208 CONFEDERATE PORTRAITS
best possible shape, he sought a more active life. This is not the general view. Some maintain that he had not the system or the practical gifts for managing so great an office and they cite his sarcastic remark that he carried the records of the State Department under his hat. They misjudge him. We have already seen that he was master of all the details of handling a great plantation and that in these he could be systematic enough. Such of his state papers and dispatches as have been printed are admir- able in their vigor, brevity, and point.
The true explanation of his failure is supplied by Mrs. Chesnut, in her usual terse and vivid fashion : " Incom- patibility of temper. Mr. T. rides too high a horse ; that is, for so despotic a person as Jeff Davis." ^^ And Toombs himself indicates the same condition of things in a letter to his wife referring to a later suggestion that he should be secretary of war, a position, by the way, for which Stephens considered him peculiarly qualified : " I thought I had been very explicit on that point. I would not be Mr. Davis's chief clerk. His Secretary of War can never be anything else. ... So far as I am concerned, Mr. Davis will never give me a chance for personal distinc- tion. He thinks I pant for it, poor fool." ^^ As a practical illustration of Toombs's respect for government and em- powered authority nothing could be more delightful than his public dispatch to a quite properly qualified commit- tee which required him to give up some part of his cotton-planting and substitute the production of food-
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