CHAPTER XII.

A

Toombs and Stephens.

MID the acrimonious rivalries of partisan politics, like the fragrant wild flower of India in the deep

est tangle-woods of the jungle, exquisite friendships are sometimes born. Between two great Georgians whose distinguishing attributes were in polar contrast and whose political opinions and affiliations often clashed on vital public issues, there existed through all the fluctuating fortunes of more than fifty years the warmest and tenderest personal relations. These two men were Alexander H. Stephens and Robert Toombs. Damon and Pythias were not more loyal to each other; nor David and Jonathan more devoted. They were sometimes called the Castor and Pollux of Georgia politics.

The most observable difference between the two men lay in the outward contrasts of physical attributes. Toombs was muscular, full-statured, deep-chested and imperious. He was a tower of strength. His veins were swiftly pulsed by vigorous and warm blood of the richest quality of red. His sinews were wrought of steel. His muscles were spun of oak. His head was leonine. His dark brow, over which clustering waves of hair fell with cloud-like effects, seemed to be the abode of lightning and

the home of thunder. Stephens was fragile, sickly, wan and emaciated. He wore the typical look of an invalid. His eyes were bright, but they beamed like lanterns in the windows of the charnel-house. His cheeks were sunken, and his features, contracted by suffering, were overlaid with an enamel of sepulchral whiteness. He appeared to be constantly hovering upon the borders of another world and to be taking his last view of earth. His farewell looks were ever and anon whispering good-by. Nevertheless his voice possessed an unusual compass and an extraordinary power of penetration; but whereabouts in his slender anatomy the physical force lay hidden which expelled these musical harmonies is one of the inscrutable mysteries of finite existence.

Both men in the earlier glows of political campaigning in Georgia labored under peculiar difficulties begotten of physical handicaps. The difficulty with Toombs was in lifting his audience to the high-water levels of enthusiasm, which his picturesque personality inspired. He addressed men many of whom were in the same state of mind as the Englishman who wondered if any man on earth could be really as great as Daniel Webster looked when he appeared for the first time on the streets of London. The difficulty with Stephens was in overcoming the depreciated estimate of his powers created by his slight figure and in kindling among his auditors by his rare genius something of the ecstasy of feeling which caused the rustics of the village to rave over the accomplishments of the schoolmaster in Goldsmith's rare poem

"And still they gazed and still the wonder grew

That one small head could carry all he knew."

It was the boast of Mr. Toombs that he had never tasted the wares of the apothecary's shop until he was thirty-four years of age. It was the misfortune of Mr. Stephens that he had to be literally dieted on drugs and that mustard plasters almost took the place of bread and butter. Mr. Toombs gathered the commonwealth with bated breath and painful apprehension about his sickbedside only once. But Mr. Stephens was at least three separate times the center of such melancholy scenes; thrice the newspapers of the State were striped with black columns, teeming with editorial post-mortems and eloquent obituaries; thrice the salty lachrymals were filled; thrice the flag above the Capitol drooped and sighed at half-mast.

But the outward and obvious differences between these two great Georgians were only the external flowerings of the contrasts whose taproots ramified the hidden subsoil beneath. Mr. Toombs was by nature impetuous and impulsive. His fiery temper subsided somewhat when the air was tranquil; but it slept like knighthood stretched beside its lance and pillowed on its shield, ready with panther leap for instant action on the slightest signal of alarm. Mr. Stephens was calculating and deliberate. He made abundant drafts upon caution. He was not without spirit; but like the disciplined charger he had been trained to the bit. Mr. Toombs argued with volcanic eruptions; Mr. Stephens in higher mathematics. Both were eloquent; but the eloquence of Mr. Stephens was the eloquence of fine-spun fabric, while the eloquence of Mr. Toombs was the eloquence of molten lava hurled

Both men were

from the heated cauldrons of Vesuvius. tenacious of conviction, but Mr. Stephens had more patience to exhaust. He was more tolerant than Mr. Toombs; and while he was not disposed to temporize in any sense which implied surrender or compromise of principle, he was more disposed to treat with his adversaries in the hope of finding some common basis of agreement. Mr. Stephens even when perfectly sure of his ground was prone to measure consequences; while Mr. Toombs was disposed to let consequences trail behind in the rear coach while he grimly pressed the lever upon the engine. Both men were industrious workers, but Mr. Toombs with temperamental impatience worked spasmodically, while Mr. Stephens with steady stroke worked continuously; the one like the woodsman hewing down the forest, the other like the oarsman plying up the stream. Ruddy Toombs, with the vigor of mountain granite in his frame, produced no literature; while delicate Stephens, with insistent and steady toil, wrote volume after volume. Both were princely givers and royal entertainers; but Toombs by wise investment accumulated two fortunes and died rich; while Stephens lived narrowly within his margins and died poor. On political issues Toombs was at one time a Democrat and Stephens a Whig. Equally loyal to the South, Stephens opposed while Toombs advocated secession; and when the war was over Toombs resisted while Stephens tolerated reconstruction. The elements of contrast extended even to the names which they separately bore. Toombs was christened Robert A., but he dropped his middle name soon after beginning the practice of law. Stephens at first had no middle name, being christened simply Alexander for

his paternal grandfather, but he subsequently adopted the middle name of Hamilton, in honor of an old preceptor whom he greatly admired. Such differences as these appear to leave little room for friendship; but differences sometimes face each other in the friendly guise of supplements rather than in the hostile frown of contradictions. This is what made possible the friendship between Toombs and Stephens. Besides they were both ardent patriots and true statesmen.

Frequently when Mr. Stephens was ill and unable to attend to his business in the courts, it was Mr. Toombs who looked after his cases; and he managed them as skillfully and as carefully as he did his own. Rash as Mr. Toombs often was in conversation, he was ultra-conservative when it came to protecting the interests of his clients or to guarding the obligations of his fiduciary trusts. Judge Linton Stephens, himself one of the noblest of Georgians, who belonged literally as well as locally to the breed of Sparta, declared that he would sooner trust Mr. Toombs than almost any one he knew to decide questions in which he was himself vitally interested.

Better able to travel than his invalid Achates, it was the custom of Mr. Toombs, whenever circumstances favored, to visit Mr. Stephens at Liberty Hall for conversational interviews.

At the provisional convention of the Confederate States in Montgomery in 1861 it was Mr. Toombs who advocated and urged the election of Mr. Stephens to the vice-presidency, although Mr. Stephens had carried his Union sentiments even to the point of opposing secession.