Nicholas Hamner Cobbs (February 5, 1796 – January 11, 1861) was a minister and evangelist of the Episcopal church who served as the first bishop of Alabama from 1844 to 1861.

His immigrant ancestor Ambrose Cobbs had come to the Chesapeake Bay colony from England and patented lands in Tidewater York County in 1639.

The young missionary taught school during the week, then on weekends traveled by horse drawn wagon with a small choir to various Episcopalian homes in the Piedmont, Shenandoah Valley and Blue Ridge mountain region between Bristol and Lynchburg.

Cobbs re-established or became rector of two parishes in his home of Bedford County: Trinity Church and St. Stephen's, and several others in the region, including St. John's in Roanoke.

Cobbs accepted a position slightly eastward at St. Paul's Church in Petersburg, Virginia.

[7] In 1843, Cobbs moved westward and accepted a position as rector of St. Paul's church (later the Episcopal cathedral) in Cincinnati, Ohio.

The city had become a major gateway for travel on the Ohio River and settlement of both the Midwest (which did not allow slavery pursuant to the Northwest Ordinance and subsequent state constitutions, but which adopted various legalisms to allow visiting slaveholders to continue to own enslaved individuals) and the non-seaboard South (from Kentucky across the Ohio River and further south into Tennessee, Mississippi, Alabama and Louisiana).

Cobbs died in Montgomery, Alabama, on January 11, 1861, the day of his state's secession from the Union on the eve of the American Civil War.