Robert Toombs Quotes
The North understand it better - they have told us for twenty years that their object was to pen up slavery within its present limits - surround it with a border of free States, and like the scorpion surrounded with fire, they will make it sting itself to death.
Toombs, Robert. Speech of Hon. Robert Toombs, Delivered in Milledgeville, on Tuesday Evening, November 13, 1860, Before the Legislature of Georgia. Boughton, Nisbet & Barnes, State Printers, 1860.
The Republicans had broken off from the Whig Party and started a new one attracting some liberal Democrats also. The Republican Party described themselves as “radicals” and argued for major reform quickly.
The Act was passed by the Pennsylvania General Assembly whose clerk interestingly enough was Tom Paine.
The issue of slavery which had been suppressed in Congress for the first decades of the nation broke out when Missouri was considered for statehood. By previous agreement, slavery was not even discussed in Congress but the time period elapsed. Tallmadge not only proposed that no more slaves could come into Missouri but most shocking to the Southerners was that every person born in the new state would be free at the age of 25. In a generation, there would be no more slavery in Missouri and there would be no economic compensation for slave owners at all. The House of Representatives accepted the amendment, but it failed in the Senate. At that time, Senators were not elected by voters but were appointed by the state legislators and the Southern slave states had a disproportionate share of the senate from a population point of view. But what this quotation shows clearly that a majority of the country in 1819 were opposed to slavery and were willing to end it without compensation.
See {613644} for the earlier decree which this modified.
Although some Arab nations such as Saudi Arabia maintained legal slavery into the 1960s, Tunisia’s Emancipation pre-dated that of the United States.
Until the Civil War, every territorial issue in American politics was colored by the slavery question. The South, even with its advantage of counting slaves as three-fifths of a person was inexorably losing proportional Congressional strength as the growth rate of the free states was much greater. So there would be a pro-slavery movement in every new territory. Wilmot and others were determined that after slavery had been outlawed for two decades in California before the territory became affiliated with the United States, that slavery not be reintroduced which is just what the Southern pro-slavery forces were trying to do. The amendment passed handily in the House but was killed in the Senate where Southern strength was proportionately stronger.
The first anti-slavery newspaper published in the United States & the first journal in America to advocate immediate, unconditional emancipation
See {613949} for the Governor’s letter to George Washington.
One of the many complaints that many people made at the time about Smith and his Mormons was that they opposed slavery. In fact, Smith not only opposed it be had a plan for compensating the slave owner and a method for paying for it. Smith was not advocating the kinds of personal lifestyle issues of his church the way modern religious leaders do, but was concerned with the much larger issues of expansionism, corruption of the courts and judiciary, and land distribution. He was a classic reform candidate in that sense. Smith had written to most of the then likely Presidential candidates of both major parties asking for their position on the Mormons who were facing persecution wherever they went. None of the politicians would make any satisfactory commitments. Smith took Direct Action and became the only major religious official to have run for the Presidency of the United States until Pat Robertson tried and failed in 2000. Smith’s assassination shortly thereafter cut his run for the Presidency short before it made much headway and politically he had no chance to affect the race.
In this quotation Lincoln got out of the rhetorical trap that Douglas had set for him by disclosing his personal preferences as opposed to the positions that Douglas had accused him of being pledged to. See {615827}.
In this case, the Pope was obeyed on the issue of slavery. However, Papal injunctions against slavery have not always had the desired effect. See {617632}
He was the Russian Reformer who ended serfdom and gave land to the peasants and then was assassinated. Ironically, both Alexander II and Lincoln were assassinated—because of their reform efforts—Lincoln for going too far; the Czar for not going far enough. See the Nickname that was given to the Czar: {622809}.
This quotation illustrates the strong abolitionist tendency in the Ohio Territory. Under this clause, escaped slaves from Southern states would not be returned by the state authorities. Even more insulting to the slave enthusiasts of the South, if a Southerner brought any slaves into Ohio with them as was common for Southerners traveling with their personal slaves or horse team drivers, those slaves would be free. An interesting aspect of this clause of the Ohio Constitution was that the beginning was, word for word, copied from the Northwest Ordinance of 1787. See {618100}.
A few years later he had a clearer idea of what was to be done. However, the additional factor of the Civil War played a big part in driving his Emancipation Proclamation. See {609360}
He is often referred to as “of Lahore.” He was a much better theologian than a historian. His credit of Islam with the principles that would end slavery, ignored the fact that just as American founding fathers espoused equality and freedom yet some owned slaves, likewise Mohammed, the founder of Islam, was a slaveholder. Historically, long after most of the world had abolished slavery, it still existed in the Islamic nations. They were forced out of the African slave trade by the European powers in the 19th century. But slavery was legal in Saudi Arabia as late as the 1960s. Slavery was still practiced in Sudan in 2005 with Muslims attacking Christians and Animists and taking them as slaves despite the official laws banning such practices. The government itself aided the slavers. Also, although Islam is credited with a major assault on slavery, it was not slavery per se that Muhammad banned. It was the slavery of another Muslim. Sharia and the Koran allows slavery so long as the slave is an unbeliever.
Even before we had a Constitution there was major opposition to slavery. The “price” of the American Union was the acceptance of the slavery of the South. But the hypocrisy of a country based on liberty to allow and enforce slavery was not lost on the founding fathers. Ironically the abolitionists among the founding fathers were certain that they could persuade the Southern slaveholders of the error of slavery in a few years and things would be set right in the land. Even George Washington {630626}, and Thomas Jefferson and some other slaveowners at the time wished to see its abolition. Slaveholding Southern Founding Fathers in general were so wary of the abolitionists that they achieved structural, disproportionate, power in the new Constitution to ward off the abolitionists attempts to reform slavery.
Washington was from Virginia, the largest of the slave states, and he himself owned slaves. In his will he emancipated all his slaves. Most of his fellow Southern Slave owners however not only disagreed about the abolition of slavery but were adamant that slavery spread so that the abolitionists never attain a majority.
Jefferson’s views, actions and inactions regarding slavery are very complex and contradictory. This quotation is one example of the many statements and activities to end slavery. Yet he never freed his own slaves (as did George Washington) and he fathered a child by one of his slaves with no attempt at freeing even her and the child. The Andrew Dickson White article is one of the first serious studies of the Jefferson contradictions regarding slavery.
Note that Lincoln did not justify the emancipation proclamation on moral or humanitarian grounds, but on the grounds of military necessity.
Robert Augustus Toombs was an American lawyer, planter, and national politician from Georgia who became one of the organizers of the Confederacy and served as its first Secretary of State under President Jefferson Davis. He also served in the Confederate States Army, but later became one of Davis' critics. After the Confederate defeat, Toombs fled the United States. He did not return until 1867, after his daughter's death. He regained political power in Georgia as Congressional Reconstruction ended in 1877.
