flea | Spring project part 3: T. R. R. Cobb and Slavery

T. R. R. Cobb and Slavery

T. R. R. Cobb House (http://www.trrcobbhouse.org/)
Photographs from my visit to the T. R. R. Cobb House and exteriors of other nearby historic Athens houses, April 15, 2009: http://www.flickr.com/photos/casperflea/sets/72157616880658494/

T. R. R. Cobb, An Inquiry into the Law of Negro Slavery in the United States of America (1858) accessed online through the Gale database Sabin Americana.

Peter Kolchin, American Slavery, 1619-1877. (Hill and Wang, New York, rev. ed. 2003 [1993]).

“Slavery,” R. M. Hare, in Lawrence C. Becker and Charlotte B. Becker, eds., Enyclopedia of Ethics, (New York, Routledge, 2001) p. 1593-1594.

T. R. R. Cobb was one of the more famous historic Athenians, a prominent lawyer, founder of the UGA law school, and (after 1860) a secessionist who used his legal skills to argue for slavery and for the independence of the South. His house is currently located at the other end of the street that I live on, and on days when I walk to work I walk right by it. Many of the historic houses in Athens have been moved at some point, but none have been as peripatetic as the Cobb house, which was transported in pieces some 60 miles to Stone Mountain Park in 1985, and then returned to Athens and restored starting in 2004. The house itself was originally a fairly plain Federal style building given to Cobb as a wedding present by his in-laws; his father in law, Joseph Henry Lumpkin, was one of the founding justices of the Supreme Court of Georgia. The Cobbs expanded in 1852, adding two large octagonal rooms to the front of the house that seem to be modeled on the octagonal office in the old governor's mansion in Milledgeville, GA, which in 1852 happened to be occupied by T. R. R.'s older brother, Howell. Howell Cobb served as Speaker of the U. S. House and Secretary of the Treasury under James Buchanan following his tenure as governor of Georgia, and was considered a possible candidate for president if the Civil War had not come about. Naturally, the Cobbs had a prominent plot in the Oconee Hills Cemetery.

T. R. R. Cobb was the most ardent pro-slavery advocate and ardent secessionist in his family, and his 1858 book is typical of contemporary defenses of slavery, as they are described by Kolchin, albeit with more legal scholarship than most could boast. Cobb, of course, did not see it that way: in the preface he notes, “My book has no political, no sectional purpose. I doubt not I am biased by my birth and education in a slaveholding State.” Cobb describes slavery as a “natural” condition, and provides a worldwide survey of slavery in history (among the Jews, Egyptians, Greeks, and Romans) to support his case. He further adduces religious and racial arguments in favor of slavery, also noting that American slaves are in general better off than, for example, free mill-workers in Great Britain. Cobb enlisted in the Confederate Army after war broke out, and rose to the rank of Brigadier-General; he was killed in the battle of Fredericksburg, coincidentally within sight of the house his mother had grown up in. His body lay in state in his office in one of the octagonal rooms of his house, and his funeral was one of the biggest public events in Athens during the war.

I went looking in the world of reference works on philosophy and ethics for discussions of slavery, and found almost nothing. The short entry by Hare cited above takes a worldwide view of the ethics of slavery; most of the bibliographical references are to slavery in the ancient and classical world. Hare takes the position that while the average person today feels slavery is wrong, moral philosophers “assess the arguments used to attack or defend the institution,” taking a more objective viewpoint.

Kolchin's book is perhaps the most important thing I have read so far. It is a scholarly overview of American slavery from its origins to the post-bellum period, and does an excellent job of summarizing the current state of scholarship on the topic. It also has the advantage of being highly readable; if I were teaching American History to college students this would certainly be a required book. Kolchin covers all aspects of slavery: the historical and economic conditions that made slavery such a vital part of Southern life; the lives of slaves, masters, and white Southerners who did not own slaves, and how all of them were deeply interwoven in the slave economy which dominated the South; and the religious, moral, racial, practical, and philosophical arguments made in favor of slavery by its advocates.