Howell Cobb led an extraordinary and unusually wide-ranging public life. He entered Congress in his twenties and quickly made his mark, rising to Speaker of the House at just 34, one of the youngest ever to take the gavel.
After returning home to serve as Governor of Georgia, he remained a prominent national voice, and by the late 1850s he was in Washington again as Secretary of the Treasury under President Buchanan. As the sectional crisis deepened, Cobb's path shifted alongside the nation's. He emerged as one of the South's most forceful advocates for secession, and his leadership shaped the earliest foundations of the Confederacy.