Cobb, Howell, 1815-1868

<p>Howell Cobb (September 7, 1815 – October 9, 1868) was an American political figure. A southern Democrat, Cobb was a five-term member of the United States House of Representatives and Speaker of the House from 1849 to 1851. He also served as the 40th Governor of Georgia (1851–1853) and as a Secretary of the Treasury under President James Buchanan (1857–1860).</p>

<p>Cobb is, however, probably best known as one of the founders of the Confederacy, having served as the President of the Provisional Congress of the Confederate States. Delegates of the Southern slave states declared that they had seceded from the United States and created the Confederate States of America.</p>

<p>Born in Jefferson County, Georgia in 1815, son of John A. Cobb and Sarah (Rootes) Cobb, Howell Cobb was of Welsh American ancestry. He was raised in Athens and attended the University of Georgia, where he was a member of the Phi Kappa Literary Society. He was admitted to the bar in 1836 and became solicitor general of the western judicial circuit of Georgia.</p>

<p>He married Mary Ann Lamar on May 26, 1835. She was a daughter of a Lamar family with broad connections in the South. They would have eleven children, the first in 1838 and the last in 1861. Several did not survive childhood, including their last, a son who was named after Howell's brother, Thomas Reade Rootes Cobb.</p>

<p>Cobb was elected as Democrat to the 28th, 29th, 30th and 31st Congresses. He was chairman of the U.S. House Committee on Mileage during the 28th Congress, and Speaker of the United States House of Representatives during the 31st Congress.</p>

<p>He sided with President Andrew Jackson on the question of nullification (i.e. compromising on import tariffs), and was an effective supporter of President James K. Polk's administration during the Mexican–American War. He was an ardent advocate of extending slavery into the territories, but when the Compromise of 1850 had been agreed upon, he became its staunch supporter as a Union Democrat. He joined Georgia Whigs Alexander Stephens and Robert Toombs in a statewide campaign to elect delegates to a state convention that overwhelmingly affirmed, in the Georgia Platform, that the state accepted the Compromise as the final resolution to the outstanding slavery issues. On that issue, Cobb was elected governor of Georgia by a large majority.</p>

<p>After 63 ballots, he became Speaker of the House on December 22, 1849 at the age of 34. In 1850—following the July 9 death of Zachary Taylor and the accession of Millard Fillmore to the presidency—Cobb, as Speaker he would have been next in line to the presidency for two days due to the resultant vice presidential vacancy and a president pro tempore of the Senate vacancy, except he did not meet the minimum eligibility for the presidency of being 35 years old. The Senate elected William R. King as president pro tempore on July 11.</p>

<p>In 1851, Cobb left the House to serve as the Governor of Georgia, holding that post until 1853. He published <i>A Scriptural Examination of the Institution of Slavery in the United States: With its Objects and Purposes</i> in 1856.</p>

<p>He was elected to the 34th Congress before being appointed as Secretary of the Treasury in Buchanan's Cabinet. He served for three years, resigning in December 1860. At one time, Cobb was Buchanan's choice for his successor.</p>

<p>In 1860, Cobb ceased to be a Unionist, and became a leader of the secession movement. He was president of a convention of the seceded states that assembled in Montgomery, Alabama, on February 4, 1861. Under Cobb's guidance, the delegates drafted a constitution for the new Confederacy. He served as President of several sessions of the Confederate Provisional Congress, before resigning to join the military when war erupted.</p>

<p>Cobb joined the Confederate army and was commissioned as colonel of the 16th Georgia Infantry. He was appointed a brigadier general on February 13, 1862, and assigned command of a brigade in what became the Army of Northern Virginia. Between February and June 1862, he represented the Confederate authorities in negotiations with Union officers for an agreement on the exchange of prisoners of war. His efforts in these discussions contributed to the Dix-Hill Cartel accord reached in July 1862.</p>

<p>Cobb saw combat during the Peninsula Campaign and the Seven Days Battles. Cobb's brigade played a key role in the fighting during the Battle of South Mountain, especially at Crampton's Gap, where it arrived at a critical time to delay a Union advance through the gap, but at a bloody cost. His men also fought at the subsequent Battle of Antietam.</p>

