WITH THE GEORGIA MILITIA.
General Toombs' next appearance in the field was as adjutant and
inspector-general of General G. W. Smith's division of Georgia militia.
He was present during the battles before Atlanta, the engagement at
Peachtree Creek, and the siege of the city. General J. E. Johnston had
just been relieved from command of the Confederate forces, and General
J. B. Hood placed in charge. General Toombs wrote from Atlanta:
The tone of the army has greatly improved. We are now
receiving reenforcements from the West. Davis, having
kicked Johnston out, now feels obliged to sustain Hood, so
the country is likely to get good out of evil. General Hood
is displaying great energy and using his best exertions for
success. I think very well of him. He is a most excellent
man, and undoubtedly of great military talent. Whether
equal or not to this great struggle, time must prove.
The militia are coming up finely. Twelve hundred of them
arrived here this evening, armed and tolerably well
equipped. Poor fellows! They are green and raw,
undisciplined and badly officered. It keeps us at work day
and night to bring order out of this confused mass, and we
have but a poor chance. They march right into the
trenches, and are immediately under the enemy's fire all
day. We shall trust to a kind Providence alone to preserve
them from a great disaster, and make them useful to the
army and the country. The pressure is so great that we are
compelled to put them to the work of veterans without an
hour's preparation. I am doing my utmost to get them in the
best possible position. Georgians are all coming up well
except the cities.
Speaking of men who try to shirk duty, Mr. Toombs wrote, "Poor
creatures! What do they want to live for?"
General Toombs had the task of organizing the recruits and getting them
ready for the field. He writes to his wife: "Since I began this letter,
the Yankees have begun an attack on a part of our line and I was obliged
to ride with General Hood to look after our defenses." General Toombs
alludes to General E. C. Walthall of Mississippi, as "a splendid officer
and a gentleman." He says: "The enemy are evidently intending to starve
us rather than to fight us out. I have, at the request of General Hood,
not less than twenty letters to write on that very subject. Sherman
shells the town furiously every day. Not much damage yet."
It has been customary to speak in light terms of the Georgia militia,
who, late in the day, took the field to man the defenses when Sherman
was marching to the sea. They were frequently made up of old men and
boys who had been exempt from the regular service, and these were
hurried into action with poor equipment and scant preparation. General
Toombs, in a letter written to his wife, July 25, 1864, says:
The militia have behaved with great gallantry. This is
sincerely true. They have far exceeded my expectations, and
in the fight on Thursday equaled any troops in the line of
battle. If they will stand and fight like men, our homes
will be saved. God give them the spirit of men, and all
will be well!
In another place he writes:
We have a mixed crowd, a large number of earnest, brave,
true men; then all the shirks and skulks in Georgia trying
to get from under bullets.
General Toombs commended and endorsed the policy of Governor Brown
during his six years' administration of the office from 1857 to 1863.
These two men were warm friends and political allies. When Governor
Brown's third term was drawing to a close, he preferred the selection of
General Toombs as his successor. But Toombs declined to make the race.
His game now was war, not politics. He preferred the field to the
Cabinet. He writes with considerable feeling this letter to his wife:
Whatever fate may befall me, I feel that this is my place,
in the field and with the militia, with the men who own the
country and who are struggling to preserve it for their
children. I am truly thankful to God for the health he has
given me to enable me to perform my part of this work.
He called all the sons of Georgia to come, even to "die together rather
than let the Yankee overrun and conquer Georgia." He concludes a letter
of appeal:
Better be
Where the unconquered Spartans still are free,
In their proud charnel of Thermopylae.
General Toombs' last military service, after the fall of Atlanta, was on
the 20th of December, 1864, when as adjutant and inspector-general he
served in General G. W. Smith's division, Georgia militia, at the siege
of Savannah. General Dick Taylor, in his "Destruction and
Reconstruction," gives a very graphic description of General Toombs'
energy. The Georgia militia had left Macon for Savannah, and to avoid
capture by the resistless column of Sherman's army, then marching to the
sea, was shipped by way of Thomasville. The trains were sometimes slow
in moving, and to General Taylor, who was anxious to mass all forces at
Savannah, the delay was galling. When Toombs came up, he "damned the
dawdling trainmen, and pretty soon infused his own nervous force into
the whole concern. The wheezing engines and freight vans were readily
put in motion, and Governor Brown's 'army' started toward Savannah."
News reached General Taylor about that time that the Federal forces at
Port Royal were coming up to capture Pocotaligo on the Charleston and
Savannah road. This was a dangerous move, as General Taylor was anxious
to hold this line for coast defense. He needed reenforcements to hold
this point, and at once thought of "Joe Brown's Army." The position of
Governor Brown was, however, as General Taylor understood it, that
Georgia troops were to be held to guard Georgia soil. This was one of
the points in his discussion with Mr. Davis. General Taylor consulted
with General Toombs, however, and they arranged to have the Georgia
militia "shunted off at a switch near Savannah and transported quietly
to Carolina." At Pocotaligo these troops had a lively brush with the
Union forces and succeeded in holding the railroad. The Georgians were
plucky whether at home or abroad, but General Taylor declared that
Toombs enjoyed his part in making them "unconscious patriots."
Sherman's march to the sea was the concluding tragedy of the Civil War.
The State which had been at the forefront of the revolution had become
the bloody theater of battle. From the Tennessee River to Atlanta,
Sherman and Johnston had grappled with deadly fury down the mountain
defiles; then Cheatham and Wheeler harassed him at Macon and united for
a final siege of Savannah. The granaries and workshops of the
Confederacy were gone when Georgia was devastated--as General Lord
Wolseley said, Sherman's invasion was a swordthrust through the vitals
of the young nation. Robert Toombs had followed his own idea of meeting
the invader as soon as he struck an inch of State soil and fighting him
as long as a man remained. From the fruitless defense of Savannah,
Toombs hastened to discuss the situation with Governor Brown. He
happened to be dining with him that April day when the news came of the
surrender at Appomattox. The two men looked at each other intently, when
they realized that all was over.
