Erik Visits an American Grave, Part 1,811

This is the grave of Thomas Cobb.

Born in 1823 in Jefferson County, Georgia, Thomas Reade Rootes Cobb, or T.R.R. Cobb as he was know in his writings, was very much the child of the slaveholding elite South. His older brother was Howell Cobb, Speaker of the House, Secretary of the Treasury under James Buchanan, and traitor in defense of slavery. So you know what kind of class act Thomas Cobb was already.

To say the least then, the younger Cobb was all in on slavery. He worked as a court reporter for the state supreme court–I mean, his slaves did the real work for his income on his lands, let’s be clear–in the late 1840s and most of the 1850s. But his real passion was being a pro-slavery intellectual. These were the most special types of guys (and a few women). They used the best in modern science to create justifications for the white race over Africans that always took the most ridiculous and overwrought turns. I guess when the argument is transparent nonsense, that’s what you have to do. Well, the South loved this shit. In 1858, he wrote An Inquiry into the Law of Negro Slavery in the United States of America, which became his most well known work. A key passage:

[T]his inquiry into the physical, mental, and moral development of the negro race seems to point them clearly, as peculiarly fitted for a laborious class. The physical frame is capable of great and long-continued exertion. Their mental capacity renders them incapable of successful self-development, and yet adapts them for the direction of the wiser race. Their moral character renders them happy, peaceful, contented and cheerful in a status that would break the spirit and destroy the energies of the Caucasian or the native American.

Sure, OK, whatever dude. But the book was taken very seriously by his allies in the pro-slavery movement. It was seen as the apotheosis of global pro-slavery thought, with its deep dives into the ancient world and other historical examples to prove that chattel slavery in the American South was the height of human civilization. And lest you think I am being hyperbolic, this is how Cobb and the like framed their project.

As such, Cobb was considered one of the South’s great intellectuals and so spent the years before the Civil War involved in those kind of projects. He was one of the founders of the University of Georgia Law School, where I am sure many of the whites attending today would be pretty into Cobb’s thinking. He also helped draft the Georgia Code of 1861, which is considered the first comprehensive codification of common law in the United States. I make no claims on any of this, but that’s how it is reported in some places. Part of what he did was put in a citizens arrest law that remained part of the legal code in Georgia until 2021.

Cobb did have other ideas as well. He thought that any couple caught engaging in premartial sex should be legally forced to marry. He was a strong prohibitionist and wanted to ban sex work. He was a big Presbyterian in that old Scots-Irish austere way and was a leader in his Athens church.

It goes without saying that Cobb loved the idea of treason in defense of slavery. Despite his ardor for slavery, he wasn’t a total secessionist until after the election of Abraham Lincoln in 1860, but once he crossed that line, he was in all the way. He and his brother Howell then toured around the state promoting secession. In fact, he was one of the writers of the Confederate Constitution, which admittedly was no great feat since it’s basically the American Constitution adding an overt defense of slavery and changing the presidency to a single six-year term. He was elected to the Confederate Congress and was chairman of the Committee on Military Affairs. But the thing was–and this was a problem for the Confederacy generally, from Jefferson Davis on down–is that all the leading politicians of the region really wanted to be soldiers. They had valued violence going back decades and the idea of sitting and legislating instead of leading soldiers in the field was very hard for most of these guys. So like many of them, Cobb spent more time in the field than he did in Richmond.

Cobb had organized Cobb’s Legion at the beginning of the war, one of the many privately raised groups of soldiers on both sides of the war. The idea of a legion per se had no real place in a modern army, another problem for a romanticizing bunch of Confederate leaders. So Robert E. Lee had it placed in his Army of Northern Virginia. It took a ton of casualties during the Maryland Campaign leading up to and including Antietam. Cobb was commissioned as a colonel and he was nominated for promotion to brigadier general in November 1862, but it wasn’t approved by Congress before Cobb died. Of course, the whole time he thought he was being wronged by other Confederate elites. Why wasn’t he commanding the Army of Northern Virginia? He blamed Lee, he blamed Davis, he blamed anyone else above him in the Confederate hierarchy for not seeing his obvious military genius.

Now, I don’t want you all to cry too much over this–but Cobb did not survive his beloved war of treason. I know, it’s hard to read. He was so white and manly! But he took a fragment from an artillery shell to the leg at Fredericksburg and it severed his femoral artery and he bled out. Kudos to whichever Union soldier killed the slaver. Cobb was 39 years old. It was right about this time, later in 1862, that the South began to realize that the North was not in fact filled with wimpy libs who were scared to fight and in fact their beloved treason to defend slavery would cost a lot of their lives. Sad.

Thomas Cobb is buried in Oconee Hill Cemetery, Athens, Georgia.

If you would like this series to visit other people who committed treason in defense of slavery, you can donate to cover the required expenses here. No one ever does, so we’ll see how long I can keep this series going. Anyway, Braxton Bragg is in Mobile, Alabama and Stonewall Jackson is in Lexington, Virginia. Previous posts in this series are archived here and here.