Robert Toombs

Born near Washington, Georgia in 1810, Robert Augustus Toombs was the fifth child of Catherine Huling and planter Robert Toombs. He was of English descent.[1] His father died when he was five. After private education, Toombs entered Franklin College at the University of Georgia in Athens when he was fourteen. During his time at Franklin College, Toombs was a member of the Demosthenian Literary Society. After the university chastised Toombs for unbecoming conduct in a card-playing incident,[2] he continued his education at Union College, in Schenectady, New York. He graduated there in 1828. He returned to the South to study law at the University of Virginia Law School in Charlottesville.

Toombs was admitted to the Georgia bar and began his legal practice in 1830. He entered politics, gaining election to the Georgia House of Representatives, where he served in 1838. He failed to win re-election, but was elected again in the next term, serving 1840–41. He failed again to win re-election, but was elected in 1842, serving a third, non-successive term, 1843–1844.

Toombs won a seat in the United States House of Representatives in 1844, and would win re-election several times. He served several terms in the lower chamber until 1853. In 1852 the state legislature elected him to the US Senate. There Toombs joined his close friend and fellow representative Alexander H. Stephens from Crawfordville, Georgia. Their friendship became a powerful personal and political bond, and they effectively defined and articulated Georgia's position on national issues in the middle decades of the nineteenth century. Toombs, like Stephens, emerged as a states' rights partisan and became a national Whig. After that party dissolved, Toombs aided in the creation of the short-lived Constitutional Union Party in the early 1850s.

As did most Whigs, Toombs considered Texas to be the 28th state, but he opposed the Mexican–American War.[6]

Toombs and his brother Gabriel owned large plantations and operated them using enslaved African Americans. Toombs increased his personal slave holdings as his wealth increased. Toombs owned six slaves in 1840.[7] By 1850, he owned 17 slaves.[8] In 1860, he owned 16 slaves at his Wilkes County plantation,[9] and an additional 32 slaves at his 3,800-acre plantation in Stewart County, Georgia on the Chattahoochee River.[10]

By 1860, Toombs and his wife lived without any other family members in Wilkes County; in the census that year, Toombs owned $200,000 in real estate; the value of his personal property, primarily made up of slaves, totaled $250,000.[11] One of his slaves, Garland H. White, escaped just before the Civil War. He became a soldier and chaplain in the Union Army in 1862. Other slaves were freed by the Union Army as it occupied areas of Georgia. William Gaines and Wesley John Gaines (1840-1912), also former slaves of Toombs, both became church leaders.[12]

Throughout the 1840s and 1850s, Toombs fought to reconcile national policies with his personal and sectional interests. In common with Alexander H. Stephens and Howell Cobb, he defended Henry Clay's Compromise of 1850 against southerners who advocated secession from the Union as the only solution to sectional tensions over slavery. He denounced the Nashville Convention, opposed the secessionists in Georgia, and helped to frame the famous Georgia platform (1850). His position and that of Southern Unionists during the decade 1850–1860 was pragmatic; he thought secession was impractical.[13]

From 1853 to 1861, Toombs served in the United States Senate. He reluctantly joined the Democratic Party when lack of interest among voters in other states doomed the Constitutional Union Party. Toombs favored the Kansas–Nebraska Act of 1854, the admission of Kansas as a slave state under the Lecompton Constitution, and the English Bill (1858). However, his faith in the resiliency and effectiveness of the national government to resolve sectional conflicts waned as the 1850s drew to a close.

Toombs was present on May 22, 1856, when Congressman Preston Brooks beat Senator Charles Sumner with a cane on the Senate floor.[14] As Brooks thrashed Sumner, his House allies Laurence M. Keitt and Henry A. Edmundson prevented witnesses from coming to Sumner's aid, with Keitt brandishing a pistol to keep them at bay.[14] Senator John J. Crittenden attempted to intervene, and pleaded with Brooks not to kill Sumner.[14] Toombs interceded for Crittenden, begging Keitt not to attack someone who was not a party to the Brooks-Sumner dispute. Later Toombs suggested that he had no issue with Brooks beating Sumner, and in fact approved of it.[14]

On June 24, 1856, Toombs introduced the Toombs Bill, which proposed a constitutional convention in Kansas under conditions that were acknowledged by various anti-slavery leaders as fair. This marked the greatest concessions made by pro-slavery senators during the struggle over Kansas. But the bill did not provide for the submission of the proposed state constitution to popular vote, where, as the vote on the LeCompton Constitution showed, it would have been soundly defeated. The silence on this point of the territorial law, under which the Lecompton Constitution of Kansas was framed in 1857, was the crux of the Lecompton struggle.