Toombs and Brown had been closely allied since the day that the latter
was nominated for Governor in 1857. They had fought campaigns together.
Toombs had sustained Governor Brown's war policy almost to the letter.
Now they shook hands and parted. Henceforth their paths diverged. Days
of bitterness put that friendship to an end. Both men worked his course
during reconstruction as he saw fit. But political differences deepened
almost into personal feud.
General Toombs repaired to his home in Washington and, on the 4th of
May, 1865, Jefferson Davis, his Cabinet and staff, having retreated from
Richmond to Danville, thence to Greensboro, N. C., and Abbeville, S. C.,
rode across the country with an armed escort to Washington, Ga. Here,
in the old Heard House, the last meeting of the Confederate Cabinet was
held. The members separated, and the civil government of the Southern
Confederacy passed into history. There were present John C.
Breckenridge, Secretary of War; John H. Reagan, Postmaster-General,
besides the members of Mr. Davis' staff. The Confederate President was
worn and jaded. He looked pale and thin, but was plucky to the last.
After the surrender of Lee and Johnston, he wanted to keep up the
warfare in the mountains of Virginia, and in the country west of the
Mississippi, but he was finally persuaded that the Confederacy must
cease to struggle. On the public square of Washington the little brick
house, with its iron rail and its red walls, is still pointed out to the
visitor as the spot where the Davis government dissolved. It was a
dramatic fate which determined its dissolution at the home of Robert
Toombs. He had been present at its birth. His had been one of the
leading spirits of the revolution. He had served it in the Cabinet and
field, he had been pressed for the position of its chief magistracy, and
now in the shadow of his own rooftree its concluding council was held.
General Reagan was a guest of General Toombs during his stay in
Washington, as was General St. John and Major Raphael J. Moses, who had
been a member of Toombs' staff. In the evening General Toombs called
General Reagan into a room by himself and inquired whether the latter
needed any money. General Reagan said he had money enough to take him to
Texas. Then General Toombs inquired after Mr. Davis, and asked whether
he had any money. "I told him no," says General Reagan, "but that I had
money enough to take us both West of of the Mississippi, and had told
Mr. Davis so. I had no doubt but that he would rely on that." General
Toombs then asked if Mr. Davis was well mounted. "I told him yes, that
he had his bay horse Kentucky, and that after the surrender General Lee
had sent his fine gray Traveler, by his son Robert, around through
Lynchburg to Mr. Davis at Greenesboro, N. C." "Well," said General
Toombs, with thoughtfulness, "Davis and I had a quarrel once, but that
is over now. I am at home and can command money and men, and if Mr.
Davis wants anything, I shall be glad to furnish it." General Toombs
added that under terms of the convention between Sherman and Johnston,
Mr. Davis was entitled to go where he pleased between that point and the
Chattahoochee River. "I wish you would say to Mr. Davis," said Toombs,
in his bluff way, "that, if necessary, I will call my men around me and
see him safe to the Chattahoochee at the risk of my life."
On his return to the hotel Mr. Reagan gave General Toombs' message to
Mr. Davis, and told the latter of the inquiries and offers. "That is
like Toombs," said Mr. Davis. "He was always a whole-souled man."
The four men whom the Washington government wanted to arrest and hold
responsible for the war were Toombs, Davis, Slidell, and Howell Cobb.
Their friends understood this perfectly, and each man was urged to make
his escape. Jefferson Davis was arrested in Irwin County, Ga., on May
10. He was rapidly making his way to the West, and was trying to reach
Texas. How General Toombs finally escaped must be reserved for a more
extended recital.
General Toombs and Mr. Davis never met but once after the war. It was
unexpected, dramatic. Some years after General Toombs had returned from
his long exile, and Mr. Davis was just back from his trip to England,
the ex-president visited Lookout Mountain, Tennessee, the guest of the
poet Sidney Lanier. He here appeared at his best in the company of
sympathetic and admiring friends, and charmed everyone by his polish and
learning. The day before Jefferson Davis left, General and Mrs. Toombs
arrived at the mountain. Mr. Davis was, at that time, absent on a
horseback trip. He was fond of riding, and had gone over to see some of
the fine views of the mountain and to inspect the fields where recent
battles had raged with so much fury. The hotel was kept by a Northern
man who knew nothing of the relations between Mr. Davis and General
Toombs, and he believed the thing to do was to put General and Mrs.
Toombs in a vacant room of the cottage occupied by Mr. Davis. It was a
small house, with a piazza extending along the front. It so happened
that the Toombses, who had just learned of Mr. Davis' presence at the
hotel, were sitting on the piazza chatting with friends when Mr. Davis
came up. Mr. Davis had also heard of General Toombs' arrival at the
hotel, but neither knew that the other was domiciled in the same
cottage. To General Toombs the appearance was as if Mr. Davis had come
at once to make a cordial call. No one could be more hospitable and
polite than Toombs, and this apparent challenge to friendship brought
out the best side of his nature. The men met with considerable warmth.
From General Toombs Mr. Davis advanced to Mrs. Toombs. Between these two
the meeting was profoundly affecting. He embraced her tenderly. Toombs
and Davis had been friends and neighbors years ago in Washington City,
and Mr. Davis had been extremely fond of Mr. Toombs' family. The
distinguished party soon fell into friendly conversation. Next day Mr.
Davis left Lookout Mountain. He never met Robert Toombs again.