Entering public life about the same time, living a short distance apart, professing the same political principles, practicing in the same courts of law, were Alexander H. Stephens of Taliaferro and Robert Toombs of Wilkes. Entirely unlike in physical organism and mental make-up, differing entirely in origin and views of life, these two men were close personal friends, and throughout an eventful period of more than half a century, preserved an affectionate regard for each other.

Mr. Stephens was delicate, sensitive, conservative, and sagacious, while Toombs was impetuous, overpowering, defiant, and masterful. Stephens was small, swarthy, fragile, while Toombs was leonine, full-blooded, and majestic. And yet in peace and war these two men walked hand in hand, and the last public appearance of Robert Toombs was when, bent and weeping, he bowed his gray head at the coffin and pronounced the funeral oration over Alexander Stephens.

In the General Assembly of 1843, Robert Toombs was a member of the house, but his ability and power had marked him as a candidate for Congress, and Mr. Stephens had already been promoted from the State Senate to a seat in the national legislature at Washington. The law requiring the State to choose congressmen on the district plan had been passed, and the General Assembly was then engaged in laying off the counties into congressional districts. The bill, as first reported, included the counties of Wilkes and Taliaferro in the second district of Georgia. Here was a problem. Toombs and Stephens had been named as Whig candidates for the Clay campaign of 1844. To have them clash would have been to deprive the State of their talents in the national councils. It would be interesting to speculate as to what would have been the result had these two men been opposed. Stephens was naturally a Union man, and was no very ardent advocate of slavery. Toombs inherited the traditions of the Virginia landowners. It is not improbable that the firmness of the one would have been a foil for the fire of the other. History might have been written differently had not the conference committee in the Georgia Legislature in 1843 altered the schedule of districts, placing Taliaferro in the seventh and Wilkes in the eighth Congressional district. Both were safely Whig, and the future Vice-President and premier of the Southern Confederacy now prepared for the canvass which was to plunge them into their duties as members of the national Congress.

Robert Toombs had already made his appearance in national politics in 1840. Although still a member of the Georgia Legislature, he took a deep interest in the success of the Whig ticket for President. His power as a stump speaker was felt in eastern Georgia, where the people gathered at the "log cabin and hard cider" campaigns. The most daring feat of young Toombs, just thirty years old, was in crossing the Savannah River and meeting George McDuffie, the great Democrat of South Carolina, then in the zenith of his fame. An eye-witness of this contest between the champions of Van Buren and Harrison declared that McDuffie was "harnessed lightning" himself. He was a nervous, impassioned speaker. When the rash young Georgian crossed over to Willington, S.C., to meet the lion in his den, Toombs rode horseback, and it was noticed that his shirt front was stained with tobacco juice, and yet Toombs was a remarkably handsome man. "Genius sat upon his brow, and his eyes were as black as death and bigger than an ox's." His presence captivated even the idolators of McDuffie. His argument and invective, his overpowering eloquence, linger in the memory of old men now. McDuffie said of him: "I have heard John Randolph of Roanoke, and met Burgess of Rhode Island, but this wild Georgian is a Mirabeau."

In 1844 Robert Toombs was a delegate to the Baltimore convention which nominated Henry Clay, and during this visit he made a speech in New York which attracted wide attention. It threatened to raise a storm about his head in Georgia. In his speech he arraigned Mr. Calhoun for writing his "sugar letter" to Louisiana, and for saying that he would protect sugar because it was the production of slave labor. Mr. Toombs declared: "If any discrimination is made between free and slave labor it ought to be in favor of free labor." "But," said he, "the Whigs of Georgia want no such partial protection as Mr. Calhoun offers; they want protection for all classes of labor and home industry. The Whigs protest against these efforts to prejudice the South against the North, or the North against the South. They have a common interest as well as a common history. The blood that was mingled at Yorktown and at Eutaw cannot be kept at enmity forever. The Whigs of Bunker Hill are the same as the Whigs of Georgia." Mr. Toombs was actually charged in this campaign with being an Abolitionist. He was accused of saying in a speech at Mallorysville, Ga., during the Harrison campaign, that slavery was "a moral and political evil." This was now brought up against him. Mr. Toombs admitted saying that slavery was a political evil. He wrote a ringing letter to his constituents, in which he declared that "the affected fear and pretended suspicion of a part of the Democratic press in relation to my views are well understood by the people. I have no language to express my scorn and contempt for the whole crew. I have no other reply to make to these common sewers of filth and falsehood. If I had as many arms as Briareus they would be too few to correct the misrepresentations of speeches I have made in the past six months."

