HENRY LEWIS BENNING (April 2, 1814-July 10, 1875), jurist, statesman, soldier, was born on a plantation in Columbia County, Georgia, the son of Pleasant Moon and Matilda Meriwether White Benning, the third of eleven children. He attended Franklin College (University of Georgia), where he graduated with first honors at the age of twenty. Upon his graduation he moved to Columbus and there made his home for the rest of his life. At twenty-one he was admitted to the bar, and two years later was appointed solicitor-general for his judicial circuit.
He afterward served a term in the General Assembly. On September 12, 1839, he married Mary Howard Jones of Columbus, by whom he had ten children, of whom five daughters survived him. His only son died of wounds received in the Civil War. Able, logical, industrious, and of the highest integrity, he had not a few of the qualities of Calhoun.
He was convinced that to free the negroes would create such social chaos in the South as to make civilization impossible and life for the whites unendurable. He believed emancipation, and the subsequent enfranchisement of the slaves, inevitable if the South remained in the Union. He therefore became an ardent secessionist. But while he felt secession necessary he considered it by no means the solution to the problem. He feared some of the northernmost slave states might, from economic reasons, develop a sentiment against the institution, and he would protect the lower South from the chaos of emancipation by the formation of a "consolidated" Southern Republic, with strong centralized powers, so that slavery could be put "under the control of those most interested in it." (letter to Howell Cobb, Toombs, Stephens and Cobb Correspondence," American Historical Association Annual Report, 1911, II, 171).
In the crisis of 1850 he was for immediate withdrawal from the Union, and became an enthusiastic supporter of the movement to hold a Southern Conference at Nashville. In the election held in Georgia to name delegates to this conference he was successful, but most of the other secessionist candidates were overwhelmingly defeated, and the small number of votes cast showed that the vast majority of the people were not aroused. Indeed, the fact that Georgia, generally regarded as a pivotal state, had thus decisively repudiated the "Southern-rights" movement, foredoomed the convention to failure.
But Benning was persistent and resourceful. Ostensibly, in an effort at compromise, he introduced at Nashville a resolution to the effect that nothing less than the Missouri line could be accepted by the South as a settlement of the territorial problem. He believed the South could be persuaded to demand this as an ultimatum; that the North would promptly reject it; and that secession would then be the only alternative. The resolution was duly passed, but the result was not what he had hoped it would be. Meeting in December, the Georgia Convention, instead of ratifying the action of Nashville, accepted Clay's compromise measure, "being impelled thereto" (in the language of the resolution) "by an earnest desire to save the American Union."
In 1851 Benning accepted the nomination of the Southern Rights Democrats as one of their candidates for Congress and, although he ran ahead of his party, was defeated in the Constitutional Union "landslide" of that year. In 1853 he was elected by the General Assembly as an associate justice of the Georgia supreme court, where he delivered, in the case of Padelford vs. Savannah (14 Georgia,438) an exhaustive opinion in support of the principle that a state supreme court is not bound by the decisions of the Supreme Court of the United States on constitutional questions. The two courts he held to be "coordinate and co-equal." This remarkable decision, comprising eighty pages, is perhaps the most vigorous and elaborate exposition of the doctrine of "strict con