Thomas R. R. Cobb: The Making of a Southern Nationalist (review)

354CIVIL WAR HISTORY Hon mistress, adoring daughter, dissipated sons, and Yankee in-law, but the contours of their relatíonships elude Landers. Perhaps the most obvious example of this haziness is Lander's unwillingness to sketch Calhoun 's or his family's definition of their duties and prerogaHves. Since Calhoun's conspicuous inability to shape his family relaHons seems to have emasculated his patriarchal authority to the vanishing point, the lapse is striking. Nevertheless, the work is a correcHve for the Calhoun historiography and a source of informaHon for historians of the southern family and culture. Susan M. Bowler Northwestern University Thomas R. R. Cobb: The Making of a Southern Nationalist. By William B. McCash. (Macon: Mercer University Press, 1983. Pp. xi, 356. $18.95.) For quite some Hme, Thomas R. R. Cobb has "needed" abiography, and William B. McCash took quite some Hme to write this one. Thomas R. R. Cobb: The Making of a Southern Nationalist began as a Ph.D dissertaHon at the University of Georgia, completed in 1968. To his credit McCash has expanded his research and integrated recent scholarship; this is a book, not a published dissertaHon. To their credit the editors at Mercer University Press have produced a handsome work; among other things, the footnotes, photographs, and inset quotaHons are well done. Yet, despite McCash's meHculous research and careful prose and despite the editors' obvious commitment to quality, Thomas R. R. Cobb is a somewhat flawed biography. Indeed it may not even be a biography; McCash has written a series of topical chapters, each of which focuses upon a different enthusiasm in Cobb's life. Between Chapter 1, "Early Life" and Chapter 10, "Epilogue " are eight semi-independent chapters which deal by turns with Cobb's law career, religious zeal, educaHonal reform, defense of slavery , conversion to secession, service in the Confederate Congress, creaHon of Cobb's Georgia Legion, and Civil War generalship. There is some reason for such an organizaHon. Surely Cobb's military career dominated the last phase of his life unHl his death in 1862 at the Battle of Fredericksburg. And his secessionist convicHons led logically to his selecHon to represent Georgia in the Montgomery ConvenHon, which became the first Confederate Congress. Yet the topical organizaHon denies the chronological narraHvewhich usually defines biography. The reader does not see Cobb's life whole, only separate facets ofit. McCash strives valiantly to knit his topics together, and there is logic in the order in which he presents them. But the reader can only see Cobb in a vacuum, only occupied in composing the Georgia Code, wriHng his Law of Negro Slavery, railing against Sabbath-breakers, or revising the Georgia book reviews355 Constitution. Seldom does the reader see Cobb's accomplishments or his failures in the context of his life. Still trying to link the various interests in Cobb's life, McCash superimposes the theme that Cobb "came very close to being a representative southerner, if such can be said of anyone" (p. ix), that he "personified southern distinctiveness" (p. 328). That point is debatable. Cobb, the "representative southerner," compared New Orleans, the South's largest city, to Sodom and Gomorrah and criticized his fellow Southerners at Rock Alum Springs, Virginia, for cardplaying, billiards, bowling, and dancing. About then Confederate Secretary of War Judah P. Benjamin, Cobb wrote, "/ do not speak to Benjamin and have denounced him as a dirty dog" (p. 286). About Jefferson Davis, Cobb wailed that the "President's conduct to me has been infamous" (p. 294). Of J. E. B. Stuart, Cobb complained, "I was left to do all the dirty and hard work on the way, while his old West Point friends . . . were assigned every desirable position . . . "(p.207)."Leehatesme"(p.303), Cobb wrote. Robert E. Lee was "haughty and boorish and supercilious"; nor in Cobb's eyes did Lee have "the first feeling of a gentleman" (p. 307). If Cobb "personified southern distinctiveness," he certainly had some negative things to say about Southern social mores and members of the pantheon of Southern heroes and statesmen. And in light of Cobb's narrow-minded Calvinism, his educational conservatism, his legalistic outlook and his combative personality, McCash might have...