COMMENCING LIFE ANEW.
When General Toombs finally returned to Georgia it was with a great part
of his fortune gone, his political career cut off by hopeless
disability, and his household desolate. These were serious calamities
for a man fifty-seven years of age. He found himself forced under new
and unfavorable conditions to build all over again, but he set about it
in a vigorous and heroic way. His health was good. He was a splendid
specimen of manhood. His once raven locks were gray, and his beard,
which grew out from his throat, gave him a grizzly appearance. His dark
eye was full of fire and his mind responded with vigor to its new work.
When General Toombs arrived at Washington, Ga., he consulted some of his
friends over the advisability of returning to the practice of law, which
he had left twenty-five years before. Their advice was against it.
Things were in chaos; the people were impoverished, and the custodians
of the courts were the creatures of a hostile government. But Robert
Toombs was made of different stuff. Associating himself in the practice
of his profession with General Dudley M. DuBose, who had been his chief
of staff, and was his son-in-law, an able and popular man in the full
vigor of manhood, General Toombs returned actively to the practice of
law. He was not long in turning to practical account his great
abilities. Success soon claimed him as an old favorite. Business
accumulated and the ex-senator and soldier found himself once more at
the head of the bar of Georgia. Large fees were readily commanded. He
was employed in important cases in every part of Georgia, and the
announcement that Robert Toombs was to appear before judge and jury was
enough to draw large crowds from city and country. His old habits of
indomitable industry returned. He rode the circuits like a young
barrister again. He was a close collector of claims, an admirable
administrator, a safe counselor, and a bold and fearless advocate. In a
short time General Toombs' family found themselves once more in comfort,
and he was the same power with the people that he had always been.
Cut off from all hope of official promotion, scorning to sue for
political pardon, he strove to wield in the courts some of the power he
forfeited in politics. He figured largely in cases of a public nature,
and became an outspoken tribune of the people. He did not hesitate to
face the Supreme Court of Georgia, then made up of Republican judges,
and attack the laws of a Republican legislature. Among the bills passed
at that time to popularize the legislature with the people, was a series
of liberal homestead and exemption laws. They were the relief measures
of 1868. By these schemes, at once rigorous and sweeping, millions of
dollars were lost in Georgia. They were intended to wipe out old debts,
especially contracts made during the war, and Governor Bullock had
appointed a Supreme Court which sustained them. These laws were
abhorrent to Toombs. He thundered against them with all the powers of
his learning and eloquence. When he arose in court, there stood with
him, he believed, not only the cause of his client, but the honor of the
whole State of Georgia. It was much easier to seduce a poverty-stricken
people by offering them measures of relief than to drive them by the
bayonet or to subject them to African domination. In the case of
Hardeman against Downer, in June, 1868, he declared before the Supreme
Court that these homestead laws put a premium on dishonesty and robbed
the poor man of his capital. "But we must consider the intention of the
Act," said the Court. "Was it not the intention of the legislature to
prevent the collection of just such claims as these you now bring?"
"Yes, may it please the Court," said Toombs, shaking his leonine locks,
"there can be no doubt that it was the intention of the legislature to
defraud the creditor; but they have failed to put their intention in a
form that would stand, so it becomes necessary for this Court to add its
own ingenuity to this villainy. It seems that this Court is making laws
rather than decisions."
In one of his dissenting opinions upon these laws, Justice Hiram Warner
declared that he would not allow his name to go down to posterity
steeped in the infamy of such a decision. General Toombs lost his case,
but the decision was subsequently overruled by the Supreme Court of the
United States.
The times were full of evil. The legislature was dominated by
adventurers and ignorant men, and public credit was freely voted away to
new enterprises. The State was undeveloped, and this wholesale system of
public improvement became popular. Unworthy men were scrambling for
public station, and the times were out of tune. In the midst of this
demoralization Toombs was a pillar of fire. He was tireless in his
withering satire, his stinging invective, his uncompromising war upon
the misgovernment of the day.
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 trimming 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 constitution 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 God, 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 shilling 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 button 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 God 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 associate
with. I would like to associate 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
damned 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 assembly of
manikins whose object is never higher than their breeches pockets;
seekers of jobs and judgeships, 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 constitutionality 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.