Robert Toombs
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Robert Augustus Toombs
(born , July 2, 1810, Wilkes county, Ga., U.S.died Dec. 15, 1885, Washington, Ga.) U.S. politician. He was a plantation owner and a lawyer. He served in the U.S. House of Representatives (184553) and the Senate (185361), but he resigned his Senate seat to help form the Confederate States of America. Disappointed at not being chosen its president, he served briefly as secretary of state (1861). He criticized Jefferson Davis's extralegal policies during the American Civil War and after the war fled to England. He returned to Georgia in 1867 to rebuild his law practice and to help revise the state constitution and restore white supremacy.
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Oxford Dictionary of the US Military:
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Robert Augustus Toombs
Toombs, Robert Augustus (1810-1885) U.S. congressman, Confederate cabinet member, and Confederate general. Toombs was born in Wilkes County, Georgia, and graduated from Union College and the University of Virginia Law School. He built up a fortune based on slaves and real estate in Georgia, serving the state for four terms as a representative before being selected twice to be a senator. He became the first Confederate secretary of state, but served only a few months before resigning after securing a brigadier general's commission. He was the most prominent political general in the Army of Northern Virginia, and handled his brigade of mostly Georgia troops poorly during the Seven Days' battles and Second Bull Run (1862). He did, however, do very well holding Burnside's Bridge at Antietam (1862) for many hours with only five hundred men against thousands of Union attackers. When he did not get the promotion he believed he had earned there he resigned, fulfilling a promise to his wife that he would leave the army after distinguishing himself in a big battle. He spent the rest of the war quarreling with the Confederate government, and fled to Europe for two years after the war. Though he never sought a pardon and could not vote or hold office, he still dominated Georgia's constitutional convention in 1877. He died in Washington, Georgia, suffering from alcoholism and blindness.
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Gale Encyclopedia of Biography:
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Robert Augustus Toombs
Robert Augustus Toombs (1810-1885), U.S. congressman and Confederate secretary of state, was noted for his opposition to Confederate president Jefferson Davis.
Robert Toombs was born on July 2, 1810, in Wilkes County, Ga. He attended the University of Georgia but graduated from Union College in New York in 1828. After his admission to the bar in 1830, Toombs began a successful career as lawyer, planter, and businessman in Washington, Ga.
Toombs served in the Georgia Legislature from 1837 to 1843, establishing a reputation as an expert on financial matters. In 1844 he was elected to the U.S. Congress. At this time Toombs manifested the political philosophy of a conservative Whig; by 1850 he had adopted an aggressively pro-Southern stance.
In Congress, Toombs was influential in securing passage of the 1850 compromise measures. With Alexander Stephens and Howell Cobb, he established the Constitutional Union party, which dominated Georgia politics for several years and was responsible for the Georgia Legislature's election of Toombs to the U.S. Senate in 1851. Upon the party's dissolution, Toombs uneasily joined the Democrats.
Strongly opposed to the election of Abraham Lincoln as president in 1860, although Toombs had supported the idea of compromise, he advised Georgians to vote for secession. He was a prominent figure in the state secessionist convention in January 1861 and later served at the Southern Convention.
Toombs sought the Confederate presidency but then reluctantly accepted the office of secretary of state. For a man of his financial talent, the post of secretary of the Treasury would have been more suitable. Although he performed his administrative duties efficiently, Toombs grew to regard President Jefferson Davis with contempt. In July 1861 he applied for a military commission and received command of a brigade on the Virginia front.
Toombs was a temperamental officer whose exploits were variously described as cowardly and heroic. In September 1862 he resigned from the military. For a time Toombs did little but criticize Davis and Gen. Robert E. Lee.
To avoid arrest at the end of the war, Toombs fled to Cuba and then to London. He returned to Georgia in 1867 but never applied for pardon as a requirement for regaining citizenship. He restored his law practice and reestablished himself as a popular leader who carefully attempted to overturn Radical Republican rule in the South. He never again held elective office. A brilliant raconteur and a man of delightful wit and biting sarcasm, he once referred to prohibitionists as "men of small pints." He died on Dec. 15, 1885.
