Howell Cobb: The Politics of Ambition (review)

Abstract

182CIVIL WAR HISTORY from Hong Kong to Annapolis. They kept abreast of the locations of all members of the family, and when not known, requested information from one another. The most interesting stories appear in the letters of Commander Alan D. Brown, who roamed the Seven Seas. He described a party given by an American merchantman up the Santos River, a tea offered by the King of Siam, a visit to the island of St. Helena, although he did not visit the "former prison house of the Great Conqueror," and a revolution in Panama in 1873, where he caught the "Panama fever." In addition , his years at the United States Naval Academy, where he was an instructor, are verv illuminating, especially the New Year's Eve party in 1870. As usual in a book filled with people and events, there are a few misspellings and sentence fragments. I also doubt if the Army of the Potomac , under General George B. McClellan, ever numbered 175,000 troops. On occasion there appears to be too much family trivia, but this is to be expected in a book of this type. Nothing has yet been published which better illustrates, in such an interesting and scholarly fashion, the interplay of a family so involved in the Civil War years. The author has correlated the Tyler-Brown letters into an excellent narrative. Tyler-Browns of Brattleboro is definitely not an edited work of Civil War letters, but a complete and well written account of a fascinating family. The book is well researched and organized, and is a must for all persons interested in nineteenthcentury United States history. Robert C. Harris University of West Florida Howell Cobb: The Politics of Ambition. By John Eddins Simpson. (Chicago: The Adams Press, 1973. Pp. vi, 198. Paperback, $4.95.) As his subtitle suggests, the author attempts to prove that his subject offers "a case study of the thesis that the Civil War was caused by selfish , shortsighted politicians" (p. iii). Howell Cobb entered national political life as a member of Congress and rose quickly to the influential post of Speaker of the House of Representatives during the critical struggles over the compromise measures of 1850. Cobb then returned to Georgia to serve as "Unionist" governor of his state from 1851 to 1853 before returning to Congress in 1855. Successively Secretary of the Treasury during Buchanan's administration, president of the provisional Confederate Congress, and general in the Confederate armies, Cobb ended his career as the leading expounder of the post-war Georgia Democracy's racist politics. Cobb's political career certainly offers an ample opportunity to test the author's thesis. Moreover, the author's bibliography indicates that he attempted to test the thesis by consulting a wide variety of primary sources, including the large collection of Cobb manuscripts still controlled by family heirs. BOOK REVIEWS183 The author has shown that Cobb gave little consideration to any career except that of a politician, pursuing legal studies and the legal profession only as an evil necessary to enable him to practice politics. The author also demonstrates that this love for politics caused Cobb to neglect money matters, leaving him and his family in a continually precarious financial position, certainly an ironic counterpoint to his successful administration of the nation's finances. The author also suggests (p. 47) that his wife's delicate health and emotional instability drove Cobb further into politics as an escape. But the full implications of the aged "blundering generation" thesis, as they apply to Cobb, remain, in this reviewer's opinion, unproven. The personal opinion must be emphasized because of the format of the book. Although it is written in a scholarly style and contains numerous quotations, the book appears without a footnote to aid the reader, whose task is further complicated by the absence of an index. The reviewer , denied the ability to examine specific references for specific conclusions, is forced to rely upon his own knowledge of the same primary sources which the author examined. On that basis, this reviewer finds unacceptable the author's conclusions that Cobb's Treasury department was "patronage-rich" or that the department's patronage could or did "enable...