Time & Perspective Quote by Robert Toombs

Toombs is doing what skilled politicians do when the moral weather turns: he reframes a concrete, ugly reality as a misunderstanding of history. The line is a blunt rebuke to critics who warned that expanding U.S. territory would drag slavery with it. By calling the “territorial question” an “abstraction,” he attacks the opposition’s premise as airy theory, then flips it into an empirical dare: look at the “last sixty years” and stop pretending you don’t see the pattern.

The phrase “deaf and blind” is not just insult; it’s a strategy. It casts disagreement as sensory failure rather than ethical judgment, implying the evidence is so obvious only incapacity could deny it. That move matters because it shifts the debate away from whether slavery should expand and toward whether one is competent to interpret national experience. In other words: if you oppose him, you’re not principled, you’re ignorant.

Context sharpens the edge. Toombs, a Georgia politician who would become a Confederate leader, is speaking from inside the long arc of U.S. expansion where slavery repeatedly traveled with conquest and settlement. The “last sixty years” gestures back to the early republic: territorial acquisitions, the cotton boom, and the steady conversion of land into slave-labor economies. He’s defending the premise that empire and bondage are structurally linked, but he does it in the idiom of inevitability, as if it’s mere historical realism.

The subtext is a warning disguised as common sense: stop treating expansion as neutral policy. It is power, and power has a system attached.