It was on the 3d of October, 1844, that Robert Toombs spoke at a memorable political meeting in Augusta, Ga. Augusta was in the heart of the district which he was contesting for Congress, and the Democrats, to strengthen their cause, brought over McDuffie from South Carolina. Large crowds were present in the shady yard surrounding the City Hall; seats had been constructed there, while back in the distance long trenches were dug, and savory meats were undergoing the famous process of barbecue. Speaking commenced at ten o'clock in the morning, and, with a short rest for dinner, there were seven hours of oratory. People seldom tired in those days of forensic meetings. Toombs was on his mettle. He denounced the Democrats for dragging the slavery question before the people to operate upon their fears. It was a bugbear everlastingly used to cover up the true question at issue. It was kept up to operate on the fears of the timid and the passions and prejudices of the unsuspecting.

The young Whig then launched into a glowing defense of the National Bank. The Democrats had asked where was the authority to charter a bank? He would reply, "Where was the authority, in so many words, to build lighthouses? Democrats were very strict constructionists when it was necessary to accomplish their political purposes, but always found a way to get around these doubts when occasion required." He taunted McDuffie with having admitted that Congress had power to charter a bank.

Mr. Toombs contended that a tariff, with the features of protection to American industry, had existed since the foundation of the government. This great system of "plunder" had been supported by Jefferson. Eloquently warming up under the Democratic charge that the tariff was a system of robbery, Mr. Toombs appealed to every Whig and Democrat as an American who boasted of this government as "a model to all nations of the earth; as the consummation of political wisdom; who asks the oppressed of all nations to come and place himself under its protection, because it upholds the weak against the strong and protects the poor against the rich, whether it has been going on in a system of plunder ever since it sprang into power." "It is not true," he said, "it is not true!"

Turning with prophetic ken to his Augusta friends, he asked what would be the effect were the Savannah River turned through the beautiful plains of Augusta, and manufactures built up where the industrious could find employment. Hundreds of persons, he said, would be brought together to spin the raw cotton grown in the State, to consume the provisions which the farmers raised, thus diversifying their employment and increasing their profits. "Would any man tell me," shouted the orator, his eyes blazing, and his arms uplifted, "that this would impoverish the country—would make paupers of the people? To increase the places where the laborer may sell his labor would never make him a pauper. Be controlled," said he, "in the administration of government and in all other things, by the improvement of the age. Do not tie the living to the dead. Others may despise the lights of science or experience; they have a right, if they choose, to be governed by the dreams of economists who have rejected practical evidence. But no such consistency is mine. I will have none of it."

McDuffie in his speech declared that all the plundering which England had been subjected to from the days of Hengist and Horsa could not equal the plundering which the people of the exporting States had sustained.

Toombs answered that if a man must pay tax to sustain the government it was better he should pay it in such a way as to benefit his own countrymen than for the benefit of foreign manufacturers and foreign capitalists.

Mr. Toombs alluded to a letter of James K. Polk to a Pennsylvania manufacturer, as leaning toward protection.

McDuffie said that Polk's letter was "composed for that meridian."

"Henry Clay does not need an interpreter," cried Toombs. "He is the same in the North as in the South. He would rather be right than President."

"Dallas, the Democratic nominee for vice president, is a high-tariff man," said Toombs. "He voted for the tariff of 1832 and against the compromise measures. Although the sword was drawn to drink the blood of McDuffie's friends in Carolina, Dallas would still adhere to his pound of flesh."

Toombs concluded his great reply to McDuffie: "We have lived under the present order of things for fifty years, and can continue to live under it for one thousand years to come, if the people of the South are but content to stand upon their rights as guaranteed in the Constitution, and not work confusion by listening to ambitious politicians: by taking as much pains to preserve a good understanding with our Northern brethren, the vast majority of whom are inclined to respect the limitations of the Constitution."

This was perhaps the greatest political meeting Georgia ever held. Politics were at white heat. Toombs and McDuffie each spoke two hours. The campaign cry was for the Whigs: "Clay, Frelinghuysen, Toombs, and our glorious Union," and by the Democrats: "Polk, Dallas, Texas, and Oregon." It was Whig vs. Loco-foco. The Whig leaders of the South were Pettigru, Thompson, and Yeadon of South Carolina, Merriweather, Toombs, and Stephens, of Georgia, while the Democratic lights were McDuffie, Rhett, and Pickens of South Carolina, and Charlton, Cobb, Colquitt, and Herschel V. Johnson of Georgia.

