The southern-rights men, as a small but noisy part of the southern people then called themselves, had mistaken Toombs's last-mentioned speeches in congress as declarations for immediate disunion in case California was admitted under her free constitution; and when he supported the compromise measures, and also the Georgia Platform, they hotly denounced him as a turncoat. In their blind fury they could not see, as everybody else did, that vehement and fervent language, proper to awaken one's people from perilous apathy, may really be at the time understatement, and that, after the people have awakened, to seek in that same language the counsel of right action would be the extreme of immoderate folly. The more you meditate it the more plainly you discern that his leadership was masterly. From the first to the last his appeal was to the middle class of property owners--then so numerous that it was practically the whole of southern society. His object at the first, as he declared, was to make with this class the protection of their fundamental property interest the prominent question of national politics. And the end showed that he not only took, but that he kept, the right road. The Georgia Platform became the bible of every political following in the State. The next year, 1851, Toombs, still a whig, supported Howell Cobb, a democrat, for governor against McDonald, one of the most popular men of the State, the southern-rights candidate. Toombs's side, which won by a large majority, was called the union party. You will not be deceived by this if you keep in mind that Cobb was elected on the Georgia Platform, which had pledged the people of the State to resist, even to disunion, certain named encroachments upon slavery which providence had already ordered to be made.