Leadership Quote by Robert Toombs

Toombs frames grievance as bafflement, then snaps the mask off: “but such is not human nature.” It’s a neat rhetorical bait-and-switch, designed to make Southern secession feel less like a power play and more like a reluctant diagnosis. He inventories “vast advantages” the North already enjoys, characterizing the South as “obedient and profitable brethren” whose “security and tranquility” should have satisfied any reasonable partner. The trick is that those words aren’t conciliatory; they’re proprietorial. “Obedient” and “profitable” reduce an entire region to a compliant asset, and the familial “brethren” softens what is, in effect, a business arrangement defended at gunpoint.

Context matters: Toombs was a leading Georgia fire-eater on the eve of the Civil War, speaking from the vantage of a slaveholding political class that feared losing control of the federal government and the expansion of slavery. His intent is to recast the conflict as Northern ingratitude and meddling rather than Southern insistence on a racialized labor system. By implying the North should “respect” Southern “tranquility,” he’s also signaling what tranquility means: social order preserved through coercion, insulated from moral scrutiny and political reform.

The closing shrug about “human nature” is the cynical flourish. It universalizes a very specific historical dispute, inviting the listener to treat sectional conflict as inevitable envy rather than a contest over power, economics, and human bondage. It’s not resignation; it’s permission.