Thomas Reade Rootes Cobb

Thomas Reade Rootes Cobb 1823-62, American lawyer, b. Jefferson co., Ga.; brother of Howell Cobb. Admitted to the bar in 1842, he edited 20 volumes of the Georgia supreme court reports (1849-57), prepared A Digest of the Statute Laws of the State of Georgia (1851), and compiled (1858-61) a new state criminal code. Cobb was a militant secessionist. In the Georgia secession convention he was chairman of the committee that wrote a new state constitution (1861) and helped write the Confederate Constitution. In the Civil War he organized and led Cobb's Legion. Promoted to brigadier general in Nov., 1862, he was killed at Fredericksburg the following month.

Cobb, Thomas Reade Rootes (1823–62) lawyer, Confederate congressman and military officer born in Jefferson County, Georgia. Cobb was the younger brother of Treasury secretary Howell Cobb. Cobb was the author of An Inquiry into the Law of Negro Slavery (1858) and A Historical Sketch of Slavery from the Earliest Periods (1859). In the Civil War he organized “Cobb's Legion” and was promoted to brigadier general in 1862. He died at Fredericksburg (1862).

Cobb claimed slavery was divinely ordained, and celebrated South Carolina's secession with a motto he had spread across the front of his house: “Resistance to Abolition is Obedience to God.”