Henry Benning

Henry Lewis Benning (April 2, 1814 – July 10, 1875) was a senior officer of the Confederate States Army who commanded infantry in the Eastern Theater of the American Civil War. Benning also was a lawyer, legislator, and associate judge on the Georgia Supreme Court. Following the Confederacy's defeat at the end of the war, he returned to his native Georgia, where he resumed his legal practice.

At the request of the Columbus Rotary Club circa 1918, Fort Benning was named in his honor, and remained such until 2023, when it was redesignated Fort Moore. In March 2025, the Secretary of Defense ordered that the name be reverted back to "Fort Benning." However, now the name purports to pay tribute to Corporal Fred G. Benning of Neligh, Nebraska, who was awarded the Distinguished Service Cross for his extraordinary heroism in combat during World War I with the U.S. Army in France , and later served as mayor of his home town. Corporal Benning is not related to Confederate General Benning.

Early life and education

Benning was born on a plantation in Columbia County, Georgia owned by his parents Pleasant Moon and Malinda Meriwether White Benning, the third of eleven children. His grandfather, Richard White of Richmond, Virginia, had served in the Revolutionary War. His father operated the plantation using enslaved labor, specifically 24 slaves in 1820, but moved his family to Harris County, Georgia in 1832.

Benning received a private education appropriate to his class, including at Franklin College (now the University of Georgia), and graduated in 1834. While a student, he was a member of the Phi Kappa Literary Society. He then traveled to Talbot County, Georgia, and read law under the guidance of George W. Towns.

Lawyer, planter and judge

After being admitted to the bar in 1835 (at the age of 21) in Muscogee County, Georgia (whose only town and county seat is Columbus). He made that area his home for the rest of his life. From 1837 to 1839, Benning became the solicitor general for Columbus, then married as discussed below. In the 1840 federal census, Benning owned 20 slaves in Muscogee County. A decade later, Bennett owned 60 slaves in that county. By 1860, he had become a judge of the county's superior court.

Politician

In 1840 Benning began his political career, but failed to secure a seat in the Georgia General Assembly. However, he remained politically active, and became an ardent secessionist, bitterly opposing abolition and the emancipation of slaves. In a letter to Howell Cobb written in July 1849, he stated that a Southern Confederacy would not be enough because it might itself eventually become divided into northern and southern regions as slavery waned in some of the states, and he called for a Southern "consolidated Republic" that "will put slavery under the control of those most interested in it."

In 1850, Benning became one of the Georgians who gathered with representatives of eight other slaveholding states in Nashville, Tennessee to ponder actions should Congress stop slavery's expansion westward into new territories. However, the Compromise of 1850 stopped that secession movement. In 1851, he was nominated for the U.S. Congress as a Southern rights Democrat but again failed to win election.

In 1853, he was elected an associate justice of the Georgia Supreme Court. The following year, Benning authored Padelford v. Savannah (1854), and claimed that state supreme courts could decided constitutional issues on "coordinate and co-equal" basis with the U.S. Supreme Court This "state's right" position received support in the SouthHewitt, pp. 100-01.

Benning led Georgia's delegation to the Democratic National Convention in 1860, and led his delegation in walking out of the convention when delegates failed to insert a plank supporting slavery into the national party's platform. This split within the Democratic party effectively delivered the general election to the opposing Republican Party.

Following the election of Abraham Lincoln to the U.S. presidency in 1860 on a platform opposing the expansion of slavery into the territories (but promising not to interfere with the institution where it currently existed), Benning on November 19, 1860 addressed Georgia's legislature and urged secession. When legislators authorized a secession convention, Benning represented Muscogee County and briefly presided as delegates elected George W. Crawford as the convention's president, then helped draft the state's secession ordinance.