The campaign of 1844 was bitter in Georgia. The Whigs carried the burden of a protective tariff, while the memories of nullification and the Force bill were awakened by a ringing letter from George M. Troup, condemning the tariff in his vigorous style. This forced Mr. Toombs, in his letter accepting the congressional nomination, to review the subject in its relation to the States' Rights party in Georgia. "The tariff of 1824," said he, "which was voted for by Andrew Jackson, carried the principle of protection further than any preceding one. Jackson was the avowed friend of the protective policy, yet he received the vote of Georgia, regardless of party. In 1828 the Harrisburg convention demanded additional protection, and this measure was carried through Congress by the leading men of the Democratic party. It created discontent in the South, and the Act of 1832 professed to modify the tariff—but this measure not proving satisfactory was 'nullified' by South Carolina. General Jackson then issued his proclamation which pronounced principles and issues utterly at war with the rights of the States, and subversive of the character of the government. The opponents of consolidating principles went into opposition. Delegates met in Milledgeville in 1833, adopted the Virginia and Kentucky resolutions, denounced the sentiments of Jackson's proclamation, and affirmed the doctrine of States' Rights."

"The Democratic party was then," said Toombs, "cheek by jowl with the whole tariff party in the United States, sustaining General Jackson, and stoutly maintaining that the leaders of that spirited little band in our sister State, whose talent shed a glory over their opposition, deserved a halter. They sustained John C. Forsythe in voting against the Compromise bill—that peace offering of the illustrious Henry Clay."

Mr. Toombs declared in this campaign that the effect of a tariff on the productive industries of a country has been a disputed question among the wisest statesmen for centuries, and that these influences are subject to so many disturbing causes, both foreign and domestic, that they are incapable of being reduced to fixed principles. Mr. Toombs did not hesitate, however, to condemn "the theories of the South Carolina school of politics."

Mr. Toombs opposed the acquisition of Texas. He did not believe the North would consent. "It matters not," he said, "that Mexico is weak, that the acquisition is easy. The question is just the same: Is it right, is it just, is it the policy of this country to enlarge its territory by conquest? The principle is condemned by the spirit of the age, by reason, and by revelation. A people who love justice and hate wrong and oppression cannot approve it. War in a just cause is a great calamity to any people, and can only be justified by the highest necessity. A people who go to war without just and sufficient cause, with no other motive than pride and love of glory, are enemies to the human race and deserve the execration of all mankind. What, then, must be the judgment of a war for plunder?" He denounced the whole thing as a land job, and declared that he would rather have "the Union without Texas than Texas without the Union."

The Democratic opponent of Mr. Toombs in this canvass was Hon. Edward J. Black of Screven, who had been in Congress since 1838. The new district was safely Whig, but the young candidate had to fight the prestige of McDuffie and Troup and opposition from numberless sources. It was charged that he always voted in the Georgia Legislature to raise taxes. He retorted, "It is right to resort to taxation to pay the honest debt of a State. I did vote to raise taxes, and I glory in it. It was a duty I owed the State, and I would go to the last dollar to preserve her good name and honor."

While Mr. Toombs was making a speech in this canvass a man in the audience charged him with having voted for the free banking law and against the poor-school fund. "The gentleman," said Mr. Toombs, "seems to find pleasure in reveling in my cast-off errors. I shall not disturb him."

"How is this, Mr. Toombs," shouted a Democrat at another time, "here is a vote of yours in the house journal I do not like."

"Well, my friend, there are several there that I do not like: now what are you going to do about it?"

Especially was opposition bitter to Henry Clay. Cartoons were published from Northern papers, of Clay whipping a negro slave, with this inscription: "The Mill Boy of the Slashes." Pictures appeared in the Democratic papers of a human figure surmounted by a pistol, a bottle, and a deck of cards. To this a rÉsumÉ of Clay's misdeeds was appended:

"In 1805 quarreled with Colonel Davis of Kentucky, which led to his first duel. In 1808 challenged Humphrey Marshall, and fired three times at his breast. In 1825 challenged the great John Randolph, and fired once at his breast. In 1838 he planned the Cilley duel, by which a murder was committed and a wife made a mourner. In 1841, when sixty-five years old, and gray-headed, is under a five thousand dollar bond to keep the peace. At twenty-nine he perjured himself to secure a seat in the United States Senate. In 1824, made the infamous bargain with Adams by which he sold out for a six thousand dollar office. He is well known as a gambler and Sabbath-breaker."

But the eloquent Harry of the West had a large and devoted following. He visited Georgia in March of this year, and charmed the people by his eloquence and magnetism. Robert Toombs had met him at the social board and had been won by his superb mentality and fine manners. Women paid him the tribute of their presence wherever he spoke, and little children scattered flowers along his path. But the November election in Georgia, as elsewhere, was adverse to the party of Henry Clay. Toombs and Stephens were sent to Congress, but the electoral vote of Georgia was cast for Polk and Dallas, and the Whigs, who loved Clay as a father, regarded his defeat as a personal affliction as well as a public calamity.