Robert Toombs - Public Service

Public Service

Toombs was admitted to the bar in 1830, and served in the Georgia House of Representatives (1838, 1840–1841, and 1843–1844). His genial character, proclivity for entertainment, and unqualified success on the legal circuit earned Toombs the growing attention and admiration of his fellow Georgians. On the wave of his growing popularity, Toombs won a seat to the United States House of Representatives (1844–1853), and joined his close friend and fellow representative Alexander H. Stephens from Crawfordville, Georgia. Their friendship forged a powerful personal and political bond that effectively defined and articulated Georgia's position on national issues in the middle decades of the nineteenth century. Toombs, like Stephens, emerged as a states' rights partisan, became a national Whig, and once the Whig Party dissolved, aided in the creation of the short-lived Constitutional Union Party in the early 1850s.

Toombs stood with most Whigs regarding the status of Texas as the 28th state. Historian William Y. Thompson writes that Toombs was "prepared to vote all necessary supplies to repel invasion. But he did not agree that the territory between the Nueces and the Rio Grande rivers was a part of Texas. He declared the movement of American forces to the Rio Grande at President Polk's command 'was contrary to the laws of this country, a usurpation on the rights of this House, and an aggression on the rights of Mexico."

From 1853 to 1861 Toombs served in the United States Senate, only reluctantly joining the Democratic Party when lack of interest among other states doomed the Constitutional Union Party.