Howell Cobb

• 1. Introduction

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  On the 9th of July 1850, President Zachary Taylor died and the line of presidential succession ran directly to Howell Cobb. Vice President Millard Fillmore stepped up, leaving no vice president. For a brief period, the Senate also had no president pro tempore. That made Cobb, as Speaker, next in the succession. But the Constitution required the president to be at least thirty-five years old; Cobb had not yet reached that threshold. The Senate elected William R. King as president pro tempore on July 11, closing the window after two days. Cobb never spoke much about the episode. He had larger plans, and darker ones. How did a Georgia lawyer become one of the most powerful figures in antebellum Washington? And what drove the same man to walk away from everything he had built and help found a rival nation?

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• 2. Athens and the Bar

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  Jefferson County, Georgia, was home to the Cobb family when Howell arrived on the 7th of September 1815, the son of John A. and Sarah Cobb. The family was of Welsh American descent, and they raised him in Athens. He studied at Franklin College, now the University of Georgia, where he joined the Phi Kappa Literary Society.

  On the 26th of May 1835, Cobb married Mary Ann Lamar, the daughter of Colonel Zachariah Lamar of Milledgeville. The match placed him inside one of the South's prominent networks. Mary Ann's relatives included Mirabeau B. Lamar, who became president of Texas, and Georgia financier Gazaway Bugg Lamar. Between 1838 and 1861, the couple had eleven children, though several died in childhood, including their last son, named after Cobb's brother Thomas Reade Rootes Cobb.

  He was admitted to the Georgia bar in 1836, then appointed solicitor general of the state's western judicial circuit. That same year he served as a presidential elector. His election to the 28th Congress as a Democrat began four consecutive terms in the House. In the 28th Congress he chaired the House Committee on Mileage. He backed President James K. Polk through the Mexican-American War and became a forceful advocate for extending slavery into western territories. When the debates of 1850 arrived, he sat in the Speaker's chair at their center.

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• 3. Two Days from the Presidency

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  Cobb had reached the Speakership only after sixty-three ballots, prevailing on the 22nd of December 1849, at the age of thirty-four. He was the presiding officer of the House and, as such, stood high in the line of succession. Then the succession suddenly became relevant.

  Cobb became a staunch supporter of the Compromise of 1850 after its terms were agreed upon. He joined Georgia Whigs Alexander Stephens and Robert Toombs in a statewide campaign to elect delegates to a state convention that would affirm it. That convention produced the Georgia Platform, which declared that the state accepted the Compromise as the final resolution of the outstanding slavery disputes. Cobb won the governorship of Georgia by a large majority on that platform. He left the House in 1851 to serve as governor. President James Buchanan would later call him to a senior post in Washington.

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• 4. From Treasury to Confederate Founder

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  After the governorship, Cobb won election to the 34th Congress. President James Buchanan appointed him Secretary of the Treasury, a post he held from 1857 through December 1860. Buchanan had at one point considered Cobb his likely successor in the White House.

  In 1856, while still in the 34th Congress, Cobb published "A Scriptural Examination of the Institution of Slavery in the United States: With its Objects and Purposes." The book argued that slavery was morally and theologically justified. He owned one thousand enslaved people.

  In 1860, Cobb ceased to be a Unionist and became a leading figure in the Southern secession movement. On the 4th of February 1861, delegates from the seceded slave states gathered in Montgomery, Alabama, with Cobb presiding. Under his guidance, they drafted a constitution for the Confederate States of America. He served as president of several sessions of the Confederate Provisional Congress and personally swore in Jefferson Davis as the Confederacy's first president. Once the new government stood, he resigned his political role and entered the Confederate army.

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• 5. A General in the Field

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  Cobb entered Confederate service as colonel of the 16th Georgia Infantry. He was appointed brigadier general on the 13th of February 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 prisoner exchange. Those efforts contributed to the Dix-Hill Cartel accord reached in July 1862.

  He saw combat during the Peninsula Campaign and the Seven Days Battles. His brigade played a key role at the Battle of South Mountain, arriving at Crampton's Gap at a critical moment to delay a Union advance, but at a bloody cost. His men also fought at the Battle of Antietam.

  In October 1862, Cobb was detached from the Army of Northern Virginia and sent to the District of Middle Florida. Promoted to major general on the 9th of September 1863, he was placed in command of the District of Georgia and Florida. During this period, he suggested constructing a prisoner-of-war camp in southern Georgia, at a location thought safe from Union forces. That suggestion led to the creation of Andersonville prison.

  Sherman's army camped one night near Cobb's plantation during the 1864 Atlanta Campaign and March to the Sea. Sherman described Cobb 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 his property, and ordered his subordinates to spare nothing. The plantation burned.

  "You cannot make soldiers of slaves, or slaves of soldiers," Cobb told Confederate leaders in the war's final months, opposing General Robert E. Lee's proposal to enlist enslaved men as 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." In the spring of 1865, his forces were sent to Columbus, Georgia to oppose Wilson's Raid. He led Confederate resistance in the Battle of Columbus on Easter Sunday, the 16th of April 1865. He surrendered to the United States at Macon, Georgia, on April 20.

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• 6. After the Confederacy

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  Back in Athens, Cobb refused to make any public statement about Reconstruction policy until he received a presidential pardon. Former constituents and soldiers had pressed him to do so. The pardon arrived in early 1868. That summer, Cobb delivered a series of speeches bitterly attacking the Reconstruction Acts and the Radical Republican program in Congress. That autumn, while vacationing in New York City, he died of a heart attack. His body was returned to Athens for burial in Oconee Hill Cemetery.

  Howell Cobb's uncle, also named Howell Cobb, had served in the United States Congress from 1807 to 1812. He then served as an officer in the War of 1812. His younger brother Thomas Reade Rootes Cobb entered both politics and the Confederate military, and died in the Civil War. A cousin, Thomas Willis Cobb, sat in the United States Congress and became the namesake of Cobb County, Georgia. His niece Mildred Lewis Rutherford, known as Miss Millie, became a prominent educator and a leader in the United Daughters of the Confederacy. She was also a white supremacy advocate in the postwar South. His son Andrew J. Cobb served as a justice of the Georgia Supreme Court.

  His daughter Mary Ann Lamar Cobb Erwin created the Southern Cross of Honor in 1899, the United Daughters of the Confederacy's decoration for Confederate veterans. His portrait had been on display in the Speaker's Lobby outside the House Chamber at the United States Capitol. Speaker Nancy Pelosi ordered its removal on the 18th of June 2020, during the George Floyd protests.

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