Lawyer, secessionist, soldier: Gen. Henry Benning won glory in a lost war
On Sept. 17, 1862, Confederate Col. Henry Lewis Benning of Columbus was ordered to deploy his infantrymen on high ground along Antietam Creek in Sharpsburg, Md., and hold that line against federal forces trying to ford the stream or cross its stone bridge.
They were protecting Gen. Robert E. Lee’s flank at one of the bloodiest battles of the Civil War, and their position was crucial: If they wavered, Union forces would break through.
They did not: Benning’s outnumbered soldiers endured fierce fire as they repelled wave after wave of assaults, finally retreating when they ran low on ammunition and no longer could hold their ground.
Though forced to withdraw, they won glory for holding back the enemy advance for hours.
Benning, who already had earned the nickname “Old Rock” for being steadfast under fire, afterward was promoted to brigadier general.
But among the casualties at Antietam was his son Seaborn Jones Benning, a captain who survived being shot in the head. It would not be his last wound.
Benning gained distinction again on July 2, 1863, at the Battle of Gettysburg, where Confederates took a boulder-strewn hill called the “Devil’s Den,” and Benning’s men held off a furious federal counterattack.
But again his son was wounded: A bullet shattered his left thigh.
Wounds of war
The infantry brigade Benning helped raise in Columbus on Aug. 29, 1861, fought also in the battles of Fredricksburg, Second Manassas, the Wilderness, and Malvern Hill, combat that involved some of the most iconic figures of the Civil War.
Benning in 1863 was sent West, where he joined in the three-day Battle of Chickamauga, a Confederate victory, but he soon rejoined Lee’s command.
He was wounded in the left shoulder during the Battle of the Wilderness in May 1864, and returned to service during the months-long siege of Petersburg, Va. His brigade remained with Lee until the Army of Northern Virginia surrendered at Appomattox Court House on April 9, 1865.
A week later, back in Columbus, a Union force unaware of Lee’s surrender attacked the city, easily overwhelming local defenders on Easter Sunday in a confusing night battle, and destroying the industrial base that had backed the Confederacy.
Amid this wreckage of war, Benning came home to Columbus a hero, and still a leading man in his community, but not all he had dreamed he would be.
He did not know his name would live on, forever linked to one of America’s most prominent military posts, a place generations of soldiers would come to know.
Because of Fort Benning, his legacy is that of an infantry commander.
But only four of his 61 years were the Civil War, and he died just a decade after.
Who was he before?
Lawyer, judge, rebel
Benning was born April 2, 1814, in Columbia County, outside Augusta, the son of Malinda Meriwether White and Pleasant Moon Benning, who owned a hundred slaves and settled in Hamilton, Ga., in 1832, when the son was off to college.
One of 11 children, Benning in 1831 at age 16 left for the University of Georgia predecessor Franklin College, where in 1834 he graduated first in a class that included Howell Cobb. Cobb became a Georgia congressman, house speaker, Confederate leader and Benning’s confidant and rival.
With a law degree, Benning started at George W. Towns’ firm in Talbotton. Towns was a state legislator and congressman, and later governor.
Benning, admitted to the bar in Columbus in 1835, had his own political ambitions.
When his classmate Cobb was elected to Congress, Benning sent his congratulations, but noted Cobb, fourth in his class, had only a “respectable” ranking. “Where shall we rank him on glory’s page who was first?” he asked.
Gov. Charles McDonald appointed Benning solicitor general of the Chattahoochee Judicial Circuit in 1837, and the state legislature elected him to the post in 1838.
On Sept. 12, 1839, he married Mary Howard Jones, the only daughter of Columbus lawyer, businessman and civic leader Seaborn Jones. Jones twice was elected to Congress, served as a state senator and military leader, and built the midtown mansion now called “St. Elmo,” which he named “El Dorado.”
Benning resigned as solicitor general to join his father-in-law’s firm.
He ran as a Democrat for the Georgia General Assembly in 1840, and lost. Yet he still rose to prominence during the sectional debate over slavery, joining the “fire-eaters” in Southern leadership who felt secession inevitable and necessary to preserve slavery.
Born of slaveowners and a slaveowner himself, he believed the Deep South cotton states needed a nation devoted to slavery’s survival, else the North would stamp it out.
Believing the North would not fight to save the Union, he argued the Southern states’ right to secede a decade before the war. He represented Georgia at the June 8-12, 1850, Southern Convention of slaveholding states in Nashville, where he introduced resolutions incorporated into the convention’s charter.
In 1851, he ran for Congress as a States’ Rights candidate, and lost again.
But two years later the General Assembly elected him to the state Supreme Court, where Benning at 39 became the youngest justice in the state’s history.
The next year, he wrote in Padleford v. Savannah that the Georgia Supreme Court needn’t abide by U.S. Supreme Court decisions, because the two were “coordinate and coequal.” But he served only one term: Legislators did not re-elect him.