<p>In October 1862, Cobb was detached from the Army of Northern Virginia and sent to the District of Middle Florida. He was promoted to major general on September 9, 1863, and placed in command of the District of Georgia and Florida. He suggested the construction of a prisoner-of-war camp in southern Georgia, a location thought to be safe from Union invaders. This idea led to the creation of Andersonville prison.</p>

<p>When William T. Sherman's armies entered Georgia during the 1864 Atlanta Campaign and subsequent March to the Sea, Cobb commanded the Georgia Reserve Corps as a general. In the spring of 1865, with the Confederacy clearly waning, he and his troops were sent to Columbus, Georgia to help oppose Wilson's Raid. He led the hopeless Confederate resistance in the Battle of Columbus, Georgia on Easter Sunday, April 16, 1865.</p>

<p>During Sherman's March to the Sea, the army camped one night near Cobb's plantation. When Sherman discovered that the house he planned to stay in for the night belonged to Cobb, whom Sherman described in his Memoirs as "one of the leading rebels of the South, then a general in the Southern army," he dined in Cobb's slave quarters, confiscated Cobb's property and burned the plantation, instructing his subordinates to "spare nothing."</p>

<p>In the closing days of the war, Cobb fruitlessly opposed General Robert E. Lee's eleventh hour proposal to enlist slaves into the Confederate Army. Fearing that such a move would completely discredit the Confederacy's fundamental justification of slavery, that black people were inferior, he said, "You cannot make soldiers of slaves, or slaves of soldiers. The day you make a soldier of them is the beginning of the end of the Revolution. And if slaves seem good soldiers, then our whole theory of slavery is wrong." Cobb's opposition to Lee's proposal is dramatized in the opera Appomattox (composer Philip Glass, librettist Christopher Hampton), which debuted in Washington, D.C.'s Kennedy Center in November 2015. Cobb's role was sung by Timothy J. Bruno.</p>

<p>Cobb surrendered to the U.S. at Macon, Georgia on April 20, 1865.</p>

<p>Following the end of the Civil War, Cobb returned home and resumed his law practice. Despite pressure from his former constituents and soldiers, he refused to make any public remarks on Reconstruction policy until he received a presidential pardon, although he privately opposed the policy. Finally receiving the pardon in early 1868, he began to vigorously oppose the Reconstruction Acts, making a series of speeches that summer that bitterly denounced the policies of Radical Republicans in the U.S. Congress.</p>

<p>That autumn, Cobb vacationed in New York City, and died of a heart attack there. His body was returned to Athens, Georgia, for burial in Oconee Hill Cemetery.</p>

COBB, HOWELL, (nephew of Howell Cobb [1772-1818]), a Representative from Georgia; born at ``Cherry Hill,'' Jefferson County, Ga., September 7, 1815; moved with his father to Athens, Ga., in childhood; was graduated from Franklin College (then a part of the University of Georgia), at Athens in 1834; studied law; was admitted to the bar and commenced practice in Athens, Ga., in 1836; solicitor general of the western judicial circuit of Georgia 1837-1841; elected as a Democrat to the Twenty-eighth and to the three succeeding Congresses (March 4, 1843-March 3, 1851); chairman, Committee on Mileage (Twenty-eighth Congress); Speaker of the House of Representatives (Thirty-first Congress); Governor of Georgia 1851-1853; elected to the Thirty-fourth Congress (March 4, 1855-March 3, 1857); Secretary of the Treasury in the Cabinet of President Buchanan and served from March 6, 1857, to December 10, 1860, when he resigned; chairman of the convention of delegates from the seceded States which assembled in Montgomery, Ala., on February 24, 1861, to form a Confederate Government; appointed a brigadier general in the Confederate Army February 13, 1862, and promoted to major general September 9, 1863; surrendered at Macon, Ga., April 20, 1865; died in New York City October 9, 1868; interment in Oconee Cemetery, Athens, Clarke County, Ga.

