Description

Thomas R. R. Cobb (1823–1862) was an ardent secessionist often referred to as “the James Madison of the Confederacy.” Cobb was a prominent lawyer, a leader of the Georgia bar, a prominent figure in southern legal education, a key legal theorist of the secession movement, and the central figure in the writing of the Confederate Constitution. First published in 1858, An Inquiry into the Law of Negro Slavery in the United States of America was the first and only treatise published by a southern author on slavery law. Based on extensive scholarship on the Roman law of slavery and racist to the core, the work fully explicates the southern defense of slavery. An important practical manual for lawyers and judges at the time of its publication and an essential tool for scholars and students of slavery and legal history ever since, the work is also the most significant summary of proslavery legal theory.