Howell Cobb

Howell Cobb (September 7, 1815 – October 9, 1868) was an American and later Confederate 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 from 1851 to 1853 and as secretary of the treasury under President James Buchanan from 1857 to 1860. He is best known as one of the founders of the Confederacy, having served as president of the Provisional Congress of the Confederate States, where delegates of the Southern slave states declared that they had seceded from the United States and created the Confederate States of America.

Cobb was born in Jefferson County, Georgia, on September 7, 1815, the son of Sarah (née Rootes) Cobb and John A. Cobb, and was of Welsh American descent. He was raised in Athens, Georgia, a center of political and intellectual life in the state. He studied at the University of Georgia in Athens, where he became a member of the Phi Kappa Literary Society, an influential student debating organization that helped shape his skills as an orator and advocate. On May 26, 1835, he married Mary Ann Lamar, the daughter of Colonel Zachariah Lamar of Milledgeville, a member of a prominent Southern family whose relatives included Texas President Mirabeau B. Lamar and Georgia financier Gazaway Bugg Lamar. The couple had eleven children between 1838 and 1861, though several died in childhood, including their last, a son named after Cobb’s brother, Thomas Reade Rootes Cobb.

Cobb was admitted to the bar in 1836 and quickly entered public life. That same year he was appointed solicitor general of Georgia’s western judicial circuit, a position that gave him early prominence in the state’s legal and political circles. Also in 1836 he served as a presidential elector in the national election, aligning himself with the Democratic Party. His early legal and political work coincided with a period of intense sectional and partisan conflict in the United States, and Cobb’s career developed within the context of Georgia’s expanding plantation economy and the entrenchment of slavery.

Cobb was elected as a Democrat to the Twenty‑eighth, Twenty‑ninth, Thirtieth, and Thirty‑first Congresses, representing Georgia in the U.S. House of Representatives. During the Twenty‑eighth Congress he served as chairman of the House Committee on Mileage, and in the Thirty‑first Congress he was elected Speaker of the House. After 63 ballots, he became Speaker on December 22, 1849, at the age of 34. In 1850, following the July 9 death of President Zachary Taylor and the accession of Millard Fillmore to the presidency, Cobb, as Speaker, 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 that he did not meet the constitutional minimum age of 35 for the presidency; the Senate elected William R. King president pro tempore on July 11. In Congress, Cobb sided with President Andrew Jackson’s position on nullification, favoring compromise on import tariffs, and he became an effective supporter of President James K. Polk’s administration during the Mexican–American War. An ardent advocate of extending slavery into the territories, he nonetheless became a staunch supporter of the Compromise of 1850 as a Union Democrat once it had been agreed upon.

Cobb played a central role in securing Southern acceptance of the Compromise of 1850. He joined Georgia Whigs Alexander H. Stephens and Robert Toombs in a statewide campaign to elect delegates to a state convention that overwhelmingly affirmed, in the Georgia Platform, that Georgia accepted the Compromise as the final resolution of the outstanding slavery issues. On the strength of his advocacy for this position, Cobb was elected governor of Georgia by a large majority and left the House in 1851 to serve as the state’s chief executive. He held the governorship from 1851 to 1853. During the 1850s he emerged as one of the South’s most prominent defenders of slavery. In 1856 he published “A Scriptural Examination of the Institution of Slavery in the United States: With its Objects and Purposes,” which attempted to justify slavery on religious grounds and reflected his deep commitment to the institution. He was elected to the Thirty‑fourth Congress but, before taking his seat, was appointed secretary of the treasury in President James Buchanan’s Cabinet. He served in that post for three years, from 1857 until his resignation in December 1860, as sectional tensions escalated; at one time, Buchanan regarded Cobb as a potential choice to succeed him in the presidency.

