Part 18 (1/2)
Here was a fine field and a rare occasion for his pungent criticism and denunciation. His utterances were not those of a political leader. He was not tr.i.m.m.i.n.g his sails for office. He did not shape his conduct so as to be considered an available man by the North. He fought error wherever he saw it. He made no terms with those whom he considered public enemies. He denounced radicalism as a ”leagued scoundrelism of private gain and public plunder.”
In opposing the issue of State bonds to aid a certain railroad, he declared that if the legislature saddled this debt upon the taxpayers, their act would be a nullity. ”We will adopt a new const.i.tution with a clause repudiating these bonds, and like aetna spew the monstrous frauds out of the market!”
”You may,” he said, ”by your deep-laid schemes, lull the thoughtless, enlist the selfish, and stifle for a while the voices of patriots, but the day of reckoning will come. These cormorant corporations, these so-called patriotic developers, whom you seek to exempt, shall pay their dues, if justice lives. By the Living G.o.d, they shall pay them.”
”Georgia shall pay her debts,” said Toombs on one occasion. ”If she does not, I will pay them for her!” This piece of hyperbole was softened by the fact that on two occasions, when the State needed money to supply deficits, Toombs with other Georgians did come forward and lift the pressure. Sometimes he talked in a random way, but responsibility always sobered him. He was impatient of fraud and stupidity, often full of exaggerations, but scrupulous when the truth was relevant. Always strict and honorable in his engagements, he boasted that he never had a dirty s.h.i.+lling in his pocket.
The men who ”left the country for the country's good” and came South to fatten on the spoils of reconstruction, furnished unending targets for his satire. He declared that these so-called developers came for pelf, not patriotism. ”Why, these men,” he said, ”are like thieving elephants.
They will uproot an oak or pick up a pin. They would steal anything from a b.u.t.ton to an empire.” On one occasion he was bewailing the degeneracy of the times, and he exclaimed: ”I am sorry I have got so much sense. I see into the tricks of these public men too quickly. When G.o.d Almighty moves me from the earth, he will take away a heap of experience. I expect when a man gets to be seventy he ought to go, for he knows too much for other people's convenience.”
”I hope the Lord will allow me to go to heaven as a gentleman,” he used to say. ”Some of these Georgia politicians I do not want to a.s.sociate with. I would like to a.s.sociate with Socrates and Shakespeare.”
During his arguments before the Supreme Court, General Toombs used to abuse the Governor and the Bullock Legislature very roundly. The Court adopted a rule that no lawyer should be allowed, while conducting his case, to abuse a coordinate branch of the government. General Toombs was informed that if he persisted in this practice he would be held for contempt. The next time Toombs went before the Court he alluded to the fugitive Governor in very sharp terms. ”May it please your Honors, the Governor has now absconded. Your Honors have put in a little rule to catch me. In seeking to protect the powers that be, I presume you did not intend to defend the powers that were.”
The papers printed an account of an interview between General Gordon and Mr. Tilden in 1880, Gordon told Tilden that he was sorry he could not impart to Tilden some of his own strength and vitality. ”So my brother told me last year,” answered Mr. Tilden. ”I have since followed him to the grave.” Toombs read this and remarked that Tilden did not think he was going to die. ”No one expects to die but I. I have got sense enough to know that I am bound to die.”
On one occasion Toombs was criticising an appointment made by an unpopular official. ”But, General,” someone said, ”you must confess that it was a good appointment.” ”That may be, but that was not the reason it was made. Bacon was not accused of selling injustice. He was eternally d.a.m.ned for selling justice.”
General Toombs was once asked in a crowd in the Kimball House in Atlanta what he thought of the North. ”My opinion of the Yankees is apostolic. Alexander the coppersmith did me much evil. The Lord reward him according to his works.” A Federal officer was standing in the crowd. He said: ”Well, General, we whipped you, anyhow.” ”No,” replied Toombs, ”we just wore ourselves out whipping you.”
He spoke of the spoliators in the State Legislature as ”an a.s.sembly of manikins whose object is never higher than their breeches pockets; seekers of jobs and judges.h.i.+ps, anything for pap or plunder, an amalgamation of white rogues and blind negroes, gouging the treasury and disgracing Georgia.”
He was a violent foe of exemptions, of bounties, and of all sorts of corruption and fraud. He was overbearing at times, but not more conscious of power than of honesty in its use. He was generous to the weak. It was in defense of his ideas of justice that he overbore opposition.
General Toombs kept the issues before the people. He had no patience with the tentative policy. He forfeited much of his influence at this time by his indiscriminate abuse of Northern men and Southern opponents, and his defiance of all the conditions of a restored Union. He could have served his people best by more conservative conduct, but he had all the roughness and acerbity of a reformer, dead in earnest. It was owing to his constant arraignment of illegal acts of the post-bellum regime that the people finally aroused, in 1870, and regained the State for white supremacy and Democratic government. He challenged the authors of the Reconstruction measures to discuss the const.i.tutionality of the amendments. Charles J. Jenkins had already carried the cause of Georgia into the courts, and Linton Stephens, before United States Commissioner Swayze in Macon, had made an exhaustive argument upon the whole subject.
Toombs forced these issues constantly into his cases, and kept public interest at white heat.
CHAPTER XXVII.
DAYS OF RECONSTRUCTION
In July, 1868, the people of Georgia made the first determined stand against the Republican party. John B. Gordon was nominated for Governor, and Seymour and Blair had been named in New York as National Democratic standard-bearers. A memorable meeting was held in Atlanta. It was the first real rally of the white people under the new order of things.
