From the wikipedia page on the subject:

"Representatives enthusiastically described a language that could work in a wide variety of environments, from banking and insurance to utilities and inventory control. They agreed unanimously that more people should be able to program and that the new language should not be restricted by the limitations of contemporary technology. A majority agreed that the language should make maximal use of English, be capable of change, be machine-independent and be easy to use, even at the expense of power."

Emphasis added. The machine code that went before was slow and very expensive to develop, and required detailed specifications to be handed to the programmers in order to be able to implement the software. COBOL was clearly an attempt at increasing the accessibility of programming for a larger audience than those that felt comfortable with machine language.

This succeeded admirably, many people joined the ranks of programmers with COBOL as their first language in a large variety of business applications. The jump in abstraction level between machine language and COBOL was very large.

“I used to be a mathematics professor. At that time I found there were a certain number of students who could not learn mathematics. I then was charged with the job of making it easy for businessmen to use our computers. I found it was not a question of whether they could learn mathematics or not, but whether they would. […] They said, ‘Throw those symbols out — I do not know what they mean, I have not time to learn symbols.’ I suggest a reply to those who would like data processing people to use mathematical symbols that they make them first attempt to teach those symbols to vice-presidents or a colonel or admiral. I assure you that I tried it.” — Hopper c. 1958