[3] He was raised in Athens and attended the University of Georgia, where he was a member of the Phi Kappa Literary Society.

She was a daughter of Colonel Zachariah Lamar, of Milledgeville, from a prominent family with broad connections in the South.

Several did not survive childhood, including their last, a son who was named after Howell's brother, Thomas Reade Rootes Cobb.

He was an ardent advocate of extending slavery into the territories, but when the Compromise of 1850 had been agreed upon, he became its staunch supporter as a Union Democrat.

[4][7] He joined Georgia Whigs Alexander Stephens and Robert Toombs in a statewide campaign to elect delegates to a state convention that overwhelmingly affirmed, in the Georgia Platform, that the state accepted the Compromise as the final resolution to the outstanding slavery issues.

He was appointed a brigadier general on February 13, 1862, and assigned command of a brigade in what became the Army of Northern Virginia.

Between February and June 1862, he represented the Confederate authorities in negotiations with Union officers for an agreement on the exchange of prisoners of war.

In October 1862, Cobb was detached from the Army of Northern Virginia and sent to the District of Middle Florida.

He suggested the construction of a prisoner-of-war camp in southern Georgia, a location thought to be safe from Union incursions.

He led the hopeless Confederate resistance in the Battle of Columbus, Georgia on Easter Sunday, April 16, 1865.

"[18] In the closing days of the war, Cobb fruitlessly opposed General Robert E. Lee's eleventh hour proposal to enlist slaves into the Confederate Army.

Following the end of the Civil War, Cobb returned home and resumed his law practice.

Finally receiving the pardon in early 1868, he began to vigorously oppose the Reconstruction Acts, making a series of speeches that summer that bitterly denounced the policies of Radical Republicans in the U.S. Congress.

His niece Mildred Lewis "Miss Millie" Rutherford was a prominent educator, white supremacy advocate, and leader in the United Daughters of the Confederacy.