In March 1861, the Southern states that had seceded appointed special commissioners to travel to the other slaveholding Southern states that had yet to secede. Benning was the commissioner from Georgia to the Virginia secession convention, and tried to persuade Virginia politicians to vote to join Georgia in seceding from the Union. In a February 1861 speech to the Virginia secession convention, Benning gave his reasoning for the urging of secession from the Union, appealing to ethnic prejudices and pro-slavery sentiments to present his case and saying that were the slave states to remain in the Union their slaves would ultimately end up being freed by the anti-slavery Republican Party. He stated that he would rather be stricken with illness and starvation than see African Americans liberated from slavery and be given equality as citizens:

American Civil War

Although he was considered for a cabinet position in the government of the newly-established Confederacy, he chose to join the Confederate army instead. Benning recruited the 17th Georgia Infantry, a regiment. On August 29, 1861, those troops elected him as their colonel. The regiment became part of Robert Toombs's brigade in the right wing of the Army of Northern Virginia, under General Robert E. Lee.Eicher, pp. 128-29.

As a newly minted army officer, Benning immediately ran into political difficulty. He questioned the legality of the Confederate government's Conscription Act and spoke against it openly as a violation of states' rights. Refusing to obey certain orders, he came close to being court-martialed, but influence from his friend, Colonel T. R. R. Cobb, defused the situation. The first significant action he saw was at the Second Battle of Bull Run in August 1862. At the Battle of Antietam, Benning's brigade was a crucial part in the defense of the Confederate right flank, guarding "Burnside's Bridge" across Antietam Creek all morning against repeated Union assaults. His courage in battle was no longer questioned by his superiors, and he became known as the "Old Rock" to his men. He was promoted to brigadier general on April 23, 1863, with date of rank of January 17, 1863.

For most of the rest of the war, Benning continued as a brigade commander ("Benning's Brigade") in the division of the aggressive John Bell Hood of Texas. He missed the Confederate victory at the Battle of Chancellorsville because his brigade was stationed in southern Virginia along with the rest of Lieutenant General James Longstreet's First Corps. However, it returned for active combat in the Battle of Gettysburg. There, on July 2, 1863, Benning led his brigade in a furious assault against the Union position in the Devil's Den, driving out the defenders at no small cost to themselves. That September, Longstreet's Corps was sent west to assist General Braxton Bragg's Army of Tennessee. On the second day of the bloody Battle of Chickamauga, Benning participated in Longstreet's massive charge against a gap in the Union line even as his horse was shot out from under him. He mounted another horse, which was also killed. Finally, he cut loose a horse from a nearby artillery battery and rode into combat bareback. During a surprise Union counterattack against his brigade, many of his men fled, and Benning ran off to Longstreet to report the calamity. Riding an old artillery horse and whipping it with a piece of rope, Benning was "greatly excited and the very picture of despair," as was reported by Longstreet after the war. Benning said, "General, I am ruined; my brigade was suddenly attacked and every man killed; not one is to be found. Please give me orders where I can do some fighting." Longstreet responded impassively, "Nonsense, General, you are not so badly hurt. Look about you. I know you will find at least one man, and with him on his feet report your brigade to me, and you two shall have a place in the fighting line." Longstreet's reply humiliated Benning but instilled enough determination in him to return to find his brigade and prevail in the battle.

Benning's Brigade fought at the Battle of Wauhatchie outside Chattanooga, Tennessee, and joined Longstreet's Corps in its unsuccessful Knoxville Campaign in late 1863. Returning to Virginia, the brigade fought against Union Lieutenant General Ulysses S. Grant in the 1864 Overland Campaign, where Benning was severely wounded in the left shoulder during the Battle of the Wilderness on May 5. That wound kept him out of the remainder of the campaign and much of the subsequent Siege of Petersburg, but he was able to return in time for the waning days of that lengthy campaign. His brigade withstood strong Union assaults against its entrenchments but was forced to withdraw along with the rest of Lee's army in the retreat to Appomattox Court House in early April 1865. Benning, heartbroken, was one of the final officers to lead his men to the surrender ceremony.

Postwar legal practice

After the war, Benning returned to Columbus to resume the practice of law. He found that his house had been burned, his bondsmen left, and all of his savings had disappeared. Furthermore, he had to support, along with his own family, the widow and children of his wife's brother, who had been killed in the war.

Personal life

On September 12, 1839, Benning married Mary Howard Jones of Columbus, Georgia. Mary was the daughter of the Honorable Seaborn Jones, a prominent attorney, former Georgia Secretary of State, and United States Representative. The couple had ten children during their twenty-nine year marriage, including an infant son who died within hours of birth and three daughters who died of childhood diseases. Five Benning daughters survived their parents. Daughter Louise married Samuel Spencer, a railroad executive.

