y head at the coffin and pronounced the funeral
oration over Alexander Stephens.

In the General Assembly of 1843, Robert Toombs was a member of the
house, but his ability and power had marked him as a candidate for
Congress, and Mr. Stephens had already been promoted from the State
Senate to a seat in the national legislature at Washington. The law
requiring the State to choose congressmen on the district plan had been
passed, and the General Assembly was then engaged in laying off the
counties into congressional districts. The bill, as first reported,
included the counties of Wilkes and Taliaferro in the second district of
Georgia. Here was a problem. Toombs and Stephens had been named as Whig
candidates for the Clay campaign of 1844. To have them clash would have
been to deprive the State of their talents in the national councils. It
would be interesting to speculate as to what would have been the result
had these two men been opposed. Stephens was naturally a Union man, and
was no very ardent advocate of slavery. Toombs inherited the traditions
of the Virginia landowners. It is not improbable that the firmness of
the one would have been a foil for the fire of the other. History might
have been written differently had not the conference committee in the
Georgia Legislature in 1843 altered the schedule of districts, placing
Taliaferro in the seventh and Wilkes in the eighth Congressional
district. Both were safely Whig, and the future Vice-President and
premier of the Southern Confederacy now prepared for the canvass which
was to plunge them into their duties as members of the national
Congress.

Robert Toombs had already made his appearance in national politics in
1840. Although still a member of the Georgia Legislature, he took a deep
interest in the success of the Whig ticket for President. His power as a
stump speaker was felt in eastern Georgia, where the people gathered at
the "log cabin and hard cider" campaigns. The most daring feat of young
Toombs, just thirty years old, was in crossing the Savannah River and
meeting George McDuffie, the great Democrat of South Carolina, then in
the zenith of his fame. An eye-witness of this contest between the
champions of Van Buren and Harrison declared that McDuffie was
"harnessed lightning" himself. He was a nervous, impassioned speaker.
When the rash young Georgian crossed over to Willington, S. C., to meet
the lion in his den, Toombs rode horseback, and it was noticed