By 1860 Cobb had abandoned his earlier Unionist stance and became a leading advocate of secession, a position consistent with his status as a large slaveholder—he once owned as many as 1,000 enslaved people. He was a signer of the Georgia Ordinance of Secession and emerged as a principal organizer of the new Confederate government. He presided over the convention of seceded states that assembled in Montgomery, Alabama, on February 4, 1861. Under Cobb’s guidance, the delegates drafted a constitution for the Confederate States of America. He served as president of several sessions of the Confederate Provisional Congress and administered the oath of office to Jefferson Davis as president of the Confederacy before resigning his legislative role to join the Confederate military when war began.

Cobb entered Confederate military service 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 Confederate authorities in negotiations with Union officers over the exchange of prisoners of war, efforts that contributed to the Dix–Hill Cartel accord reached in July 1862. Cobb saw combat during the Peninsula Campaign and the Seven Days Battles. His brigade played a key role in the Battle of South Mountain, particularly at Crampton’s Gap, where it arrived at a critical moment to delay a Union advance through the gap at heavy cost. His men also fought in the subsequent Battle of Antietam. In October 1862 he was detached from the Army of Northern Virginia and sent to command in the District of Middle Florida. Promoted to major general on September 9, 1863, he was placed in command of the District of Georgia and Florida. He suggested the construction of a prisoner‑of‑war camp in southern Georgia, thought to be safe from Union incursions; this proposal led to the creation of the notorious Andersonville prison.

As Union forces under Major General William T. Sherman advanced into Georgia during the 1864 Atlanta Campaign and the subsequent March to the Sea, Cobb commanded the Georgia Reserve Corps as a general. During Sherman’s march, the Union army camped one night near Cobb’s plantation. Upon learning that the house he intended to occupy belonged to Cobb, whom he described in his Memoirs as “one of the leading rebels of the South, then a general in the Southern army,” Sherman chose to dine in Cobb’s slave quarters, confiscated his property, and ordered the plantation burned, instructing his subordinates to “spare nothing.” In the spring of 1865, as the Confederacy collapsed, Cobb and his troops were sent to Columbus, Georgia, to oppose Union General James H. Wilson’s cavalry raid. He led the ultimately futile Confederate resistance in the Battle of Columbus, Georgia, on Easter Sunday, April 16, 1865. In the closing days of the war, Cobb strongly opposed General Robert E. Lee’s last‑minute proposal to enlist enslaved people as soldiers in the Confederate Army, arguing that such a measure would undermine the ideological foundations of slavery. He declared, “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 surrendered to United States forces at Macon, Georgia, on April 20, 1865.

After the Civil War, Cobb returned to Georgia and resumed his law practice. Although urged by former constituents and soldiers to speak publicly on Reconstruction policy, he refused to do so until he received a presidential pardon, even as he privately opposed federal Reconstruction measures. In early 1868 he obtained the pardon and soon thereafter began to denounce the Reconstruction Acts vigorously, delivering a series of speeches that summer attacking the policies of Radical Republicans in Congress. Later that year he traveled to New York City for a vacation. While there, he died of a heart attack on October 9, 1868. His body was returned to Athens, Georgia, for burial in Oconee Hill Cemetery.

Cobb belonged to an extended family that produced many prominent Georgians before and after the Civil War. His uncle and namesake, also Howell Cobb, served in the U.S. House of Representatives from 1807 to 1812 and later as an officer in the War of 1812. His younger brother, Thomas Reade Rootes Cobb, was a noted lawyer, politician, and Confederate officer who was killed in the Civil War. Thomas Willis Cobb, a member of the United States Congress and the namesake of Cobb County, Georgia, was a cousin. His niece Mildred Lewis “Miss Millie” Rutherford became a prominent educator, advocate of white supremacy, and leader in the United Daughters of the Confederacy. Cobb’s daughter, Mrs. Alexander S. (Mary Ann Lamar Cobb) Erwin, created the United Daughters of the Confederacy’s Southern Cross of Honor in 1899, an award for Confederate veterans. His son Andrew J. Cobb later served as a justice of the Supreme Court of Georgia. As a former Speaker of the House, Howell Cobb’s portrait was long displayed in the U.S. Capitol; it was removed from public display in the Speaker’s Lobby outside the House Chamber following an order by Speaker Nancy Pelosi on June 18, 2020, during the George Floyd protests.