Thomas Cobb, Constitutionalism, Slavery, and Secession

I'm in Athens for a couple of days for a fabulous workshop for teachers at the Cobb House.  This is my first outing since I finished a very, very long year — tons of teaching, which is always great fun and exhausting at the same time, and also tons and tons of administrative work, and a little bit of writing was stuffed in the creases.  I'm looking forward to talking about some current projects — the jurisprudence of Washington College (and to a lesser extent Virginia Military Institute) literary addresses, as well as some typical topics for a faculty lounge — like where law schools are going with faculty hiring.  But right now….

This time in Athens is particularly welcome because it's giving me a chance to get back to someone who is central to my work — Thomas R.R. Cobb, who was a law professor, legal reformer, treatise writing — and ultimately Confederate General.  I'll be talking about how Thomas Cobb's writings and speeches distilled Southern thinking about the critical role of slavery in Southern society.  Cobb's 1858 An Inquiry in the the Law of Negro Slavery surveyed western history — from ancient Egypt to the Haitian Revolution to the recent emancipation in the British West Indies — to show the ubiquity of slavery and the economic and demographic catastrophe that Southerners believed would follow emancipation.  An Inquiry provides a synthesis of Southern thought on slavery and property and it helps to show why Southerners saw a threat to slavery as a threat to their entire world.  In speeches in November 1860 to the legislature just after Lincoln was elected, and in April 1861 to Clark County voters, Cobb linked those values about slavery and economy with constitutional ideas.  Cobb joined the cultural values supporting slavery with constitutional ideas to support secession. Cobb was an activist scholar who showed how big ideas about culture related to constitutional law and impelled him to action.  Those values led him from his law office in Athens where he wrote An Inquiry to Milledgeville, where he spoke about secession, to Fredericksburg, where he died on the battlefield, defending his nation and his values.

And before I come back to Chapel Hill, I'm planning on getting over to the Oconee Hill Cemetery, where Cobb is buried — it's one of those antebellum cemeteries I love to study as sites of constitutional thought.

Update: Here's a podcast of the CLE I gave on Thomas Cobb on February 11, 2012, at UNC's festival of legal learning.  And here's a podcast of comments I made at a panel on slavery and universities at the Southern Historical Association in November 2011 in Baltimore.  Here's a podcast of a talk on Cobb that I presented at the Southern Intellectual History Circle in Williamsburg on February 23, 2012.