Thomas Reade Rootes Cobb (April 10, 1823 – December 13, 1862), also known as T. R. R. Cobb, was an American lawyer, author, politician, and

Confederate States Army The Confederate States Army (CSA), also called the Confederate army or the Southern army, was the Military forces of the Confederate States, military land force of the Confederate States of America (commonly referred to as the Confederacy) duri ...

officer, killed in the

Battle of Fredericksburg The Battle of Fredericksburg was fought December 11–15, 1862, in and around Fredericksburg, Virginia, in the Eastern Theater of the American Civil War. The combat between the Union Army, Union Army of the Potomac commanded by Major general ( ...

during the

American Civil War The American Civil War (April 12, 1861May 26, 1865; also known by Names of the American Civil War, other names) was a civil war in the United States between the Union (American Civil War), Union ("the North") and the Confederate States of A ...

. He was the brother of noted Confederate statesman

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 the speaker of the House from 1849 to ...

Early life, education and marriage

Cobb was born in 1823 in Jefferson County,

Georgia Georgia most commonly refers to: * Georgia (country), a country in the South Caucasus * Georgia (U.S. state), a state in the southeastern United States Georgia may also refer to: People and fictional characters * Georgia (name), a list of pe ...

, to John A. Cobb and Sarah (Rootes) Cobb. He was the younger brother of

. Cobb graduated in 1841 from Franklin CollegeEicher, John H., and Eicher, David J., ''Civil War High Commands'', Stanford University Press, 2001; , p. 592. (present-day

University of Georgia The University of Georgia (UGA or Georgia) is a Public university, public Land-grant university, land-grant research university with its main campus in Athens, Georgia, United States. Chartered in 1785, it is the oldest public university in th ...

), where he was a member of the

Phi Kappa Literary Society The Phi Kappa Literary Society is a College literary societies (American), college literary society, located at the University of Georgia in Athens, Georgia, and is one of the few active literary societies left in America. Originally founded in ...

. He was admitted to the bar in 1842. He married Marion Lumpkin, daughter of the Supreme Court of Georgia Chief Justice

Joseph Henry Lumpkin Joseph Henry Lumpkin (December 23, 1799 – June 4, 1867) was the first chief justice of the Supreme Court of the U.S. state of Georgia. While ambivalent on the topic of slavery early in his life, he was a slaveholder and eventually became a de ...

. Only three of their children lived past childhood: Callender (Callie), who married Augustus Longstreet Hull; Sarah A. (Sally), who married Henry Jackson, the son of Henry Rootes Jackson; and Marion (Birdie), who married Michael Hoke Smith. The

Lucy Cobb Institute The Lucy Cobb Institute was a girls' school on Milledge Avenue in Athens, Georgia, United States. It was founded by Thomas R. R. Cobb, and named in honor of his daughter, who had died of scarlet fever at age 14, shortly before construction wa ...

, which he founded, was named for a daughter who died shortly before the school opened. His niece

Mildred Lewis Rutherford Mildred Lewis Rutherford (July 16, 1851 – August 15, 1928) was a prominent white supremacist speaker, educator, and author from Athens, Georgia. She served the Lucy Cobb Institute, as its head and in other capacities, for over forty years, and ...

served the school for over forty years in various capacities.

Political career

From 1849 to 1857, he was a reporter of the Supreme Court of Georgia. He was an ardent

secession Secession is the formal withdrawal of a group from a Polity, political entity. The process begins once a group proclaims an act of secession (such as a declaration of independence). A secession attempt might be violent or peaceful, but the goal i ...

ist, and was a delegate to the Secession Convention. He is best known for his treatise on the law of slavery titled ''An Inquiry into the Law of Negro Slavery in the United States of America'' (1858), a passage of which reads:

is 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.Morris, Thomas D., ''Southern Slavery and the Law, 1619–1860'', University of North Carolina Press, 1996, , p. 18.

Cobb's Inquiry represented the capstone of proslavery legal thought and has been called one of the most comprehensive American proslavery treatise. It drew together examples from world history of slavery, which he used to argue that slavery was close to ubiquitous in human history and thus natural. He also drew on evidence of slavery's economic necessity and on then popular ideas of "science," which supported white supremacy and slavery. Cobb was also one of the founders of the

University of Georgia School of Law The University of Georgia School of Law (Georgia Law) is the law school of the University of Georgia, a Public university, public research university in Athens, Georgia. It was founded in 1859, making it one of the oldest American university law ...

, and served on the first Georgia code commission of 1858 and drafted what became the private, penal, and civil law portions of the Georgia Code of 1861, which was the first successfully enacted attempt at a comprehensive codification of the common law anywhere in the United States. It is the ancestor of today's

Official Code of Georgia Annotated The ''Official Code of Georgia Annotated'' or ''OCGA'' is the compendium of all laws in the state of Georgia. Like other state codes in the United States, its Judicial interpretation, legal interpretation is subject to the U.S. Constitution, th ...

. Simultaneously, the Northern law reformer

David Dudley Field II David Dudley Field II (February 13, 1805April 13, 1894) was an American lawyer and law reformer who made major contributions to the development of American civil procedure. His greatest accomplishment was engineering the move away from common ...

was independently working in the same ambitious direction of trying to codify ''all'' of the common law into a coherent

civil code A civil code is a codification of private law relating to property law, property, family law, family, and law of obligations, obligations. A jurisdiction that has a civil code generally also has a code of civil procedure. In some jurisdiction ...