According to historian Jacob S. Clawson, he was "a bullish politician whose blend of acerbic wit, fiery demeanor, and political tact aroused the full spectrum of emotions from his constituents and colleagues....[he] could not balance his volatile personality with his otherwise keen political skill."[15]

The original Confederate Cabinet. L-R: Judah P. Benjamin, Stephen Mallory, Christopher Memminger, Alexander Stephens, LeRoy Pope Walker, Jefferson Davis, John H. Reagan and Robert Toombs.

In the presidential campaign of 1860, Toombs supported John C. Breckinridge. On December 22, soon after the election of Republican Abraham Lincoln, Toombs sent a telegram to Georgia that asserted that "secession by 4 March next should be thundered forth from the ballot-box by the united voice of Georgia." He delivered a farewell address in the US Senate (January 7, 1861) in which he said: "We want no negro equality, no negro citizenship; we want no negro race to degrade our own; and as one man [we] would meet you upon the border with the sword in one hand and the torch in the other."[16] He returned to Georgia, and with Governor Joseph E. Brown led the fight for secession against Stephens and Herschel V. Johnson (1812–80). His influence was a powerful factor in inducing the "old-line Whigs" to support immediate secession.

Toombs' house in Washington, Georgia, seen here in 1934.

Unlike the crises of 1850, these events galvanized Toombs and energized his ambitions for becoming the president of the new Confederate nation.

The selection of Jefferson Davis as the new nation's chief executive dashed Toombs's hopes of holding the high office of the fledgling Confederacy. In Georgia, it was expected the new president would be one of the delegates sent from Georgia.[17] Toombs had a serious drinking problem which worried fellow delegates, leading him to not be selected.[18] Toombs had no diplomatic skills but Davis chose him as the Secretary of State. Toombs was the only member of Davis' administration to express dissent about the Confederacy's attack on Fort Sumter.

After reading Lincoln's letter to the governor of South Carolina, Toombs said to Davis:

"Mr. President, at this time it is suicide, murder, and will lose us every friend at the North. You will wantonly strike a hornet's nest which extends from mountain to ocean, and legions now quiet will swarm out and sting us to death. It is unnecessary; it puts us in the wrong; it is fatal."[19]

His wife returned to Georgia in late 1866 following the death of their last surviving child, Sallie Toombs DuBose, in Washington County, Georgia. She went to help their widowed son-in-law care for several small children. Toombs missed his wife and returned to Georgia in 1867, but he refused to request a pardon from the president. He never regained his right to vote nor hold political office during the Reconstruction era.[21]

However, Toombs restored his lucrative law practice, in connection with his son-in-law Dudley M. DuBose. The latter was elected in 1870 as a Democratic U.S. Representative and served one term. Toombs gradually resumed political power in Georgia. He funded and dominated the Georgia constitutional convention of 1877, in the year that federal troops were withdrawn from the South.[22] He demonstrated the political skill and temperament that earlier had earned him a reputation as one of Georgia's most effective leaders. He gained a populist reputation for attacks on railroads and state investment in them.

1883 was a year marked by losses for Toombs. After that, he sank into depression, alcoholism, and ultimately became blind.[23] As March began, his son-in-law Dudley M. Dubose had a stroke and died. His long-time political ally, former Confederate Vice-president and Georgia Governor, Alexander H. Stephens, also died. By September, his beloved wife Julia died. Toombs died December 15, 1885. He was buried at Resthaven Cemetery in Wilkes County, Georgia with his wife, his daughter, and son-in-law. Toombs was survived by four grandchildren: Rev. Robert Toombs DeBose, Judge Dudley M. DuBose, Camilia DuBose, and Sally Lousia Toombs DuBose.

