United States Military Installations Named For Confederate General

Military Installation	Named For
Fort A. P. Hill	Ambrose Powell Hill
Camp Beauregard	P.G.T. Beauregard
Fort Benning	Henry L. Benning
Fort Bragg	Braxton Bragg
Fort Gordon	John Brown Gordon
Fort Hood	John Bell Hood
Fort Lee	Robert E. Lee
Fort Pickett	George Pickett
Fort Polk	Leonidas Polk
Fort Rucker	Edmund Rucker

Henry L. Benning* to Howell Cobb, February 23, 1848

Columbus [ga.], 23d Feby., 1848.

Dear Howell, You ask me to write you soon and fully my views of Cass's letter and Dickinson's resolution. I have had so much to do lately that I could not attempt an answer until now, although your letter of the 3d inst., has been on hand for a fortnight. What you require of me involves, I think, my opinion as to the course which ought to be pursued by the democatic party to secure the next Presidency. On a question of such magnitude I am not prepared to speak with confidence; and yet upon your invitation . . . I will venture a suggestion or two.

First then, I do not object to Mr. Dickinson's resolutions. Still I must say that they are not precisely the thing according to my notion of what the exigency demands. The sins are chiefly sins of omission. The resolutions do not declare what principle ought to govern in the interval between the time of acquiring territory and the time at which the people thereof may choose to settle those “questions of domestic policy”, which it is left to them to settle.

Again, they very indistinctly, if at all, condemn the principle of the Wilmot proviso. If I am not mistaken in that principle, it is that Congress may prohibit slavery in acquired territory as long as it remains territory. Now, Mr. D's resolutions say no more than that Congress cannot do anything inconsistent with the right of the people of the territories to form themselves into States equally sovereign with the old states. The W. Proviso principle is not inconsistent with this right. That which it is inconsistent with is the right of the people of the territories to hold slaves therein if Congress forbids.

Once more, no general principle is announced by the resolutions upon the question of the quantity of territory we ought to require from Mexico in a treaty of peace. Perhaps these omissions are merits, but I venture to think not, and more audacious still, to send you what I deem the remedy in three resolutions, or rather two, ac companying this. The first is new, the second, one of Mr. D's unchanged, and the third is the other of his with some additions important but not in my opinion affecting the abstract principle on which the resolution rests.

Why these alterations? Let us consider for a moment the strength of the two parties in a sectional point of view. We see the Whig majorities, both certain and expected, chiefly in the free states, the Democratic in the slave. We see also already organized in some of the important free states a third party having naturally more sympathy with the Whigs than with the Democrats, and in the other free states no inconsiderable amount of the same third party in the state of raw material. If we add together the votes of the certain free Whig states, 51, and of those in which the abolitionists are supposed by the Whigs to have a casting vote, viz, N. Y. 36, Pa. 26, Ind. 12, Me. 9, N. H. 6, we shall have 51 plus 84 equals 135. Now even allowing for Wisconsin, 143 elects, so that those free states with either Ky. 12, N. C. 11, or Mo. 8, may dictate their man. We see too in New York strong symptoms of this abolition element becoming truly formidable, and in Pa. we distrust somewhat—a very little—the ability of the new soldiers under the banner of free trade to resist the temptation which the enemy will assuredly offer them in the resurrection of the Act of 1842. Further, we behold the Whigs in their conventions, legislatures and public meetings North already adopting the Wilmot Proviso, and on the other hand the Democrats generally ejecting the “perilous stuff” from their stomachs, as witness the letters and speeches of Buchanan, Dallas, Cass, etc., Dickinson's resolutions, and the general tone of the press. Seeing all this and much more of the same sort, are we not obliged to infer as a thing accomplished, 1st: That the Whigs intend to bid for Abolition bodaciously? And 2d: That they can afford to bid higher for it than can the Democrats, supposing the latter base enough to enter the lists? And are we not bound also to admit that true policy demands of the Democrats to endeavor to counteract the effect of the fusion of the two factions into one? Can this be done at all except by looking to the slave states?

If, however, we carry the slave states, we have but 117 votes. It won't do, then, to hazard the loss of much of our strength in the free states. The problem is to gain South and not lose North. It is the aim of the resolutions which I send you to solve it.

First then, I say that the Whigs reckon without their host when they count upon absorbing abolition, because they will nominate either Clay or Taylor; and the abolitionists, the honestly mad ones, will die at the stake before they will vote for the reprobate who dares say in word or deed that man may hold property in man— may traffic and trade in human flesh—particularly when his opponent will be a non-slaveholder and a patriot competent to utter any amount of innocent but "moral and religious sentiment" against the “peculiar institution.” What says 1844? Has Mr. Clay set his negroes free since? And Genl. Taylor, a sugar planter, on the poisonous banks of the Mississippi; he is in a much worse predicament, beyond the reach of any fable in Æsop, because by his avowed innocence of all knowledge of political questions and by his self-imposed inexorable taciturnity he will not be able even to tell the abolitionists so much as that he believes slavery to be a great moral and political evil.

