Leadership Quote by Robert Toombs

Toombs’s line is a neat piece of political jiu-jitsu: take a moral movement that terrified the slaveholding South and reframe it as an economic conspiracy. By pointing out that “thousands of abolitionists” were also “free traders,” he isn’t offering trivia. He’s trying to collapse antislavery conviction into something far less noble - a set of commercial interests that can be argued with, bargained over, and dismissed as self-serving.

The context is the sectional crisis of the mid-19th century, when Southern leaders like Toombs fought not only abolitionism but the broader Northern coalition that could outvote them: industrialists, reformers, and emerging Republican power. “Free trade” is doing double duty here. It gestures at tariff battles (with Southerners often styling themselves as the victims of protectionist policy) while also hinting at a broader anxiety: that the North’s economic ideology and the South’s labor system were incompatible, and that moral critique was just the most effective weapon in an economic war.

The subtext is cynical and tactical. If abolitionists can be painted as market ideologues, then slavery’s opponents become just another interest group - no different from bankers or manufacturers - and the South’s defense of slavery can be recast as legitimate self-defense in a clash of “systems.” It’s a way of dodging the moral indictment by changing the subject: from human bondage to trade policy, from conscience to commerce. In that shift, Toombs is also signaling to moderates: don’t be seduced by moral rhetoric; follow the money.