US Congressman and Senator, Civil War Confederate Brigadier General. A noted attorney of his day, he served in both the US House of Representatives and Senate, then after following Georgia out of the Union was a Confederate Cabinet Secretary, Congressman, and General. Raised in northeast Georgia, he was academically advanced enough to be admitted to Franklin College of the University of Georgia at 14, though he was to be expelled over what was possibly the first of the alcohol related incidents that were to mar his life. (Indeed, it was to be said of him: "Stupid, he would have been dismissible. Sober, he would have been a statesman for-the-ages. Alas, he was neither"). Toombs transferred to Union College of Schnectady, New York from which he graduated in 1828, then following study at the University of Virginia Law School was admitted to the Bar in 1830. Despite his somewhat off-putting manner a successful legal practice led him into politics and to his first election to the Georgia State Legislature in 1837; named to the US Congress as a Whig in 1844, he opposed the annexation of Texas and the Mexican War, though he did express willingness to send troops to repel the invasion of American lands. Though Toombs supported the right of his fellow slave-owners to take their 'peculiar property' into the western territories and opposed the Wilmont Proviso of 1846, and while he believed that secession was permissable in theory, he and the other Southern Unionists felt that separation was not the proper remedy for the conflicts of the time. He supported Henry Clay's Compromise of 1850 and the attendant Georgia Platform of the same year and after joining the US Senate as a Democrat in 1853 maintained the same political positions as he had previously. Toombs favored the Kansas-Nebraska Act of 1854 and the Lecompton Constitution of 1857 and was to gradually harden his pro-Southern positions as time went on; following the presidental election of 1860 in which he supported John C. Breckinridge, he resigned his Senate seat on February 4, 1861 and returned home to campaign for secession. When the Provisional Confederate Congress met in Montgomery to form a new government Toombs wanted to be President, and while none questioned his intelligence there were progressively increasing doubts as to his reliability. A story persists that he was indeed to be named President, but when a delegation went to offer the job they found him drunk and backed-off. Named Secretary of State, he quickly became a thorn in President Davis' side, though he was to stand alone in opposing the shelling of Fort Sumter, reasoning that such an action would cost the South friends and support. After a few months of being increasingly difficult he resigned from the Cabinet and applied for a commission in the Confederate Army. Named a Brigadier General on July 19, 1861 he fought with the Army of Northern Virginia until receiving a hand wound defending Burnside's Bridge at Sharpsburg on September 17, 1862. Unable to obtain his second star he resigned on March 3, 1863 and served under General Gustavus Woodson Smith in the Georgia Militia until returning home. Escaping at the end of the conflict, he traveled to Havana and thence to London and Paris before returning to America thru Canada in 1867. Toombs refused to petition for a pardon and thus never regained his citizenship, though he did resume a lucrative law practice and was to be a major architect of Georgia's Constitution of 1877. He died following a period of steadily declining health.