, and how dares he to interrupt members in the exercise of their constitutional rights. Gentlemen, has the sense of shame departed with your sense of right, that you permit a creature, an interloper, in no wise connected with you, to stand at that desk and interrupt your order?"

Mr. Toombs continued, amid these boisterous scenes, his alternate rôle of argument, of appeal, of denunciation. He contended that a power delegated to the House must be used by a majority of the House. He concluded:

"I therefore demand of you before the country, in the name of the Constitution and the people, to repeal your illegal rule, reject the one on your table, and proceed to the discharge of your high duties, which the people have confided to you, according to the unvarying precedents of your people and the law of the land."

This performance was denounced by Northern restrictionists as menacing and insolent. Mr. Stephens, in his "War Between the States," contended that it should rather be considered in the light of a wonderful exhibition of physical as well as intellectual prowess—in this, that a single man should have been able, thus successfully, to speak to a tumultuous crowd and, by declamatory denunciations combined with solid argument, to silence an infuriated assembly.

The noise during the delivery of this speech gradually ceased. The clerk stopped calling the roll, all interruptions were suspended and "every eye," says Mr. Stephens, "was fixed upon the speaker." It was a picture worthy of ranking with Lamartine's great speech to the revolutionists in France.

On the 29th of February Mr. Toombs addressed the House upon the general territorial question. He said:

"We had our institutions when you sought our allegiance. We were content with them then, and we are content with them now. We have not sought to thrust them upon you, nor to interfere with yours. If you believe what you say, that yours are so much the best to promote the happiness and good government of society, why do you fear our equal competition with you in the Territories? We only ask that our common government shall protect us both, equally, until the Territories shall be admitted as States into the Union, then to leave their citizens free to adopt any domestic policy in reference to this subject which in their judgment may best promote their interest and their happiness. The demand is just. Grant it, and you place your prosperity and ours upon a solid foundation; you perpetuate the Union so necessary to your prosperity; you solve the problem of republican government. If it be demonstrated that the Constitution is powerless for our protection, it will then be not only the right but the duty of the slaveholding States to resume the powers which they have conferred upon this government and to seek new safeguards for their future protection.... We took the Constitution and the Union together. We will have both or we will have neither. This cry of Union is the masked battery behind which the rights of the South are to be assaulted. Let the South mark the man who is for the Union at every hazard and to the last extremity; when the day of her peril comes he will be the imitator of that character, the base Judas, who for thirty pieces of silver threw away a pearl richer than all his tribe."

On the 15th of June, 1850, while the compromise measures were shifting from House to House, the question was put to some of the advocates of the admission of California, whether they would under any circumstances admit a slave State into the Union. They declined to say.