This year is the 175th anniversary of the graduation of Union's “other” secretary of state, Robert Augustus Toombs, who held that post for the Confederacy at the start of the Civil War. A brief biography of Toombs was written in 1960 by Fred C. Cole, president of Washington and Lee University and former editor of The Journal of Southern
History. The following is adapted from his article.
Among all the colleges of America, Union is unique. No other college can boast of two alumni who served concurrently as Secretary of State-William H. Seward [Class of 1820], who served the North under Lincoln, and Robert Toombs, who served the Confederacy under Jefferson Davis.
Toombs took office on Feb. 27, 1861, amid an atmosphere of excitement and apprehension that surrounded the State House at Montgomery, Ala. Like the office of secretary of state in the now alien government of the United States, the position was considered one of honor and distinction, in effect, the “premiership” of Jefferson Davis's cabinet. Southerners generally agreed that Davis had done well in his choice of top government officials; all knew the excellent qualities of leadership and statesmanship of Robert Toombs.
Unfortunately, the office that Toombs assumed was not destined to be one of power and influence. The Confederacy was to exist as a nation at war. The continuous crises involved in meeting the impossible demands of the armies in the field were to take precedence over long-term plans and efforts towards establishing the Confederacy among the great nations of the world. Toombs found himself virtually a chief clerk for the Davis administration, handling mainly the infrequent correspondence and instructions between the government and its agents abroad and those active n the still uncommitted states of the Upper South.
He resigned his office in July of 1861, just a few days after his commission as a brigadier-general in the Confederate Army became effective.
Thus the South lost one of its ablest civilian leaders from the political arena. The problems which the South faced demanded wisdom, persuasiveness, insight, eloquence, reason, the ability to get things done-in short, the qualities Robert Toombs possessed. At the age of 51, in the prime of his intellectual capacities, he ceased to be an important force in Southern statesmanship.
Toombs and Seward did not attend Union together but less than a decade separated their undergraduate careers, and both were in large measure exposed to the same influences, chief among them, perhaps, that of Eliphalet
Nott, the distinguished scholar and academician who served as president from 1804 to 1866.
Toombs was one of 28 transfer students among the 83 members of Union's Class of 1828. He came to Union from Franklin College in Athens, Ga., an institution that was to evolve into the University of Georgia. Toombs's biographer, Professor Ulrich B. Phillips, suggests that Franklin College at that time was deficient in most areas of collegiate excellence. But what the institution lacked in academic rigor, it made up for in disciplinary stringency, and a hard and fast rule concerning card-playing by students proved Toombs's downfall-or so the story goes. Apparently, Toombs at Union was a model student in deportment.
Union had a number of Southern students, and it is not too difficult to draw a parallel between what happened at Union among men of different sectional heritages and that which occurred on the national scene. At first, there was the mingling of factions, the realization that there were differences of attitudes and beliefs, but a general acceptance of things as they were. Then the differences grew in importance, and the lines of debate and argument were drawn. And, finally, the secession itself, if you will, of the groups to their special areas of the graduation stage occurred.
From Union, Toombs went to the University of Virginia to prepare for a career in law, and in this career, begun at the age of 20, he found wealth, prestige, and, characteristically then as today, a stepping stone to public service. At age 27, he became a member of the Georgia state legislature. In 1844, he was elected to Congress, where he won many friends and worked to avoid sectional friction wherever possible. Throughout the decade of the 1850s, and through 1860, Toombs remained, in the final test, a compromiser, a politician in the best sense of the term. He labored long in behalf of the Compromise of 1850, supported the Kansas-Nebraska Act, and in 1856 he sought to halt bloodshed in Kansas through a bill of his own that would provide quick admission of the suffering
territory as a state on the terms of any properly conceived republican constitution.
Toombs was one of a Senate Committee of Thirteen which made a last effort to seek areas of compromise, and this failing, he reluctantly gave up his hopes of keeping Georgia within the Union and of
preserving the Union itself. On Jan. 7, 1861, he made his farewell speech in the Senate, and several days later journeyed south.
After the war, Toombs retired to his home at Washington, Ga. He renewed his law practice with great success, and within the borders of Georgia he again exercised strong influence. His last great act of service to Georgia was his work with the convention of 1877, which framed a new state constitution and wisely heeded Toombs's counsel to “establish a few fundamental principles and leave these other matters to the legislature and the people, in order to meet the ever varying affairs of human life.” He died in 1885.