Further Reading
Although Ulrich B. Phillips, The Life of Robert Toombs (1913; repr. 1968), is dated, it remains a judicious and scholarly work. William Y. Thompson, Robert Toombs of Georgia (1966), is well documented and very thorough, emphasizing Toombs as an undisciplined individualist. For general background see Burton J. Hendrick, Statesmen of the Lost Cause (1939).
Columbia Encyclopedia:
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Robert Augustus Toombs
Toombs, Robert, 1810-85, American statesman, Confederate leader, b. Wilkes co., Ga. A successful lawyer in Georgia, he entered politics as a Whig, serving in the state legislature and in Congress (1845-53). He favored the Compromise of 1850 and with Howell Cobb and Alexander H. Stephens canvassed Georgia to have it ratified. With them also he organized the short-lived Constitutional Union party, which elected him (1852) to the U.S. Senate, in which he served until 1861. A brilliant orator, Toombs was a firm supporter of Southern measures but did not become an avowed secessionist until after the election of Abraham Lincoln. Thereafter he played a leading role in the Georgia secession and in the organization of the Confederacy. Made secretary of state in the new government, he soon resigned to become a brigadier general commanding Georgia troops in Virginia. He fought in the Peninsular campaign, the second battle of Bull Run, and the Antietam campaign in the Civil War, resigning when he was refused promotion. Toombs, who had coveted the Confederate presidency, belonged to the faction that opposed the policies of Confederate President Jefferson Davis. After the war he fled to Europe, returning in 1867. He continued to be important in Georgia politics, especially after Reconstruction. He himself remained "unreconstructed," refusing to the end to take the oath of allegiance to the United States.
Bibliography
See biographies by U. B. Phillips (1913, repr. 1968) and W. Y. Thompson (1966).
Wikipedia on Answers.com:
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Robert Toombs
| Robert Augustus Toombs | |
|---|---|
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| United States Senator from Georgia |
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| In office March 4, 1853 – February 4, 1861 |
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| Preceded by | Homer V.M. Miller |
| Succeeded by | Robert M. Charlton |
| 1st Confederate States Secretary of State | |
| In office February 25, 1861 – July 25, 1861 |
|
| Preceded by | Office instituted |
| Succeeded by | Robert M. T. Hunter |
| Personal details | |
| Born | July 2, 1810 Wilkes County, Georgia, U.S. |
| Died | December 15, 1885 (aged 75) Washington, Georgia, U.S. |
| Political party | Whig, Democrat |
| Spouse(s) | Julia A. Dubose |
| Alma mater | Franklin College of Arts and Sciences (University of Georgia) Union College University of Virginia Law School |
| Profession | Politician, Lawyer |
| Religion | Methodist |
Robert Augustus Toombs (July 2, 1810 – December 15, 1885) was an American and Confederate political leader, Whig Party Senator from Georgia, a founding father of the Confederacy, its first Secretary of State, and a minor Confederate general in the Civil War. He feuded bitterly with Confederate president Jefferson Davis. Clawson says 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."[1]
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Early life
Born near Washington, Wilkes County, Georgia, Robert Augustus Toombs was the fifth child of Catherine Huling and Robert Toombs. He was of English descent[2]. His father died when he was five, and he entered Franklin College at the University of Georgia in Athens when he was just fourteen. During his time at Franklin College he was a member of the Demosthenian Literary Society, which honors him as one of its most legendary alumni to this day. After the university chastised him for unbecoming conduct in a card-playing incident, Toombs continued his education at Union College, in Schenectady, New York, from which he graduated in 1828. Toombs went on to study law at the University of Virginia Law School in Charlottesville. Shortly after his admission to the Georgia bar, he married his childhood sweetheart, Julia A. Dubose, with whom he had three children.
