This offering represents a history lesson, not so much as a roadmap pointing to a particular destination in the future but as echoes that bear hearing.
As a bonus, the lesson touches on a pioneer Putnam County family, an antebellum boy who grew up in Athens, and a Baldwin County girl who at one time was perhaps the wealthiest woman in Georgia, the curious sidenote these characters share with our current-day political life, and an unsettling hint that what may be taken for granted as permanent may not remain that way in the future.
The tale here comes after spending parts of four days and evenings last week watching cable news coverage of the seeming chaos and machinations surrounding the Republicans choosing their new speaker of the U.S. House of Representatives.
During those four days, TV’s talking heads enjoyed a field day. Had Kevin McCarthy swapped so many concessions of his powers in exchange for votes that nothing, except evermore raucous floor fights, will get done for the next two years? Would McCarthy’s job as speaker become little more than cat-herder-in-chief?
Were the Republicans capable of governing? Were they so splintered that they did not even care about governing, concerned only with personal animosity toward McCarthy or with grabbing off committee assignments and television appearances? At one point early in the week, even Sean Hannity of Fox News called their scramble a “clown show.”
And worse: were they so splintered that they risked implosion from within – and disappearing as a political party?
But by the end of the week, it became apparent there was some meat on the bone in the complaints from 20 or so holdouts against McCarthy, mainly that many rank-and-file members had little input – and sometimes little knowledge – about bills a “cartel” of decision- making party leaders put before them to vote on.
Okay, the history lesson. At one point, one of the cable news channels briefly flashed a graphic showing other times in our history when there were serious contests for House Speakers. My eyes caught the number-two guy on the list: Howell Cobb of Georgia. It took 63 ballots to elect him speaker of the House in 1849, some 174 years ago.
Sixty-three ballots? It makes McCarthy’s tedious 15 ballots over four days seem like child’s play. I knew who could explain the ins and outs of Cobb’s 1849 election. It was Randy Reid, who had taken a teaching job at Athens Academy 30-odd years ago so that he could work on his LSU doctoral dissertation on Cobb.
Born in 1815, Howell Cobb was the Athens boy mentioned above. His father was John Addison Cobb, a developer and land speculator who had gone bankrupt in the aftermath of the Panic of 1837.
Likewise, Mary Ann Lamar was the Baldwin County girl. She was the granddaughter of “Little River John” Lamar, whose antebellum plantation in Putnam County is now part of the large Georgia Power Co. tract between U.S. 441 and Dennis Station Road. She was the daughter of Zachariah Lamar, who put together a string of 12 plantations, using slave labor in the hundreds to produce cotton on an industrial scale.
One of those plantations was “Hurricane” on the Baldwin County side of Little River. On Sherman’s 1864 March to the Sea, he and his 63,000 troops were mainly after mills – and food – but he personally ordered Hurricane to be burned after he learned of Cobb’s association with it.
At the time of his marriage to Lamar in the early 1830s, Howell was an up-and-coming young lawyer who spent considerable time away from home riding various judicial circuits. The circuit-riding provided valuable for political networking and also resulted in the young couple writing letters to each other every night they were apart, a habit they continued throughout their lives. The collection of Cobb-Lamar papers in UGA’s Hargrett Library numbers 50,000 items.
By 1841, at the age of 26, Cobb was elected as a Democrat to Congress, which in those days was not a full-time job, meeting twice a year in a “long” session and a “short session,” explained Reid. By 1849, at the age of 34, but with eight years in Congress behind him, Cobb was considered the frontrunner to become the next speaker of the House of Representatives. He was adamant he would only take the job “as is.”
The last of the 1840s and the whole decade of the the1850s turned out quite well for the country economically. However, it also became a time of political turmoil, with the main issue centering on the extension of slavery in the western territories.
Cobb eventually would be elected speaker and would oversee the House version of the Compromise of 1850, which did not last. In this timeframe, the Whig party of business interests (and Lincoln) simply disintegrated.
New to the stage came the Free Soil party, whose adherents saw a threat from wealthy slaveowners taking the best lands in the West. Also, the nativist American party (the “know-nothings”). The newly minted Republican party would grow out of the bits and pieces of the ruins.
By 1860, on the eve of the Civil War, it was the Democrats’ turn to splinter. Lincoln would win the 1860 presidential election with about 40 percent of the total vote after three Democratic factions put up three different candidates.
The past may not be able to predict the future, but it certainly is capable of producing a few echoes.