Years before Margaret Mitchell published her Civil War novel, ''Gone with the Wind'', she wrote an article in the ''Atlanta Constitution'' (December 20, 1925) in which she referenced the Benning family and their experiences during the war.

Regarding Mary Benning, Mitchell wrote, "She was a tiny woman, frail and slight, but possessed of unusual endurance and a lion’s heart. The battles she fought at home were those of nearly every Southern woman, but her burdens were heavier than most. Left in complete charge of a large plantation, this little woman, who was the mother of ten children, was as brave a soldier at home as ever her husband was on the Virginia battlefields. She saw to it that the crops were gathered, the children fed and clothed, and the Negroes cared for. To her fell the work of superintending the weaving and spinning of enough cloth, not only to clothe her own children and servants, but also Confederate soldiers. While her husband was away she buried her aged father, whose end was hastened by the war."

Many of her descriptions of the Bennings are reflected in the lives of the O'Haras and others in the novel.

Death and legacy

On his way to a court appearance on July 10, 1875, Benning had a stroke (termed apoplexy at the time). He died in Columbus and was buried in Linwood Cemetery. He had survived his wife, Mary Benning, by about seven years. HIs firstborn son, Seaborn Jones Benning, had died of consumption on December 12, 1874.

In 1918, at the request of the Columbus Rotary Club, the U.S. Army named its new U.S. Army Infantry School in Muscogee County Fort Benning. During World War II, a Liberty ship was named in honor of Benning. The SS ''Henry L. Benning'', United States Merchant Marine 0946, was built in Baltimore, Maryland and went into service on March 9, 1943. The ship hauled cargo and troops throughout the Pacific theater.

In 2020, during the George Floyd protests, there were renewed calls to rename U.S. Army installations named after Confederate soldiers, including Fort Benning. Fort Benning was renamed Fort Moore, after Vietnam War era Lieutenant General Hal Moore Jr. and his wife, Julia as of May 11, 2023. It became the only base named for a married couple. However, in March 2025 it resumed its former name, although now officially honoring an unrelated soldier, Corporal Fred G. Benning of Neligh, Nebraska, who received the Distinguished Service Cross for heroics in 1918 during World War I.

See also

* List of Confederate States Army generals
* List of signers of the Georgia Ordinance of Secession

References

Citations

Bibliography

* Dameron, J. David
''General Henry Lewis Benning: A Biography of Georgia's Supreme Court Justice and Confederate General.''
Heritage Books: Westminster, Maryland: 2008.
* Eicher, John H., and David J. Eicher. ''Civil War High Commands''. Stanford, CA: Stanford University Press, 2001. .
* Freeman, Douglas S. ''Lee's Lieutenants: A Study in Command''. 3 vols. New York: Scribner, 1946. .
* Hewitt, Lawrence C. "Henry Lewis Benning." In ''The Confederate General'', vol. 1, edited by William C. Davis and Julie Hoffman. Harrisburg, PA: National Historical Society, 1991. .
* Kane, Sharyn, and Richard Keeton
''Fort Benning, the Land and the People''
. National Park Service.
*
* Tagg, Larry
''The Generals of Gettysburg''
Campbell, CA: Savas Publishing, 1998. .
* Warner, Ezra J. ''Generals in Gray: Lives of the Confederate Commanders''. Baton Rouge: Louisiana State University Press, 1959. .

External links

*

Henry L. Benning Papers
at Columbus State University

Henry L. Benning
at Benning-Cobb-Russell Family of Georgia

{{DEFAULTSORT:Benning, Henry L.
1814 births
1875 deaths
19th-century Georgia (U.S. state) state court judges
American slave owners
Confederate States Army brigadier generals
Justices of the Supreme Court of Georgia (U.S. state)
Military personnel from Columbus, Georgia
People from Columbia County, Georgia
People of Georgia (U.S. state) in the American Civil War
Signers of the Georgia Ordinance of Secession
University of Georgia alumni
Fire-Eaters