, but Field's proposed civil code was not actually enacted until 1866 in Dakota Territory, was belatedly enacted in 1872 in California, and was repeatedly rejected several times by his home state of New York and never enacted in that state. Unlike Field's largely race-neutral code, (At p. 154.) the original Georgia Code was strongly biased in favor of slavery and white supremacy, and even contained a presumption that blacks were ''prima facie'' slaves until proven otherwise. Georgia ultimately kept the Code after the Civil War but revised it in 1867 and many more times since, to purge the racism and pro-slavery bias inherent in the original text. A long-standing item in the code was the " citizens' arrest law", which was added to the code in 1863 and remained unchanged until 2021 when the Georgia General Assembly curtailed the law Cobb served in the

Confederate Congress The Confederate States Congress was both the provisional and permanent legislative assembly/legislature of the Confederate States of America that existed from February 1861 to April/June 1865, during the American Civil War. Its actions were, ...

, where for a time he was

chairman The chair, also chairman, chairwoman, or chairperson, is the presiding officer of an organized group such as a board, committee, or deliberative assembly. The person holding the office, who is typically elected or appointed by members of the gro ...

of the Committee on Military Affairs. He was also on the committee that was responsible for the drafting of the Confederate constitution.

American Civil War

Cobb organized

Cobb's Legion Cobb's Legion (also known as the Georgia Legion) was an American Civil War Confederate States Army unit that was raised from the state of Georgia by Thomas Reade Rootes Cobb during the summer of 1861.Longacre, 1986, p. 147. A legion in the Civi ...

in the late summer of 1861 and was commissioned a colonel in the

Confederate army The Confederate States Army (CSA), also called the Confederate army or the Southern army, was the military land force of the Confederate States of America (commonly referred to as the Confederacy) during the American Civil War (1861–1865), fi ...

on August 28, 1861. The Legion was assigned to the

Army of Northern Virginia The Army of Northern Virginia was a field army of the Confederate States Army in the Eastern Theater of the American Civil War. It was also the primary command structure of the Department of Northern Virginia. It was most often arrayed agains ...

. It took heavy losses during the

Maryland Campaign The Maryland campaign (or Antietam campaign) occurred September 4–20, 1862, during the American Civil War. The campaign was Confederate States Army, Confederate General (CSA), General Robert E. Lee's first invasion of the Northern United Stat ...

. He was promoted to brigadier general on November 1, 1862, but this promotion was not confirmed by the

Death and legacy

At the

, he was mortally wounded in the thigh by a Union artillery shell that burst inside the Stephens house near the Sunken Road on Marye's Heights. He bled to death from damage to his

femoral artery The femoral artery is a large artery in the thigh and the main arterial supply to the thigh and leg. The femoral artery gives off the deep femoral artery and descends along the anteromedial part of the thigh in the femoral triangle. It enters ...

on December 13, 1862. Some later accounts by veterans claim that the wounding was by rifle fire and that a Confederate soldier may have been responsible.Controversies about the death of T. R. R. Cobb
He is buried at Oconee Hill Cemetery in

Athens, Georgia Athens is a consolidated city-county in the U.S. state of Georgia (U.S. state), Georgia. Downtown Athens lies about northeast of downtown Atlanta. The University of Georgia, the state's flagship public university and an Research I university, ...

. The T. R. R. Cobb House, where Thomas Cobb and his wife Marion lived in Athens is now a museum. Originally constructed across Prince Avenue from its current location, it was moved to Stone Mountain Park in Stone Mountain, Georgia, where it was partially reassembled about 1990. Stone Mountain Park had hoped to restore the house, but the project fell through. Then, it was transported back to Athens where it was reassembled and underwent an extensive restoration. The house is now an operational museum owned by the Watson-Brown Foundation.

Works

* ''Digest of the Statute Laws of Georgia'' (185

* ''Inquiry into the Law of Negro Slavery in the United States'' (185

* ''Historical Sketch of Slavery, from the Earliest Periods'' (185

* ''The Code of the State of Georgia'' (1861) AKA ''The Code of 1863'' because though published in 1861, the

Georgia General Assembly The Georgia General Assembly is the state legislature of the U.S. state of Georgia. It is bicameral, consisting of the Senate and the House of Representatives. Each of the General Assembly's 236 members serve two-year terms and are directl ...

did not pass it till 186

* ''The Code of the State of Georgia'' (1873) * ''The Colonel'' (1897)

Notes

References

* Eicher, John H., and Eicher, David J., ''Civil War High Commands'', Stanford University Press, 2001; * McCash, William B. 1983. ''Thomas R.R. Cobb: The Making of a Southern Nationalist''. Macon, GA: Mercer University Press. * O'Reilly, Francis Augustín, ''The Fredericksburg Campaign: Winter War on the Rappahannock'', Louisiana State University Press, 2003; * Sifakis, Stewart. ''Who Was Who in the Civil War.'' New York: Facts On File, 1988; * Warner, Ezra J. ''Generals in Gray: Lives of the Confederate Commanders.'' Baton Rouge: Louisiana State University Press, 1959;

External links

Marion Lumpkin Cobb profile
womenhistoryblog.com. Accessed March 4, 2024.
Thomas Reade Rootes Cobb
at the ''

New Georgia Encyclopedia The ''New Georgia Encyclopedia'' (NGE) is a web-based encyclopedia containing over 2,000 articles about the state of Georgia. It is a program of Georgia Humanities (GH), in partnership with the University of Georgia Press, the University System ...

'' {{DEFAULTSORT:Cobb, Thomas R. R. 1823 births 1862 deaths American legal writers Deputies and delegates to the Provisional Congress of the Confederate States Confederate States Army brigadier generals People from Jefferson County, Georgia People of Georgia (U.S. state) in the American Civil War Signers of the Confederate States Constitution Signers of the Provisional Constitution of the Confederate States Signers of the Georgia Ordinance of Secession University of Georgia alumni Politicians killed in the American Civil War Proponents of scientific racism Proslavery activists killed in the American Civil War Burials at Oconee Hill Cemetery Slave owners killed in the American Civil War