did not think he
was going to die. "No one expects to die but I. I have got sense enough
to know that I am bound to die."

On one occasion Toombs was criticising an appointment made by an
unpopular official. "But, General," someone said, "you must confess that
it was a good appointment." "That may be, but that was not the reason it
was made. Bacon was not accused of selling injustice. He was eternally
damned for selling justice."

General Toombs was once asked in a crowd in the Kimball House in
Atlanta what he thought of the North. "My opinion of the Yankees is
apostolic. Alexander the coppersmith did me much evil. The Lord reward
him according to his works." A Federal officer was standing in the
crowd. He said: "Well, General, we whipped you, anyhow." "No," replied
Toombs, "we just wore ourselves out whipping you."

He spoke of the spoliators in the State Legislature as "an assembly of
manikins whose object is never higher than their breeches pockets;
seekers of jobs and judgeships, anything for pap or plunder, an
amalgamation of white rogues and blind negroes, gouging the treasury and
disgracing Georgia."

He was a violent foe of exemptions, of bounties, and of all sorts of
corruption and fraud. He was overbearing at times, but not more
conscious of power than of honesty in its use. He was generous to the
weak. It was in defense of his ideas of justice that he overbore
opposition.

General Toombs kept the issues before the people. He had no patience
with the tentative policy. He forfeited much of his influence at this
time by his indiscriminate abuse of Northern men and Southern opponents,
and his defiance of all the conditions of a restored Union. He could
have served his people best by more conservative conduct, but he had all
the roughness and acerbity of a reformer, dead in earnest. It was owing
to his constant arraignment of illegal acts of the post-bellum regime
that the people finally aroused, in 1870, and regained the State for
white supremacy and Democratic government. He challenged the authors of
the Reconstruction measures to discuss the constitutionality of the
amendments. Charles J. Jenkins had already carried the cause of Georgia
into the courts, and Linton Stephens, before United States Commissioner
Swayze in Macon, had made an exhaustive argument upon the whole subject.
Toombs forced these issues constantly into his cases, and kept public
interest at white heat.

CHAPTER XXVII.

DAYS O