Robert Toombs / Statesman, Speaker, Soldier, Sage

by Pleasant A. Stovall

Mr. Toombs called on all men of integrity, intellect, and courage to come into the service of the State and prove their devotion to the Constitution and the Union. "With no memory of past differences," he said, "careless of the future, I am ready to unite with any portion or all my countrymen in defense of the integrity of the republic."

Mr. Toombs took the stump, and his words rang out like an alarm bell. Men speak to-day of his activity and earnestness in that great campaign, as with "rapid and prompt perception, clear, close reasoning, cutting eloquence, and unsparing hand he rasped the follies of disunion and secession." A prominent journal of that day, speaking of his speech in Burke County, Ga., declared that "his manly eloquence has shaken and shivered to the base the pedestal upon which the monument of American ruin was to be erected."

In November of that year a convention of delegates from Southern States was held at Nashville. Ex-Governor Charles J. McDonald represented Georgia. That meeting protested against the admission of California with slavery restriction; charged that the policy of Congress had been to exclude the Southern States from the Territories, and plainly asserted that the powers of the sovereign States could be resumed by the States separately. On November 3 the election of delegates to the Georgia convention was held. Toombs had already turned the tide. A great majority of Union men were chosen. Whigs and Democrats united to save the State. Toombs stood convicted before many of his old followers of "unsoundness on the slavery question"—but he was performing his greatest public work.

Among the delegates elected by the people to the Georgia convention, which met at Milledgeville, December 10, 1850, were Toombs and Stephens and many of the best men in the State.

The work of the distinguished body was memorable. They adopted the celebrated "Georgia Platform," whose utterances were talismanic. Charles J. Jenkins reported the resolutions. They recited, first, that Georgia held the American Union secondary in importance to the rights and principles it was bound to perpetuate. That as the thirteen original colonies found union impossible without compromise, the thirty-one of this day will yield somewhat in the conflict of opinion and policy, to preserve the Union. That Georgia had maturely considered the action of Congress (embracing the compromise measures) and—while she does not wholly approve it—will abide by it as a permanent adjustment of this sectional controversy. That the State would in future resist, even to the disruption of the Union, any act prohibiting slavery in the Territories, or a refusal to admit a slave State. The fifth plank declared for a faithful execution of the Fugitive-slave bill.

Upon this platform the Union men selected Howell Cobb as their candidate for Governor. The Southern Rights men selected Charles J. McDonald. This party claimed that the South was degraded by the compromise measures. Their platform was based upon the Virginia and Kentucky resolution. It asserted the right of secession and maintained the constitutionality and necessity of intervention by Congress in favor of admitting slavery into the Territories. The distinct doctrine of the compromise measures was non-intervention.

Howell Cobb was a born leader of men. Personally he was the most popular man in the State. Entering public life at an early age he had been a congressman at twenty-eight. He had been leader of the Southern party, and was chosen Speaker, as we have seen, in 1849, when only thirty-four years old. He had been known as a strong friend of the Union, and some of the extreme States' Rights men called him a "consolidationist."

In his letter accepting the nomination for Governor, he alluded to the long-cherished doctrine of non-intervention. The Wilmot Proviso had been withdrawn and the Union saved. The people had been awarded the right to determine for themselves in the Territories whether or not slavery was to be a part of their social system.

No man was so tireless or conspicuous in this campaign as Mr. Toombs. Although expressing a desire that someone else should go to Congress from his district, he accepted a renomination to assert his principles. He did not, however, confine his work to his district. He traveled from one end of the State to the other. He recognized that party organization in Georgia had been over-thrown and party lines shattered in every State in the Union. He boldly declared that a continuance of the Union was not incompatible with the rights of every State. He asserted that the animating spirit of his opponents, the States' Rights party, was hostility to the Union. Some of the members still submitted to the humiliation of raising the cry of "the Union," he said, but it was a "masked battery," from which the very Union was to be assailed. Mr. Toombs announced on the stump that "the good sense, the firmness, the patriotism of the people, would shield the Union from assault of our own people. They will maintain it as long as it deserves to be maintained."

Mr. Toombs admitted that the antislavery sentiment of the North had become more violent from its defeat on the compromise measures.