Public service
Toombs was admitted to the bar in 1830, and served in the Georgia House of Representatives (1838, 1840–1841, and 1843–1844). His genial character, proclivity for entertainment, and unqualified success on the legal circuit earned Toombs the growing attention and admiration of his fellow Georgians. On the wave of his growing popularity, Toombs won a seat to the United States House of Representatives (1844–1853), and joined his close friend and fellow representative Alexander H. Stephens from Crawfordville, Georgia. Their friendship forged a powerful personal and political bond that 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, became a national Whig, and once the Whig Party dissolved, aided in the creation of the short-lived Constitutional Union Party in the early 1850s.
Toombs stood with most Whigs regarding the status of Texas as the 28th state. Historian William Y. Thompson writes that Toombs was "prepared to vote all necessary supplies to repel invasion. But he did not agree that the territory between the Nueces and the Rio Grande rivers was a part of Texas. He declared the movement of American forces to the Rio Grande at President Polk's command 'was contrary to the laws of this country, a usurpation on the rights of this House, and an aggression on the rights of Mexico."[3]
From 1853 to 1861 Toombs served in the United States Senate, only reluctantly joining the Democratic Party when lack of interest among other states doomed the Constitutional Union Party.
From Unionist to Confederate
Throughout the 1840s and 1850s, Toombs fought to reconcile national policies with sectional interests. He had opposed the Annexation of Texas but vowed to defend the new state once it was annexed late in 1845. He also opposed the Mexican-American War, President Polk's Oregon policy, the Walker Tariff of 1846 and the Wilmot Proviso, first introduced in 1846. 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 has often been misunderstood. They disapproved of secession, not because they considered it wrong in principle, but because they considered it inexpedient.
Toombs objected to halting the spread of slavery into the territories of California and New Mexico and even the abolishment of what John C. Calhoun had called the "peculiar institution" in Washington, D.C. He took the view that the territories were the common property of all the people of the United States and that Congress must insure equal treatment to both slaveholder and non-slaveholder. If the rights of the South were violated, Toombs declared, "Let discord reign forever."[4]
Toombs favored the Kansas-Nebraska Act, the admission of Kansas 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.
On June 24, 1856, Toombs introduced the Toombs Bill, which proposed a constitutional convention in Kansas under conditions which were acknowledged by various anti-slavery leaders as fair, and which mark the greatest concessions made by the pro-slavery senators during the Kansas struggle. The bill did not provide for the submission of the constitution to popular vote, and 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.
Thompson refers to Toombs as "hardly a man of the people with his wealth and imperious manner. But his handsome imposing appearance, undoubted ability, and boldness of speech appealed to Georgians, who kept him in national office until the Civil War brought him home."[5]
Secession
In the presidential campaign of 1860 he supported John C. Breckinridge, and on December 22, soon after the election of Abraham Lincoln, sent a telegram to Georgia that asserted that "secession by the 4th of March next should be thundered forth from the ballot-box by the united voice of Georgia." He delivered a farewell address in the 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.”[6] He returned to Georgia, and with Governor Joseph E. Brown led the fight for secession against Stephens and Herschel V. Johnson (1812–1880). His influence was a most powerful factor in inducing the "old-line Whigs" to support immediate secession.
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Unlike the crises of 1850, these events galvanized Toombs and energized ambitions for becoming the president of the new Confederate nation.
Confederacy
The selection of Jefferson Davis as the new nation's chief executive not only dashed Toombs's highest hopes but also turned him into one of the most outspoken critics of the Confederate government and its policies. Nevertheless, Davis chose Toombs as his first Confederate States Secretary of State. Toombs was the only member of the Davis administration to voice reservations about the attack on Fort Sumter. After reading Lincoln's letter to the governor of South Carolina, Toombs said memorably: "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."
