Athens, [ga.], Jany. 21st, 1848.
My Dear Sir:
On my return from Savannah this morning I found your letter of the eighth of
this month waiting my arrival. I sincerely regret that any reference to the extract
of my letter to you in Bennett’s Paper should have given you any concern, for I
repeat what I said to you before, that I neither desired nor intended any
concealment of my change of opinion towards Mr. Clay. Whether General Taylor
will or will not submit himself to be used by the very men who would have
defeated his election could they have done so, I cannot say. He has been
faithfully warned, I know, not
to do so, but to compel these leaders to surrender to him at discretion
and to make no terms with them; he has been further admonished to beware of the
rock on which Mr. Clay's barque has been so signally wrecked, as every
Statesman should be who when his government is engaged in a foreign war will
with unfilial [hand ? ] expose the nakedness of his parent country.
For the bold and decided stand taken by Mr. Buchanan and
other distinguished Democrats at the North, the South owes them a deep debt of
gratitude; for myself however, I never for a moment believed that the North
would take the responsibility of dissolving the American Union upon a false
issue, even when slavery was the subject. And I believe at this very moment
that the institution stands upon a firmer basis than it ever has done since the
formation of the Republic. Had the Abolitionists let us alone we should have
been guilty, I verily believe, of political and social suicide by emancipating
the African race, a measure fatal to them, to ourselves, and to the best
interest of this Confederacy and of the whole world. The violent assaults of
these fiends have compelled us in self defence to investigate this momentous
subject in all of its bearings, and the result has been a firm and settled
conviction that duty to the slave as well as the master forbids that the
relation should be disturbed; and notwithstanding Mr. Webster's false declaration
as the result of his personal observations among us, there is but one mind
among the whole of our people upon this subject. And we never will submit for
one moment to the smallest aggression upon our constitutional rights.
Respecting this property even Judge Warner,1 Massachusetts man as he
is, declared to me a few days since that dearly as he was attached to the
Union, he would not hesitate a moment to advocate its immediate dissolution
should the principle of the Wilmot Proviso be engrafted upon our system. I
repeat that my mind was never more at ease than at present upon this subject.
Having been at home so short a time, I know nothing of the
local news. Your friends are all well. Tom and myself leave again tomorrow for
Talbotton where the Supreme Court sits on Monday next; he was appointed at
Savannah Assistant Reporter, and I thing it altogether likely that after this
year Kelly will retire from the business. There is nothing unpleasant between
Col. Franklin and himself.
_______________
* Chief-justice of the supreme court of Georgia, 1845-1867.
1 Hiram Warner, a native of Massachusetts, was at
this time an assooiate-justlce of the supreme court of Georgia.
SOURCE: Ulrich Bonnell Phillips, Editor, The Annual
Report of the American Historical Association for the Year 1911, Volume 2: The
Correspondence of Robert Toombs, Alexander H. Stephens, and Howell Cobb, p.
94-5