But suppose this eccentric faction shedding from its humid hair pestilence upon the nations shall, contrary to the best founded expectations, flying from its orb, sink into the sun of Whiggery. Console yourself because you could not by any possibility prevent it, and because all will not be lost. Democracy will have over-balancing accessions from other sources. The last four years have been fruitful in the product of every good thing, including voters, both indigenous and naturalized. It is not extravagant, I think, for our party to reckon upon two thirds of the former and nine tenths of the latter. Why there are but three modes, or rather two and a half, suggested for conducting the war — to fight, to tax, and to take — which is one; to back clean out of a conquered country, telling the cutthroats that we were unrighteously, unconstitutionally, and damnably there from the first, which is two — to back partly out to an unnamed line, going we only know from ocean to ocean, across the continent where it is all desert and mountain, and there to fight to the very death, provided always that any enemy should dare come up and knock a chip off of Jonathan's head — which is half a one. Now, will any but the old fools (of all fools the worst you know) take up with the second or third of these plans? The young have no more sense than to believe that war is war—blood, chains, gold, territory, and no more “sentiment” than to smite, to rivet, to sieze, and to annex. They feel that woe to the vanquished is weal to the victor. We may call these young fellows ours. How many are there? The New York Herald says 800,000 — two thirds of that number are 530,000, half of which 260.000 would be the excess in our favor. Of them 160 or 170 thousand are in the free states. Then the naturalized vote must be quite large. Again, how Democratic the Army is becoming, even the regulars. Every letter from it will be a personal appeal to father, brother, friends, to put down those who give aid and comfort to the enemy. Above all, our annexation policy must bring recruits from all classes and quarters. All this being so, are we not able to despise the nauseous compound?

How, then, are we to “gain South”? I say by the principle contained in the last clause of the third of the resolutions, declaring that citizens of the slave states may settle with their slaves in the acquired territory until such time as the people thereof see fit to forbid it by legislation. The adoption of this will not carry a single slave into such territory, not one, but it will carry many a vote into the ballot box. Mere barren option, never to be availed of tho' it is, still the candidate who refused it could not at the South in a contest with one who conceded it stand a fire of blank cartridges. What Hotspur felt is nature:

I'd give thrice as much land to any well deserving friend.

But in the way of Bargain I'd cavil on the ninth part of a hair.

But won't its adoption do us more harm at the North than even so much good as this at the South can outweigh? It is not possible. Remember how far Dickinson's untouched resolutions go. These say “it is best” (mind you only expediency) to leave questions of domestic policy, that is whether there shall or shall not be slavery, to the people of the territory. So then it is best to let the people there make it a slave territory if they will. Going thus far will not damage us, it is agreed. Why? Because the good sense of the people North sees that such a permission is a mere vanity. Like laying duties upon cotton — or coal at Newcastle. Now how much further does my amendment go? It only affirms that it is best (expediency too) on many momentous accounts to permit the citizens of all the states to have an equal right of removal into the acquired territory and of holding there as property whatever they held as such where they came from. It does not affirm that such “citizens” have a right to do this or that Congress has not the right to forbid it. The constitutional question, so difficult, such a tool of death in the hands of madmen whether at the North or the South, is honorably and fairly got rid of, as indeed it is in Dickinson's original resolution to the extent to which it goes. For the most that can be made out of the expression “by leaving”, “by permitting” is that it is doubtful whether Congress has power on this subject “to bind and to loose” and therefore that it ought not to interfere to do either. Now, if the reasons assigned by Buchanan, Cass, etc., are sufficient to prove the harmlessness of leaving the question of slavery to the people of the territory, they are equally sufficient to prove the harmlessness of permitting all citizens to remove into the territory with their slaves and there to hold them in bondage. Those reasons amount to this, that the interest of slaveholders will prevent them from wishing to cross the Rio Bravo with their slaves, and so of course the people to pass the laws on the subject to slavery, being all non-slaveholders, will prohibit it. Why is it the interest of the slaveholder to keep away? On account of incompatibility of soil, climate, productions, danger of loss by facilities for escape, and on account of the region being now by the laws of Mexico free. Every one of these reasons will still affect the interest of the slaveholder to the same extent if my amendment should be adopted. It may be said that one of those reasons, viz: that drawn from the fact that the territory is now by law free and a slave going there would become free on touching the soil, would not apply if slave owners were “permitted” to take their slaves and hold them as such in the territory. Practically it is all the same. I submit that a prudent slaveholder will be as shy of putting himself and his slaves in the power of Mexican laws to be made, as of those already made. Very well. The good sense of Northern Democracy can as easily see this as the other. and the prospect of carrying Ky., N. C., and Md., with the principle, and of losing S. C. and all that she can influence, without it, will make the scales fall from their eyes in a trice. One thing is never to be forgotten, that committed as the party is, it cannot in its wildest dreams hope for the vote of an abolitionist, and further, that the action of the abolitionists as a party as to keeping embodied or subsiding into Whiggery will depend upon what the Whigs do and not upon anything that we can do, unless we undo all that we have done. In such a case ought we not to follow the dictates of ordinary prudence?

