PHOTO: Ric Feld, Associated Press
I was happy to have the essay below published by the Cleveland Plain-Dealer online at Cleveland.com and accompanied by this photo and caption: “In this 2006 file photo, visitors to the Rotunda at the Georgia State Capitol walk past the portraits of George Washington, clockwise from top left, Benjamin Franklin, Robert Toombs and James Edward Oglethorpe. In a guest column today, author Virginia Pye, the great-great-great-great-half-niece of Toombs, a Confederate general and the first secretary of state of the Confederacy, writes that Toombs’ efforts during Reconstruction to suppress the Black vote have had lasting impacts in voter suppression today.”
One of my ancestors should have been stopped. Because he and others like him weren’t, those fighting voter suppression have a more difficult battle, and one of the worst chapters in U.S. history seems to be repeating itself.
In 1865, Gen. Robert Toombs, former senator from Georgia and the first secretary of state for the Confederacy, went into political exile in Europe, unrepentant and unwilling to accept the outcome of the war. Like many Confederates, he still clung to a false belief that President Abraham Lincoln’s victory at the polls had been stolen. Toombs had distinguished himself on the Civil War battlefield and as a Confederate firebrand, but his most lasting legacy came after the war, when he did all he could to restrict voting rights in Georgia.
The myth of the Lost Cause gave us not just Civil War monuments but also hagiographies of so-called Confederate heroes. One published in 1892 by a sycophant named Pleasant Stovall was passed down to me. By my generation, Toombs was a persona non grata in our family. I remember my grandmother cringing at the mention of his name. She was a well-educated Southern white who supported civil rights in the ’60s. And yet, half a century earlier, she and my grandfather had clung to Toombs’ prestige when they saddled my mother with the compound first name of Mary Toombs, the second half of which she jettisoned as soon as she moved up North as a young woman.
On his return to America in 1867, Robert Toombs was granted, as Stovall writes, “a long interview with his old senatorial colleague, President Andrew Johnson. He went home from Washington and was never again molested.”
Never brought to court, never held fully accountable, never stopped. Like other Confederate leaders, Toombs was stripped of his U.S. citizenship and barred from seeking public office, but wasn’t shunned or silenced.
Instead, he became more emboldened than ever. In 1875, when Republicans in Congress put forward a General Amnesty Act with a single provision excluding Jefferson Davis and Robert Toombs, the Democrats refused to accept the amendment and the bill was never passed. When asked why he didn’t seek a pardon, Toombs replied, “Pardon for what? I haven’t pardoned you all yet.”
He continued to fight for white supremacy and in July 1868, Stovall writes, “a memorable meeting was held in Atlanta. It was the first real rally of the white people under the new order of things. There was much enthusiasm, and crowds gathered from every part of Georgia.” The rally was reported to be the largest in state history and Toombs its most rousing orator. “Leaders deprecated his extreme views, but the hustings rang with his ruthless candor,” Stovall reports.
Toombs’ populist Jim Crow rhetoric appealed to white farmers and workers afraid of a changing society and who were harboring a deep resentment of federal authority. But Toombs was respected at the highest levels of society, too. In 1872, the University of Georgia invited him to deliver the commencement address. Far from being ostracized, he had multiple platforms from which to rail against the rights and rules put in place during Reconstruction, declaring, Stovall writes, that they were “the product of ‘aliens and usurpers,’ and that he would have none of it.”
At the Georgia constitutional convention of 1877, Toombs argued that “a new and ignorant element had been thrown in among the people as voters,” and as Stovall quotes Toombs, “We must not only protect ourselves against them but in behalf of the poor African, I would save him from himself ... [since] their previous condition ... was such as to disqualify them from exercising the right of self-government.”
The racist views of Robert Toombs and others like him continue today in Donald Trump and those Republicans desperate to limit voting rights in order to hold onto power.
We must do all we can to prove the late American writer William Faulkner wrong when he wrote, “The past is never dead. It isn’t even past.” We must make it past. We must not allow our era’s Robert Toombses to dominate. He belongs in the dustbin of history and with him those who are trying to take our country backwards instead of forward into a fairer and more equitable future.