Robert Toombs, Howell Cobb, and Benjamin H. Hill addressed the mult.i.tude. There was much enthusiasm, and crowds gathered from every part of Georgia. This was the great ”Bush Arbor meeting” of that year, and old men and boys speak of it to-day with kindling ardor. ”Few people,” said Toombs in that speech, ”had escaped the horrors of war, and fewer still the stern and bitter curse of civil war. The histories of the greatest peoples of earth have been filled with defeats as well as victories, suffering as well as happiness, shame and reproach as well as honor and glory. The struggles of the great and good are the n.o.blest legacies left by the past to the present generation, trophies worthy to be laid at the feet of Jehovah himself. Those whose blades glittered in the foremost ranks of the Northern army on the battlefield, with a yet higher and n.o.bler purpose denounce the base uses to which the victory has been applied. The old s.h.i.+bboleths of victory are proclaimed as living principles. Whatever else may be lost, the principles of Magna Charta have survived the conflict of arms. The edicts of the enemy abolish all securities of life, liberty, and property; defeat all the rightful purposes of government, and renounce all remedies, all laws.[”]
General Toombs denounced the incompetency of the dominant party in Georgia--”In its tyranny, its corruption, its treachery to the Caucasian race, its patronage of vice, of fraud, of crime and criminals, its crime against humanity and in its efforts to subordinate the safeguards of public security and to uproot the foundations of free government it has forfeited all claims upon a free people.”
Alluding to General Longstreet, who had been a member of the Republican party, General Toombs said: ”I would not have him tarnish his own laurels. I respect his courage, honor his devotion to his cause, and regret his errors.” He denounced the ruling party of Georgia as a ma.s.s of floating putrescence, ”which rises as it rots and rots as it rises.”
He declared that the Reconstruction Acts ”stared out in their naked deformity, open to the indignant gaze of all honest men.”
The campaign at that time was made upon the illegality of the amendments to the Const.i.tution. Enthusiasm was fed by the fiery and impetuous invective of Toombs. The utterances of most public men were guarded and conservative. But when Toombs spoke the people realized that he uttered the convictions of an unshackled mind and a fearless spirit. Leaders deprecated his extreme views, but the hustings rang with his ruthless candor.
The conclusion of his Bush Arbor effort was a fine sample of his fervid speech: ”All these and many more wrongs have been heaped upon you, my countrymen, without your consent. Your consent alone can give the least validity to these usurpations. Let no power on earth wring that consent from you. Take no counsel of fear; it is the meanest of masters; spurn the temptations of office from the polluted hands of your oppressors. He who owns only his own sepulcher at the price of such claims holds a heritage of shame. Unite with the National Democratic party. Your country says come; honor says come; duty says come; liberty says come; the country is in danger; let every freeman hasten to the rescue.”
It was at this meeting that Benjamin H. Hill, who made so much reputation by the publication of a series of papers ent.i.tled, ”Notes on the Situation,” delivered one of the most memorable speeches of his life. It was a moving, overmastering appeal to the people to go to the polls. When this oration was over, the audience was almost wild, and Robert Toombs, standing on the platform, in his enthusiasm threw his hat away into the delighted throng. A young bright-faced boy picked it up and carried it back to the speakers' stand. It was Henry Grady.
The defeat of the National Democratic party in 1868 disheartened the Southern people, and the old disinclination to take part in politics seized them stronger than before. In 1870, however, General Toombs delivered, in different parts of Georgia, a carefully prepared lecture on the Principles of Magna Charta. It was just the reverse in style and conception to his fervid Bush Arbor oration. It was submitted to ma.n.u.script and was read from notes at the speakers' stand. With the possible exception of his Tremont Temple lecture, delivered in Boston in 1856, it was the only one of his public addresses so carefully prepared and so dispa.s.sionately delivered. In his opinion the principles of free government were drifting away from old landmarks. The times were out of joint, the people were demoralized. The causes which afterward led to the great revolt in the Republican ranks in 1872 were already marked in the quick perception of Toombs, and this admirable state paper was framed to put the issue before the public in a sober, statesmanlike way, and to draw the people back to their old moorings. This lecture was delivered in all the large cities and many of the smaller towns of Georgia, and had a great effect. Already there had been concerted appeal to Georgians to cease this political opposition and ”accept the situation.” Even statesmen like Mr. Hill had come round to the point of advising the people to abandon ”dead issues.” The situation was more desperate than ever.
In his Magna Charta lecture Mr. Toombs said that Algernon Sidney had summed up the object of all human wisdom as the good government of the people. ”From the earliest ages to the present time,” said he, ”there has been a continued contest between the wise and the virtuous who wish to secure good government and the corrupt who were unwilling to grant it. The highest duty of every man, a duty enjoined by G.o.d, was the service of his country.” This was the great value of the victory at Runnymede, with its rich fruits--that rights should be respected and that justice should be done. ”These had never been denied for seven hundred years, until the present evil days,” said Toombs. Magna Charta had been overridden and trampled underfoot by brave tyrants and evaded by cowardly ones. There had been ingenious schemes to destroy it. The men of '76 fought for Magna Charta. These principles had been prominent in our Const.i.tution until a Republican majority attempted destruction and civil war. Kings had made efforts to destroy its power and subvert its influence. Not a single n.o.ble family existed in England but which had lost a member in its defense. Society was organized to protect it, and all good and true men are required to maintain its teachings. ”The a.s.sa.s.sins of liberty are now in power, but a reaction is coming. Stand firm, make no compromise, have nothing to do with men who talk of dead issues. It is the s.h.i.+bboleth of ruin. Push forward, and make a square fight for your liberties.”