Robert Toombs. Pleasant A. Stovall

speech fell like a clap of thunder. The Wilmot Proviso waved like a black flag over the heads of Southern men. No one had spoken outright until Mr. Toombs in his bold, dashing, Mirabeau style accepted the issue in the words just given. The House was filled with storms of applause and jeers, and, as can be imagined, Mr. Toombs' speech did not soothe the bitterness or alter the determination of either side.

      On the 22d of December a conference was held by Whigs and Democrats, the Southern Whigs excepted, and a resolution reported that the person receiving the largest number of votes for Speaker, on a certain ballot, should be declared elected, provided this number should be the majority of a quorum, but not a majority of the House. Mr. Stanton of Tennessee offered this "plurality resolution."

      Mr. Toombs sprang to his feet and declared that the House, until it organized, could not pass this or any other rule.

      Members stood up and called Mr. Toombs to order, claiming that there was already a question pending. Mr. Stanton contended that he had the floor.

      Toombs called out: "You may cry 'order,' gentlemen, until the heavens fall; you cannot take this place from me. I have the right to protest against this transaction. It is not with you to say whether this right shall be yielded or when it shall be yielded."

      Mr. Stevens of Pennsylvania: "I call the gentleman to order."

      Mr. Toombs: "I say that by the law of 1789 this House, until a Speaker is elected and gentlemen have taken the oath of office, has no right to adopt any rules whatever."

      (Loud cries of "order.")

      Mr. Toombs: "Gentlemen may amuse themselves crying 'order.'"

      (Calls of "order.")

      Mr. Toombs: "But I have the right and I intend to maintain the right to——"

      Mr. Vandyke called upon the clerk to put the preceding question. "Let us see," he said, "whether the gentleman will disregard the order of this House."

      Mr. Toombs: "I have the floor, and the clerk cannot put the question."

      "The House," he said, "has no right. Gentlemen may cry 'order' and interrupt me. It is mere brute force, attempting by the power of lungs to put me down."

      Confusion increased. Members called out to encourage Mr. Toombs, and others to put him down. In the midst of this babel he continued to speak, his black hair thrown back, his face flushed, and his eyes blazing like suns. His deep voice could be heard above the shouts like a lion's roar. Members shouted to the clerk to call the roll for the yeas and nays.

      Toombs continued: "If you seek by violating the common law of parliament, the laws of the land, and the Constitution of the United States, to put me down ["order, order, call the roll"], you will find it a vain and futile attempt. ["Order."] I am sure I am indebted to the ignorance of my character on the part of those who are thus disgracing themselves ["order, order"], if they suppose any such efforts as they are now making will succeed in driving me from the position which I have assumed. I stand upon the Constitution of my country, upon the liberty of speech which you have treacherously violated, and upon the rights of my constituents, and your fiendish yells may be well raised to drown an argument which you tremble to hear. You claim and have exercised the power to prevent all debate upon any and every subject, yet you have not as yet shown your right to sit here at all. I will not presume that you have any such right ["order, order"]. I will not suppose that the American people have elected such agents to represent them. I therefore demand that they shall comply with the Act of 1789 before I shall be bound to submit to their authority." (Loud cries of "order.")

      The Act to which Mr. Toombs referred recited that the oath must be administered by the Speaker to all the members present, and to the clerk, previous to entering on any other business. This he tried to read, but cries of "order" drowned his voice.

      

      Throwing aside his manual Mr. Toombs walked further out into the aisle and assumed a yet more defiant position.

      "You refuse," he said, "to hear either the Constitution or the law. Perhaps you do well to listen to neither; they all speak a voice of condemnation to your reckless proceedings. But if you will not hear them the country will. Every freeman from the Atlantic to the Pacific shore shall hear them, and every honest man shall consider them. You cannot stifle the voice that shall reach their ears. The electric spark shall proclaim to the freemen of this republic that an American Congress, having conceived the purpose to violate the Constitution and the laws to conceal their enormities, have disgraced the record of their proceedings by placing upon it a resolution that their representatives shall not be heard in their defense, and finding this illegal resolution inadequate to secure so vile an end, have resorted to brutish yells and cries to stifle the words of those they cannot intimidate."

      The clerk continued to call the roll, and Mr. Toombs with splendid audacity turned upon him. Pointing his finger at the locum tenens, he cried with scorn: "I ask by what authority that man stands there and calls these names. By what authority does HE interfere with the rights of a member of this House. [The clerk continued to call.] He is an intruder, and how dares he to interrupt members in the exercise of their constitutional rights. Gentlemen, has the sense of shame departed with your sense of right, that you permit a creature, an interloper, in no wise connected with you, to stand at that desk and interrupt your order?"

      Mr. Toombs continued, amid these boisterous scenes, his alternate rôle of argument, of appeal, of denunciation. He contended that a power delegated to the House must be used by a majority of the House. He concluded:

      "I therefore demand of you before the country, in the name of the Constitution and the people, to repeal your illegal rule, reject the one on your table, and proceed to the discharge of your high duties, which the people have confided to you, according to the unvarying precedents of your people and the law of the land."

      This performance was denounced by Northern restrictionists as menacing and insolent. Mr. Stephens, in his "War Between the States," contended that it should rather be considered in the light of a wonderful exhibition of physical as well as intellectual prowess—in this, that a single man should have been able, thus successfully, to speak to a tumultuous crowd and, by declamatory denunciations combined with solid argument, to silence an infuriated assembly.

      The noise during the delivery of this speech gradually ceased. The clerk stopped calling the roll, all interruptions were suspended and "every eye," says Mr. Stephens, "was fixed upon the speaker." It was a picture worthy of ranking with Lamartine's great speech to the revolutionists in France.

      On the 29th of February Mr. Toombs addressed the House upon the general territorial question. He said:

      "We had our institutions when you sought our allegiance. We were content with them then, and we are content with them now. We have not sought to thrust them upon you, nor to interfere with yours. If you believe what you say, that yours are so much the best to promote the happiness and good government of society, why do you fear our equal competition with you in the Territories? We only ask that our common government shall protect us both, equally, until the Territories shall be admitted as States into the Union, then to leave their citizens free to adopt any domestic policy in reference to this subject which in their judgment may best promote their interest and their happiness. The demand is just. Grant it, and you place your prosperity and ours upon a solid foundation; you perpetuate the Union so necessary to your prosperity; you solve the problem of republican government. If it be demonstrated that the Constitution is powerless for our protection, it will then be not only the right but the duty of the slaveholding States to resume the powers which they have conferred upon this government and to seek new safeguards for their future protection. … We took the Constitution and the Union together. We will have both or we will have neither. This cry of Union is the masked battery behind which the rights of the South are to be assaulted. Let the South mark the man who is for the Union at every hazard and to the last extremity; when the day of her peril comes he will be the imitator of that character, the base Judas, who for thirty pieces of silver threw away a pearl richer than all his tribe."

      On the 15th of June, 1850, while the compromise measures were shifting