He again charged into the front lines of the secession debate when Abraham Lincoln was elected president in 1860. Benning insisted Lincoln and the Republicans would eliminate slavery as soon as they were able.
“My first proposition is that the election of Mr. Lincoln to the Presidency of the United States means the abolition of slavery, as soon as the party which elected him shall acquire the power to do the deed,” Benning told the General Assembly in November 1860, later emphasizing, “This party hates slavery; that is the word – hates slavery.”
Benning was elected a local delegate to Georgia’s state secession convention in January 1861, and represented Georgia at the Virginia Secession Convention the following February.
When the North proved Benning was wrong its fighting for the union, Benning proved he was a soldier, not just a hothead politician.
Aftermath
The war that made him a hero erased much of his fortune, and destroyed his dream of joining the founders of a new nation.
He came home to resume his law practice, responsible for an extended family that had lost much of its capital. He lost his wife on June 28, 1865.
The following December, as federal troops occupied the city during Reconstruction, Benning was chosen to lead a military force again, for a peculiar reason:
Rumors spread that freed slaves would wreak havoc during the Christmas holidays. The anticipated violence spawned panic.
The local Daily Sun on Dec. 7 reported talk of a freedmen insurrection: “We should form militia companies, officered by reliable men, and should keep a strict watch.” On Dec. 9, the federals occupying the city authorized a three months’ citizens militia, with Benning leading one of two companies.
Yet the holidays passed uneventfully.
In 1868, Benning moved the family from the mansion his father-in-law built outside the city to a house on upper Broadway. The mansion today called “St. Elmo” remains, on 18th Avenue north of Lakebottom Park, but the Broadway house is gone.
In September 1871, Benning served as president of a newly formed public library association. But his last days were at hand.
He lost his twice-wounded son Seaborn on Dec. 12, 1874. Within a year Benning also was gone, dying of a stroke on July 10, 1875, on his way to the courthouse downtown, where the Columbus Government Center stands today.
Legacy
Despite his mixed election success, Benning’s political influence helped propel the South to declare its independence, and he was direct in his reasons why. He was said to have been a skilled orator.
“He had a candor and directness proverbial. He spoke with a low guttural tone and a syllabic precision that heightened the effect of his manly character,” the Daily Enquirer gushed in an Oct. 20, 1918, biographical sketch marking the official naming of Camp Benning.
His early accomplishments, such as graduating first in his class and ascending so young to the state Supreme Court, show his depth and drive.
“That’s what struck me, what a young man he was to be so accomplished,” said Judge Gil McBride, Chief Judge of the Chattahoochee Judicial Circuit.
Benning was fiercely independent, believing states’ rights also superseded those of the Confederate government. He believed the Confederacy’s Conscription Act was unconstitutional, and risked court martial by not following orders he thought unlawful.
Benning believed national government should be severely limited, whether it was the Union’s government or the Confederacy’s, McBride said.
Benning and his wife had 10 children. Of the nine besides Seaborn, four died young.
But five daughters survived their parents: Mary Howard, Sarah Jones, Louisa Vivian, Augusta Jones and Anna Caroline.
Louisa Vivian married Samuel Spencer, a former Confederate cavalryman who became a railroad tycoon. Augusta Jones married Reese Crawford, son of Martin Crawford, a Columbus judge, U.S. congressman, Confederate congressman and cavalry commander. Their son Henry Benning Crawford in the 1920s became Columbus’ second city manager.
Anna Caroline never married.
Like her father, she became a leader: She was president of the
Lizzie Rutherford Chapter of the United Daughters of the Confederacy from its founding in 1894 until she died in February 1935.
She also served in the Equal Franchise League advocating women’s suffrage, formed at the public library Nov. 26, 1913. The following
Jan. 11, she joined the executive committee of the Muscogee County Equal Suffrage League.
She remained in the Benning home on upper Broadway until 1934, when she moved to a room at the city hospital.
Civic leaders’ strenuous lobbying pushed the Army not only to name Columbus’ post “Camp Benning” in 1918, but to maintain it after World War I’s end. By custom Northern posts were named for Union generals and Southern posts for Confederate ones, to ease long-held resentments.
The old animosities died as hard as their martyrs.
Historian Louise DuBose wrote that when Anna Caroline at age 65 joined dignitaries in a parade marking Camp Benning’s opening, she rode in a car bearing an American flag.
A grandmother in the crowd shook her fist at Henry Benning’s daughter and shouted, “I’m ashamed of you, riding down Broad Street behind that old rag!”
The daughter had the honor of raising that “old rag” out at the new Army post named for her father, who as a young man once asked a more famous college classmate where on glory’s page he would rank.
Today no one trains for war at Fort Howell Cobb.
This story was originally published October 24, 2018 at 12:00 AM.