Army general
Within months of his cabinet appointment, a frustrated Toombs stepped down to join the Confederate States Army. He received a commission as a brigadier general on July 19, 1861, and served first as a brigade commander in the (Confederate) Army of the Potomac, and then in David R. Jones's division of the Army of Northern Virginia through the Peninsula Campaign, Seven Days Battles, Northern Virginia Campaign, and Maryland Campaign. He was wounded in the hand at the Battle of Antietam. He resigned his CSA commission on March 3, 1863, to become Colonel of the 3rd Cavalry of the Georgia Militia, and subsequently served as a brigadier general and adjutant and inspector-general of General Gustavus W. Smith's division of Georgia militia. Denied a military promotion, he resigned his commission in March 1863. He then launched a major attack on Davis and the government, opposed conscription and the suspension of habeas corpus, as newspapers warned that he verged on treason. As the war ended he fled to Europe.[7]
Final years
He returned to Georgia in 1867 but he refused to request a pardon from the president and never regained his right to vote nor his political career. He did restore his lucrative law practice. In addition, he dominated the Georgia constitutional convention of 1877, where once again 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 his attacks on railroads. In his final years he was blinded and ravaged by alcoholism.[8]
Legacy
Georgia's Toombs County is named for Robert Toombs. So is the Georgia town of Toomsboro, though with a slightly altered spelling. His legacy also lives on in his hometown of Washington, Georgia. Visitors to Washington can tour the Robert Toombs House, a State Historic Site operated by the Georgia Department of Natural Resources.
Robert Toombs Christian Academy in Lyons, Georgia was named in his honor.
References
- ^ Jacob S. Clawson, "A Georgia Firebrand in the Midst of the Sectional Crisis" (H-CivWar March 2012) online
- ^ Robert Toombs, statesman, speaker, soldier, sage: his career in Congress and ... By Pleasant A. Stovall page 2
- ^ William Y. Thompson, Robert Toombs of Georgia, (Baton Rouge: Louisiana State University Press, 1966, Library of Congress No. 66-25722, p. 38)
- ^ Thompson, p 58
- ^ Thompson, p. 25
- ^ http://opinionator.blogs.nytimes.com/2011/01/27/the-south-rises-again-and-again-and-again/#more-78437
- ^ Chesson 2000
- ^ Chesson, 2000
Further reading
- 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., & Eicher, David J., Civil War High Commands, Stanford University Press, 2001, ISBN 0-8047-3641-3.
- 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
- Thompson, William Y. Robert Toombs of Georgia (1966), scholarly biography
Primary sources
- Phillips, Ulrich B. "The Correspondence of Robert Toombs, Alexander H. Stephens, and Howell Cobb" in Annual Report of the American Historical Association, vol. 2 (1911). online 759 pp
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Wikimedia Commons has media related to: Robert Toombs |
External links
- Robert Toombs, New Georgia Encyclopedia
- Robert Toombs at the 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
| United States House of Representatives | ||
|---|---|---|
| Preceded by (none) |
Member of the U.S. House of Representatives from Georgia's 8th congressional district March 4, 1845 – March 3, 1853 |
Succeeded by Alexander H. Stephens |
| Confederate States House of Representatives | ||
| Preceded by (none) |
Representative to the Provisional Confederate Congress from Georgia 1861 |
Succeeded by (none) |
| United States Senate | ||
| Preceded by Robert M. Charlton |
United States Senator (Class 2) from Georgia March 4, 1853 – February 4, 1861 Served alongside: William Crosby Dawson and Alfred Iverson, Sr. |
Succeeded by Homer V. M. Miller(1) |
| Political offices | ||
| Preceded by (none) |
Confederate States Secretary of State February 25, 1861 – July 25, 1861 |
Succeeded by Robert M. T. Hunter |
| Notes and references | ||
| 1. Because of Georgia's secession, the Senate seat was vacant for ten years before Miller succeeded Toombs. | ||
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