Robert Augustus Toombs (July 2, 1810 – December 15, 1885) was an American politician from Georgia, who was an important figure in the formation of the Confederacy.

From a privileged background as a wealthy planter and slaveholder, Toombs embarked on a political career marked by effective oratory, although he also acquired a reputation for hard living, disheveled appearance, and irascibility.

He was identified with Alexander H. Stephens's libertarian wing of secessionist opinion, and in contradiction to the nationalist Jefferson Davis, Toombs believed a civil war to be neither inevitable nor winnable by the South.

Appointed as Secretary of State of the Confederacy (which lacked political parties), Toombs was against the decision to attack Fort Sumter, and resigned from Davis's cabinet.

He was commissioned a brigadier general in the Confederate States Army and was wounded at the Battle of Antietam, where he performed creditably.

During the 1865 Battle of Columbus, Toombs's reluctance to use canister shot on a mixture of Union and Confederate soldiers resulted in the loss of a key bridge in the war's final significant action.

On his return two years later, he declined to ask for a pardon, and successfully stood for election in Georgia when the Reconstruction era ended in 1877.

After private education, Toombs entered Franklin College at the University of Georgia in Athens when he was fourteen.

[citation needed] During his time at Franklin College, Toombs was a member of the Demosthenian Literary Society.

There Toombs joined his close friend and fellow representative Alexander H. Stephens from Crawfordville, Georgia.

Their friendship became a powerful personal and political bond, and they effectively defined and articulated Georgia's position on national issues in the middle decades of the nineteenth century.

[6] Toombs and his brother Gabriel owned large plantations and operated them using enslaved African Americans.

In common with Alexander H. Stephens and Howell Cobb, he defended Henry Clay's Compromise of 1850 against southerners who advocated secession from the Union as the only solution to sectional tensions over slavery, though during the debate leading up to that compromise he had declared, "if by your legislation you seek to drive us from the Territories purchased by the common blood and treasure of the people, and to abolish slavery in the District, thereby attempting to fix a national degradation upon half the States of this confederacy, I am for disunion, and if my physical courage be equal to the maintenance of my convictions of right and duty I will devote all I am and all I have on earth to its consummation.

Toombs favored the Kansas–Nebraska Act of 1854, the admission of Kansas as a slave state under the Lecompton Constitution, and the English Bill (1858).

However, his faith in the resiliency and effectiveness of the national government to resolve sectional conflicts waned as the 1850s drew to a close.

"The thousands of blind Republicans who do openly approve the treason, murder, and arson of John Brown, get no condemnation from their party for such acts.

Toombs declared that the South should "Never permit this Federal Government to pass into the traitors' hands of the black Republican party.

"[18] He returned to Georgia, and with Governor Joseph E. Brown led the fight for secession against Stephens and Herschel V. Johnson (1812–1880).

The selection of Jefferson Davis as chief executive dashed Toombs's hopes of holding the high office of the fledgling Confederacy.

Toombs was the only member of Davis' administration to express dissent about the Confederacy's attack on Fort Sumter.

After reading Lincoln's letter to the governor of South Carolina, Toombs said to Davis: "Mr. President, at this time it is suicide, murder, and will lose us every friend at the North.

You will wantonly strike a hornet's nest which extends from mountain to ocean, and legions now quiet will swarm out and sting us to death.

"[21]Within months of his cabinet appointment, a frustrated Toombs resigned to join the Confederate States Army (CSA).

The Liberty Ship SS Robert Toombs was launched in 1943 by the Southeastern Shipbuilding Corporation and served through World War II and after, eventually being sold for scrap.