Cobb graduated in 1841 from Franklin College[1] (present-day University of Georgia), where he was a member of the Phi Kappa Literary Society.

Only three of their children lived past childhood: Callender (Callie), who married Augustus Longstreet Hull; Sarah A.

The Lucy Cobb Institute, which he founded, was named for a daughter who died shortly before the school opened.

He is best known for his treatise on the law of slavery titled An Inquiry into the Law of Negro Slavery in the United States of America (1858), a passage of which reads: [T]his inquiry into the physical, mental, and moral development of the negro race seems to point them clearly, as peculiarly fitted for a laborious class.

Their mental capacity renders them incapable of successful self-development, and yet adapts them for the direction of the wiser race.

Their moral character renders them happy, peaceful, contented and cheerful in a status that would break the spirit and destroy the energies of the Caucasian or the native American.

[7] Georgia ultimately kept the Code after the Civil War but revised it in 1867 and many more times since, to purge the racism and pro-slavery bias inherent in the original text.

[1] At the Battle of Fredericksburg, he was mortally wounded in the thigh by a Union artillery shell that burst inside the Stephens house near the Sunken Road on Marye's Heights.