<p>A mid-nineteenth-century politician, Howell Cobb served as congressman (1843-51; 1855-57), Speaker of the U.S. House of Representatives (1849-51), governor of Georgia (1851-53), and secretary of the treasury (1857-60). Following Georgia's secession from the Union in 1861, he served as president of the Provisional Confederate Congress (1861-62) and a major general of the Confederate army.</p>

<p>Cobb was born in Jefferson County on September 7, 1815, the eldest child of Sarah and John Cobb. His younger brother, Thomas R. R. Cobb, became a prominent jurist and Confederate general. Around 1819 the family moved to Athens, where Cobb attended the University of Georgia, graduating in 1834. He became an attorney in 1836. His marriage in 1835 to Mary Ann Lamar produced twelve children, six of whom survived to adulthood.</p>

<p>Although the practice of law provided Cobb with a profession, politics was his avocation. Like his father, he embraced the doctrines of the Jacksonian Democrats, which he defended first in university debating societies and then on the stump. In 1837 the state legislature elected him solicitor general for the Western Judicial Circuit of Georgia. In 1842 Georgia Democrats nominated him to Congress representing the Sixth District, an election he won easily.</p>

<p>Cobb's affability and quick mastery of House rules hastened his advancement within the Democratic caucus. Already, sectional disputes touching on slavery and its future tainted congressional debates. From both inclination and political necessity, the young congressman labored to protect southern interests in these struggles. He believed that the best security for slavery and the South lay within a federal union of equal partners based upon adherence to the Constitution. Unlike "fire-eating" southerners, however, he believed that this goal could be achieved only through a pro-Union policy of compromise in times of sectional controversy. Consequently, Cobb engaged extreme southern states' rights men with the same vigor that he directed toward northern abolitionists. As a result of these battles, he later found his path to higher office blocked by opponents within the Georgia Democratic Party.</p>

<p>During the late 1840s the dispute over slavery reached crisis proportions as Congress attempted to resolve the future of slavery in western territories acquired as a result of the Mexican War (1846-48). Elected Speaker of the Thirty-first Congress, Cobb labored both behind the scenes and in his rulings from the chair to assist in securing passage of the Compromise of 1850. The following year he was elected governor at the head of a pro-compromise coalition of Union Democrats and Whigs. The success of this Constitutional Union Party helped solidify the South's acceptance of the Compromise of 1850, but it earned Cobb the permanent enmity of many southern-rights Democrats and damaged his standing with the national Democratic Party. He found himself politically isolated after the Constitutional Union organization collapsed in 1852 when its Whig wing, led by Alexander Stephens and Robert Toombs, declined to join the national Democracy.</p>

<p>At the conclusion of his gubernatorial term in 1853, Cobb returned to private life but worked diligently to restore his standing within the Democratic Party. He reacted gracefully in 1853 when southern-rights Democrats in the state legislature blocked his election to the Senate, and in 1855 he regained his congressional seat. In the presidential election of 1856 Cobb campaigned vigorously on behalf of Democratic nominee James Buchanan, who then rewarded his efforts by naming him treasury secretary.</p>

<p>During Cobb's tenure at the Treasury Department, the financial panic of 1857 beset the nation. Yet the ongoing crisis over slavery in the territories remained a more serious threat to the nation's future than any temporary economic dislocation. Throughout his political life Cobb had argued that only the national Democratic Party could effect the compromises essential to the maintenance of the Union. By 1860 the sectional pressures over slavery had grown so intense that the Democratic Party split into northern and southern organizations. This split, combined with the rise of the Republican Party in the North, served to place control of the federal government in the hands of an antislavery party. Confronted with the election of Abraham Lincoln to the presidency, Cobb abandoned his faith in the Union and forcefully urged Georgia's secession.</p>

<p>Following secession, Cobb served as president of the Provisional Confederate Congress. He received some consideration for the Confederate presidency, but lingering animosities among southern-rights men effectively denied him the post. At the conclusion of his term he entered the Confederate army. He began his service as colonel of the Sixteenth Georgia Infantry and eventually rose to the rank of major general. He saw service in Virginia during the Peninsula campaign and the Seven Days Battles. In October 1862 he was transferred to the district of middle Florida, and then in September 1863 he took command of Georgia state troops. He surrendered his troops to Union forces in Macon on April 20, 1865.</p>

<p>Cobb declined to make any public remarks on Reconstruction policy pending receipt of a presidential pardon. That pardon came three years after the war's end. He promptly delivered a series of speeches in the summer of 1868, bitterly denouncing Radical Republican plans for Reconstruction. He died of a heart attack while vacationing in New York on October 9, 1868.</p>