If the war continues we ought to proclaim some such principle as that embodied in the first resolution. If we elect our man with that as one of bur battle cries, be sure Mexico won't waste minutes before she will come with a decent proposition for peace. And I think the sooner the thing is done the better. Let it have time [to] feel its way into grace and favor and for the Whigs to commit themselves against it. However, as to “grace and favor”, there is no fear that it will need friends. True, we shall continue to hear the dog-in-the-manger growl of the Charleston Mercury. He has been so long only showing his teeth that we have come to believe that is all they were made for. All North it will out run the Cholera, as Prince John said to Jesse.¹ Bye the bye, I have just seen the N. Y. Herald's account of the Utica convention. The address is able, not so well written as that of the Albany convention. There is one good thing in it, the declaration that they don't make W. Provisoism a test, a sine qua non. This being so, it has occurred to me that our Baltimore convention could not by any possibility have evidence enough presented to it to decide which to admit, Hunkers or Barnburners, nor the heart to risk making martyrs of the innocent, to the triumph of the guilty, and that therefore it would be obliged as a matter of sheer conscience not to be at home to New York but still to do a good part by her all the same as if she were admitted inside. That is, nominate some man staunch, staunch as Chimborazo, on all the test questions, the sine qua nons, so that both divisions of the democracy may be gratified. Howell, I am death for Equity. Now, equality is equity. By presenting such a candidate the two wings will “spread” themselves in rivalry to speed the common body. What do you think of this. Bright, ain't it.

Well, this is the hand which I want to deal you at Baltimore. I am bound to say that there are some good cards in it. And anybody can play it. Genl. Cass is a good old man, Dallas is a gentleman, Buchanan is touched with the tariff, a man of vigor, tho’, very great, sufficient doubtless to bear letting that drop out of his veins. I care not so much for the player as the cards.

Yes, the grand thing for success is harmony, unanimity in the principles and measures to be sent before the country in the address and resolutions respecting the war question and the territory question, chiefly the last. You Democrats in the House have nothing to do, being a minority, except to ascertain this common ground, compare notes, yield a little, and it will be yielded unto you. Keep the slavery question out of the way of any public discussion in the convention. What the convention does ought to be done without delay, without fuss, with perfect unity and perfect unanimity. Let its work instantly spring forth complete in every part, like Minerva from the head of Jupiter. If there is a will there is a way. There are Democrats in Congress from nearly every State, and what they can all agree upon be sure they can get their several state delegations to Baltimore to agree upon. And then, out of abundance of caution, let one member of Congress, if possible, from each state go down to Baltimore as a lobby member, an organ of assimilation. You know we shall all be strangers to one another. Why can't we organize victory. I see I have written reams. It shows at least that I take interest in the cause and that I am disposed to accomplish the object of your letter, that is (ain't it?) to enable you fellows at Washington to find out which way the wind blows. Write to me again. Speak out. Condemn what I have proposed if it ought to be done, tell me what's better — above all tell me the probable “platform” as well as the man. Dix and Shunk I forgot about. Either will do well, so far as I am at present advised.

P. S. — Tell Iverson I will answer his in a day or two, and show him this. I don't care who sees it.

Send me the address and resolutions of our last convention at Baltimore, if you can do it easily.

[Resolutions enclosed with the foregoing.]

Resolved: That the United States have the intelligence and the virtue and the power to administer with safety, with justice and with equity any quantity of territory which they may honorably acquire from any foreign nation.

Resolved: That true policy requires the government of the United States to strengthen its political and commercial relations upon this continent by the annexation of such continuous territory as may conduce to that end and can be justly obtained, and that neither in such acquisition nor in the territorial organization thereof can any conditions be constitutionally Imposed or institutions be provided for or established inconsistent with the right of the people thereof to form a free sovereign state with the powers and privileges of the original members of the confederacy.

Resolved: That in organizing a territorial government for territory acquired by common blood and common treasure, and conferring in its achievement common glory, the principles of self government will be best promoted, the spirit and meaning of the Constitution best observed, the sentiments of justice of equality and of magnanimity best consulted, the self sacrificing love for the Union best maintained and strengthened, and the shining examples of mutual forbearance and compromise set us by our fathers in every dark day of our past career best emulated, by leaving all questions which concern the Domestic policy of such territory to the unrestrained Legislation of the people thereof, and until such legislation forbid, by permitting the citizens of every state to settle therein and to hold as property there whatever they may have held as property in the states from which they came.

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* A lawyer of Columbus, Ga., previously a college chum of Howell Cobb's, and always a keen student of public affairs; associate-justice of the supreme court of Georgia, 18531861; brigadier-general in the Confederate army.

¹”Prince John” Van Buren, to Jesse Hoyt.

SOURCE: Ulrich Bonnell Phillips, Editor, The Annual Report of the American Historical Association for the Year 1911, Volume 2: The Correspondence of Robert Toombs, Alexander H. Stephens, and Howell Cobb, p. 97-103