The Georgia Department of Natural Resources owns the house and land, Wilkes County, Georgia operates the Robert Toombs House in Washington.[24] Georgia also erected a historical marker in Clarkesville, Habersham County, Georgia concerning the Toombs-Bleckly House, which Toombs acquired as a summer residence in 1879 and sold to Georgia Supreme Court justice Logan E. Bleckley five years later, although it burned down in 1897.[25]

These locations were named for Robert Toombs:

• Toombs County, Georgia is named for Robert Toombs.[26]
• Wilkin County, Minnesota was originally Toombs County.
• Toombs Judicial Circuit includes the superior courts of Glascock County, Lincoln County, McDuffie County, Taliaferro County, Warren County, and Wilkes County.[27]
• So is the Georgia town of Toomsboro, though with a slightly altered spelling.
• Camp Toombs in Toccoa, Georgia, was the training base of Easy Company, 506th Parachute Regiment during World War II and was named after him.
• Robert Toombs Christian Academy Archived February 24, 2012, at the Wayback Machine, a segregation academy in Lyons, Georgia, is named in his honor.

In addition, two steamships were named for him. The Liberty Ship SS Robert Toombs was launched in 1943 by the Southeastern Shipbuilding Corporation and served through World War II and after, eventually being sold for scrap.[28] The troop transport USS General LeRoy Eltinge (AP-154) was sold out of federal service to the Waterman Steamship Company and rebuilt as a long hatch general cargo ship in 1968. Renamed the SS Robert Toombs, she served with Waterman until being sold for scrap in 1980.[29]

• List of signers of the Georgia Ordinance of Secession
• Confederate States of America, causes of secession
• "Died of states' rights"
• List of American Civil War generals (Confederate)
• Robert Toombs House

• Chesson, Michael. "Toombs, Robert Augustus"; American National Biography Online 2000
• Davis, William C., The Union That Shaped the Confederacy: Robert Toombs and Alexander H. Stephens. University Press of Kansas, 2001. Pp. xi, 284.
• Eicher, John H., and David J. Eicher, Civil War High Commands. Stanford: Stanford University Press, 2001. ISBN 978-0-8047-3641-1.
• Phillips, Ulrich B. The Life of Robert Toombs (1913), a scholarly biography focused on his antebellum political career. online
• Scroggins, Mark. Robert Toombs: The Civil Wars of a United States Senator and Confederate General (Jefferson McFarland, 2011) 242 pp. ISBN 978-0-7864-6363-3 online review, scholarly biography
• Sifakis, Stewart. Who Was Who in the Civil War. New York: Facts On File, 1988. ISBN 978-0-8160-1055-4.
• Thompson, William Y. Robert Toombs of Georgia (1966), scholarly biography
• Warner, Ezra J. Generals in Gray: Lives of the Confederate Commanders. Baton Rouge: Louisiana State University Press, 1959. ISBN 978-0-8071-0823-9.

• "Rebel Lion Redux", by Ray Chandler, Georgia Backroads, Summer 2008, pp. 19–23.

Wikimedia Commons has media related to Robert Toombs.

• Works by or about Robert Toombs at Internet Archive
• Robert Toombs Archived April 5, 2013, at the Wayback Machine, New Georgia Encyclopedia
• United States Congress. "Robert Toombs (id: T000313)". Biographical Directory of the United States Congress. Retrieved on 2008-02-13
• The Life of Robert Toombs
• Robert Toombs : Statesman, Speaker, Soldier, Sage at Project Gutenberg (Transcription of 1892 text)
• Robert Toombs' Letters to Julia Ann Dubose Toombs, 1850-1867, Digital Library of Georgia
• Daguerrotype of Robert Toombs, Richmond, Virginia, ca. 1854, taken by Jesse Whitehurst, at Digital Library of Georgia
• Toombs-Bleckley House historical marker
• Robert Augustus ″Bob″ Toombs (1810-1885) Find a Grave Memorial