American Insights: The Dreaded Hypothetical Made Real
The nation was at the brink. By the time Georgia’s Henry Benning rose to address the Virginia Secession Convention on Monday, February 18, 1861, seven slaveholding states had already passed ordinances severing their ties with the United States.
Benning’s goal as a secession commissioner was clear: win Virginia—an ancient seat of American political might—to the Confederate cause.
Three months had passed since the impossible became real: with Lincoln’s election, Americans were set to witness the inauguration of the first vocal anti-slavery president in the nation’s history, and the ascension of a party whose founding purpose was to cease slavery’s spread into new territory and call slavery what it was—a wrong and a national disgrace.
South Carolina, that old beacon of proslavery rhetoric, had led the way. “The Union of the Constitution was a union of slave-holding states,” Robert Barnwell Rhett wrote on behalf of South Carolina’s secession convention in December 1860. “It rests on slavery.” He implored the South, “We ask you to join us in forming a confederacy of slaveholding states.”
That plea was on Benning’s mind as he made Georgia’s case to Virginia. What was the reason Georgia seceded? “It was a conviction, a deep conviction… that a separation from the North was the only thing that could prevent the abolition of her slavery,” Benning said. “This conviction, sir, was the main cause.”
The “Black Republican party,” Benning warned, “hates slavery,” and “we cannot doubt the result.”
As the South had done for years, Benning used the terror of hypotheticals, rooted in a vast white supremacist tradition, to press the point home. Should Black Republicans succeed, he warned, “the black race will be in a large majority, and then we will have black governors, black legislatures, black juries, black everything.”
But that was the least of it. “Suppose they elevated Charles Sumner to the presidency? Suppose they elevated Fred Douglass, your escaped slave, to the presidency? What would be your position in such an event? I say give me pestilence and famine sooner than that.”
More than 600 miles southwest, crowds gathered in Montgomery, Alabama, as Jefferson Davis and Alexander Stephens were inaugurated as the Confederacy’s first president and vice president. “The condition of slavery with us,” Davis had told the Senate in February 1860, “is nothing but the form of civil government instituted for a class of people not fit to govern themselves.”
Speaking in Savannah a month after Benning’s speech, Stephens took aim at the Declaration of Independence’s assertion of natural equality. “Our new government is founded upon exactly the opposite idea,” he said. “Its foundations are laid, its cornerstone rests, upon the great truth that the negro is not equal to the white man; that slavery—subordination to the superior race—is his natural and normal condition. This, our new government, is the first, in the history of the world, based upon this great physical, philosophical, and moral truth.”
To the proslavery statesmen of the Confederacy, America was not a place of promise for all, but a place of power for the few. Benning was not merely afraid of attacks on the peculiar institution; he was haunted by what its moral and physical destruction would mean to the society he cherished.
The Civil War, Reconstruction, the industrial age, the twentieth century—all would be proving grounds for a question that has haunted America since its infant years: what will we choose, and who do we want to become?
A century and a half after Benning’s hypothetical President Douglass unsettled proslavery listeners, that night terror was realized on a cold night at a crowded Grant Park in Chicago. At 11 p.m. Eastern, on Tuesday, November 4, 2008, major networks broke the news: America had elected its first Black president.
Addressing supporters, Barack Obama opened with a message of American promise: “If there is anyone out there who still doubts that America is a place where all things are possible; who still wonders if the dream of our founders is alive in our time; who still questions the power of our democracy, tonight is your answer.”
He brought a message to the world, too: “The true strength of our nation comes not from the might of our arms or the scale of our wealth, but from the enduring power of our ideals: democracy, liberty, opportunity and unyielding hope.”
The next day, The New York Times headline read: “Racial Barrier Falls in Decisive Victory.” Romanticized, perhaps, but the headline captured a central truth: America had done what Benning had only mentioned in near mockery, and had done so at the highest level of politics.
The contrast between 1861 and 2008 is real, but it is also profoundly American. The nation once stained by the curse of slavery was the same nation that endured to see the Declaration’s words realized in the presidency itself—a union made, if only a little, more perfect.